I've got to start cutting back on these bargain subscriptions. You know how it is; you go away for a while and the magazines start to pile up. You never get on top of them all again. This one's from 1964, three years before the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (and lysergic acid diethylamide-25 only became illegal in the U.S. fourteen months after that LP was on everybody's turntable). The Review's consulting editorial staff included notables from Cornell, U.C. Berkeley (big shock), MIT, the NIMH and the RAND Corporation.
While the magazine seemed psychopharmacologically advanced, it also seemed socially retrograde, as in that article in the table of contents suggesting a treatment of sexual problems. "When LSD is given alone, it frequently accentuates anxiety so that it is now combined with intravenous Ritalin." I am not a doctor, although at least one of the two London gentlemen responsible for the article is. (It may be an excerpt from their book published the previous year, Lysergic Acid (LSD 25) and Ritalin in the Treatment of Neurosis, covered in the book review section.) Does anyone use terms like "frigidity" anymore? Does "How about a shot of Ritalin during foreplay?" sound like a reading from the Tibetan Book of Disastrous Sexual Propositions? I am not a doctor, but the Beatles had their first trip by getting dosed by their dentist, and even that sounds better than a hypodermic in the sack.
Please don't ask me to explain the cover illustration. I thought someone had had a prophetic vision of Burning Man until I realized it was a Rorschach. Tomorrow I go back to comic books.
