Pusey Plans No Investigation of Drug

President Pusey said yesterday that the University is not planning its own investigation into the use of psilocybin at the Center for Research in Personality, and that he is confident that David C. McCielland, head of the Center, will satisfy investigators from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

McCielland met yesterday with Alfred J. Murphy, senior food and drug inspector at the Department, to discuss the University's use of the consciousness-expanding drug in experiments involving graduate student subjects. McCielland declined to comment on the meeting.

The dispute over the drug, which must by law bear the label "may be habit-forming," broke out at a meeting of members of the Center March 15. Part of the controversy involves the question of whether the experimenter himself should be under the influence of the drug.

Two colleagues at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center say he should not. Dr. Max Rinkel told the CRIMSON that the experimenter "should definitely not be under the influence of psilocybin at the time of his experiment. If he were, he could neither control nor observe it properly."

Both Richard Albert and Timothy Leary, working with psilocybin at the University, hold that the experimenter must be under the mild influence of the drug to follow effectively their subjects' reactions.

Agreeing with Rinkel, Alberto DiMascio, principal investigator at the Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory, emphasized that "such studies be carried out in cooperation with a trained psychiatrist, who should possess as much knowledge as possible about the drug's actions and side effects, and the methods used to alleviate or counteract them in case any emergency should arrive."

"This physician," according to DiMascio, "should be available on call and in the building in which the experiments are being carried out, since it has been shown that the drug's actions may alter both the physical and mental processes of an individual."