Five dollars per capsule

The Washtenaw County Medical Society seldom generated news in the 1960s or any other time. But for its monthly meeting on Jan. 10, 1967, the society asked Dr. John C. Pollard, a scientist in the Medical School’s Mental Health Research Institute, to tell an audience of local doctors and high school principals about his research on the use and abuse of consciousness-altering substances among young people.

This time, Dr. Pollard made news.

Based on his work with U-M students, Pollard told his listeners — including a local reporter — that LSD was selling on the campus for $5 per capsule at a strength three-and-a-half times greater than pills used in scientific studies. He made no estimate of how many students had tried LSD, but he said “enormous amounts of marijuana may be used on this campus,” and hashish, as well.

He said the use of LSD should be restricted until its effects were better understood — thus his research on it — but he saw little reason for “an overly harsh law” against marijuana.

A rising panic

Dr. John C. Pollard, who shook up U-M administrators with a claim about drug use on the campus. (Image credit: Ann Arbor News.)

Pollard’s remarks landed smack in the middle of a rising panic over illicit drugs in American society, with college campuses the key target of the alarm. No doubt that accounts for the swift retort of U-M authorities.

One unnamed administrator suggested that “Pollard was having hallucinations,” while Richard Cutler, U-M’s vice president for student affairs, said he was “thunderstuck” by Pollard’s claims. “We attempt to keep our ear to the ground,” he said, “but we just haven’t picked up any such information. We may be stupid or blind, but I think this office would know if the use were as widespread as Professor Pollard said.”

At this, Pollard raised an eyebrow. He considered himself, conducting confidential research, to be more likely than University officials to get reliable information from students. He told a Michigan Daily reporter: “It would be ridiculous for a student to sit down with a dean and say, ‘Guess what? We were using pot last night!'”

Pollard’s estimates certainly didn’t shock Ann Arbor’s low-key police chief, Walter Krasny, who told the Daily that “perhaps four out of 10 students today might know about drugs on the campus as opposed to about one in 10 just three years ago.” The cops had been hearing about campus “pot parties” for a while, the chief said, though LSD was “somewhat of a new kick to us.”

Timothy Leary at Hill

At Hill Auditorium, Timothy Leary urged students to “turn on” their parents. (Image: Michigan Daily, Feb. 14, 1967.)

No sooner had the fray over Dr. Pollard died down than the evangelist of LSD himself, Dr. Timothy Leary, knelt on the stage of Hill Auditorium and preached to a packed house on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

Coached by none other than the media guru Marshall McLuhan, Leary, long since expelled from the Harvard faculty, had packaged his enthusiasm for LSD into a slogan worthy of Madison Avenue — “Tune in, turn on, drop out” — with the express purpose of igniting a psychedelic revolution in human consciousness. But if the slogan was pithy, his elaborations were never long on clarity, as he demonstrated that night at Hill.

Seated before a lit candle, he announced that he was broadcasting from a television station inside his body called “WDNA” and declared: “We were meant to live in a Garden of Eden. We must wake up… Don’t get hung up on the current popular, plaster, and cardboard TV show. We were all born in Hollywood studios.” To escape, one must take “the visionary trip…a highly regularized psychotic revelation.” Once they had returned, he advised, his listeners should “go home and turn on Mom and Dad. Don’t use words. Just do it” — another slogan in the making. (As one journalist put it, “like the great Oz, Leary is not a bad man; just not a very good wizard.”

Summer of Love

A poster for the Michigan Marijuana Initiative. (Image courtesy of the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library.)

No one knew how many Americans were using recreational drugs, let alone how many college students — though a survey by Eastern Michigan University’s student newspaper that summer estimated usage at one in three EMU students.

But if numbers were scarce, attention was lavish. Just when Dr. Pollard was raising his alarm in Ann Arbor, evangelists of psychedelia were staging a “Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that drew legions of reporters, and the media spotlight only grew brighter during the city’s “Summer of Love.” The columnist Herb Caen coined the term “hippie” for the denizens of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and teenagers began to fashion themselves in their image.

The craze quickly swamped pop culture. When the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that May, few listeners doubted the meaning of the song title “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and the Beatles themselves quickly confirmed they had been using LSD. (Only later did Paul McCartney reveal that his love song “Got To Get You Into My Life” was a hymn to his affair with pot.)

Inappropriate for “rational men”

By the fall of ’67, U-M officials had taken up a position that alternated between fervent disapproval of drug use among students and reassuring statements that, actually, there was next to no drug use among students.

“Young man, you’ve got nothing there but weeds!” The Michigan Daily ran this commentary on the generation gap by  cartoonist Bill Mauldin, creator of World War II’s iconic G.I.’s, Willie and Joe. 

In September, the Michigan Alumnus, the monthly publication of the Alumni Association, reprinted a statement by J.U. Monro, dean of Harvard College at Harvard University, asserting that “if a student is stupid enough to misuse his time here fooling around with illegal and dangerous drugs, our view is that he should leave college and make room for people prepared to take good advantage of the college opportunity.”

That gave U-M’s president, Harlan H. Hatcher, a chance to agree, wholeheartedly, on the same page where Monro’s letter appeared.

“Dean Monro’s position coincides precisely with our attitude here at Michigan,” Hatcher wrote. “We discourage the use of these drugs by every means at our disposal. We regard them as dangerous and totally inappropriate within a community of rational men.”

That said, Hatcher reported “the best data which we can produce reveal that the frequency of use of either of these drugs on our campus is extremely rare.”

A thoughtful note was struck by a student editor in Colorado, Bob Ewegen, whose essay was reprinted in the Daily.

“The motto of the children of Kennedy was, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,'” Ewegen wrote. “The slogan of the children of Leary is simply, ‘Ask only what you can do for your senses.’ The two standards are in deep conflict, and both sides are beamed at the college generation. The one accepted by this generation may well set the tone of American life for decades to come.”
 
 
Sources included the Michigan Daily; Michigan Alumnus; Steven Siff, “Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience;” (2015); and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, “Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion” (1985). The lead image is a cropped version of the Bill Mauldin cartoon that ran in the Michigan Daily in 1967. The commentary on the generation gap reads: “Young man, you’ve got nothing there but weeds!”