On this day, November 16, 1938, LSD was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_16

• 1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Albert Hofmann from ergotamine at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel.

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Research suppressed for 80 years, now of interest to new researchers

https://www.amazon.com/Tripped-Nazi-Germany-Dawn-Psychedelic/dp/0358646502

The author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed returns with a provocative new history of drugs and postwar America, examining the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and secretly shaped the War on Drugs.

Berlin 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use—long kept under control by the Nazis’ strict anti-drug laws—is rampant throughout the city. Split into four sectors, Berlin's drug policies are being enforced under the individual jurisdictions of each allied power—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the US. In the American zone, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis’ anti-drug laws and bringing home anything that might prove “useful” to the United States.

Five years later, Harvard professor Dr. Henry Beecher began work with the US government to uncover the research behind the Nazis psychedelics program. Begun as an attempt to find a “truth serum” and experiment with mind control, the Nazi study initially involved mescaline, but quickly expanded to include LSD. Originally created for medical purposes by Swiss pharmaceutical Sandoz, the Nazis coopted the drug for their mind control military research—research that, following the war, the US was desperate to acquire. This research birthed MKUltra, the CIA's notorious brainwashing and psychological torture program during the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately shaped US drug policy regarding psychedelics for over half a century.

Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Tripped is a wild, unconventional postwar history, a spiritual sequel to Norman Ohler’s New York Times bestseller Blitzed. Revealing the close relationship and hidden connections between the Nazis and the early days of drugs in America, Ohler shares how this secret history held back therapeutic research of psychedelic drugs for decades and eventually became part of the foundation of America’s War on Drugs.

https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Reawakening-Psilocybin-Ketamine-Changing-ebook/dp/B0DDL9Y3LT

[Lochloosa]

2. And I just got a new vial of liquid....I've been trying to decide when to give it a try.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Cary Grant credited LSD with arresting his addiction to alcohol.

[NNadir]

4. I have Hoffman's book "My Problem Child," which is interesting as history inasmuch it provides insight into...

...the primitive conditions under which medicinal chemists worked in the 1940's. (Modern chemists would be appalled; using a hood was considered as being for "sissies," by his boss.)

Nevertheless, he was surprised to have been contaminated by the compound, which led him to recognize how low the dose was, when he deliberately ingested some of it the next day, a quantity he thought could not possibly have effect, but would be considered a high dose today.

LSD, My Problem Child.

If I recall correctly - I'm not entirely sure I do - he used azide chemistry via a hydrazide intermediate to couple the lysergic acid to diethylamine. Hopefully he was working with small quantities. Azide chemistry can be dangerous.

All of this did not seem to effect his life span. He lived to be 102.

I haven't looked at the book in many years, but I know it's somewhere on my shelves.

He was studying ergot alkaloids and their derivatives for the purpose of exploiting their use in inducing labor in pregnant women. If I recall, the lysergic acid starting material was isolated from ergot itself.

A total synthesis of enantiomerically pure lysergic acid is found here: Liu, Qiang, Zhang, Yu An, Xu, Ping,Jia, Yanxing, Total Synthesis of(+)Lysergic Acid 2013 J. Org. Chem.78, 21, 10885-10893. (Don't try this at home.) I would have thought that the synthesis would have started from tryptophan (which is likely the starting material in biosynthesis) but apparently, although the authors tried that approach, it is not.

It may be the primitive conditions under which he worked that led him to discover LSD's remarkable hallucinogenic properties. If I recall from the book, which I read probably decades ago, he considered himself very cautious in the lab with respect to contamination, and was surprised by his unintended "trip," and thus, again, went back to deliberately take what he considered a tiny dose, which proved to be a stronger dose than what is found in street drugs, shocking him.