Sublime

Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25, was the twenty-fifth in a series of ergot derivatives synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz laboratories.

In the fall of 1938, Hofmann made the twenty-fifth molecule in this series, naming it lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 for short. Preliminary testing of the compound on animals did not show much promise (they became restless, but that was about it), so the formula for LSD-25 was put on the shelf.

while it had never occurred to Hofmann that his discovery would become a ‘pleasure drug’, he also . . . came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD in the 1960s as an understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialistic, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature.

(Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers. He also was the first to synthesize MDMA since it had been patented by Merck in 1912 and forgotten. Recognizing its psychoactive properties, he introduced the so-called empathog

All of the scientists doing psychedelic research today work exclusively with a synthetic version of the psilocybin molecule. (The mushroom’s psychoactive compound was first identified, synthesized, and named in the late 1950s by Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD.)