Both anticholinergic and neuroleptic drugs were withdrawn from eight long‐stay hospitalized chronic schizophrenics. These patients and normal controls were then tested on Calev, Venables & Monk's (1983) immediate and delayed matched recall tasks to evaluate their rate of forgetting of verbal well‐encoded materials. The results showed rapid forgetting in schizophrenics. This finding suggests that a post‐encoding deficit characterizes long‐stay schizophrenics after drug withdrawal. Cognitive and brain pathologies that may explain these results are discussed. 1991 The British Psychological Society