Albert Hoffman to Steve Jobs: "How did LSD affect your life?"

[Bennyboy]

Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he'd be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.

See the letter here. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-before-pub_b_227887.html

Written just after his 101st birthday, the letter's penmanship is impressive for a man of his years. I showed it to my grandmother, Ruth Grim, who was 8 years Hofmann's junior and did amateur handwriting analysis as long as Hofmann had been tripping. Without knowing who he was, she said in an e-mail that "something happened early in his life that made him twisted about things. Maybe he felt threatened. Also--creative with his hands, hard on himself, thinks a lot, stubborn, careful with the way he expresses himself, not influenced by other's thinking."

Doblin says Hofmann often said he had a happy childhood and wouldn't characterize him as twisted. Hofmann, for his own part, often referred to LSD as his own "problem child" and in his letter he asks Jobs to "help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonderchild."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-before-pub_b_227887.html

[B Calm]

1. K&R

[Warpy]

2. Acid is transformative for a lot of us

They did do a long term study of those of us who partook back in the 60s and found that use was not a predictor of life success nor was it a predictor of later mental illness. What they did find was an unusually high proportion of former users in human services jobs, from social workers to doctors.

I think it's likely Gates dropped at one point or another or he wouldn't be at all concerned with how to disburse his fortune to help others, even though I do quibble with some of its destinations.

No wonder the Republican arm of the plutocracy wanted it suppressed ASAP.