Hofmann's Story 4
When his superior, Arthur Stoll, read the report, he telephoned immediately to ask, "Are you certain that you have made no mistake in the weighing? Is the stated dose really correct?"
Professor Ernst Rothlin, director of the pharmacology department at Sandoz, and two of his colleagues then repeated the experiment using only a third of what Hofmann had tried. Even with this reduction, the effects were "extremely impressive and fantastic." As Hofmann has put it since, "All doubts in the statements of my report were eliminated."
Subsequent studies were carried out by Werner Stoll, the son of Arthur Stoll, involving forty-nine administrations to twenty-two people at the University of Zurich. In 1947, he published the first article on LSD's mental effects in the pages of the Swiss Archives of Neurology. This was followed in 1949 by his second communique on LSD to this journal, entitled "A New Hallucinatory Agent, Active in Very Small Amounts." Two further studies on clinical experiences with LSD were issued that same year.
Six years after Hofmann's discovery, LSD made its way to the United States. It was taken to Los Angeles by Nicholas Bercel, a psychiatrist now specializing in the electroencephalograph (EEG), who had been handed some casually by Werner Stoll with a request that he try it. LSD was also requested and received through the mail at Boston's Psychopathic Hospital, where it was first given to Dr. Robert Hyde, the Assistant Director. After swallowing 100 mcg., he became paranoid but claimed that there was no effect and that the hospital had been cheated. He even insisted on making his hospital rounds. An associate commenting later said, "That was not Dr. Hyde's normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man."
After R. Gordon Wasson, the first "white" to be be-mushroomed, collected specimens of so-called "magic mushrooms," the French mycologist Roger Heim, Director of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and an acclaimed expert on tropical mushroom species, and his Parisian colleagues succeeded in the difficult task of cultivating the species from the specimens and spore prints collected in Mexico. Heim wrote to Sandoz asking if its research team would assist in analyzing the mushrooms that had been grown. His colleagues had been unable to extract the active ingredients. Heim thought Sandoz, successful with LSD-25, might be in the best position to undertake such work. Albert Hofmann accepted Heim's offer with enthusiasm, having already read about the Wassons' discovery in a newspaper article.
Heim sent Sandoz 100 grams of dried Psilocybe mexicana that he had grown in cultures. The research team there first tested this on dogs, trying to establish what would be a reliable dose. The results were uncertain and almost depleted the mushroom supply. Hofmann ingested 2.4 grams himself to see if cultivation had ruined its psychoactivity.
While the dosage was moderate by Indian standards, the effects led Hofmann to conclude that humans provide a more sensitive testing of mind-affecting substances than animals. Using about a third of Hofmann's dose, his team members then made many tests of various fractionated extracts and soon isolated 4-OPO3-DMT and 4-OH-DMT (psilocybin and psilocin).
[more to come]
