Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Albert Hoffmann father of LSD dead at 102

"Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack."- Washington Post

What I found interesting while reading the obituary of Hoffmann in the Washington Post was that it makes absolutely no mention of it's use by the CIA in it's mind control experiments during the cold war. So important did the CIA believe that LSD would be an important drug in getting it's cold war prisoner's to talk that the agency once attempted to buy all the stockpile that Sandoz Labs had so that it could not be sold to anyone else. The CIA then cut a check to cover the purchase of 25,000 lbs of LSD. The trouble was Sandoz only had about 25 pounds of the stuff. Somebody in the CIA had misread the quantity Sandoz had in stock. Even back then the CIA was getting the intelligence wrong. Of course LSD like many of the other "truth serums" turned out to be pretty much useless in getting quality information in interrogations.

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