LSD and Leukemia

In 1967, more than a year after he began using lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a 19-year-old U.S. college freshman was admitted to New York's Presbyterian Hospital complaining of fever and malaise. After extensive laboratory tests, his ailment was diagnosed as acute leukemia, or "cancer of the blood," a fatal disease of the blood-forming organs. At about the same time, a 22-year-old Australian suffering from an obsessive-compulsive neurosis was treated with LSD injections for two months. A year later, suffering from fatigue, pallor, bleeding gums, rashes and an "influenza-like illness," he too was found to be a victim of acute leukemia.

Chromosome Breaks. Two cases obviously do not prove that "acid" is leukemogenic as well as hallucinogenic. For more than two years, however, laboratory evidence connecting LSD and leukemia has been mounting. Cell damage from LSD was first reported in March 1967 by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Maimon M. Cohen at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Within six months, so much evidence had accumulated that the National Foundation-March of Dimes called an emergency meeting of top geneticists to consider the problem. The geneticists were properly hesitant to report outright that LSD causes leukemia. Nevertheless, they observed that the cells of people who had used LSD showed a high incidence of the kind of chromosome breaks and abnormalities characteristic of leukemia. The abnormalities occurred four to five times more frequently among LSD users than among nonusers, said Dr. Cohen.

Discussing the young Australian leukemia victim in the June 28 issue of the British Medical Journal, Dr. O. Margaret Garson and Meryl K. Robson moved a little closer to blaming LSD directly for the abnormalities. "The association between the ingestion of lysergide and the occurrence of acute leukemia may be casual rather than causal," they wrote, "but certain unusual features in our case suggest that it may be causal." Among these features were the patient's unusual bone-marrow chromosome pattern and the presence of large cells containing multiple micronucleoli. Dr. Lionel Grossbard and colleagues at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, who reported the case of the U.S. college student in the A.M.A. Journal, were somewhat more cautious in their conclusions. Further evidence is needed, they said, before the relationship between LSD and leukemia can be conclusively established.

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