By Jeffrey Lieberman
March 29, 2017
As a child of the 1960s, I observed the ebb and flow of the counterculture
and experimentation with recreational drugs, and the indelible effects these
social movements left on American society. As a medical student in the
1970s, I became intimately acquainted with the promise and perils of the
psychoactive agents in those drugs. During my psychiatric training in the
1980s, I cared for PCP-crazed patients, students having bad trips, youths
strung-out on speed and coke-heads and pot heads in the emergency room,
inpatient psychiatric units, state mental hospitals, on the streets and in
homeless shelters.