LSD Creeping Back as Drug for Youth

By LARRY TYE
c.1997 The Boston Globe

LSD is back.

The drug that embodied the psychedelic '60s has been creeping back
to college campuses, high schools and even grammar schools. It is less
expensive than before, at $5 a hit, and much less potent, although its
audience, as always, is mainly middleclass, white and suburban.

What is most surprising about this hallucinogen's comeback is how
quietly it is happening. By most counts, LSD now is substantially more
popular among the young than heroin, cocaine or crack. Yet while
health specialists and parents are sounding alarms over those drugs,
there is barely a whisper about LSD.

The reason: Even many of those who should know are not aware of
LSD's revival. That is understandable because lower doses mean
fewer kids will end up in hospitals or other places where officials
would notice them, and because the drug an invisible blot on a
piece of paper makes it tough for parents or teachers to spot.

``People are finally waking up to one era's dangerous drug, cocaine,
and they're looking for something that's safer, cleaner, and not
stigmatized,'' said Dr. David Gastfriend, head of addiction services at
Massachusetts General Hospital. ``People don't have to use needles
for LSD, there's the fantasy of safety because there's no withdrawal,
and it has the nostalgia of the '60s and '70s.

``There's no collective memory among today's young adults and
teenagers from that era. They don't remember Art Linkletter's
daughter flying out the window to her death on an LSD trip,''
Gastfriend added.

Summer Baker, 15, said that when she was in the eighth grade in
Attleboro, ``once every two weeks I'd be in school doing LSD with
friends. The teachers didn't know. When you're on LSD, unless you're
really what us teenagers say is `bugging out,' `flipping out,' it's very
hard to tell. Unlike marijuana, your parents can't smell it or anything.
You don't have any real evidence of it besides your pupils, which tend
to dilate really big.

``About 10 percent of the kids in my town were smoking pot, and
about 5 percent were doing acid,'' added Baker, who is now in a drug
treatment program in Lawrence. ``It made me feel like it wasn't me,
like I was watching this whole scene of action.''

That feeling of unearthing new energy and mindexpanding
experiences has drawn people to the drug since 1938, when
dlysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was first synthesized by a
chemist in Switzerland. For its first quartercentury or so, this potent
hallucinogens was legal. It was touted as a therapy to stimulate the
heart and lungs, then as a cure for everything from schizophrenia to
alcoholism. But it did not really catch on until the early 1960s.

LSD became as synonymous with the youth culture of that era as the
Beatles and the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and
Sergeant Pepper.

``By the late '60s and early '70s there was kind of an epidemic of
LSD, associated with a cultural style that glorified the ability to change.
The world was changeable, people were changeable,'' said Dr. Robert
B. Millman, who runs drug and alcohol treatment programs at Cornell
Medical Center in New York and who has been studying LSD for
more than 20 years.

``But usage went down with the decline of all the other drugs
associated with cultural change,'' Millman said. ``The world hadn't
changed the way we thought it would. We still had to get jobs and go
to college. And there was an increased perception of LSD's danger,
you could lose your mind.''

In recent years memories of those ``bad trips'' have faded, and a new
generation is testing the drug's appeal.

One way to measure that rising use is by asking young people, which
is what the University of Michigan has been doing under a federal
grant. Between 1992 and 1996 the share of eighth graders who said
they had tried LSD at least once rose from 2.7 to 5.1 percent. Usage
was even more widespread, and the increase almost as dramatic,
among 10th graders. And of more than 18,000 12th graders surveyed
nationwide in 1996, 12.6 percent said they had tried LSD, up from
8.8 percent five years before.

Casual and regular use of LSD was considerably higher in each age
group than use of cocaine, crack cocaine or heroin. ``There's no
question there's been a resurgence of LSD in recent years,'' said Lloyd
Johnston, who runs the survey.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration backs up that assessment,
nationwide and in New England. LSD ``is really everywhere,'' said
Michael Cunniff of DEA's Boston office, although drugfighting
agencies spend most of their time and money trying to contain cocaine
and heroin.

The most convincing evidence comes from teachers and students at
grammar schools, high schools and universities across the region.
Some say LSD never entirely disappeared, although most say use
picked up five years ago and really took off the last year. The typical
progression, they add, is for young people to start with alcohol, add
marijuana, then turn to LSD in their quest for a trip that lasts longer
and takes them further, even if it is harder to get off.

``I would say it's in second place to marijuana, although a far second,''
said Wayne Alexander, principal of Barnstable High School. A
16yearold Barnstable senior, Jeremy Lang, was found drowned in a
drainage ditch last year after taking LSD.

Such incidents are unusual in this latest goround with the drug, in part
because it is turning up in doses of 50 micrograms or less, compared
to the 100 to 200 micrograms of the 1960s and '70s. And with so few
identifiable victims, state and school officials say they are not sure who
is using the drug or when, which is why they have been so silent. ``We
need to bring people's awareness of LSD to the same level as with
cocaine and crack,'' said Ralph Timperi, who oversees drug control
programs at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

The first step in increasing awareness, Timperi and others say, is to
understand the drug's allure to this new generation.

A start might be its low cost, $5 for a typical dose or as little as $1 a
dose in bulk. Since it is synthetic and easy to make, basement
``chemists'' can quickly set up shop and are difficult to find and stop.
And LSD has proven especially attractive to young people who attend
allnight dance marathons called raves, as well as fans of rock groups
like Phish, who see LSD as enhancing their experience much in the
way their parents used it at Grateful Dead concerts.

``Here's a drug that's very cheap, widely available and doesn't turn up
in routine urine tests,'' said Mark Kleiman, a drug policy specialist at
the University of California at Los Angeles. ``All of that wouldn't be
enough, however, if LSD still had among kids the horrible reputation it
got at the end of the '60s.

``What put an end to the first wave of LSD use was the casualties.
Everybody knew somebody who had a very, very, very bad trip.''

Millman, the Cornell psychiatrist, said today's lower doses mean fewer
bad trips, but ``people who take it and are at risk are going to get into
trouble. ... Our job is to educate the public about the real dangers
not exaggerate, but tell the truth, then know how to treat these kids
when they start using it and start getting derailed.''

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