tagged w/ Albert Hoffman
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Gus Van Sant is bringing Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" to the screen.
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" told the wild-edging-to-unbelievable story of Ken Kesey, the "undisputed King of the Counter Culture" who during the early 1960s became America's top new literary light, then -- fueled by Sandoz 25 LSD -- abruptly ditched his day job as the next Norman Mailer to become a sort of proto acid Christ. This is the title, not incidentally, of my new book, the story of multi-talented Kesey's spectacular rises and falls.
Kesey changed everything, exploding on the American literary stage with two critical and commercial blockbuster novels, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion," a feat unequaled by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and John Updike. So why had Kesey abandoned literary lion-hood to become an LSD evangelist whose self described job was to “save the world” by blowing its mind? Stay tuned.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-christensen/acid-christ-ken-kesey-psychedelic_b_764629.htmlGus Van Sant is bringing Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"... more
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“A Bicycle Trip” is an amazing award-winning short animation by three young Italian filmmakers, Lorenzo Veracini, Nandini Nambiar and Marco Avoletta. The film tells a story about Dr. Albert Hofman, the chemist working in Basel (Switzerland) who discovered LSD. On April 19, 1943, Hofmann performed a self-experiment in his laboratory to determine the true effects of LSD, intentionally ingesting 250 micrograms of the substance, an amount he predicted to be a threshold dose (however, an actual threshold dose is only 20 micrograms).
Less than an hour later, Dr. Hofmann began experiencing sudden and intense changes in perception. He then decided to leave the laboratory, making his journey home on a bicycle. During the bicycle trip home, Hofmann’s condition rapidly changed, and all along the way he struggled with alternating feelings of anxiety and fear, accompanied by perceptions of an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with an intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.
This piece includes a number of colorful illustrations from the film, as well as the remarkable animated short, “A Bicycle Trip.”“A Bicycle Trip” is an amazing award-winning short animation by three... more
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Here are a few excerpts from the article which I find telling and encouraging to anyone who has any opinion in this field. Please take the time to sit back and read some of this.
The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102. Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.
More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what he refers to as the "40-year-long bad trip" that researchers like him have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This 40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by "enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive."
A Return to Respectability
Much greater than usual media attention accompanied the most recent World Psychedelic Forum held in March in Basel, Switzerland, the home of Albert Hofmann. A headline in the May issue of the staid British medical journal The Lancet -- known for challenging the Pentagon's Iraq casualty numbers -- read, "Research on Psychedelics Moves into the Mainstream."
The Healing Potential of Psychedelics
Unlike other treatments, which have shown pitifully low success rates, psychedelic-assisted therapy focuses on the emotional context under which a patient suffers addiction, not the use of the drugs themselves. "This," says Tom Roberts, a professor of psychology at Northern Illinois University and the co-editor of a new two-volume compilation, Psychedelic Medicine, "is what makes them uniquely effective. They allow negative ideas and feelings -- where most addictions have their origins -- to surface into consciousness. With the guidance of a mental health professional, the person can let them go." Once these negative feelings are gone, Roberts says, the person no longer feels the need to deaden them with drugs or alcohol.
Here are a few excerpts from the article which I find telling and encouraging to... more
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The father of LSD has died. Albert Hofmann was 102 when he died of a heart attack at his home in Switzerland yesterday. The chemist discovered the mind-altering drug in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains.
He became the first human guinea pig when a tiny amount of the hallucinogen seeped on to his finger during a 1943 experiment. He later took a larger dose and said he was filled with an
overwhelming fear that he would "go crazy." For decades after it was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention. He says he produced the drug "as a medicine" and it wasn't his fault if people abused it.
But he also wrote a book titled "LSD - My Problem Child."
By Associated Press
Published: Wed, April 30, 2008 - 5:13 am
Last Updated: Wed, April 30, 2008 - 5:16 am The father of LSD has died. Albert Hofmann was 102 when he died of a heart attack at... more
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The first ever World Psychedelic Forum opens on Friday in Basel highlighting renewed cultural and scientific interest in hallucinogens like LSD.
Discovered by Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, LSD – or lysergic acid diethylamide - fell from grace in the flower power 1960s, but a new medical study using the drug has just been approved.
The three-day forum brings together around 50 international experts to debate "the multi-dimensional psychedelic experience with its tremendous potential for expanding consciousness and for self-awareness".
Hofmann, still sprightly at 102, will be guest of honour.The first ever World Psychedelic Forum opens on Friday in Basel highlighting renewed... more
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