1971-11-30-sc-p19-glenn-harmon-editorial

November 30, 1971 Spokane Daily Chronicle Page 19:

Spokane Daily Chronicle, Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1971.

LSD Victim's Father Answers Student Editorial

LSD can cause permanent damage to the brain’s "memory bank" and the associated "process of reasoning" and amphetamines and even marijuana can cause brain damage.

These opinions from one of the nation’s top experts on drugs, Dr. Hardin B, Jones of the University of California, are quoted in a letter to the Washington State Evergreen and published today by the student daily from E. Glenn Harmon, Spokane attorney.

Harmon wrote in answer to a recent Evergreen editorial casting doubt on the authenticity of Harmon's views of the effect of LSD in causing his son, Larry J. Harmon, to kill one person and wound four others in a shooting incident Nov. 11 at Gonzaga University here, Larry Harmon was killed by police during the incident.

Text Quoted

The text of Mr. Harmon's letter follows:

As a former managing editor of The Evergreen, I write to ask the right to reply to the editorials you published on November 16, 1971, commenting on the death of my son, Larry J. Harmon. As a former newspaperman and now a lawyer, I recognize your moral and legal right to characterize my report of my son’s death as "an emotional yet unsound account of his son’s last three years." Unquestionably I was emotional, so much so that I failed to note that I missed the date of his first LSD episode by a year. He met LSD on his 19th birthday, June 27, 1969, not his 18th, and died on November 11, 1971.

I recognize also your right to point out that he said “no” to many values, including guilt and innocence, when he "gunned down Hilary M. Kunz, 69-year- old caretaker at St. Aloysius Catholic Church."

I can understand what you mean when you say: "Larry Harmon should not have taken the drug, bu the fault lies with him so much as with the society which closes its eyes in disgust."

I can appreciate what you are saying when you say: "Society must come to grips with the fact that drugs like LSD are not devious devices of perverted or immoral degenerates, but easily accessible playthings in the lives of many of the own 'good children.'" But I do not agree that drugs should continue to be "attractive playthings" to our "good children."

I recognize your right to run the other editorial which said these things, in part:

“The only people E. Glenn Harmon's statement is going to reach will be those afraid to look truth in the eye. Those familiar with LSD may already be laughing.

“LSD could very wall be dangerous, we don’t know. Science evidently doesn’t know as much about LSD as those who have been stunned emotionally by its use by a friend or relative.

"...We have no facts—we have a smear campaign...A fairy tale...Certainly, if you want to scoff and deny that LSD is harmful to you or to others because it has not destroyed you or your friends, you have the right to do so, as I read your editorials, I think of you as a young man trying to persuade himself of his own infallibility because he hasn't failed yet.

I remember well how infallible I was when I was a senior at Washington State College. There was little I did not know, and less that I was uncertain about, in my own mind,

Time Alters Views

Time has taught that most of the things I knew so surely were simply not true, I was certain that if Adolph Hitler were destroyed, the world would embark on an extended period of peace.

Please accept the fact that you, and all young people, may be as completely fallible as we elders whom you blame for “messing up” your world, I, together with my classmates, was as sure as you that our “elders” were responsible for the great depression starting in 1929. And we were just as sure as you that we would correct all the errors of our parents and their parents.

As one who can remember well when he was a college student, looking forward to remaking the world in a better image, I applaud the continued determination of today’s young to do a better tan we elders did. But I plead with you, do it without the aid of drugs.

Let me speak now of drugs. Since you and your paper rushed to defend LSD, marijuana, the drug scene, I assume you feel you are qualified to do so. But are you? What to you know personally of drugs.

From my own studies when I was searching for help for my son, I concluded this: Every knowledgeable expert in the field of drug abuse who has no axe to grind—no social program to foster—tells the same story. Drugs do damage human bodies. Drugs may alter or destroy living cells. Drugs can and do alter human brain patterns. Though drugs may bring incredible, unbelievable, indescribable momentary pleasures, they also bring their toll of disaster. All too soon. Continued use of drugs inevitable brings sexual impotence.

Perhaps you will ask, who tells you these facts? Part of the story comes from those who have been on drugs, who have either broken the spell cast by drugs or are trying to do so, I wish you could read the letters such people write. But in addition to the testimony of those who know first hand what drugs did to them, we also have scientific evidence. Hard facts.

Study Made

Dr. Hardin B. Jones, assistant director of Donner Laboratory, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has studied drugs and their effects since January 1965. The Donner Laboratory is the medical research division, or the medial subsidiary, of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, which did the basic research which led to creation of the atomic bomb and nuclear energy.

The director of the Donner Laboratory is Dr. John Lawrence, brother of Dr. Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclatron. The Donner Laboratory is famed for its studies of the relationship between nuclear physics and medicine, and for its research into that field. The assistant director of the Laboratory which is applying the techniques of nuclear physics to the study of medicine and the human body, Dr. Hardin B. Jones is recognized as an expert on drug damage to the human brain. He has the findings of the most powerful research tools known to man available to him.

Course Taught

Among other things, Dr. Jones teaches a course in "Drug Use and Drug Abuse” at the University of California at Berkeley.

I think Dr. Jones is qualified to express a valid opinion on the danger of drugs, including LSD, to the human brain, If you value the scientific approach, as I did in college, you may agree that he should be able to "tell it like it is."

This is what Dr. Hardin B. Jones has told me, summarized briefly:

LSD damages human brains. It can cause permanent damage to the brain’s "memory bank" and the associated "process of reasoning." To date, research has not pinpointed the precise way in which this damage is done. But that such damage frequently is done is established beyond scientific doubt.

Marijuana Studied

Marijuana and its effects on the brain have also been studied by the same powerful scientific research equipment used to study the effects of LSD. Marijuana or "pot" accumulates in the brain cells with continued use of marijuana. The build-up of cannibis can be observed, located, and studied. In time, the build-up creates observable brain damage in some people.

Amphetamines or "speed" also causes observable brain damage, Only quicker. When the damage caused by “speed” has progressed so far, it is permanent, irreversible.

Jones also has told me this fact you may not know. The greater the intellect of the person who take LSD, the greater the danger of permanent brain damage. Dr. Jones has written:

"One important fact to set straight with the public is that it is not the borderline psychotic who is over into paranoia or schizophrenia by LSD. LSD is a psychomimetic drug, but it does not bring on a typical natural psychosis, rather something unnatural in its severity and in the pattern of effect on that personality. LSD makes the best minds psychotic, its worst effects are not so much on the mentally weak as on those with naturally powerful intellects."

What he is saying is that not everyone is immediately damaged by LSD, of course, Yet hospital records indicate that there are about 100,000 prolonged hospitalizations per year due to LSD psychosis, Dr. Jones reports. My son was hospitalized for 10 days. Dr, Jones estimates that probably 50,000 to 100,000 people in this country, many of them with naturally powerful intellects, are as seriously damaged as my son, Larry was. The percentage of those seriously damaged by LSD is far greater than you would imagine.

Why isn't the truth known more widely? In part, because the public usually hears of LSD brain damage only when an LSD victim kills, kills himself, or is killed. Most parents with children with such brain damage keep the knowledge securely wrapped away from public sight, even after death. And so the truth stays hidden.

How many young men and women must LSD and other drugs kill or cripple mentally before you, and many others, recognize what is happening to your generation?

Your newspaper called my story of my son’s death years after taking LSD "a fairy tale." Perhaps it is to you. I wish it were to me. To me it is a reality I hope you never share.

Thank you for writing about my son as you did. Without your editorials, I might never have written this letter.

I would like to think that God may have been guiding your hand.