The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD
Mon, Apr 19
|Virtual Cinema
Explore the History and Future of LSD on Bicycle Day, April 19th! In honor of the first time a young Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann ingested a dose of a new compound he discovered in 1943, a drug so potent that mere fractions of a milligram can alter the perception of reality.
Time & Location
Apr 19, 2021, 11:40 AM EDT – May 02, 2021, 11:59 PM EDT
Virtual Cinema
About the event
The Substance: Albert Hofmann's LSD (90 mins). Directed by Martin Witz. Virtual tickets are $8.
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thesubstance/100432213
In 1943, at the Sandoz chemical-pharmaceutical laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann, conducted experiments with Ergot, a fungus that occurs on rye, and first synthesized diethylamide of d-lysergic acid, otherwise known as LSD. A drug so potent that mere fractions of a milligram can alter a subject's perception of reality, and which came to change the world forever. This film explores how Hofmann's discovery became the subject of 1950's Cold War experiments by the American military and the CIA, who saw LSD as a potential weapon. Meanwhile, international psychiatrists and consciousness researchers tried to unlock the drug's medicinal possibilities, wondering whether it might be an effective tool for contemporary psychiatry or neuroscience.
In the early 1960s, Hofmann's "miracle drug" escaped from the lab. The psychedelic substance appealed to the counterculture, whose members saw…