Thread by @Paperclip_In

What connects a bicycle trip made by a lesser-known chemist, PCR, CIA, Merry Pranksters, Vietnam war and Richard Nixon? – A thread (1/n)

Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, was working on a bunch of alkaloids from fungus infested wheat as a treatment for pain (2/n)

#OTD in 1939, while running some assays and weighing it out, he accidentally spilt the compound on his desk and unknowingly ingested it as he touched his face and mouth. As he started to feel uneasy after a while, he took his bicycle to head back home (3/n)

During his journey, his vision was transformed into a panorama of colors, geometric shapes, patterns that seemed to spontaneously form, morph and collapse into one another. This was the world’s first known psychedelic trip with the compound, LSD-25 (4/n)

Every year, April 19 has a cult following where people dress up in fancy costumes and undertake bicycle parade parties and day-glo cycle rides. This is how and why a psychedelic journey is referred to as "a trip" (5/n)

The term psychedelic was coined by English writer – Aldous Huxley who had a profound mystical experience from mescaline, a compound found in Peyote cactus. But LSD-25 was 1000 times more potent than mescaline making it more amenable to recreational use (6/n)

As Aldous Huxley and his psychiatrist friend, Humphry Osmond, communicated in a letter "To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic, Take a pinch of Psychedelic" - Let's see what happened from a pinch of LSD and how our world changed (7/n)

But while the world knows about Hoffman’s bicycle trip as the eureka moment, no one understood how LSD worked, but it became the tool for western mysticism, a source of evil and even influenced the war on drugs as we know it (8/n)

After WWII, with growing Russian worries, the CIA created an organization to test mind-control and appointed Sidney Gottlieb as the chief scientist, who tested it on war criminals jailed at CIA black sites (9/n)

He even formed a non-profit organization to give grants to psychologists and psychiatrists to test on human volunteers (10/n)

One such facility was the Veteran Affairs Hospital in Palo Alto. A janitor named Ken Kesey was a subject, who later wrote “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” (11/n)

Kesey’s friends were a fledgling rock group – Merry Pranksters, and their music became the cult music for the 1960s psychedelic rock. Even the Beatles’ track and lyrics – Sergeant Peppers were influenced by LSD (12/n)

LSD became an influence in the political spectrum through Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor (13/n)

Leary's experiment with LSD on prison inmates made him a cult influencer of the 1960s hippy movement, that led to widespread anti-war protests and anti-government marches against the Vietnam war (14/n)

Richard Nixon, the then President called Leary as the most dangerous man in America and with growing civil unrest and the knowledge of the darker side of CIA’s mind control testing becoming apparent, Nixon banned them on 18th June 1971 (15/n)

LSD does however have a profound impact on human lives and their survival. Nobel Prize winner, Kary Mullis was said to have thought of his PCR idea after ingesting LSD and driving to his cabin on PCH1 highway on a Friday night (16/n)

The panoramic patterns from the highway lights in his vision became the influence to add base pairs to DNA to detect even small levels of DNA. The invention forever changed medical science and more recently the fight against COVID (17/n)

NB: Paperclip does not promote or encourage use of LSD or any kind of addictive drugs/substance. We also strongly encourage everyone to abide by the laws of their respective regions with regard to consumption of addictive substances

Sources: PsychedeRx.com, npr.org/2018/01/05/575…,
Poisoner-In-Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Stephen Kinzer)