Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-05-01

It’s Thursday, May 1st and it’s 4:20 somewhere in the world. I’m your host, “Radical” Russ Belville and this is your NORML Daily Audio Stash.

Today is May Day, also known as International Worker’s Day. We call on labor organizations worldwide to stand up for worker’s privacy and beat back the scourge of suspicion-less and pre-employment drug testing of workers. Drug testing without probable cause essentially means that you’re assumed to be guilty of a crime until you can prove yourself innocent. It means that while the government is constitutionally restricted from unreasonable searches of your person without warrant, your employer may treat you like property. Workers of the world – unite!

Today on the Daily Audio Stash we’re speaking with Rick Doblin from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. We’ll be discussing the life and legacy of Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, who passed away at age 102 this week.

Cannabis Karri is back with some more fantastic reggae. This time we’ve got Carlton Livingston and his song, “100lb Collie Weed”. I ‘n’ I love dis track, mon. Irie!

Then we’ll speak with Nicholas Van Dam, a doctoral candidate in psychology at State University of New York. Nicholas has just published a paper in the journal Human Psychopharmacology examining the studies of cannabis and schizotypal syndromes and how those studies are misrepresenting cannabis’ role by ignoring the use of other drugs.

We’ve got a lot to cover, so sit back and relax with a tasty beverage and your favorite strain and enjoy your NORML Daily Audio Stash…

Albert Hofmann, the Father of LSD, Dies at 102 - New York Times
PARIS — Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102.

The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann’s 1979 book “LSD: My Problem Child.”

Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

102 years old.  When you think about all of the technological and social changes Dr. Hofmann lived through, it is almost like an acid trip itself.  Imagine, when he was 21 years old, marijuana was still legal and would be for the next ten years of his life.  He saw the first crude airplanes all the way to the space shuttle.  He’s seen flappers to Pussycat Dolls, World War I to Gulf War II, and women and blacks go from non-voting second-class citizens to front-runners for the Democratic nomination for president.

But most of all, I’m always thrilled when outspoken users of illicit substances live long, fruitful lives.  From Willie Nelson turning 75 to Dr. Hofmann living more than a century, it always reminds me that the prohibitions against drugs often have little to do with protecting our health.  It also reminds me that, aside from George Burns, I rarely hear of a tobacco smoker and alcohol drinker making it to 100.