PATIENTS SUE OVER LSD TREATMENT

More than 80 people who claim to have been damaged by LSD prescribed by
psychiatrists are to pursue a court action for damages against the NHS.

They say they suffer flashbacks and mental problems after prolonged courses
of the hallucinatory drug between the 1950s and the early 1970s. It was
prescribed by hospital psychiatrists for patients with acute depression
because it was believed to open minds more efficiently than psychoanalysis.

Some patients insist that they were given such high doses that they were
under the influence of the drug for years at a time.

David Harris, senior partner of the solicitors Alexander Harris, in
Altrincham, Greater Manchester, said that his firm was pursuing an action
for personal injury on behalf of 87 claimants. Mr. Harris said: "LSD was
administered by the NHS for a wide range of conditions. For some the effects
have been very traumatic. LSD was not a licensed drug and all those whom we
have spoken to believe they were not asked to give their consent."

The claimants will aim to prove that they had much higher doses than those
who took LSD recreationally in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many complain that
they were never able to work again. Angela Scrivens, 53, from Blackburn, was
18 when she was prescribed LSD for depression in 1964. In the care of a
psychiatrist at Burnley General Hospital, she was subject to bouts of
anxiety and, at times, felt suicidal.

Mrs. Scrivens remembers being asked to take the drug each Friday morning.
Within half an hour she would feel sick and cold and then the hallucinations
would start.

She says that she was told that the drug would shorten her psychoanalysis
from five years to 18 months, but she was still being given it six years
later. "I was so ill at the time that when they said this was going to help
I believed that."

A company growing cannabis plants for therapeutic use said yesterday that
the first study in which volunteers took extracts of the drug had shown
encouraging results. GW Pharmaceuticals, which is cultivating cannabis under
licence, hopes to produce treatments mainly to relieve pain and dysfunction
caused by nerve damage.