What is LSD? Is it harmless, as many claim? Is it addicting?
How does it affect the human mind and body?
Why are many "tripping" on LSD, and heatedly claiming it is GOOD?
Here is the inside story — shocking, sobering, starkly grim.
Sure it's dangerous," said an acidhead. "But so is everything I enjoy. Why should I worry about my chromosomes when everything else in the world is so messed up?"
"Blow your mind, turn on, tune in, drop out." This is the slogan of young drug faddists. According to them, if you don't take drugs, you're absolutely
"NOWHERE."
Chemical Roulette?
One LSD tripper took the drug and believed that he could fly. He jumped out of a 10-story window and fell to his death on the street below. He really ended up — nowhere!
Another, driving his car while under the influence of LSD, looked on all the red lights as something beautiful, beckoning him onward. He crashed and killed the occupants of another car.
One young fellow took LSD once. It didn't turn him on so he quit. Two years later he suffered a severe mental breakdown!
A 17-year-old, high on LSD, thought he was losing his sight because of the drug and tried to tear out his eyeballs "so my eyes can see." Another youth took the drug and was impelled to a compulsive search for someone to rape! One fellow, a heavy user, is totally convinced that he is an orange. He is by afraid if anyone touches him he may turn into orange juice.
Case after case could be cited — hundreds and thousands of them. Said Dr. J. Thomas Ungerleider, assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical Center: "It is totally UNPREDICTABLE who will have a bad experience. You can have 100 good trips — then a bummer. Even one trip will do it."
Dr. Marvin Block, vice-president of the U.S. National Council on Alcoholism, said a "successful" trip with LSD is about as rare as a successful swim across the top of Niagara Falls! He told a group of 650 teenagers there were 250 young people confined to Bellevue Hospital in New York who were "totally insane only through use of LSD." He warned they would never recover!
Search for Identity
Most LSD users fall within the 1830 age group. Most users of the drug have been students or "dropouts" searching for a meaning to life, looking for a new standard of values to live by.
Said Dr. Allan Y. Cohen, a former associate of Timothy Leary, "I once thought that LSD and other psychedelic drugs supplied answers. I 'tuned in, turned on, dropped out' for three years. . . . I saw that drugs do NOT make better people. There were still laziness, arguments, fear — it added up to 'psychedelic hypocrisy.' Sure, we talked love, brotherhood, God — but when we were honest, we admitted that LSD was not as advertised."
Dr. Cohen admitted, "I saw that LSD users — myself included — did not live any more spiritual lives, although they thought they were very spiritual people."
What is the full story about LSD? What is the truth about this mind-bending drug? Is it really harmless, as some insist?
Is it addicting? How does it affect the human mind and body?
Universal Escapism
The world today is discontented. People are frustrated as never before. Massive human problems plague the human race — from war in Vietnam to the threat of famine; from crises in the Mideast to riots and crime. Marriage problems, competition in business, immorality and strife — these and millions of other worries cause millions to seek escape, a way "out of it all."
People today often seek "instant courage," or "instant relief." They want to experience new kicks, or intensify old thrills. Many thousands, in order to "get away from it all," attempt to draw a chemical curtain between themselves and REALITY!
In the United States, several millions have become drug dependent or drug
oriented. They cannot sleep, wake up or feel comfortable without drugs. The struggle to escape reality approaches a near mania. While adults heedlessly gulp barbiturates or amphetamines, youngsters turn to pot (marijuana), or "acid" (LSD).
Thousands are actually going OUT OF THEIR MINDS in a futile, tragic, empty search for relief, escape, new thrills! From college students and teenagers to people in every walk of life, from middleclass to upper class homes, people are exhorted to abdicate their responsibilities, drop out of the "rat race," and lose their minds in a euphoric mental nirvana!
Like dumb sheep, they are complying with those exhortations in ever-increasing numbers. They are leaving their homes, schools and friends. Thousands of them are even abdicating their place in organized society in favor of the communal life of the "hippies."
Worst Problem in Colleges
Drugs and their misuse have become one of the biggest problems facing U.S. colleges and universities. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) if not the most widespread has certainly been one of the worst of a dizzying lineup of mind-bending materials.
The problem reached such proportions that Dr. James L. Goddard, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, felt compelled to issue a stern letter of warning to the officials of more than 2,000 American colleges and universities. He warned that unless concerted action were taken by college officials, "an untold number of our students may suffer permanent mental and physical injury."
Widespread Use
Estimates of those who have used LSD range from about 50,000 (very conservative) to 500,000 (a much more likely figure). Some estimates go as high as one million (Dr. Timothy Leary).
Figures vary on the number of college students who have used or are using the drug. One estimate puts the figure at one percent of all college students. Others are not so conservative.
Said a person from Greenwich Village, "Here in the Village you can't walk down the street without bumping into a head (LSD users are called acidheads). From my own experience I can tell you of four large universities in this area where at least 40 percent of the student body has a nodding acquaintance with LSD, if they haven't already tried it."
He added, "Don't undersell the widespread use of LSD. Most of it is underground, but it is there, make no mistake about that."
Dr. Timothy Leary, high priest and apostle of the LSD movement, said in April 1966, "It is estimated that well over 100,000 Americans have taken the timeless voyage through their nervous systems — have had the veil of symbolic illusion lifted for a few hours. The next decade is going to be the most exciting period in human history." He declared, somewhat naively, "I predict that by 1970 between 10,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans will have talked to their cells."
In a student survey conducted at the world-famous California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, out of the 1,290 filling out the questionnaire, nearly TWENTY PERCENT admitted the use of marijuana, one of the milder hallucinogens. Another NINE PERCENT affirmed they had tried LSD. Fifty percent of the undergraduates who have used LSD said it had been in the last month. There was no indication by any of those interviewed that they would discontinue their use of the illicit drugs (Los Angeles Times).
Power of a Cube
LSD trippers, in describing their "trip," often speak of God, hell, nirvana, terror, revelation, ecstacy, horror, fear or anguish, joy, madness, beauty, ugliness.
Very little is really known about LSD's effects after it enters the body. What is known gives experts a real fright. LSD is so potent that less than two pounds of the stuff would be enough to send the entire population of New York City on a psychedelic trip to never-never land! A little more than forty pounds would be enough to send everybody in the United States on a psychedelic voyage into "inner space."
One ounce of LSD powder represents about 300,000 doses of 100 micrograms each. A small envelope may transport 10,000 doses through the, mails. A box of facial powder could hold 15,000 doses. One kilo, which could supply 10 million doses of 100 micrograms, would have a street value (illicit) of $50 million!
History of LSD
Illegal use stems from 1949 when knowledge of LSD and its reactions was confined to psychiatrists and psychologists who were using it in scientific experimentation only. In the early 1950's, the philosopher Aldous Huxley began to suggest its potential as a "mind-expanding" agent. Huxley's preachments met with ready acceptance by a small group of teachers, headed by Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard.
The use of students in mind-expanding experiments at the university's Center for Research and Personality gained wide notoriety and resulted in Leary's being dismissed from the university.
Today, Leary has a wide following and is known as the founder and high priest of the League for Spiritual Discovery — the first modern psychedelic religion. The League was founded to give credence to Leary's fight with the U.S. government over a thirty-year indictment for illegally transporting untaxed marijuana.
Intellectual Insanity
Only a few short years ago, the demented, mentally incompetent or insane person was to be pitied. Today, to "blow your mind" with drugs has come to represent, for many, a plane of intellectual development. It has become the "in thing" to do among those seeking new experiences or escape from life's problems.
You are supposed somehow to "find yourself" in insanity. According to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, another former Harvard psychologist and principal proponent of consciousness-expanding agents, "It becomes necessary for us to go out of our minds in order to use our head?' (David Solomon, LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, New York: Putnam's Sons, 1964, Introduction, p. xiii)
Dr. James L. Goddard, former Commissioner of Food and Drugs, while testifying before the Senate in May, 1966, said, "The records of many hospitals show the admission of patients who have taken this drug and have literally LOST THEIR MINDS. They have lost the power to think and to reason and to create — LOST all power to use what is so fundamental to a life of achievement" (Margaret Kreig, Black Market Medicine, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967, p. 294).
Yet LSD and other hallucinogens are purported to expand the mind and to make it function in new inventive and creative ways!
Readily Available
Today, LSD is as close to you as your nearest college campus. At $3 to $5 a "cap," or dose, many student distributors pay their way through college at the expense of others.
One student dealer told of selling 450 LSD capsules in a ten-day period. He estimated 200 to 400 students at one of the prominent colleges use LSD EVERY WEEKEND! Fear of possible dangers is all that keeps thousands more from "taking a trip" — yet fear isn't sufficient to keep others from getting "high" two or three times weekly.
Although loudly proclaimed to be nonaddicting, "acid" — LSD — causes many students to become habituated. They drop out of school, work, and society to pursue the fleeting pleasures of LSD. The "acid-heads" then become obsessed with an almost missionary zeal "to turn other people on."
Not content to be quietly insane by themselves, they want to introduce others to the mysteries of LSD.