Eve Babitz Testifies For Marijuana and LSD

Eve Babitz photographed by Julian Wasser

After celebrating "Tram Day," marking the first time a woman—Susi Ramstein—took an LSD trip on June 12, 1943, I just discovered another reason to celebrate women's contributions to psychedelic movement this week.

Sixty years ago, on June 15, 1966, the young artist and writer Eve Babitz testified along with her employer Walter Bowart of the East Village Other newspaper about their experiences with LSD and marijuana before the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

The New York Times article by Nan Robertson, “Senators Urged to Take LSD ‘Trip,’ ” appeared in the paper on the following day, saying, “Eve Babitz, 23, a strawberry blonde, remarked of marijuana: ‘It’s not fattening, you don’t get a hangover, it’s not addicting… Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother.’ Asked after the hearing why she had not persuaded her grandmother to try, Miss Babitz replied: ‘She’s turned on already.’ ”

Babitz testified that she had been a hypochondriac but that LSD had "freed her from her fears." Presaging the "Set and Setting" lessons around LSD trips, Babitz told the committee, "The best way to take it is with a friend, or two trusted friends, in the country." She suggested setting up park "reserves" staffed by doctors as "vest-pocket launching pads for LSD users."  

Bowart suggested that a member of the committee should have an LSD session and report back to the other members. Paula Sherwood, 26, a senior at New York University, also testified, saying along with Babitz that they would continue to take the drug even if it were made illegal. (This didn't happen until the 1970 Controlled Substances Act.) 

Babitz went on to write books like "Eve's Hollywood," "Sex and Rage" and "I Used to Be Charming," being called the West Coast Joan Didion who lived the life she wrote about, embracing the Hollywood high life in the late 1960s and early ’70s while staying "drunk and stoned."  She called her unpublished book "Travel Broadens" a "blow by blow description of how I saw what I saw. Me being a 19 year old, semi-hippy, marijuana smoking, pill taking, balling Sunset Strip cunt.” Along the way, she designed some really great album covers, for The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt, among others.  

She posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp and dated the likes of Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford and Steve Martin, who called her "a lyrical chronicler of L.A. music and art."  While dating Ralph Metzner, a German PhD from Harvard who was co-writer with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) of 1964’s "The Psychedelic Experience," the couple consulted the I Ching regarding their relationship. "The main pronouncement was ‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden,'" said Metzner. "I interpreted that to mean we should discontinue our relationship. Eve, understandably, was pissed. But the oracle was right! The maiden was powerful.”

Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021, six days before Didion. A 2024 book, Didion and Babitz by Vanity Fair's Lili Anolik, interweaves their stories. Babitz's archive, including drafts of her books and articles, original works of art, personal journals, photographs she took of her celebrity circle, and more than 500 letters has been acquired by the Huntington Library.