Just about everyone knows what 420 is, but there’s another important drug holiday this month that’s often overlooked: Bicycle Day.
This unofficial day of remembrance—observed on April 19—is dedicated to the inventor of LSD, and an especially trippy bike ride he took on the way home one day.
On April 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann began whipping up a batch of LSD (which he had unknowingly invented while trying to create a drug for treating respiratory and circulatory illnesses).
Hofmann had no clue that the drug was psychedelic in nature. He had tested it on animals and was under the impression that it didn’t do anything at all. While attempting to reexamine the compound, a small amount accidentally made contact with his skin.
In his book, LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann wrote that he was forced to leave the lab while “being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness.” At home, Hofmann, lying on his couch, “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”
The first LSD trip lasted two hours.
Curious and ready to experiment, Hofmann once again dosed himself three days later on April 19 at 4:20pm. He took 250 micrograms of LSD—a much larger dose than the first time—and began experiencing extreme perceptual distortions. “Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh,” he wrote in his lab notes.
“I was able to write the last words only with great effort,” he comments in the book.
Hofmann said he found himself struggling to speak and asked a lab assistant to escort him home. Due to wartime restrictions on cars, the duo rode bikes to Hofmann’s home.
“On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms,” wrote Hofmann. “Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror.”
He described feeling as though he was frozen and unable to move, although he was actually traveling quickly.
And that fateful trip is now commemorated by LSD advocates every year.
The part they usually leave out of the story though is what happened when Hofmann got home. He described “demonic transformations” of everyday objects and his mind was assailed with fears of dying or going insane.
A doctor determined that Hofmann was not in any physical danger, at which point his fears receded and he began to actually enjoy the trip.
Keep in mind this was his first experience with a psychedelic and the world’s first serious experience with LSD. All things considered, he did a pretty good job.
Hofmann’s final lab note on the experience, which was added two days later, was: “Home by bicycle. From 18:00 [to approximately] 20:00 most severe crisis.”
Although he had problems with the psychedelic movement of the ’60s that he helped create, Hofmann would go on to become one of the most prominent advocates for the therapeutic use of LSD and psilocybin.