READ THE NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED LETTER FROM LSD-INVENTOR ALBERT
HOFMANN TO APPLE CEO STEVE JOBS

The following post is adapted from the new book "This Is Your Country On
Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America." The letter is
published with the permission of the estate of LSD-inventor Albert
Hofmann. For more on events related to the book, see the Facebook page
or follow Ryan Grim on Twitter.

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.

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."

He specifically asks Jobs to fund research being proposed by Swiss
psychiatrist Peter Gasser and directs Jobs to Doblin's
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Doblin and
Hofmann were close; Doblin gave the doctor his first tab of ecstasy in
the '80s when it was still legal, he says, and Hofmann loved it,
saying that finally he'd found a drug he could enjoy with his wife, no
fan of LSD.

Doblin provided a copy of the letter to me; Hofmann's son, Andreas
Hofmann, executor of his father's estate, authorized its
publication.

The letter led to a roughly 30-minute conversation between Doblin and
Jobs, says Doblin, but no contribution to the cause. "He was still
thinking, 'Let's put it in the water supply and turn everybody on,'"
recalls a disappointed Doblin, who says he still hasn't given up hope
that Jobs will come around and contribute.

That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking
is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic
drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists.
The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books,
the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s
Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times
technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet
revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly
altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas
Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped
invent the mouse. Apple's Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates,
would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." In a 1994
interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed
as a young man.

Thinking differently--or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan
has it--is a hallmark of the acid experience. "When I'm on LSD and
hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and
into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started
knowing," Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium
commemorating Hofmann's one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early
employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of
technologists at the company, reportedly "solved his toughest
technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead."

"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my
brain," said Herbert. "Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve
problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain
are used."

Burning Man, founded in 1986 by San Francisco techies, has always been
an attempt to make a large number of people use different parts of
their brains toward some nonspecific but ostensibly enlightening and
communally beneficial end. The event was quickly moved to the desert
of Nevada as it became too big for the city. Today, it's more likely
to be attended by a software engineer than a dropped-out hippie. Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are longtime Burners,
and the influence of San Francisco and Seattle tech culture is
everywhere in the camps and exhibits built for the eight-day festival.
Its Web site suggests, in fluent acidese, that "[t]rying to explain
what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a
bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to
someone who is blind."

At the 2007 event, I set up my tent at Camp Shift--as in "Shift your
consciousness"--next to four RVs rented by Alexander and Ann Shulgin
and their septu- and octagenarian friends from northern California.
The honored elders, the spiritual mothers and fathers of Burning Man,
they spent the nights sitting on plastic chairs and giggling until
sunrise. Near us, a guy I knew from the Eastern Shore--an elected
county official, actually--had set up a nine-and-half-hole miniature
golf course. Why nine and a half? "Because it's Burning Man," he
explained. Our camp featured lectures on psychedelics and a "ride"
called "Dance, Dance, Immolation." Players would don a flame-retardant
suit and try to dance to the flashing lights. Make a mistake, and you
would be engulfed in flames. The first entry on the FAQ sign read, "Is
this safe? A: Probably not."

John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered
the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut,
he's certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties
activist, he's perhaps best known for Gilmore's Law, his observation
that "[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies
used psychedelic drugs. "What psychedelics taught me is that life is
not rational. IBM was a very rational company," he said, explaining
why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple.
Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML,
and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there's some relationship between
chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: "To a man
and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads," he
said.

Gilmore doubts, however, that a strict cause-and-effect relationship
between drugs and the Internet can be proved. The type of person who's
inspired by the possibility of creating new ways of storing and
sharing knowledge, he said, is often the same kind interested in
consciousness exploration. At a basic level, both endeavors are a
search for something outside of everyday reality--but so are many
creative and spiritual undertakings, many of them strictly drug-free.
But it's true, Gilmore noted, that people do come to conclusions and
experience revelations while tripping. Perhaps some of those
revelations have turned up in programming code.

And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the
maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told
him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a
crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel
Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick,
who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first
saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

It's no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the
legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British
wire service after Crick's death, said that when he spoke with Crick
about what he'd heard from the scientist's friends, he "listened with
rapt, amused attention" and "gave no intimation of surprise. When I
had finished, he said, 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'"

The letter from Hofmann to Jobs, transcribed below if you have
difficulty viewing:

DearSteve -

Dear Mr. Steve Jobs,

Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you
feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers
and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more
about how LSD was useful to you.

I'm writing now, shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you
support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser's proposed study of
LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with
life-threatening illness. This will become the first LSD-assisted
psychotherapy study in over 35 years.

I hope you will help in the transformation of my problem child into a
wonder child.

Sincerely,

A. Hofmann

Dear Rick,

Thank you for all you do for my problem child. I am pleased to add
whatever I can do from my part.

I learned much from your great letter, to do things after waiting for
the right moment, how clever and careful you organize and do your work.

I do hope that my letter to Steve Jobs corresponds to your
expectation, especially what regards the choice of the writing paper.
[Doblin had asked Hofmann to use his personal letterhead. It's not
what you're thinking.] I believe that I followed your
prescription.

Hopefully Dr. Gasser will be successful with his request.

Cordially -

Albert