Time magazine got to the LSD story before other magazines, writes Siff, and wrote about it more frequently. Its stories were longer on average than the pieces run by its competition and were largely sympathetic, as typified by the 1960 Time piece “The Psyche in 3-D,” about celebrities taking LSD under the supervision of their doctors; or this Life editorial from 1966 urging regulation, not prohibition, of LSD; or, from 1968, an early debunking of the gone-blind-on-LSD urban myth. So intense was the Luces’ interest in the topic that both reviewed the 1963 Life article “The Chemical Mind-Changers” prior to its publication, writes Siff. Not every column inch of LSD copy in Time was adulatory or “balanced.” In “An Epidemic of Acid Heads” from 1966, Time blamed a wave of psychotic illnesses on the recreational use of LSD.

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