The defense argued that the women were merely pawns. Manson had used an almost technologically precise combination of drugs, hypnotism, and coercion to transform these formerly nonviolent people into frenzied, psychopathic killers. At that point, scientists in the United States had been studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds and molding them to his designs.
