Bicycle Day

On the afternoon of April 19th, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann dropped acid , and rode his bike home. Hofmann, who worked in the pharmaceutical department of Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, had first synthesized LSD in 1938 while trying to create a stimulant to treat respiratory and circulatory problems. He had no idea the compound had psychedelic effects, and it yielded no visible results when tested on sedated animals, so he set it aside. With that infamous trippy ride, Hofmann became the scientist-godfather of psychedelics , a term coined by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond based on the Greek words for “mind-revealing”. Journalist John Horgan wrote for Scientific American that Hofmann believed when properly used, psychedelics could stimulate the “inborn faculty of visionary experience” that we all possess as children, and lose as we grow up. Hofmann had a complex relationship with the field he helped create, dubbing LSD his “problem child” in the book he wrote about his contributions to psychedelic chemistry. He also studied magic mushrooms, and was the first to isolate, synthesize, and name the psychedelic compounds psilocybin and psilocin. He told Horgan about a psilocybin trip he’d taken during which he ended up in a ghost town deep inside the earth. “Nobody was there,” Hofmann said. “I had the feeling of absolute loneliness, absolute loneliness. A terrible feeling!” When he came back to this plane and found himself with friends again, Hofmann felt ecstatic. He told Horgan, in his heavy Swiss accent, “I had feeling of being reborn! To see now again! And see what wonderful life we have here!” The quest to feel reborn is especially compelling in the era of COVID-19 and self-isolation. The psychedelics journal DoubleBlind recently published an article on using quarantine as a time for inner exploration and self-renewal. DoubleBlind co-founder Madison Margolin says that, in an alternate COVID-less universe, she’d be observing Bicycle Day at a psychedelic seder. “We were planning to partner with Disco Dining Club to celebrate both Bicycle Day and Passover.” Instead, Margolin says, DoubleBlind is co-hosting a free online festival with SPORE (the Society for Psychedelic Outreach, Reform, and Education) on April 19th to support coronavirus aid efforts, “celebrating reciprocity and our connection with Earth and each other,” starting at 8:45 a.m. PST. Trump Pays E. Jean Carroll $5.6 Million for Sex Abuse and Defamation Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them. The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices. Your device might be distinguished from other devices based on information it automatically sends when accessing the Internet (for instance, the IP address of your Internet connection or the type of browser you are using) in support of the purposes exposed in this notice. Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used to determine whether the (non-advertising) content e.g. reached its intended audience and matched your interests. For instance, whether you read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast or look at a product description, how long you spent on this service and the web pages you visit etc. This is very helpful to understand the relevance of (non-advertising) content that is shown to you. Information about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be ve