11/11/14:

Anybody involved with LSD in the early 50's?
The following letter was sent to your Class Secretary, Treasurer and Class Technology Officer: Dear Sirs,

I’m a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., and I’m writing you in your capacity as officers of Harvard’s class of 1955.

I am currently collaborating on a story with James Rathmell, a professor of anesthesiology at the Harvard School of Medicine, about the late Henry Beecher, who taught anesthesiology at Harvard in the years following World War II. In the early 1950s, Dr. Beecher and a Harvard colleague, Louis Lasagna, conducted a series of U.S. Army-backed experiments in their lab at Massachusetts General Hospital that involved giving LSD and other drugs to Harvard undergraduates. The experiments were part of a larger, CIA-led effort, Project MKULTRA, to find drugs that could be used as “truth serum” or to modify behavior. (For background see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra)

Since this research was conducted around the time that you were undergraduates, we thought it was at least possible that you or some of your classmates might have had some knowledge of it—either first-hand or otherwise--and if so might be willing to share it. Feel free to circulate this query among your classmates by email, Facebook or any other means, and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.

I am sending the same query to the officers of several other Harvard classes from the same period.

Sincerely,

John Lancaster