El Dios de los Ácidos

This book contains two interviews with Albert Hofmann, the creator of LSD. The conversations are preceded by a presentation of the character and an introduction to the subject by the interviewers, Antonio Gnoli and Franco Volpi. The meetings took place at Rittimate, Albert Hofmann's home in his native Switzerland, in 1997 and 1999 - when the interviewee was at the venerable, healthy and always lively age of 93 and 95.

Hofmann being a world-renowned figure, the father of LSD, a renowned chemist and to some extent also a humanist, one would expect that in these conversations Hofmann would expound lofty, perhaps bombastic, important and conclusive views. It is not that his thoughts lack depth - and above all wisdom - but Albert's continuing simplicity in approaching any question presented to him is surprising. It seems that faced with the temptation to deliver grand discourses on the metaphysics of his mischievous creature (LSD), Hofmann prefers to opt for answers that always stand out for their simplicity, clarity and deep understanding.

The first interview reviews the chemist's career, his childhood and the mystical experiences he had while walking in a forest near his home, his years of academic training as a natural chemist and his entry into the Sandoz company, where he worked throughout his life as director of the research laboratory. This is followed by questions and memories about the happy discovery of LSD, the years of his first hesitant research - studying its application in psychotherapy as well as among people with philosophical and artistic interests; in this section, special mention should be made of his friend Ernst Jünger, the German writer who had such an influence on Albert Hofmann's thinking.

The second interview follows the first one in subject matter, but Hofmann is quite extensive in his vision of the current state of affairs in the world, of ecology and the need for human beings to recover and recognize the debt they owe to the planet earth, as well as the need to respect it. In this interview Hofmann also recalls at length his relationship with the writer Ernst Jünger. In short, a simple book, like the character, but wise and profound at the same time.

In this book-interview, Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered LSD, evokes the history of the popular psychedelic drug, which in the 1960s became an emblem of the counterculture and youth protest. Thanks to his extraordinary testimony, the years of America on the road, the protagonists who embodied freedom and anti-conformism, from Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs, and those who, like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, saw in the depths of the psychedelic dream a way to enlighten and broaden the conscience. For all of them, Hofmann was a point of reference, just as Ernst Jünger, often quoted in this book, was for him.

It is rare that a scientist manages to break down the wall of his specialty and speak to us, as Hofmann knows how to do, with enormous simplicity, of the things of the world and of God, of man in the age of globalization, of the destiny of the West and of the spiritual richness that the East can bring us.