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125  More Data Needed
     On Effect of LSD
     The Washington Post  Saturday, November 23,1968

     Does LSD cause genetic damage?  No issue is raised more often in
question periods after popular talks on genetics, or in my mail.

     It is a hard one to answer. There have been too many suspicious
findings to write off any concern about damage to chromosomes. On the
other hand, we do not really know the actual significance to human
health of these findings.

     It is also hard to preserve honest objectivity in the face of two
facts: that LSD usage is officially and socially condemned; and that
serious psychiatric disease is elicited in many youngsters by chronic
use of the drug while there are many more whose entrapment by the drug
culture is as vicious as the tobacco and booze habits of their 
intemperate elders.

     However, before we lean toward the law for the benefit of any
doubt, we should remember how anxious many young people are about LSD.
Did their brief fling before they tired of a frightening fantasia
break their chromosomes? Are they fit to be parents?

     The most concrete findings concern chromosome breakage in white
blood cells exposed to LSD both in artificial culture and in the body.
An extensive report was published just a year ago in the New England
Journal of Medicine by Drs. M. M. Cohen, K. Hirschhorn and W. A.
Frosch of three separate New York State medical schools (Buffalo,
Mount Sinai and New York University-Bellevue). No more recent work
supersedes their report.

     In control subjects, about 4 per cent of the white cells show
chromosomes breaks. This frequency increased from two - to five-fold,
to a peak of over 20 per cent, in the white cells of LSD users. Similar
results have been obtained by many other workers, but not all.
  
     One interpretation is that chronic use of LSD multiplies the
average genetic risk by a factor of two to five. This is not a pleasant
prospect, especially from a population standpoint, but it is not
a catastrophic burden for any individual. Presumably, isolated doses of
LSD would have proportionally smaller effects. This theory supposes 
that the germ cells show only a small proportion of the effects seen
in the white cells.  There is some reason to believe that damaged germ
cells would be partially eliminated in a period of a few months or
years.

     Another source of concern is direct damage to a developing fetus
exposed to LSD taken by its mother.  There are several reports of 
malformations among such infants, and in some species of experimental
animals under LSD treatment, but the statistics are too thin to be
rigorously persuasive, one way or another.

     Meanwhile, it has been pointed out that several other drugs may
be equally potent in breaking chromosomes, including the tranquilizer,
chlorpromazine and possibly even aspirin. 

     Our present knowledge is altogether too flimsy to be either
reassuring or admonitory. What, for example, is the significance of
the 4 per cent of chromosome breaks among us normals. 

     The last Congress showed manifestly less interest in basic
research in genetic and cell biology than its predecessors. If this
tendency persists, it will keep these anguishing questions from being
answered by many capable investigators who are frustrated and 
demoralized in the present climate. In this sense, legislative coolness 
to science will cause at least as much unresolved genetic damage as the 
adolescent quest for an instant chemical mystique.

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