1. Your comical allusion of Hofman chewing his elbow off was just that, comical. You seriously misrepresent the numerous "bummers" that occurred during LSD trips. It was during the wheat germ mold hysteria that folks were consumed with halucinations and often did radical damage to themselves to rid themselves of serpents. Other than the elbow-ectomy I find your article to be an excellent comparison of the drugs and the difference in our society then and now. It would be an overload of stimlus and connectivity to drop acid in our society today whereas basic euphoria from amphetamine derivatives is epidemic.

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2. When you don't post any comments all weekend, it discourages people from commenting. Half the "fun" is seeing if others agree with you. -- Not one of Daum's more coherent comments, but in general I find her very real, unlike Rosa Brooks, whose rants fit under a few categories, all related: Why I hate Hillary; why I think Bush/Cheney are sociopaths and psychotics; Why anyone they're opposed to (Putin, Hugo Chavez, the Ayatollahs and leader of Iran, for example) is automatically right. GET RID OF BROOKS, get someone who can write and make rational arguments. MAYBE even a moderate to balance your pro-illegal lefties, like Tim Rutten?

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3. Let's NOT write about a society's addiction to tobacco and alcohol-- which, of course, have created havoc in medical care & costs, and devastated individual lives & families!!!

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4. Many people under the age of 30 have also chosen psychopsilocybin (mushrooms) over LSD. The time commitment is a bit shorter at about 10 hours maximum and it seems more natural than "acid." Or so I've heard.

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5. Excellent article, since forthrightness about hallucinogens isn't something one expects from the mainstream media. One significant difference between LSD and X, though, is the erotic factor that X brings to the party. LSD is the musical equivalent of Frank Zappa and X is the equivalent of ABBA. Frank was a great musician, but I really wish I'd had the chance to do X with Anni and Agnetha. That would be a night you wouldn't be ashamed to tell your grandkids about.

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6. LSD proved that a spiritual world exists.It also proved that the world of religion as most people know it is entirely wrong. There is a spiritual world that only the gurus of India are aware of without taking LSD. The GOD of this spiritual world is Krishna. The correct path to spirituallity comes from India the birthplace of all religions.

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7. Who exactly tried to chew their elbow off while tripping? That's just a sensational and unsubstantiated claim to scare people.

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8. The most insightful sentence in Meghan Daum's column was at the very end: "Read all 0 comments." 0 is just what is deserved for someone who concludes that when LSD was popular "a lot of people tried to chew their elbows off." The difference between the number of acid users and the number of ecstasy users, Daum says, is a whopping 3.4%! And on this tiny little difference she builds a whole column, offering lots of clever turns of phrase (a fiction writer's specialty), but not the kind of thoughtful social analysis a good newspaper would give us. Opinion-page editor, please wake up and read your columnists' work before you publish it.

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9. A spot on assessment. As a vetran of many journeys, I can tell that this lady knows of what she speaks.

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10. "Whereas one renders a person nonfunctional in the interest of questioning reality, the other is about becoming more functional while questioning very little. Exactly what our political/economic masters want. They ALWAYS get what they want because we ALWAYS rush to give it to them. The only true humans are the marginal freaks who refuse to go-along-to-get-along. The resst of us are zombies just going through the motions. Am I alone in feeling like this?

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