Lessons from a forgotten 1967 LSD pamphlet: 5 Questions for researcher Daniel Kruger
Lessons from a forgotten 1967 LSD pamphlet: 5 Questions for researcher Daniel Kruger
Kruger discusses the work of little known harm reduction pioneer Lisa Bieberman.
Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1960s was a heady time and place for psychedelics. While Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) led experiments with psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline, another Cambridge resident was asking a different set of questions about psychedelics: How can people use them safely and responsibly? Lisa Bieberman, an alumna of Radcliffe College, established the Psychedelic Information Center in Cambridge and published a national newsletter on LSD. In 1967, she wrote a set of psychedelic best practices in a 36-page pamphlet titled “Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD,” which could be purchased by mail for $1. In the introduction, Bieberman wrote, “So you’re going to take LSD;” she then makes a series of recommendations. Later, Bieberman, who married and became Lisa Bieberman Kuenning, left the psychedelic scene and became a Quaker. She died in 2022.
Daniel J. Kruger is a research scientist studying cannabis and psychedelics at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. When Kruger came across Bieberman’s work online, he felt he had found a like mind from half a century earlier. “She was trying to do something practical and useful,” he says. He wondered how her LSD pamphlet would hold up today, so along with Paul Gillis-Smith, program lead at the Center for the Study of World Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Kruger led a study surveying 600 self-identified psychedelic users about how much they agreed with Bieberman’s advice. The results, which were published in Psychedelics in August, found striking agreement, nearly sixty years after she wrote it. (The survey is still available online; anyone interested can take it here.)
The Microdose spoke with Kruger about how Bieberman pioneered the field of harm reduction – and offered advice valuable for those experimenting with psychedelic substances today.
What information was available to people in the 1960s and 1970s about psychedelics? How did Bieberman’s work fit into that picture?
In that era, there were works like The Psychedelic Experience [authored by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass)] and Be Here Now [a 1971 spiritual guide and memoir by Ram Dass], but they probably resonate a lot more once you’ve already had a psychedelic experience. I mean, The Psychedelic Experience was basically a psychedelic-lens adaptation of a Western translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bieberman was like, the kids on the street in the Haight aren’t going to understand this stuff. They want to know, what practical steps would you want to take? That’s what she provided at the psychedelic information center, and the bulletin, and this pamphlet.
Why were you interested in seeing how people responded to Bieberman’s LSD advice pamphlet today?
It was published in 1967, in a very different era, but there’s definitely a parallel to today. There’s probably more people taking psychedelics now than there were in the 1960s or at any other time in human history, but it’s a topic that the nation is polarized on. There’s a lot of excitement about clinical trials, and that’s parallel to the 1950s and 1960s, when there was a lot of serious academic and clinical research using psychedelics as therapy for depression, for alcoholism, for what we would now call PTSD.
Bieberman published the pamphlet before we had personal computers, before we had cell phones, before Wikipedia. I was curious if it would be like watching a television show from the 1960s, where it’s like, really cornball and kind of weird and kind of funny.
And so then what did you find?
We found that Bieberman’s advice was generally endorsed. Some of it was supported very strongly: Be with people who know, like and trust each other; be aware that even with a guide, you still have to do most of the work yourself; decide in advance who’s going to be there; make sure to have the day free and the day after it free. Another one people agreed with was to select a private location and put phones away. I thought that was really interesting, because I phrased it in a way that would make sense to modern readers, but Bieberman did have advice like, don’t call people on the telephone.
The only piece of advice that stood out as having a wide range of perspectives from our respondents was her suggestion to avoid looking in the mirror. There are some, including Leary and Ralph Metzer, who advise people who are having a difficult time while on psychedelics to look in the mirror. They had more of an esoteric psychological interpretation of what’s going on, like you’re peering into your soul. Other people say, no, you can get really freaked out by that, especially if it’s your first psychedelic experience. That one had mixed opinions.
SubscribedHow do you see Bieberman’s impact as different from someone like Timothy Leary?
For one, Leary couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. He was a showman, and he was well-connected. I think in the same year that “Session Games,” Bieberman’s pamphlet, came out, Leary did an interview with Playboy where he proclaimed that psychedelics were the greatest aphrodisiac ever discovered by man. He had a way of getting attention. Bieberman was just more practical. She worked with Leary, and she worked at the IFIF [the International Foundation for Internal Freedom, a psychedelic advocacy organization founded by Leary and Alpert], but she was getting stuff done. She didn’t seek the spotlight. And later, she left the scene.
How would you contextualize Bieberman’s role in the harm reduction movement more broadly? How does her work align with how we think of harm reduction today?
A lot of harm reduction efforts originated a bit later, with HIV and needle exchanges and safer sex programs, and they were extremely controversial at the time. There was a societal tension over values. The philosophy with harm reduction is that, for people who are going to do something, how do you minimize those risks? People have brought that framework into substance use, like drug testing to make sure that if people are giving you pills saying they’re ecstasy, you want to make sure it’s not fentanyl or some other substance that could be really harmful for you. I don’t think the term “harm reduction” was around at the time when Bieberman was publishing, but it’s very much along the lines of what she wanted to do. If you described the philosophy of harm reduction, I think she would agree with it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
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