Setting Stage for the Sixties: Restrictions on Speech About Drugs in America Prior to 1968 (Top Three Paper).

Scholars from a variety of disciplines have observed that the coverage of the hallucinogenic drug LSD in popular magazines in the 1950s and 1960s seemed to stoke public interest in the drug. The lack of drug information in the mass media during much of the first half of the twentieth century may have helped this magazine coverage to have such a strong effect. Speech about other, illegal drugs was restricted in much of the media prior to the 1960s through a variety of means, including obscenity law and industry codes. This study examined some of the legal and pseudo-legal mechanisms that controlled speech about drugs and explored why LSD may have been covered differently in popular magazines. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]