CHAPTER ONE

A Renaissance

IF THE START of the modern renaissance of psychedelic research can be
dated with any precision, one good place to do it would be the year 2006.
Not that this was obvious to many people at the time. There was no law
passed or regulation lifted or discovery announced to mark the historical
shift. But as three unrelated events unfolded during the course of that
year—the first in Basel, Switzerland, the second in Washington, D.C., and
the third in Baltimore, Maryland—sensitive ears could make out the
sound of ice beginning to crack.
The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of
historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the
Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered
(five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as
LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very
much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in
remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was
able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday
ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening
ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday
(he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the
Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a
dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and
took his seat.
Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance,
along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists,
pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of
them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable
molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before.