Timothy Leary, Father of the Acid Trip

It is impossible to define the meaning and nature of a drug experience by looking strictly at the chemical ingested. Mindset, setting, and sociological context variables determine the drug experience as a subjective experience capable of reaffirming or transforming one’s conception of self and one’s relationship to a whole cluster of emotionally laden symbols (Zinberg, 1984). Years ago, I wrote a research paper titled Who Was the True Father of LSD? for a graduate course in psychedelic research taught by Dr. Thomas B. Roberts in the Educational Psychology department of Northern Illinois University. Albert Hofmann first synthesized the chemical in 1938 and certainly meant to claim paternity when he published a book titled LSD, My Problem Child (Hofmann, 1980). Bicycle Day is still celebrated on April 19^th to commemorate the day in 1943 when Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with LSD and became the first person to experience the peculiar psychoactive properties of the drug he synthesized in search of a non-addictive painkiller. Many people consider this the first acid trip but I disagreed in my paper. My counterclaim was that accidental ingestion of the chemical alone would not have made it possible to trip before Humphrey Osmond’s 1956 introduction of the concept of a psychedelic or mind-manifesting drug or before the work of Aldous Huxley made the metaphor of a drug-induced trip into inner space commonly available for further articulation.

I credited Timothy Leary as the true father of the acid trip as it came to be understood in the context of 1960s counterculture. Hofmann synthesized a drug. Leary created the mindset and setting that made that drug the core sacrament of something that served the function of a religion in millions of lives and, for better or worse, changed the minds of many of those millions as dramatically as the mind of Saul of Tarsus was changed long ago on the road to Damascus. Leary’s work was a bricolage of the previous work of many others, but the final synthesis was distinctively enough his own to earn him a place in history as the man who invented the acid trip.

References

Hofmann, A. (1980). LSD, my problem child. Columbus: McGraw-Hill.

Metzner, R. (1989). Molecular mysticism: The role of psychoactive substances in the transformation of consciousness. In C. Ratsch (Ed.), Gateway to inner space. London: Prism Press.

Rosegrant, J. (1976). The impact of set and setting on religious experience in nature. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15, 301–310.

Zinberg, N. (1984). Drug, set, and setting. New Haven: Yale University Press.