Chemist who sought to bring LSD to the world dies at 75

New York

ONE day in 1964, Nicholas Sand, a Brooklyn-born son of a spy for the Soviet Union, took his first acid trip. He had been fascinated by psychedelic drugs since reading about them as a student at Brooklyn College and had experimented with mescaline and peyote. Now, at a retreat run by friends in Putnam County, New York, he took his first dose of LSD, still legal at the time.

Sitting naked in the lotus position, before a crackling fire, he surrendered to the experience. A sensation of peace and joy washed over him. Then he felt himself transported to the far reaches of the cosmos.

"I was floating in this immense black space," he recalled in the documentary The Sunshine Makers, released in 2015. "I said, 'What am I doing here?' And suddenly a voice…