Today's Trivia
What happened on April 19, 1943?
On April 16, 1943, Hofmann accidentally contacted a bit of LSD—which he first synthesized 5 years prior in 1938—likely absorbing the compound through his fingers. The ensuing experience was intriguing enough to catch the 37-year-old scientist’s attention. “At the end of the synthesis, I got in a very strange psychic situation,” Hofmann told the BBC in a 1986 interview. “A kind of dreamworld appeared. A feeling of oneness with the world.”
This initial brush with LSD convinced Hofmann to ingest what he thought was a small amount of the drug three days later, on April 19. In his Sandoz laboratory, he ingested 0.25 mg of LSD, a dose he thought would be so negligible that he planned to increase the dosage incrementally as the experiment wore on. “But this very small does, the first dose of my experiments I planned, was very, very strong,” he recalled. (Hofmann and others would soon realize that LSD is so potent that psychoactive effects start at about 20 micrograms, or 0.02 mg! So that first intentional acid drop was a doozy indeed.) (Read the article on Nautilus)
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