Read the Never-Before-Published Letter From LSD-Inventor Albert Hofmann to Apple CEO Steve Jobs
The following post is adapted from the new book "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America." The letter is published with the permission of the estate of LSD-inventor Albert Hofmann. For more on events related to the book, see the Facebook page or follow Ryan Grim on Twitter.
Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he'd be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.
Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.
See the letter here.
Written just after his 101st birthday, the letter's penmanship is impressive for a man of his years. I showed it to my grandmother, Ruth Grim, who was 8 years Hofmann's junior and did amateur handwriting analysis as long as Hofmann had been tripping. Without knowing who he was, she said in an e-mail that "something happened early in his life that made him twisted about things. Maybe he felt threatened. Also--creative with his hands, hard on himself, thinks a lot, stubborn, careful with the way he expresses himself, not influenced by other's thinking."
Doblin says Hofmann often said he had a happy childhood and wouldn't characterize him as twisted. Hofmann, for his own part, often referred to LSD as his own "problem child" and in his letter he asks Jobs to "help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonderchild."
He specifically asks Jobs to fund research being proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser and directs Jobs to Doblin's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Doblin and Hofmann were close; Doblin gave the doctor his first tab of ecstasy in the '80s when it was still legal, he says, and Hofmann loved it, saying that finally he'd found a drug he could enjoy with his wife, no fan of LSD.
Doblin provided a copy of the letter to me; Hofmann's son, Andreas Hofmann, executor of his father's estate, authorized its publication.
The letter led to a roughly 30-minute conversation between Doblin and Jobs, says Doblin, but no contribution to the cause. "He was still thinking, 'Let's put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,'" recalls a disappointed Doblin, who says he still hasn't given up hope that Jobs will come around and contribute.
That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.
Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple's Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates, would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed as a young man.
Thinking differently--or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it--is a hallmark of the acid experience. "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann's one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly "solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead."
"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain," said Herbert. "Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used."
Burning Man, founded in 1986 by San Francisco techies, has always been an attempt to make a large number of people use different parts of their brains toward some nonspecific but ostensibly enlightening and communally beneficial end. The event was quickly moved to the desert of Nevada as it became too big for the city. Today, it's more likely to be attended by a software engineer than a dropped-out hippie. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are longtime Burners, and the influence of San Francisco and Seattle tech culture is everywhere in the camps and exhibits built for the eight-day festival. Its Web site suggests, in fluent acidese, that "[t]rying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind."
At the 2007 event, I set up my tent at Camp Shift--as in "Shift your consciousness"--next to four RVs rented by Alexander and Ann Shulgin and their septu- and octagenarian friends from northern California. The honored elders, the spiritual mothers and fathers of Burning Man, they spent the nights sitting on plastic chairs and giggling until sunrise. Near us, a guy I knew from the Eastern Shore--an elected county official, actually--had set up a nine-and-half-hole miniature golf course. Why nine and a half? "Because it's Burning Man," he explained. Our camp featured lectures on psychedelics and a "ride" called "Dance, Dance, Immolation." Players would don a flame-retardant suit and try to dance to the flashing lights. Make a mistake, and you would be engulfed in flames. The first entry on the FAQ sign read, "Is this safe? A: Probably not."
John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he's certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he's perhaps best known for Gilmore's Law, his observation that "[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. "What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company," he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there's some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: "To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads," he said.
Gilmore doubts, however, that a strict cause-and-effect relationship between drugs and the Internet can be proved. The type of person who's inspired by the possibility of creating new ways of storing and sharing knowledge, he said, is often the same kind interested in consciousness exploration. At a basic level, both endeavors are a search for something outside of everyday reality--but so are many creative and spiritual undertakings, many of them strictly drug-free. But it's true, Gilmore noted, that people do come to conclusions and experience revelations while tripping. Perhaps some of those revelations have turned up in programming code.
And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.
It's no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British wire service after Crick's death, said that when he spoke with Crick about what he'd heard from the scientist's friends, he "listened with rapt, amused attention" and "gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said, 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'"
The letter from Hofmann to Jobs, transcribed below if you have difficulty viewing:
Dear Mr. Steve Jobs,
Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you.
I'm writing now, shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser's proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness. This will become the first LSD-assisted psychotherapy study in over 35 years.
I hope you will help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonder child.
Sincerely,
A. Hofmann
Dear Rick,
Thank you for all you do for my problem child. I am pleased to add whatever I can do from my part.
I learned much from your great letter, to do things after waiting for the right moment, how clever and careful you organize and do your work.
I do hope that my letter to Steve Jobs corresponds to your expectation, especially what regards the choice of the writing paper. [Doblin had asked Hofmann to use his personal letterhead. It's not what you're thinking.] I believe that I followed your prescription.
Hopefully Dr. Gasser will be successful with his request.
Cordially -
Albert
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"The reason why LSD, other psychedelics, and pot are illegal".
LSD, other psychedics and pot are illegal is not because of the benefits but because of the risks.
Brain chemistry is so different that some users may function well while others freak out. We need a lot more research.
then why the legality of cigarettes e.g.
I've never heard of someone freaking out on cigarettes.
What the anti-smoking bans are really about-
Corporations would love to criminalize cigarettes so that employees can't use a cigarette break as an excuse for smoking pot. It's all about corporate productivity and control.
Your logic:
So because people can legally harm themselves with cigarettes, we should make all harmful drugs legal. Maybe we should even encourage their use.
yeah....li
Exactly!
It is because the "authorities" don't want people experiences different levels of consciousness; that leads to them thinking for themselves, questioning authority, and not following the rules.
Alcohol is fine because it dulls the senses and turns people into sheep. Violent sheep.
Bang on!
i took a load of acid. I discovered everything was made of electricity and that there was no god.
I still believe that this is the case. Except for the electricity.
Don't doubt the electricity.
LOL! God is energy. Ergo; energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It only changes forms. Ergo, God is infinite and humans are incapable of comprehending that. Maybe that is where you hit the wall, amigo.
I love it when trippers get all religious, man...
Interesting responses here--and all seem to be male. It would be interesting to find out if any of the famous LSD ingesters ever took time to find out who or what "god" really is--by asking the women who actually know, and don't need psychedlics to find out.
You're melting!
The anti-drug mentality is the same patriarchal attitude behind the witch hunts.
"all seem to be male"? Why would you assume such a thing?
I'm a woman. I've taken a ton of LSD and there is no god. Now what was it you were saying?
LSD is just the beginning ... wait until we market pills that make you smarter.
pssst ... we already have the targets.
Probably they're mostly Republicans. LOL
The brain has an apparently finite operating capacity. However, it may also possess a reserve for use in exceptional circumstances. As well as an ability to momentarily “overclock”, in order to respond to life threatening situations. Drugs may induce these effects, but they may also be accessible though less intrusive means.
One way is to off-load all extraneous computations, and concentrate all available mental manipulating power on a particular task. This can be achieved by defining the parameters of a problem, then forgetting it, just before sleep. Leaving the mind unencumbered, to attempt all available relational associations, in the search for an appropriate solution.
REMOTE VIEWING!!!!
Does this handwriting "analysis" even take into account that Hoffmann may be used to Sütterlin for handwriting and that he at learned it that way at school?
http://en.
Astrology and Graphology should be declared illegal...
I half agree with you. Astrology is a parlor game, and harmless. Lighten up.
Graphology is a science. Yes, it should take his native language into account, but I'd say the author's mother's analysis was spot on.
I didn't look at the link but, if we're talking about the handwritten letter in this article they must consider that he was 101 years old at the time of the writing. Hardly anyone lives to that age and much less handwrites letters in such a clear and concise capacity.
Could you imagine one of today's corporate chemists being allowed, or sufficiently enlightened, to assume lifelong responsibility for the societal impact of a newly synthesized substance of his own invention? Albert Hoffman lived a very long life; he was intellectually lucid, socially connected, and highly altruistic right up to his passing at 102. He also took LSD on occasion, and it was not the street version of the drug. His very life was proof that the alleged dangers of this substance are far outweighed by its benefits. The attribution of harm is more likely connected to its illegality and subsequent adulteration in clandestine laboratories by unqualified chemists producing substances inferior to actual Sandoz LSD-25.
Sorry for the double posts before. Guess there were some after effects, after all. Posting comments is new to me.
No problem. At least you didn't contradict yourself.
Fascinating. I saw Timothy Leary give a talk in the 90s, predicting perfectly that "the screen and what you decide to put on it" will be the way of the future, the cyber-visionaries able to self-reflect in a way previously impossible except to the imagination.
Looking for God at age 20 back in '58, after reading Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness", thinking there might be hope for me after all; then reading that the Indians talked to him/her/it after eating a sacred cactus, I went all the way to Sonora and back looking, then found 13 "botones" in a friend's father's flower pots. After the mind-altering but fascinating experience I felt ashamed at myself and others for the shallow life we were iiving, and tried to be a better, more thoughtful person afterwards. I did feel that everyone should have a similar experience, whether they wanted or not. But only shared with a few close friends, not the world. Gurdjieff was right about most of us being "asleep", I believe that only constant is change, but hesitate to go back or change too much at this late time in life. I think that psychedelics have a mixture of super reality and hallucination(the colors alone are better than Disney), but as mentioned in the reference to "stairway to heaven", meditation or spiritual awareness is more closely aligned to a cosmic reality. My self-portrait was originally a nice normal photo, before discovering Photoshop, I see God in nature now, everywhere.
Exactly the point. The "powers that be" need the underlings to be "asleep". LSD shows us the superficiality and utter BS of the plane on which we exist.
"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. "
Morpheus
If I took the blue pill and didn't remember, odds are I had a pretty good time.
Memory loss = Sign of a good trip. Like Wow, man!
LOL, that was a great scene!
Looking for God without intermediaries back in '58 at age 20, after reading Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness", and thinking there might be hope for me after all, I read that Indians in Arizona ate a cactus that allowed them to talk directly with him/her/it, so after a long trip to Sonora and back looking, found them(13 large botones) in a planter in a friend's father's patio. After the mind-altering experience I was ashamed at the shallow manner in which I, and others were living. Maybe like Gurdgieff (sp.?) said, "asleep", I tried after that to try to be a better person. I do recall thinking that everyone should experience a similar experience, whether they wanted to or not. But I only shared with some friends, not the world. I know that the only constant is change, but hesitate to start over at this late date. But probably would do me good, and would coincide with the study mentioned above.On the 4th of July, someone asked me if I wanted to participate in telling my story as a senior, and my response was that if everyone turned left, I'd turn right(or vise versa). That's probably a flash back of sorts. It did help me in my photography awareness.
Oh, poo....I read the headline, clicked the link, and instead of seeing flashing strobes and a wavering psychedelic image, there was a real letter...
As Dr. Hoffman alluded, clinical research into the undiscovered benefits of LSD should be allowed to resume. LSD was a legal research chemical prior to its widespread abuse and subsequent illegality in the mid-1960's. Leary stated that the drug should not be used by everyone, He issued warnings about the unpredictable quality of the street drug called "acid". Hoffman's patented process for the manufacture of LSD-25 is extremely complex, requiring graduate level-organic chemistry skills. There are plenty of good reasons to retain some controls on LSD, yet it would be better if properly manufactured, pharmaceut
In clinical research studies, there was virtually no incidence of permanent injury. Those having difficult experiences often reported an accompanying breakthrough. From John Lennon to Steve Jobs and James Watson, many highly creative individuals gained profound insight through their experiences. Most likely all had access to the real thing - not a questionable street dosage. Allowing legitimate LSD research to continue may result in future breakthroughs facilitating world peace and greater understanding among all cultures. That is because the experience itself transcends the individual ego and leads to a discovery of universal conciousness.
Guess i'll just write this right here.
Clever lad...
The molecule is forever - one may be assured investigat
Awesome!
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