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One mistake, just one mistake - but it could have had dire consequences.
On Friday, April 16, 1943, the chemist Albert Hofmann was exhausted and unable to concentrate at the end of the week.
For example, while tidying up his desk in the laboratory of the Basel drug manufacturer Sandoz, he came into contact with one of the remedies he was currently working on.
He researched substances that stabilize the human circulation and was currently carrying out a series of experiments with different variants of lysergic acid.
The substance he accidentally ingested had the abbreviation LSD-25.
"I had to leave the laboratory, I had the feeling that something was happening to you," said Hofmann, describing the consequences.
“I rode my bike home, lay down and had a wonderful experience.
Whatever I imagined was pictorial in front of me, deeply exhilarating.
It took three or four hours, and then it disappeared. "
From the 1960s onwards, LSD was considered a supposedly risk-free intoxicant.
In 1971 it was banned
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
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On the following Monday, the 19th, he wanted to get to the bottom of the phenomenon and deliberately ingested 250 micrograms of LSD-25 at 4:20 p.m. This time he noted the consequences. Around 5 p.m., “dizziness, anxiety, impaired vision, paralysis, and the urge to laugh” set in. His ride home on his bike turned out to be a "bad trip". Hofmann's condition took on “threatening forms”, he recalled 63 years later: “Everything in my field of vision swayed and was distorted like in a curved mirror.” The dose was far too high: “I thought you made a great invention , and now you have to go. "
Hofmann didn't have to “leave”, on the contrary - the then 37-year-old had only a third of his life behind him.
Born in 1906 in the Swiss canton of Aargau, he had completed an apprenticeship as a businessman and acquired the general university entrance qualification, which in Switzerland is called Matura.
An LSD trip, wrapped in plastic, as it is now traded as a drug
Source: picture alliance / Markus C. Hur
He then studied chemistry and joined Sandoz as one of the most innovative companies in the industry at the time, as a laboratory scientist with a doctorate.
Hofmann remained loyal to the company throughout his professional life and helped develop essential pharmaceuticals, including preparations for the treatment of heart problems and for gynecology.
But he became famous for the discovery of the ergot extract, now known only as LSD, and one of the most powerful hallucinogens of all.
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In the almost two decades after Hofmann's self-discovery trip, LSD was primarily regarded as a promising experimental drug that, like any other pharmacologically active substance, was examined for possible applications in the therapy of sick people.
Numerous scientists used it to test new treatment approaches in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
This included Timothy Leary, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University near Boston. After trying LSD himself, in the early 1960s he propagated the substance as well as marijuana as a psychedelic drug and therefore soon came into conflict with the law. Leary was behind bars for drug offenses for years, fled as far as Afghanistan and returned to prison after being extradited to the United States.
Something like that would never have occurred to Albert Hofmann.
Carefully and thoroughly, he continued to research and always advocated the controlled use of his discovery of LSD in medicine.
At the same time he warned against abuse as a "luxury food", but of course could not prevent it.
Hofmann reported in detail on the discovery of LSD at a symposium on his 100th birthday in 2006 and died peacefully near Basel in 2008 at the age of 102.
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