Lsd Drug

For the last several months, frightening notices have popped up in schools, day-care centers and hospital emergency rooms throughout Southern California warning that the mind-altering drug LSD is being sold in the form of rub-on tattoos shaped like blue stars or cartoon characters. The flyers, written anonymously and in virtually the same language, claim that the brightly colored paper tabs soaked in LSD are a "new way of selling acid by appealing to our young children."

Looking at Mary in a gauze, ankle-skimming maiden dress, long brown hair, no makeup and fingers wrapped in ornate silver rings, one could mistake her for a Woodstock alumni; that is, from the original fest. Only the Mater Dei senior's Dr. Marten boots establish her in the present day. Most of her daily life nods to an era when her own parents were still in high school. She loves Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell, but she grooves to them on compact disc, not scratchy vinyl.

A Ventura lawyer, charged with drug possession after police raided an LSD party at his office last month, says he did nothing wrong and asserts that some outlawed drugs should be legalized. Attorney Douglas Andrew Palaschak admitted in an interview this week that he took LSD a few hours before his arrest May 9. He also acknowledged that conviction could lead to discipline by the State Bar of California.

Police psychologist Michael R. Mantell and San Diego County are not providing a "well-established and fully functional" program to screen applicants for high-stress jobs as sheriff's deputies, marshals and probation officers, according to a hard-hitting report approved Wednesday by the county Civil Service Commission.

Tom Becker didn't want to lie, but there didn't seem to be much choice. His mother would have a fit if she knew where he was headed. So, at 14, the altar boy from upstate New York took a deep breath and let out a whopper: "Mother," he said. "I'm going camping." With that, Becker grabbed his backpack, ran to the highway and stuck out his thumb. Destination: the Zen Mountain Monastery, high in the Catskill Mountains. Becker, a 25-year-old Costa Mesa resident, laughs at the memory.

Veiled in secrecy until a week before the opening, LACE's "Annuale 1998" doesn't offer much to get worked up about. Franklin Sirmans, a critic, writer and curator who heads the U.S. editorial desk of the journal Flash Art International, has chosen 11 able young artists from a wide pool of local applicants; but the combined results generate few intellectual sparks and even fewer flickers of genuine visual pleasure.

Some years ago, I heard through the family grapevine that a young relative had renounced everything, including the religion of his fathers, for an obscure New Age sect. Despite myself I felt annoyed. You want to join a cult, fine--why not a useful one like the Communist Party? The most seductive secular faith of the short 20th century was communism (in all its poignant, savage and self-deluded permutations). The appeal was not solely utopian.