The Final Trip: LSD Inventor Dies at 102

The man who had the first-ever bad trip has died.

Deadheads are in mourning around the globe.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD, has died aged 102, the organisation that republished his book on the mind-altering substance revealed today.

Hofmann, who advocated the medicinal properties of the drug he termed his "problem child", died from a heart attack at his home in Basel, Switzerland yesterda.

Born January 11, 1906, Hofmann discovered LSD - lysergic acid diethylamide, which later became the favoured drug of the 1960s counter-culture - when a tiny quantity leaked on to his hand during a laboratory experiment in 1943.

He noted a "remarkable restlessness, combined with slight dizziness" that made him stop his work. "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxication-like condition, characterised by an extremely stimulated imagination," Hofmann said of the experience.

"In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight too unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours," Hofmann wrote in his book LSD - My Problem Child.

"After some two hours this condition faded away."

A few days later Hofmann intentionally took a dose of LSD and experienced the world's first "bad trip" - slang for when the user suffers a disturbed reaction.

"On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror," he said.

Once home, the LSD continued to warp Hofmann's mind: "My surroundings had now transformed themselves in more terrifying ways," he wrote.

"A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me."

Long Strange Trip

What do you get when your cross IBM, the CIA, and LSD down in NSW?

One really strange tale.

FEW people realise that Keith Windschuttle, the conservative author and ABC board member, was a 1960s student radical who published an article extolling the virtues of dropping acid.

But 40 years on, Mr Windschuttle has revealed something even stranger about that incident - he might have been the innocent pawn in a CIA plot to destroy the counterculture.

In October 1967, Mr Windschuttle - then a 25-year-old arts student at Sydney University - caused a furore when he published an article in the campus magazine, Honi Soit, explaining how to manufacture and ingest LSD.

Under a headline borrowed from a Beatles lyric - "Turn on with Honi and float downstream" - the two-page article lambasted the NSW government's plan to outlaw possession of the drug, which was still legal. "The real reason behind the bigotry surrounding LSD remains a mystery," Mr Windschuttle wrote.

The Daily Telegraph denounced the article, NSW deputy premier Charles Cutler called it deplorable and other government figures demanded that Mr Windschuttle be prosecuted for obscenity, sacked as Honi Soit's editor and expelled. Sydney University took no action.

Mr Windschuttle, now editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant and a critic of drug culture, has rarely spoken of the incident and says he's spent much of the past 20 years trying to atone for his Leftist antics in the 1960s.

But although he was named as the only author of the article, the historian admits much of it was written by an American who turned up in the magazine's offices, claiming to work for the computer company IBM.

"He looked like a US marine in a business suit, with a big jaw and a crew-cut," Mr Windschuttle recalls. "He had the formula for LSD and he had an article explaining how wonderful LSD was. He told me that although they all looked pretty straight at IBM, they were really anti-establishment characters."

Read the rest. It's most amusing.

Windschuttle sounds like an interesting fellow.

Anyone who hammers Chomsky is fine with me.