Hofmann's Potion

Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," D-lysergic acid diethylamide (or LSD) was being used by researchers to understand the human mind.

Discovered in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, LSD was hailed as a powerful tool to treat alcoholism and drug addiction and to provide a window into schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Much of that pioneering research was done by the team of Humphry Osmond, Abram Hoffer and Duncan Blewett, all working in Saskatchewan.

While researchers were establishing the medical benefits of LSD, others - like author Aldous Huxley - promoted the drug as a powerful tool for mental exploration and self-understanding. At Harvard, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass (then known as Richard Alpert) became popular heroes after the university canceled their research project into psychedelics.

Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. With its thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD - and our world - with a more open, compassionate mind.

Documentaries differ from ordinary film in one special way. One comes to a fiction film knowing that the value in it is what is left out. If the filmmaker and her collaborators have done a good job, they will have created a narrative, a story, and you do that by careful economy.

Documentaries differ in the sense that they purport to reveal a truth. They rely on narrative as well, but the presumption is that this narrative is discovered from what truly exists and is shaped in a way that minimally helps us grasp it.

Here we have a narrative about a substance whose property is that it gives us a slippery reality. It and its cousins have profound powers and by simple osmosis have affected every visual thing, every cinematic lexicon, and much literary shape. And here we have a film that leaves out too much, and since it consists of primarily interviews with LSD researchers (all of whom testify to altered truth) the thing has problems.

The narrative is simple enough. This is a serious chemical with effects that are worthy of serious, scientific study. This study is not allowed in the US (while research in other drugs is). The reason in this story is because Tim Leary promoted the drug as something inevitable and necessary for everyone — the next stage. Scads of young people took it and ended up in anti-war protests, so the story goes. This, coupled with government guilt over sponsoring Army research into using it as a weapon, have resulted in unreasonable proscription of otherwise promising research.

But the story leaves too much out.

The Army research was much more nuanced than reported, and in fact related work continues today. The researchers that are interviewed all took the drug themselves, so we get a tangled mess in terms of perspectives. You can't objectively observe something you think changed your life.

This was very well done for what it was. But I think they should have put more in. Then they would have found a better story. Sure, it would have been a different story than jack- booted thugs stomp on flower children — that story does exist. But they merely borrowed it for the far richer story that we will have to wait for someone else to tell.

Ram Dass is always a joy to encounter though.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, became widely known in the '60s, with the counterculture using it to expand their consciousness. It turns out that LSD had been around for some time, having gotten synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943. Connie Littlefield's documentary "Hofmann's Potion" looks at the substance's history, as well as Timothy Leary's championing of it in the '60s. It features an interview with Hofmann (who died a few years after the documentary's release), as well as Ram Dass, another champion of it.

Basically, the documentary should serve as a rebuttal to the people who still label LSD a dangerous substance that turns people into maniacs. In reality, LSD has helped people see the world in ways that they never imagined they could.

So Albert Hofmann's wife was named Anita. That was also the name of Abbie Hoffman's wife.