Liquid Ingested by 3 Students Found to Be LSD

Three of the 14 Pacoima schoolchildren hospitalized with drug symptoms Wednesday had unknowingly taken LSD, but the rest had no drugs in their systems and may have been affected by mass hysteria, police said Thursday.

Lab tests showed that a clear liquid in a vial that a 10-year-old girl found on her way to Haddon Avenue Elementary School was LSD, perhaps thrown away by a suspect in a police chase the night before, said Lt. Rick Papke of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division.

At school, the girl and two classmates dabbed the liquid on their tongues, apparently trusting a label that identified it as a breath freshener, he said.

“The child thought she was sharing a breath mint,” Papke said. “It tasted like candy.”

The three children suffered hallucinations, dizziness and nausea, and tests found the drug in their blood and urine.

Eleven other children, who according to first reports had sampled a white powder found with the vial, had no drugs in their systems, Papke said, calling it a possible “ ‘Crucible’ situation.”

Arthur Miller’s classic play “The Crucible” was based on the Salem, Mass., witch hunt, brought on by young girls sharing a mass delusion.

The 11 children were released from hospitals Wednesday. The three who took LSD were discharged Thursday.

Papke said the 11 gave conflicting stories and claimed to have gotten the powder from the 10-year-old at recess. But she wasn’t with them at recess. She went to the nurse’s office at 8:45 a.m. and stayed there while officials called her parents to take her to a hospital, Papke said.

More than 200 parents of Haddon students attended morning and evening meetings Thursday to discuss their alarm over the previous report: that all the children had knowingly sampled drugs brought to school by a classmate.

Principal Loraine Mason said school officials would debrief children and offer them counseling. The school also planned to provide parenting classes on character education and drug awareness.

But Pablo Cruz, whose 8-year-old son attends Haddon, said school officials should have given more information at the briefings.

“I asked a simple question. We’ve been getting a lot of different stories,” he said. “We want to know what happened.”

The incident occurred a week before the beginning of a Drug Abuse Resistance Education program for Haddon students in kindergarten through fourth grade. Two DARE officers spoke to Haddon students Thursday morning about avoiding drugs and handling peer pressure.

DARE originated in Los Angeles in 1983 and sends police officers in 10,000 communities into schools to teach children how to say no to drugs, gangs and violence. The curriculum normally begins in fifth grade. Glen Levant, president of DARE America, said the new program for younger children includes a lesson answering the question, “How can you tell what is safe to touch, taste and smell?”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Boris Yaro contributed to this story.