Sidney Cohen conducted early LSD research in the 1950s and was a noted U.S. public expert on drug abuse from the 1960s to the 1980s. Cohen was a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and served in the Nixon Administration as the first Director, Division of Narcotic Abuse and Drug Addiction at the National Institute of Mental Health. He authored more than 250 journal and popular articles, books including The Beyond Within: The LSD Story, and served in editorial capacities for a number of journals. The Sidney Cohen Collection includes subject files covering Cohen's professional research, correspondence files from teen years until close to his death in 1987, biographical information documenting education and government service, audio tapes of LSD conferences from the late 1950s and early 1960s, a number of Cohen's articles and manuscripts, and files from LSD and mescaline experiments Cohen conducted with Gerald Heard.

Sidney Cohen (1910-1987) was born in New York city in 1910, graduated as a pharmacist from Columbia University in 1930, and received his medical degree from Bonn University, Bonn, Germany, in 1938. After completing an internship in Jamaica, Long Island, and New York, Cohen entered the U.S. Army and served in the Pacific Campaign, eventually becoming a Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, from which he retired in 1963.

86 boxes (43 linear ft.)

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