The report also indicates that LSD appeals to the youngest drug abusers - half of the emergency room cases of LSD use involve people under age 20 and an additional third those in their twenties. 'The LSD abuse trend is clearly running contrary to the trends of most other drugs,' said a spokesman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, citing an internal DEA report this month. 'We're watching, but so far it's just not there.'īut this flat trend occurred while experimentation with most other illegal drugs was declining in recent years. 'None of our surveys is picking up an increase in LSD use,' said Christine Hartel, deputy director of the NIDA's division of preclinical research. About one in 11 - or 8.7 percent - reported having tried LSD at least once, down from 11.3 percent in 1975 but up from 7.7 percent in 1988. The annual national survey of high school seniors conducted by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that 1.9 percent - or one out of every 53 - had used LSD in the previous month. But drug experts say it is hard to tell how widespread use of the drug is and whether it's on the rise. News of the indictments provoked shock and dismay among parents, school officials and neighboring residents. One of the six, pleading guilty in federal court, said he was responsible for supplying LSD to a 17-year-old Robinson student who shot a county police officer last June while high on the drug. Touted by the Beatles and Harvard instructor Timothy Leary in the 1960s for its 'psychedelic' power, the drug also has been blamed for suicides and assailed for 'frying the brains' of the young.Įarly this month, six men were indicted on federal charges of selling more than 100,000 doses of LSD near Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County last year, mostly to juveniles. How can you have two feelings so different at the same time?'Īmerican society too has had a love-hate relationship with LSD. 'There's an awareness you could go either way,' said Freedman, now Braun professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the UCLA School of Medicine. People taking LSD say they feel both exhilarated and anxious. Freedman, a psychiatrist and pioneer in LSD research, is the one he heard repeatedly when he was studying the drug at the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1950s: 'It's a pleasant unpleasant experience.'

The best description of an LSD trip, said Daniel X. Out-of-the-body travel, or out-of-your mind risk.Įvery 'acid trip,' drug experts say, has elements of both. To both devotees and critics, it has loomed as a larger-than-life symbol - either mind-expanding or mind-buckling. From the 'Rubber Soul' Sixties through the 'Just Say No' Eighties, LSD has always led a double life.

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