In February 1967 — months before the Summer of Love — Lisa Bieberman published a 28-page pamphlet called Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD. It cost a dollar. This year, a peer-reviewed study put her advice in front of nearly 600 modern psychedelic users. They endorsed 18 of her 19 recommendations.
The practical voice the sixties didn't listen to
Bieberman was a Radcliffe-educated writer who worked in Timothy Leary's circle at Harvard before breaking with it. Where Leary preached consciousness expansion, Bieberman ran the Psychedelic Information Center out of 26 Boylston Street in Cambridge and worried about logistics: who you should be with, what to do when panic sets in, how to handle the eleventh hour of a twelve-hour experience. Her pamphlet opens with the problem that still defines drug education: with more and more laypeople taking LSD, “the supposed experts [had] nothing more instructive to say than ‘don't.’”
The term “harm reduction” wouldn't enter the vocabulary of drug policy for another two decades. The authors of the new study argue Bieberman got there first — and the historical record backs up how unusual her pragmatism was in that scene.
The games
The pamphlet's central idea is that LSD sessions go wrong in predictable, nameable ways — “games” people play mid-trip. Some of her catalog:
- Get Me Out of This. The panicked attempt to abort a trip — which she calls the worst session game of all, because fighting the experience is what turns anxiety into a spiral. Her counter-advice: anxiety during a session doesn't mean something is wrong, and the experience will end on its own.
- The evasion games — Baby, Couch, Drunk, Let's Have an Orgy. Four styles of dodging the experience by acting helpless, playing patient, acting intoxicated, or chasing stimulation instead of letting the session do its work.
- Where's Harry? Someone wanders off and the whole session becomes a search party. Her rule: stay in one place, stay together.
- Mind Reader. Becoming convinced you know what your companions are thinking — a warning about how quickly group dynamics distort at high doses.
- I Have All the Answers / Messiah. The belief that you've unlocked the deepest truths of the universe and must share them. Write it down, she suggests, “in a form that will make sense to you tomorrow.”
- Let's Call It a Day. Trying to end the session early and rush back to normal life — squandering the re-entry hours she considered some of the most valuable of the day.
And then there's the tip that made the internet laugh this week: “Shun mirrors. On LSD you probably look awful to yourself in the mirror, probably because your pupils are dilated, and you see all your pores. You don't really look that bad.”
What 600 modern users think
The study — led by Daniel Kruger of the University at Buffalo with Paul Gillis-Smith of Harvard Divinity School and collaborators from the Michigan psychedelic community — surveyed nearly 600 self-identified psychedelic users, ages 18 to 85, and asked how much they agreed with each of 19 recommendations drawn from the pamphlet. Eighteen held up. The strongest endorsements went to the advice about trusted companions, personal responsibility, and recognizing that anxiety passes and trips end.
The lone exception: mirrors. Modern users were split — many now treat mirror-gazing as a feature of the experience, not a hazard. Sixty years of cultural change, and the only casualty of Bieberman's advice is the one about pores.
From mimeographed pamphlet to licensed profession
What makes this more than a charming headline is what happened to Bieberman's subject matter. The skills her pamphlet improvised — screening for readiness, managing anxiety without intervention, holding a safe container, structuring re-entry — are now the curriculum of state-licensed facilitator training programs in Oregon and Colorado, and the daily work of trip sitters, integration coaches, and harm reduction staff across the psychedelic workforce. Session monitors in clinical trials follow manuals that formalize the same principles her survey respondents just re-endorsed.
Harm reduction started as samizdat. It's becoming a profession — and the evidence says its founding document aged remarkably well.
Read the original
The full pamphlet is freely available as a PDF from Luminist Publications, which reissued it in 2005. The study, published in the journal Psychedelics, is worth reading alongside it.