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What Experts Say Taking Lsd Does

What Experts Say Taking Lsd Does image
Parent Issue
Day
12
Month
March
Year
1972
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Copyright Protected
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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There is no record of anyone having died from an overdose of LSD, according to a scientist for the Presidential Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse in Washington. "Theoretically there is a fatal overdose le vel for LSD as for other drugs, but no one has ever reached the death level as far as we know," he said. He said there is a record of a schizophrenic person involved ín the theft of a quantity 'of LSD who took the equivalent of 5,000 doses and still lived. He said there have been deaths from street drugs sold as LSD, but which were nót LSD. Dr. Derek H. Miller, U-M professor of psychiatry and head of the Adolescent Service in the University's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI), said there have been many instances of deaths from irrational actions by persons under the influence of LSD but none that he knows of which could be attributed directly to the drug itself. LSD is dangerous because it makes people act in an irrational way and they have been known to shoot themselves, jump out of high buildings, or drown 'themselvewhile under the influence of the drug, he said. Experimental use of LSD for treating schizophrenics, alcoholics and others has declined, but it is still being used to some-extent experimentally in medicine, he said. Dr. Robert C. Hendrix, U-M professor of pathology, says LSD cannot be found in analysis of tissue or body fluid. LSD, which is the abbreviation for lysergic acid diethylamide, is a hallucinogenic compound derived from ergot, a fungus which grows on rye and other cereal crops. It is considered a hard hallucinogen along with mescaline and peyote, as contrasted to the soft hallucinogens such as marijuana and hashish. It is not a narcotic. The late Dr. John C. Pollard, former U-M professor of psychiatry who had done considerable research on LSD and other drugs, once described the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide before the Washtenaw, County Medical Society by telling about the reactions of a patiënt who had taken the drug. "There is a frog in a beaver-lined coat in the corner of the room," the patiënt said when he entered the room. "There is no frog there," Dr. Pollard said he replied. "It really isn't there, but there it is," she said and started giggüng.