LSD Flashback : Teens Are Experiencing Sensations and Dangers of Acid in Its Campus Comeback

Looking at Mary in a gauze, ankle-skimming maiden dress, long brown hair, no makeup and fingers wrapped in ornate silver rings, one could mistake her for a Woodstock alumni; that is, from the original fest. Only the Mater Dei senior’s Dr. Marten boots establish her in the present day.

Most of her daily life nods to an era when her own parents were still in high school. She loves Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell, but she grooves to them on compact disc, not scratchy vinyl. Her make-love-not-war demeanor is dizzyingly charming.

Mary, who like other teens in this story appears under a fake name, even recently started popping a drug as inherently ‘60s as the Beatles: LSD.

Just as waifish Twiggy bodies and Warholian pop art clothes have made a comeback in youth culture, so has the psychedelic lysergic acid diethylamide-25, known as LSD, “L,” “fry” or acid. Synthesized in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, it passed through the hands and minds of CIA agents, then bohemian intellectuals in the ‘50s and was popularized a decade later by artists and musicians.

Today, it’s as easy to find on public as well as private school campuses like Mary’s for as little as $3 a tab, the stamp-like piece of blotter paper coated in the hallucinogenic. It still sells for only $5 during dry spells.

Seven students from Marina High School in Huntington Beach, including five drill-team members, made headlines in December when they accepted bubble gum unknowingly laced with acid from four fellow students. Police have made no arrests and closed the investigation. While the city’s police Sgt. Corby Bright in narcotics concedes LSD use is up at high school campuses, he cautions it’s “not an epidemic. These things are cyclical. Last year it was coke.”

A state study released last June found that among 5,655 students from 100 public junior high and high schools, LSD use more than doubled since 1985-86. The survey found that 12.2% of 11th-graders and 8.6% of ninth-graders had experimented with LSD.

A federal study also released last year by the National Institute on Drug Abuse echoed these findings.

“We do see it, but sporadically,” says Lt. Tom Garner of the county sheriff’s department. “It comes in waves but it’s not the drug of choice like methamphetamine and marijuana.”

At the state enforcement level there are more Elvis sightings than LSD. “We haven’t seen any LSD, we haven’t purchased any or been offered any to buy, and we haven’t seized any,” says John Miles, special agent with the state justice department’s regional narcotics task force.

But teens from around the county interviewed for this story painted a much different scene.

“LSD is everywhere,” repeated users and non-users alike.

While most adolescent drug abuse cases at hospitals such as the Community Psychiatric Center in Laguna Hills involve methamphetamines, LSD is still treated in about 20% to 25% of them, says Cathy Vaughn, a licensed clinical social worker and services director at CPC. Although traces of speed are usually found on LSD tabs, Vaughn doesn’t see a connection.

*

“There are just these little groups of teen-agers who want to be flower children,” she adds.

Mary from Mater Dei disagrees. Despite her dress and musical tastes, she’s very rooted in the ‘90s: recycling, communicating via the Internet and aware that free love went out with Aquarius in the age of AIDS.

Still, it was in December at a Grateful Dead concert (another band that immortalized acid in the ‘60s) where Mary tried it for the first time. Printed on the tab was a red rose.

“It was incredible. The music was so much more intense. I’d been planning on doing it for a while. (The concert) seemed like the right time. Every one of my friends does it and they kept saying (Mary) you’d love it.”

The Irvine teens stayed up until 4 a.m. that night, discussing the universe as they always did after a Dead show. But this time, Mary says, she learned much more about life and about herself. “ ‘L’ helps you take everything apart and look at (life) at its most basic part. While you’re on it a lot more answers come out. I’ve opened my mind a lot more.”

Mary has since dosed one other time and intends on continuing until it no longer “benefits” her. “Or when I have a bad trip,” she adds.

The opportunity to do it exists every weekend, continues Mary, who figures she will take another 20 or 30 hits before she gives it up. One of the smartest guys she knows in her circle has done it 25 times (he has since quit everything). “I don’t want it to be a habit,” says Mary. “I have a sort of respect for it.”

*

Like the early proponents of this psychedelic, Mary sees acid as a vehicle for mental and spiritual exploration that outweighs any consequences, which range from diminished memory capacity to permanent mental damage.

“I know it’s probably not in my health’s best interest. But it’s a choice that I knew I was ready for. Some people can’t handle it,” she says.

“I can think of about 40 people at my school who do it regularly. But I think it’s a lot about rebellion for them. I don’t think they’re doing it for the same reason I am. It’s the ‘in’ thing, which I think is kind of sad. They go out and act stupid, and it gives acid a bad rap.”

Edison High senior Tim of Huntington Beach believes LSD, along with alcohol and other drugs, deserves all the bad rap it can get.

“No drug is a good trip,” he says with a bitterness that comes from experience. “It’s all fake.”

Tim, 17, first savored the kaleidoscope of colorful images and altered perception that acid elicits at an after-hours club in Los Angeles two years ago. He was two hours into dosing on MDMA, a.k.a. ecstasy, an amphetamine trendy among ravers in the last decade, when he popped a tab of “L” onto his tongue.

“I just remember most of all it was a night not to forget,” remembers Tim. The thrills that night included a 5 a.m. chase by police when his friend ran a red light. “It sounds like a tall story, but we really got away from the cops.”

For a year, he and his entourage experimented with drugs “big time.” He puffed marijuana almost daily, did “X” (short for ecstasy) every weekend, sampled LSD intermittently and tried cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms.

Everyone seemed to be doing it. His girlfriend tried it for the first time at school. “She didn’t have a bad time and none of her teachers knew.” And he says a couple of chemistry whizzes at his school manufactured acid and speed and sold it on campus.

“I used to go to church and get drugs,” Tim says. “No place is sacred.”

But Tim found that LSD “made people stupid. I always had expectations when I was on acid. Everybody kept finding this or that. I kept trying it, looking. One guy thought he got a little smarter. He’d say he’d meet people, but they didn’t exist. I saw him literally fry his brain for life--and he’s not even 18 yet.”

Tim, who eschews even alcohol, believes his level of concentration has changed. “I used to have a good attention span. Now everything blurs.” A year later he’s still having flashbacks. “I started peaking in church, and I had to leave.”

*

Most regular LSD users “save it for special occasions,” according to Paula, a senior living in Villa Park.

Terry Cummings, the adolescent program coordinator at CPC in Santa Ana and a licensed clinical social worker who’s worked with teen drug abusers since 1965, agrees.

“You don’t see people doing LSD daily like they do speed or pot. Most save it for party time.” Cummings has seen an increase in clients who have used LSD since 1990, many young adults who started in high school. He separates them into two categories: “those who really want to get lost, tune out from their emotional pain” and the others “who follow Timothy Leary’s direction and want to expand their mind in a sort of old-fashioned version of virtual reality.”

Seventeen-year-old Paula relishes the “other world” she enters when dosing where she “can’t stop smiling” and “everything gets very real.”

She first tuned in during the summer of ’93. “I went to a park with two friends and we did it. We had all these expectations. It was so intriguing, so mystifying. I had no idea what would happen.”

As it turned out nothing did for the first two hours. She went home figuring it was a dud. Then it hit her.

“I started calling people. I had to share it with someone.” She finally found a friend who had never done it and relayed a play by play of her experience.

“A lot of my friends are really scared to try it,” says Paula, an honor student at a private high school who hates alcohol and smokes five packs of cigarettes a week. “They’re afraid of putting chemicals in their system.”

Counting 15 hits in the last year and still going, Paula is still vying for the ultimate peak. “I know it’s probably not really good for me. I’ve never had a bad trip. And it’s not like I do it that much where I think I should worry.”

And it’s not as if drugs are her life, she assures, although she says she intends to continue doing acid when she gets to college. “I have more priorities: school, family, friends.”

But after three decades of treating young people, CPC’s Cummings says even one time can be one too many. “My greatest concern is a person’s mental predisposition. I’ve seen people who’ve tried it once and had no effect and others who’ve had it one time and became seriously psychotic.

“There are those who have an experience and can see it for what it is--an experience,” he adds. “But I’ve seen too many others who been put right over the edge by LSD.”

The Scene is a weekly look at the trends and lifestyles of Orange County high schoolers.