In the wake of Albert Hofmann's death, I thought a few words would be in order.

The guy was a chemist who inadvertently stumbled onto LSD during World War II. And people have been stumbling over it ever since. No, I don't mean stumbling in the sense of being intoxicated, but in the sense of really not knowing what to do or how to deal with LSD -- either as a substance or as a political issue.

Yes, it is political. No, it should not be. (There I go, making my usual pompous judgments about what should be political -- as if I have or should have any control. It's just my way of stating my opinion.)

It's more than politics. LSD goes to the heart of the culture war. Take the first paragraph of today's Inquirer obituary:

GENEVA, Switzerland - Albert Hofmann, 102, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired - and arguably corrupted - millions in the 1960s hippie generation, died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental, Switzerland.

There is little question, though, that the LSD experience activates neural pathways which are not normally activated, and that it causes people to experience what we call "hallucinations." Now, from a logical standpoint, hallucinations are real because they are there at the time they occur. As far as what to make of them, discussion of that tends to degenerate to an argument over "shoulds." Are they insights? Are they valuable? Or are they delusions? Are they evil? Should they be medicated out of existence, and the user punished for having had them? There's another approach, which is to remain as neutral and objective in analysis as possible. From the point of a user or a nonuser, who gets to decide whether a "good trip" is good? And by what standard is a "bad trip" actually bad? I don't mean to sound like a moral relativist (although I don't understand why morality is implicated in evaluating the actions of brain chemistry), but considering the nature of the hallucinatory experience, wouldn't the maintenance of skepticism be in order?

If we can't be skeptical about our hallucinations, then what can we be skeptical about? This strikes me as common sense, and actually, the inculcation of healthy skepticism has "saved" many a "victim" of we'd call a "bad acid trip." The Merry Pranksters were an early group of acid heads who threw a series of parties called the Acid Tests, and in Tom Wolfe's book on the subject (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), he quotes this bit of advice the Pranksters used to give inexperienced users who got freaked out:

Neither accept nor deny.

There are such things as police, and some of them might not appreciate the philosophical nuances, or the humor.

Hallucinations pass, like most things in life, just as life itself eventually passes. (Eventually, and much to my unending horror, I was to learn firsthand that while hallucinations may be temporary, death is permanent.) I've never seen the point of debating what hallucinations mean, might mean, or might have meant. But I want to try to be fair to those who charge that LSD "corrupts" users, because I think an argument can be made that seeing too much can be a bad thing, in some cases. Not only is there a potential for delusions, but maintaining the kind of skepticism it takes to see past hallucinations might cause a certain "so what" attitude to develop, which could lead to forms of relativism inappropriate to dealing with ordinary day to day realities. While I'd be hesitant to call it "corruption," the realist in me recognizes that the argument can be made that it isn't "good for society" to have millions of tax paying citizens realizing that their jobs and careers mean little to nothing in terms of the big picture, and that they might be happier carving wood, raising goats and living in teepees.

But as culture war issues go, people deciding to pull up stakes and move is a minor issue. Like it or not, LSD generated a multifaceted culture war -- both for it and against it, and IMO the worst move was making it illegal. That's because LSD is in a world apart from ordinary drugs that people take to get high. Aside from the fact that it is not addictive and does not produce a high in the ordinary sense of the word, because it goes to the essence of the thought processes that make up the human brain, every experience is extremely personal in nature. The idea of the government intruding into something like that is analogous to the government getting into sexuality, and thus culture war fallout from criminalized LSD became inevitable.

LSD being a brain drug, the imprisonment of people for LSD thus approached (or at least so many users believed) Orwellian imprisonment of people for thought crimes. Culture war issues involving lifestyles (like hair, tattoos, etc.) are one thing, but when you start putting people in jail, that's when things begin to be seen along the lines of "war."

It has long struck me that what people do with their brains is analogous to what they do with "their" bodies. The reason "their" is in quotes is because women are said to have the right to abort fetuses because it's "their" body, while the other side claims the body of a fetus is not theirs, but the fetus's. However, society made a determination that because of the right to privacy in "their" bodies, women have a right to cut out those fetuses. Under what moral basis of rights does a right allow that, but not allow the same woman to ingest chemicals? I've never been able to understand it, and it all strikes me as quite arbitrary. (Not a new argument, of course.)

The Albert Hofmann Foundation recognizes the inherent culture war aspects posed LSD, and analogizes to the practice of Zapotec Indians who ingested a potent hallucinogen -- and the prejudices of the Conquistadors who wanted to stamp it out:

Conquistador Catholics, already sensitized to heresy by the blows of Protestant reformers, arrived in the New World predisposed to find the devil's work in the practices of yet un-Christianized natives. The devil was God's alter ego in the black-and-white schema of their faith. The new Administration had no choice but to root out devilish practices where they found them, and turn native ways to those of the "true" religion.

"These seeds ... are held in great veneration ... They place offerings to the seeds ... in secret places so that the offerings cannot be found if a search is made. They also place these seeds among the idols of their ancestors .... The natives do these things with so much respect that when some transgressor of the law who has the seeds in his possession is arrested and is asked for the paraphernalia which are used in taking ololiuqui ... or for the seeds themselves, he denies vehemently that he knows anything about the practices. The natives do this not so much because of fear of the law as because of the veneration in which they hold the seed ololiuqui. They do not wish to offend ololiuqui with demonstrations before the judges of the use of the seeds and with public destruction of the seed by burning."

I wonder.

Ann Althouse wondered too as she pondered this quote from Albert Hofmann:

"Under LSD, however, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday." He also "became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the plant and animal kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us."

Reading those lines, does it not make you sad that LSD is illegal?