Word: lsd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...varied types of LSD users include vast numbers of thrill seekers. Most have tried marijuana, then the amphetamines, before "graduating" themselves to what they regard as the ultimate in kicks. In the rebellious student groups like those at Berkeley (see EDUCATION) many are trying LSD because they feel lost on an impersonal, bustling campus; others have been squeezed by the need to make better grades to avoid the draft...
...most disturbing aspects of the LSD binge is that it has hit high schools and prep schools. A 17-year-old user reports that there is a sales ring in his Sherman Oaks school pushing LSD at a penny a microgram. The usual dose of the pure chemical, used by psychiatric investigators, is 100 mcg. (1/300,000th of an ounce), but even junior acid heads boast of taking walloping overdoses. "I've taken as much as 500 micrograms," says one youthful user. "At least that's what I paid...
...Never Forget." Especially alarming from the medical viewpoint is the fact that no one knows how much LSD is really in a California capsule, or how pure the drug is. The only legal supply, from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, goes to selected psychiatrists as a research tool for creating "model" psychoses, and for use in the treatment of certain patients, notably alcoholics. This supply is so rigidly controlled that none, so far as is known, is now reaching a black market. The flood of stuff in California is all bootleg, some imported from Mexico, more of it home-brewed by chemistry majors...
Happily, addiction is not a problem. Although repeat users need bigger doses to get an effect, they can "kick it cold" and suffer no withdrawal symptoms. It has no physiologic effects. Nevertheless, says Los Angeles Psychiatrist Sidney Cohen, "LSD can kill you dead-by making you feel that you can walk on water, or fly." Author of The Beyond Within: the LSD Story (TIME, Dec. 18, 1964), Dr. Cohen has taken LSD himself half a dozen times, and admits: "After a 150-microgram dose, I got a massive jolt that I'll never forget. I got a chance...
Life's Losers. What was bad for the well-adjusted research psychiatrist can be infinitely worse for the cultist. "The trouble with uncontrolled use," says Dr. Cohen, "is that the people attracted to LSD may be the very ones who have the most trouble with it. They are life's losers-dissatisfied, restless people, afflicted with problems they can't handle. A lot of them wallow in self-pity and denigrate those who have made it in the 'square' world. They see Nirvana in LSD, with its perceptual wonders, the intensity, luminosity and throbbing...