RELATIVELY
FEW readers of this blogs will have had any personal experience with illicit
drug use. Yet it has become important for every concerned person-in term of
children and other contacts-to be informed about that problem and what can be
done to prevent serious consequences. Until fairly recently, illicit drug use
and addiction were largely confined in the United States to the Skid Rows-to
the hopeless, helpless, and disadvantaged of society.
But in recent years, the
scene has shifted dramatically to better neighborhoods and schools, to the
respected and well-educated who, in increasing numbers, especially the
adolescents, have been "turning on."
College and
university students have been tempted to try drugs since 1962 when a Harvard
instructor and some graduate students enthused over the virtues of a then
little-known drug, LSD. Soon LSD became an "in" drug. It has also
become an illegal drug, and even aside from its illegality, after a first surge
of use it has become much less popular as it has become clear that taking LSD
is playing a chemical Russian roulette. But the use of other drugs-marijuana,
amphetamines, barbiturates, opiates-is widespread. And the penalties may be
multiple.
There are the legal punishments which may ruin
the life of an offender. There are the possible threats of impaired development
and alienation from life and society. And there are the risks to physical
health. What scientific information is there available about the various drugs,
their effects, and their hazards? Recently, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and
other physicians, and the National Institute of Mental Health and other government
and private agencies have been working to bring together all known facts. Lysergic acid diethylamide is a man-made
chemical first synthesized in 1938 from ergot alkaloids. Often called
"acid" by its users, it is a mind-altering drug, classed legally as a
hallucinogen.
A single
ounce of LSD is enough to make 300,000 of the usual doses, each amounting to a
speck, usually taken in a sugar cube or on a cookie or cracker. LSD, in an
average dose, has effects that last eight to ten hours- increase of pulse and
heart rate, rise in blood pressure and temperature, dilation of the pupils of
the eyes, flushing or paleness of the face, sweaty palms, chills, irregular
breathing, nausea, and distortion of the physical senses. Actually, the first
effects of the drug may be on the physical senses. There are visual phenomena:
walls appear to move, colors become more brilliant, unusual patterns unfold,
flat objects become three-dimensional.
