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whose mental and emotional stabilities themselves may be questionable. Numerous
examples of these patterns come to mind.
The late yuppie guru, Dr. Frederick Lenz (also known as Zen Master Rama), took LSD
himself but also gave it to his students. One student among the ten or so to whom Lenz
provided the drug on one occasion subsequently recalled that several hours after their trips
began, Lenz
called us to the living room and began to talk. And talk. And talk. I tried to
understand how his words were affecting us. I thought in terms of computers.
I decided that he had rebooted us with LSD and now, as we were coming
down, he was downloading his wordy operating system to our unformatted,
receptive minds. ‗He‘s formatting us like floppy disks!‘ I thought (Laxer
1993:143).
On different occasions, apparently Lenz gave other members LSD and then harangued them
about being ―possessed by demons and entities‖ (Butler 1987: see Okerblom 1988:B8).
While on LSD himself (and dressed in yellow rain gear), Lenz spent an hour supposedly
cleansing water-like demons out of a follower‘s basement (Senders and Moloney 1988:24).
Eventually, however, Lenz‘s own paranoid demons overtook him, and in early 1998 he
convinced a female student and lover to commit suicide with him by drug overdose. (He
ingested 150 Valiums and drowned, but his lover survived despite having swallowed 50
Valiums and 45 Phenobarbitals [Konigsberg 1998:22]).
Lenz was notorious for sleeping with female followers (Motoyama 1992:12), but it is not
clear whether he combined sex with LSD. Charles Manson, of course, did. For a period of
time, he gave his followers the drug several times a week over several months (Faith
2001:111, 113), often amidst orgies (Bugliosi with Gentry 1974:236-237), and, at least in
one instance, a mock crucifixion ceremony in which he was Jesus (Sanders 1989:86-87).
Few of his followers likely knew that ―when Manson passed out the LSD, he always took a
smaller dose than the others.‖ Presumably he did so ―to retain control over his own mental
faculties‖ so that he could ―instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract
promises and agreements from his followers‖ (Bugliosi with Gentry 1974:237).
Manson did not limit the drugs that his he and his followers abused simply to LSD—he gave
them marijuana and peyote whenever they were available. Indeed, his abuse of
amphetamines may have contributed to the violent rampage that his followers undertook
(under his orders) in 1969 (Faith 2001:115). Although he introduced LSD to some of his
followers, others had taken it well before meeting him (Bugliosi with Gentry 1974:235,
483). Members of another group, Love Israel, also had psychedelic histories before joining,
but their leader introduced them to a drug that almost certainly was new to them all—a
solvent called toluene (or what the leader called ‗tell-u-all‘). Even after two of his followers
died from the fumes, Love and other leaders continued to advocate the sniffing practice as a
means of inducing visions (Balch 1988:192 Israel, Israel, and Israel n.d.).
Looking at yet another group leader, Shoko Asahara‘s visions during his first LSD trip were
so dramatic that, when he came down from it, he declared, ―This is excellent,‖ even though
he had wet his pants while on the acid (Brackett 1996:98 Kaplan and Marshall 1996:162-
163). Soon LSD was one of ―an illicit pharmacy of hallucinogens, stimulants, and other
psychoactive drugs‖ that his organization produced (Kaplan and Marshall 1996:163), and
members by the thousands experienced the mind alterations caused by LSD. He, of course,
benefited greatly from these trips, because the members misattributed the vivid colors and
perceptual distortions ―to the mystical power of Asahara‘s training‖ (Kaplan and Marshall
1996:164).

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The leader of Australia‘s Great White Brotherhood, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, had a similar goal
of misattribution behind her ―religious ritual‖ of giving LSD to her teenaged followers. One
former member, who was a fourteen-year-old when the leader gave her LSD, subsequently
surmised that part of the reason that the leader subjected her young followers to these trips
was that
[i]t was also meant to make the spiritual bonding easier between the Master
and the disciple. You were supposed to recognize Anne as the ‗one true
Master,‘ Christ incarnate. She would come in to people when they were under
[the effects of LSD] and ask, ‗Do you know who I am?‘ The correct answer
was ‗The Lord Incarnate.‘ The incorrect answer meant you weren‘t working
hard enough (Hamilton-Byrne 1995:143).
These and other examples show how leaders‘ abuses of various drugs can have direct and
damaging consequences for members, especially when those leaders facilitate, and usually
direct, the experiences that the members have while on them.
C. Trusted, Fictive Families and Abuse
Related to the hierarchical, asymmetrical social structure is the frequent pattern of
alternative (and some traditional) religions to use familial terms to describe members and
their relationships. Called ‗fictive families,‘ groups often speak of leaders in parental terms
and followers as children (in relation to leaders) and siblings (in relation to one another).
Violence researchers realize, however, how dangerous family dynamics can be, so what
frequently occurs in religions whose members portray themselves as fictive families is that
these members engage in acts of intrapersonal exploitation and violence roughly analogous
to actions that occur in real family settings (Cartwright and Kent 1992).
Unfortunately, among the acts of interpersonal exploitation that sometimes occur in families
and hierarchical religions are various forms of child abuse. Innocent adults trust the fictively
parental members in the hierarchy (Shupe 1995:29), while a few of those trusted members
use their relatively unmonitored positions within the hierarchy to gain access to children and
youth. Religious scandals involving sexual assaults against children now plague numerous
religious communities, including Catholicism, the Hare Krishnas, and the ministries of some
Protestant preachers (such as the convicted pedophile Tony Leyva, who admitted to having
sexually abused as many as 100 teens but whose actual number many have been closer to
800). As one of Leyva‘s victims lamented, ―‗He was a preacher, and that means he was a
man of God, and the atmosphere felt true‘‖ (Smothers 1988:A2). In any social setting,
religious or otherwise, children are at unnecessary risk for suffering sexual abuse when left
alone with unmonitored adults, and pedophiles have used trusted religious hierarchies and
positions to gain access to victims.
D. Sexism, Patriarchalism, and Corporal Punishment
Sexism, which occurs in many (but by no means all) groups, facilitates sexual assaults
against women and contributes to the crushing poverty—an often-neglected form of
violence—in which some families live. Looking globally at the combination of sexism and
poverty, the abusive religious arrangement that epitomizes violence against poor women is
the devadasi, or temple prostitution system in India. Impoverished families sell their
daughters to temples that in turn hire them out to male clients in what may be the world‘s
largest child- and female-prostitution ring (Barry 1995:181-184).
An additional interpersonal facilitator of violence within some religions is the imposition of
corporal punishment at early ages. Fictive families, as well as families within mainstream
Western societies, often resort to ‗the rod‘ or the hand to discipline children. The long-term
consequences are enormous for the victims who are hit and the society in which they
mature. For the victims—the recipients of the punishment—―[r]esearch over the past 40