Another LSD Hallucination

There is no doubt that LSD can have severe and harmful effects on the minds of those who take it. Last week not LSD but the fear of the potent hallucinogen caused such severe disturbance in the mind of a respected state official that he was involved in a weird deception.

The story, leaked from Washington, was that in springtime six juniors at a college in western Pennsylvania had gone to a grassy knoll near the campus, taken LSD, and remained for hours, staring wide-eyed into the sun. As a result, their retinas were so badly burned that all six became totally blind. Authority for the story was Norman M. Yoder, 53, commissioner of the Office for the Blind in Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare. He stood by it after his informal report to Washington got out. A state senator and Governor Raymond P. Shafer backed it up at news conferences. The six, said Yoder, were all getting state aid.

But ophthalmologists doubted that even LSD could wipe out the eye-closing reflexes so completely. The attorney general found that "records" of the "cases" in Yoder's office were defective. Then it developed that Yoder, who has been 90% blind since child hood from a sand-lot baseball injury, had fabricated the story to drive home the dangers of LSD. Suspended from his post, "distraught and sick," Yoder had himself admitted to the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center.

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