LSD father dead at 102 — no he’s not?

Maybe Albert Hoffman (pictured at right by Alex Gray) kept having flashbacks to the age of 39. I doubt the chemical compound of LSD itself kept him preserved to 102. Anyway, the man who helped usher in the modern drug age is now dead.

The Dallas Morning News, which filed his death under its religion blog, interestingly, has this quote of his:

“I produced the substance as a medicine. ... It's not my fault if people abused it,” he said.

The New York Times story notes that he called it his “problem child,” but again, that it wasn’t his fault. And, per the Times, this is probably why the News filed his death under “religion”:

“As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

“It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”

Another sidebar: A son of Hoffman’s died of alcoholism at the age of 53. Though Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson is not listed in the Times story as among Hoffman’s direct contacts, such as Leary and Aldous Huxley, Wilson nonetheless used LSD on a semi-regular basis in the mid-1960s and at one time thought it could be an alcoholism treatment by helping alcoholics find AA’s mythical “higher power.”

Reason has more on Hoffman.

Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul,” by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.

“I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore,"”he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."

But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all.”

As an atheist, I can say that LSD, or other “entheogens,” don’t get you any closer to humus than no drug at all. And, accepting that, coffin, embalming and all, you will return to soil someday is different than believing you are mystically interconnected with “all.”

Anyway, I couldn’t resist the Timothy Leary joke.