The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has enlarged its team of agents in the Boston area to help control the growing trade in illegal drugs at local universities.

The FDA's Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, established last May, will focus its investigations on traffic in "pep pills" and barbiturates, and on manufacture of LSD in college laboratories.

According to Ronald Vanelli, director of Laboratories at Harvard, LSD can be easily made from the related chemical lysergic acid--itself not an illegal drug--by anyone with a basic knowledge of organic chemistry.

So far, FDA agents have found only one setup for producing this "bathtub" LSD in the area--a Boston apartment where two students were synthesizing a crude form of the drug. But they suspect that the same simple equipment may be duplicated on college campuses nearby, and that faculty members and graduate lab assistants as well as students may be involved.

So far, no official probe has been made at Harvard. Dean Monro said yesterday that he has no reason to believe LSD is being made here. Until he does, he said, he is not planning to recommend that access to chemicals like lysergic acid be controlled more strictly in the laboratories.

Pep Pills

Barbiturates and pep pills cannot be made as easily as LSD, but FDA officials rate sales of these drugs as an even more widespread problem. They estimate that ten billion of the pills are sold in the U.S. every year, and that illegal trade on college campuses makes up a major part of the total.

The FDA's crackdown is part of an intensified nationwide effort at drug control. The Bureau of Drug Abuse Control now has 120 agents across the country investigating sources of illegal drug supply.