T he
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Trip
On April 16th 1943 the organic chemist Albert Hoffman noticed a “not unpleasant intoxicated condition” whilst purifying Lysergic Acid Diethylmide 25, a compound derived from ergot, the fungus that grows on Rye grass. He worked in a pharmaceutical lab in Switzerland where, during the war, fuel was hard to come by and car travel a rarity so when, three days later, he deliberately “dropped” 250 micrograms of the drug, and experienced, according to his lab journal “anxiety, disturbed vision, paralysis, urge to laugh” he clambered on his bicycle and rode home. Thus it was that the discoverer of LSD took the first ever “trip” on two wheels. “Everything in my field of vision wavered,” he said, “and was distorted as seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot,” even though his lab assistant, a young woman called Susi Ramstein, had to pedal furiously to keep up. At home the bemused family doctor proclaimed Hoffman physically fit, if somewhat deranged, and it was only then that the chemist began to relax into his experiences. “A kaleidoscopic flood of fantastic images dazzled me; they circled and spiralled, opened and closed… [and] for each sound there was a corresponding, vividly shifting form and colour.” Later, after rest, he discovered “a feeling of extraordinary well-being… outside, the garden was still damp from a spring rain, and the sun made everything sparkle and gleam in fresh light.” Hoffman’s experiences were the hallmarks of a classic acid “trip”; a stimulation and distortion of perception, dissolution of the boundaries between the internal and external world and, at the right dose in the right setting, a mystical union with the natural world. April 19th was later christened “Bicycle Day” by Thomas B. Roberts, a professor of psychology, and when Hoffman asked why he had used the image of the bicycle Roberts replied “the bicycle was a more concrete image than a chemical structure, and in America there is a famous poem that marks the start of our revolution in 1775… ‘Twas the eighteenth of April in ‘75 And hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year and the midnight ride of Paul Revere”
With LSD, he inferred, there was a revolution of society, on a par with the War for Independence, and a revolution of the mind, with the chemical’s overhaul of our states of consciousness. But the connection between cycling and LSD is more than a coin flip of the calendar. If, like me, you decide a bicycle rides through the mind as much as through the land, then you begin to find a network of links, in a way the psychoanalyst Jung would have called “synchronicity” but I prefer to call the syncing of gears, a meshing of the cogs of possibility. Long before Albert Hoffman took up his vocation as an organic chemist he escaped the industry of his home town of Baden, whose narrow streets whirred to the sounds of cycling factory workers, and explored the skirting forests of Martinsberg. Hoffman’s boyhood bicycle may not have been his only route into nature (there is a picture of him on his first bike beside the woods) but it would have been a prime metaphor for fleeing the urban grime of Baden. One childhood spring, entirely without psychedelics, he “experienced a spontaneous mystical vision of the unity of all being” that “convinced me of the existence of a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight.” It’s clear Hoffman was not a ‘straight’ in a white coat but neither was he a hippy on an astral carpet. He was in fact an irrational rationalist, who, while respecting the “physical” basis of reality, the atoms that put us together, also recognised there were many other ways of perceiving that reality. It is a shame that the letters ‘LSD’, when coupled with cycling, are now taken to mean ‘Long Slow Distance’, where a rider cycles steadily over large distances to build stamina and “increased capillary density, more myoglobin, better use of free fatty acids and larger glycogen stores.” In other words ‘LSD’ has come to mean more ‘rationality’, a greater scientific mastering of the human body and a clouding of the joys of expanded consciousness. I am here to reclaim those three letters for the beatnik on a bike. There was no imperative on Hoffman to synthesise ‘LSD 25’ on April 16th 1943. His lab had rejected it as a useful medicine some five years before. He didn’t have to 95
