Texts / Lisa Bieberman

Lisa Bieberman's December 1970 bulletin explains the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, signed on October 27, 1970, which placed LSD and other psychedelics in Schedule I. She criticizes its penalties, its "continuing criminal enterprise" and "dangerous special drug offender" provisions, and its no-knock searches, then argues against the claim that drug-induced religious experience is "unnatural."

Lisa Bieberman's October 1970 bulletin reviews the two studies then available on whether heavy LSD use damages the brain: Sidney Cohen and Allen Edwards's 1968 neuropsychological tests of thirty users, and William McGlothlin's 1969 attempt to replicate them. Because their results disagree, she concludes there is no evidence of general brain damage. The issue also prints a social worker's letter about how taking LSD changed his work with drug-using teenagers.

Lisa Bieberman's February 1971 bulletin responds to news that the Black Panthers in Algeria had put the escaped Timothy Leary under house arrest. It prints a memo from Humphry Osmond recalling how he and Aldous Huxley met Leary in 1960 and later came to distrust his missionary zeal, followed by Bieberman's own memories of Leary at Harvard and a critique of press claims that LSD had ruined his mind.