LSD: Still With Us After All These Years.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

In June 1993 Ann Landers ran a letter from a reader who had recently seen an article "about how LSD is making a big comeback among the youth of America" - the kind of story that has appeared in newspapers and magazines with some regularity during the past few years. "I was a teenager in the 1960s," he wrote, "and although I was never involved in the drug scene, I remember hearing a lot of horror stories about young people jumping in front of trains, off roofs, and out of windows while under the influence of LSD. I am very concerned for this new generation of LSD users." The reader urged Landers to publish accounts by former acid users of "how this drug ruined their youth and possibly their adult years as well," along with letters from people who had "lost loved ones because of LSD."

Landers agreed there was cause for alarm. "The prospect of this dangerous drug making a comeback is bone-chilling," she replied. "This mind-altering drug has been responsible for many deaths. Flashbacks, which can occur years after the user has sworn off the drug, can be frightening."

This exchange illustrates how the conventional wisdom about LSD is propagated: People who don't know what they're talking about pass on hearsay and misinformation, blithely reinforcing each other's ignorance. As Leigh A. Henderson, an epidemiologist, and William J. Glass, a drug-abuse treatment specialist, note in their introduction to LSD: Still with Us After All These Years, this ignorance is all the more remarkable given half a century of experience with the drug, including more than a decade of legal use in psychotherapy, hundreds of clinical studies, and recreational use by millions of Americans since the early 1960s. This fascinating book summarizes that history and describes the findings of research on the current LSD scene sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Ann Landers ought to read it.

If she did, she would learn that the "big comeback" of LSD looks more like a blip. "After the intense interest and experimentation it generated in the late 1960s and early 1970s," Henderson writes, "LSD use has settled into an entrenched pattern among a limited population....The level of LSD use has varied little between the late 1970s and early 1990s." Past-month use of LSD by high-school seniors, for example, has been around 2 percent since 1975. (In the general population, the corresponding figure is less than 0.3 percent.)

Landers might also reconsider her assertion that...