Drugs

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31407, 28 June 1967, Page 16

Drugs

Sir, —When the use of LSD is controlled for therapeutic and tranquillising purposes we should be grateful, not scornful. They showed one success story with LSD on a female psychiatric patient on television earlier this year.—Yours, etc., SALLY A. SCHOON. June 27, 1967.

Sir, —Varian J. Wilson raises a good point, and LSD may come to prove, under therapy, that a concept of 2 plus 2is incorrect. One of its properties is said to be its ability to reveal to the brain the genes of its savage primordial origins, to pare down, as it were, layers of an inherited stalagmite build-up. In the case of the Beatles’ manager, Mr Epstein, this proved “really horrific,” but for Paul McCartney (horrific, too, no doubt) apparently observed intelligently to his benefit. Last week’s other report, Washington on its Crime Commission’s reference to LSD, mentions that a devotee might be killed by a hallucination that he can fly. In such a case the veneers of inherited mind might have been removed only as far as the Stone Age, when stupidly but in all good faith ancestral minds could have experimented in flight. The commission states that crime associated with LSD is minimal. Research continues, anyway.—Yours, etc., A. B. CEDARIAN. June 27, 1967.