Acid Daze
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THE GREAT DOPE OPERA
Agent Orange?
The Star of this show is just a few molecules tall...
LSD Docked
Between 1965 and 1967 the well-publicized efforts of Owsley Stanley allegedly led—in the U.S.—to the ’60s phenomenon of LSD experimentation. Stanley’s labs in Los Angeles (1965), Pt. Richmond, California (1966) and Denver (1967) produced a total of 400 grams, for which Stanley was sentenced to three years after his arrest in Orinda, California in December 1967, where 67 grams were seized.
In 1968–1969 the Windsor, California lab of Nick Sand and Tim Scully produced 1,100 grams in Windsor, distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as "Orange Sunshine" in 240-microgram tablets. Nick Sand was sentenced in 1974 to 15 years for his work in the 1968–9 Windsor lab and 1972 labs in St Louis and Fenton, Missouri which produced an unknown quantity of LSD (also distributed as "Orange Sunshine"). Tim Scully was sentenced in 1974 to 20 years (later reduced to 10 years), and paroled after one-third time under 1980s law for his work in the Pt Richmond, Denver and the Windsor labs. While Scully was released after serving 3-1/3 years due to community service and support, Nick Sand departed to Canada and continued his efforts.
In 1968–1970 the Paris and Orleans labs of Ron Stark and Tord Svenson purportedly produced several kilograms of LSD and from 1971–1972 their Belgian laboratory reportedly produced another several kilos, all distributed via the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as "Orange Sunshine." Stark eventually was arrested in Italy in 1975, where he served four years. He was arrested and deported in 1983 from Holland to the US where he faced conspiracy charges, in US v Sand and Scully et al. in San Francisco, but the charges were eventually dropped in 1983. He died in San Francisco in 1984 from a heart attack.
In 1975 the MTF survey began collecting data, while DAWN began collecting data in 1994.
In the mid-late 1970s in the UK, the "Operation Julie" group of Richard Kemp, Henry Todd, David Solomon, Andy Munro, et al. produced several kilograms. In March 1977 British agents in Operation Julie arrested over 100 suspects, with the latter receiving sentences ranging as high as 13 years.
In 1968–1969 the Windsor, California lab of Nick Sand and Tim Scully produced 1,100 grams in Windsor, distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as "Orange Sunshine" in 240-microgram tablets. Nick Sand was sentenced in 1974 to 15 years for his work in the 1968–9 Windsor lab and 1972 labs in St Louis and Fenton, Missouri which produced an unknown quantity of LSD (also distributed as "Orange Sunshine"). Tim Scully was sentenced in 1974 to 20 years (later reduced to 10 years), and paroled after one-third time under 1980s law for his work in the Pt Richmond, Denver and the Windsor labs. While Scully was released after serving 3-1/3 years due to community service and support, Nick Sand departed to Canada and continued his efforts.
In 1968–1970 the Paris and Orleans labs of Ron Stark and Tord Svenson purportedly produced several kilograms of LSD and from 1971–1972 their Belgian laboratory reportedly produced another several kilos, all distributed via the Brotherhood of Eternal Love as "Orange Sunshine." Stark eventually was arrested in Italy in 1975, where he served four years. He was arrested and deported in 1983 from Holland to the US where he faced conspiracy charges, in US v Sand and Scully et al. in San Francisco, but the charges were eventually dropped in 1983. He died in San Francisco in 1984 from a heart attack.
In 1975 the MTF survey began collecting data, while DAWN began collecting data in 1994.
In the mid-late 1970s in the UK, the "Operation Julie" group of Richard Kemp, Henry Todd, David Solomon, Andy Munro, et al. produced several kilograms. In March 1977 British agents in Operation Julie arrested over 100 suspects, with the latter receiving sentences ranging as high as 13 years.
In the summer of 1968 the Brotherhood was getting a lab set up in San Francisco to produce Orange Sunshine (LSD). Timothy Leary had just been busted for a small amount of pot, imprisoned briefly because the Brotherhood had helped him escape to Algeria, and then ended up in Kabul where he was again arrested.
Mr. Sinclair: In the summer of 1968, brotherhood members traveled to San Francisco in an attempt to secure a permanent source of supply for LSD which they found. The LSD was to be called orange sunshine and the laboratory was to be set up in December 1968.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973
*
In March of 1969, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (who had members involved with Scientology) produced its first batch of Orange Sunshine.
Mr. Sinclair. In March 1969, the first batch of “orange sunshine” LSD was made bv brotherhood members in a laboratory located outside of San Francisco. Slightly under 1 million tablets were produced in this first endeavor. Numerous millions were to be made in the next 4 years. At this point in time, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was the largest supplier of hashish and LSD in the United States.
Mr. SouRWiNE. Let us get the reference. That phrase “point of time” has meant a lot of things. You are talking about March 1969.
Mr. Sinclair. That is correct, sir.
Mr. SouRWINE. Go ahead.
Mr. Sinclair. The center of their operations was still Laguna Beach, Calif., although they were fast becoming international travelers and were purchasing property in Hawaii, Canada, Central America, and several States neighboring California. From 1966 to 1971, members of the brotherhood traveled throughout the world using false identities with passports obtained under assumed names. Their operations were virtually untouchable during this period of time.
Mr. SouRwiNE. Why was that?
Mr. Sinclair. Because of their mobility, because no one was really aware of the extent of their activities.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973 .
Meanwhile Mike Hynson – the surf board smuggler, and become best friends with talented young surfer and Dodge City’s biggest drug dealer John Gale.
Together, they opened their own company (to also make those smuggling surf boards from)
– Rainbow Surfboards.
The schooner Aafje was also running drugs under the helm of Eddie Padilla, right around this time.
As mentioned in the hearings, the Brotherhood went to some lengths to keep their true identities hidden, in fact many of the higher-level Brotherhood members went by numbers, as a sort of code. Attorney George Chula (who later came into possession of the schooner Aafje as payment for past services (which had been used to smuggle drugs by the Brotherhood), used this ‘numbers’ system so that no names would have to be exchanged.
Ramsey described Chula as “a gangster type.”
Ramsey said that Chula was on large permanent retainer from the Brotherhood and that he obtained a boat that was given to him by the Brotherhood, a large sailboat in payment for past services.
- Eszterhas – The Strange Case of the Hippie Mafia.
Mr. Sinclair: In the summer of 1968, brotherhood members traveled to San Francisco in an attempt to secure a permanent source of supply for LSD which they found. The LSD was to be called orange sunshine and the laboratory was to be set up in December 1968.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973
*
In March of 1969, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (who had members involved with Scientology) produced its first batch of Orange Sunshine.
Mr. Sinclair. In March 1969, the first batch of “orange sunshine” LSD was made bv brotherhood members in a laboratory located outside of San Francisco. Slightly under 1 million tablets were produced in this first endeavor. Numerous millions were to be made in the next 4 years. At this point in time, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was the largest supplier of hashish and LSD in the United States.
Mr. SouRWiNE. Let us get the reference. That phrase “point of time” has meant a lot of things. You are talking about March 1969.
Mr. Sinclair. That is correct, sir.
Mr. SouRWINE. Go ahead.
Mr. Sinclair. The center of their operations was still Laguna Beach, Calif., although they were fast becoming international travelers and were purchasing property in Hawaii, Canada, Central America, and several States neighboring California. From 1966 to 1971, members of the brotherhood traveled throughout the world using false identities with passports obtained under assumed names. Their operations were virtually untouchable during this period of time.
Mr. SouRwiNE. Why was that?
Mr. Sinclair. Because of their mobility, because no one was really aware of the extent of their activities.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973 .
Meanwhile Mike Hynson – the surf board smuggler, and become best friends with talented young surfer and Dodge City’s biggest drug dealer John Gale.
Together, they opened their own company (to also make those smuggling surf boards from)
– Rainbow Surfboards.
The schooner Aafje was also running drugs under the helm of Eddie Padilla, right around this time.
As mentioned in the hearings, the Brotherhood went to some lengths to keep their true identities hidden, in fact many of the higher-level Brotherhood members went by numbers, as a sort of code. Attorney George Chula (who later came into possession of the schooner Aafje as payment for past services (which had been used to smuggle drugs by the Brotherhood), used this ‘numbers’ system so that no names would have to be exchanged.
Ramsey described Chula as “a gangster type.”
Ramsey said that Chula was on large permanent retainer from the Brotherhood and that he obtained a boat that was given to him by the Brotherhood, a large sailboat in payment for past services.
- Eszterhas – The Strange Case of the Hippie Mafia.
According to the government, Owsley and two of his proteges, Nicholas Sand and Timothy Scully, had operated laboratories in California, Missouri and Belgium. These labs supplied acid to the Hell's Angels and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an organization described by the government as "the dealing arm of Tim Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery," between 1967 and 1971. Profits from these labs went into fictitious-name
bank accounts. Government prosecutors even indicted Hell's Angels leader Terry the Tramp and founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love John Murl Griggs, who had both died of drug overdoses by that time.
The key government witness is this case was William Mellon Hitchcock, heir to the Gulf Oil and U.S. Steel fortunes. Billy Hitchcock, said government prosecutors, "had the ability to launder money through foreign bank accounts." Billy Hitchcock, said the defendants' attorneys, was a "lackey who liked to lick the spoons at the
acid labs." Billy Hitchcock testified, in exchange for immunity, that he had assisted Sand and Owsley in setting up bank accounts in the Bahamas and Switzerland.
John Gale, the Dodge City drug dealer and man with obvious CIA connections (he never seemed to stay in jail long) had been busily undermining the BEL by getting them hooked on cocaine. Gale (through his CIA Columbian connections) had become the biggest cocaine broker in California.
Hynson says he didn’t know the full extent of Gale’s business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend’s house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. – Nick Schou July 8, 2009
The cult-classic film Rainbow Bridge had been released, featuring a scene where Mike Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, “Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?”
Just a few months later?
Comes the ‘Raid’.
1972 – August 5, In the largest narcotics raid that had ever taken place in California, police from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Maui to Kabul, Afghanistan, raided dozens of houses and 53 members of Brotherhood were arrested, but not all of them and they secretly continued to import hashish for several more years.
Grand jury transcripts from that case show that several Brotherhood members, including Smith, were charged with shipping hashish from the Kandahar-based Tokhi brothers – who had been supplying the Brotherhood since 1967 – after a load was captured by police in the Bay Area.
Thu, Dec 03, 2009 3:36 pm
By Nick Schou
Most of the Brotherhood now shifts their base to Maui, Mike Hynson (the surf board smuggler) Meryweather, etc.
Travis Ashbrook, turned off the increasing presence of cocaine and heroin at Brotherhood parties leaves Maui for island off the coast of Honduras, apparently in order to help set up the continuation of the hashish smuggling.
Travis, as we already know, had been with the Brotherhood since 1969 per Customs files, when he was arrested for smuggling hashish back from Afghanistan.
References:
After the raid, press begins appearing trashing the now ‘out-of-favor” Brotherhood, who was dubbed “the hippie mafia” in a 1972 Rolling Stone article.
Congress holds months of hearings on the need for this new agency (the DEA) in the spring and summer of 1973.
One of these hearings is titled “Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” – that’s the one that I have been quoting from already. You can read it for yourself at the internet archive.
More Brotherhood members get arrested on April 22, 1973 and HUGE stores of false indentification was seized. Two days later, Nicholas Sand, Timothy Scully, Michael Randall, and four other major figures in the LSD operation were indicted by a Federal grand jury in San Francisco, Calif. Four of these higher echelon members are still fugitives.
Mr. SouRwinE. Now, for the record, would you identify the four that you did not name, and indicate which of the eight are the four that are still fugitives?
Mr. Sinclair. Yes, sir. The individuals referred to are David Lee Mantel; Charles Druce, currently a fugitive; Lester Friedman; and Ronald H[adley] Stark, currently a fugitive. In addition to these four individuals, one of those previously mentioned, Michael Randall, is also a fugitive.
[…]To date, the brotherhood investigation has resulted “in the arrests of over 100 individuals, including Dr. Timothy Leary who is currently serving 15 years in Folsom prison.
Four LSD laboratories have been seized, along with over 1 million “orange sunshine” LSD tablets, and LSD powder in excess of 3,500 grams, capable of producing over 14 million dosage units of the drug.
In addition, the source of diversion for the raw materials needed in the production of LSD was identified in Europe.
A total of six hashish oil laboratories were seized, along with over 30 gallons of hashish oil and approximately 6,000 pounds of solid hashish.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973
bank accounts. Government prosecutors even indicted Hell's Angels leader Terry the Tramp and founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love John Murl Griggs, who had both died of drug overdoses by that time.
The key government witness is this case was William Mellon Hitchcock, heir to the Gulf Oil and U.S. Steel fortunes. Billy Hitchcock, said government prosecutors, "had the ability to launder money through foreign bank accounts." Billy Hitchcock, said the defendants' attorneys, was a "lackey who liked to lick the spoons at the
acid labs." Billy Hitchcock testified, in exchange for immunity, that he had assisted Sand and Owsley in setting up bank accounts in the Bahamas and Switzerland.
John Gale, the Dodge City drug dealer and man with obvious CIA connections (he never seemed to stay in jail long) had been busily undermining the BEL by getting them hooked on cocaine. Gale (through his CIA Columbian connections) had become the biggest cocaine broker in California.
Hynson says he didn’t know the full extent of Gale’s business dealings, but he does recall visiting his friend’s house one time when Gale suddenly remembered that a truck full of Colombian marijuana was on its way from Florida. – Nick Schou July 8, 2009
The cult-classic film Rainbow Bridge had been released, featuring a scene where Mike Hynson and Potts ripping open a Rainbow Surfboard to reveal a stash of hash, a stunt that takes place under a Richard Nixon poster that reads, “Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?”
Just a few months later?
Comes the ‘Raid’.
1972 – August 5, In the largest narcotics raid that had ever taken place in California, police from Laguna Beach to Oregon to Maui to Kabul, Afghanistan, raided dozens of houses and 53 members of Brotherhood were arrested, but not all of them and they secretly continued to import hashish for several more years.
Grand jury transcripts from that case show that several Brotherhood members, including Smith, were charged with shipping hashish from the Kandahar-based Tokhi brothers – who had been supplying the Brotherhood since 1967 – after a load was captured by police in the Bay Area.
Thu, Dec 03, 2009 3:36 pm
By Nick Schou
Most of the Brotherhood now shifts their base to Maui, Mike Hynson (the surf board smuggler) Meryweather, etc.
Travis Ashbrook, turned off the increasing presence of cocaine and heroin at Brotherhood parties leaves Maui for island off the coast of Honduras, apparently in order to help set up the continuation of the hashish smuggling.
Travis, as we already know, had been with the Brotherhood since 1969 per Customs files, when he was arrested for smuggling hashish back from Afghanistan.
References:
- Nicholas Schou book Orange Sunshine
- Affidavit (January 20, 1982) and court case, 666 F.2d 134; UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Kim Edward MINIS, Defendant-Appellee. No. 81-1116
After the raid, press begins appearing trashing the now ‘out-of-favor” Brotherhood, who was dubbed “the hippie mafia” in a 1972 Rolling Stone article.
Congress holds months of hearings on the need for this new agency (the DEA) in the spring and summer of 1973.
One of these hearings is titled “Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.” – that’s the one that I have been quoting from already. You can read it for yourself at the internet archive.
More Brotherhood members get arrested on April 22, 1973 and HUGE stores of false indentification was seized. Two days later, Nicholas Sand, Timothy Scully, Michael Randall, and four other major figures in the LSD operation were indicted by a Federal grand jury in San Francisco, Calif. Four of these higher echelon members are still fugitives.
Mr. SouRwinE. Now, for the record, would you identify the four that you did not name, and indicate which of the eight are the four that are still fugitives?
Mr. Sinclair. Yes, sir. The individuals referred to are David Lee Mantel; Charles Druce, currently a fugitive; Lester Friedman; and Ronald H[adley] Stark, currently a fugitive. In addition to these four individuals, one of those previously mentioned, Michael Randall, is also a fugitive.
[…]To date, the brotherhood investigation has resulted “in the arrests of over 100 individuals, including Dr. Timothy Leary who is currently serving 15 years in Folsom prison.
Four LSD laboratories have been seized, along with over 1 million “orange sunshine” LSD tablets, and LSD powder in excess of 3,500 grams, capable of producing over 14 million dosage units of the drug.
In addition, the source of diversion for the raw materials needed in the production of LSD was identified in Europe.
A total of six hashish oil laboratories were seized, along with over 30 gallons of hashish oil and approximately 6,000 pounds of solid hashish.
- Hashish smuggling and passport fraud : ”the brotherhood of eternal love” : hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session, October 3, 1973
"Turn on, tune in, drop out" is a counterculture phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in 1967. Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that McLuhan "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'". The phrase was used by Leary in a speech he delivered at the opening of a press conference in New York City on September 19, 1966. It urged people to embrace cultural changes through the use of psychedelics and by detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.
Greeting card with LSD tab (no longer attached) dropped onto the Laguna
festival site from an airplane by Johnny Gale of the Brotherhood Of Eternal Love,
giving new meaning to "dropping acid".
festival site from an airplane by Johnny Gale of the Brotherhood Of Eternal Love,
giving new meaning to "dropping acid".
DROPPING ACID
Greeting card #2 dropped from airplane with LSD tab (no longer
attached) by the Brotherhood Of Eternal Love;
Happening Flyer
Greeting card #2 dropped from airplane with LSD tab (no longer
attached) by the Brotherhood Of Eternal Love;
Happening Flyer
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The address above is obsolete; do NOT mail
Worthy of a Hitchcock Drama
Walter Bowart who founded the alternative news with his East Village Other, also wrote the very first expose on MK Ultra and LSD, OPERATION MIND CONTROL. He also married Peggy Hitchcock. Peggy just happened to be the sister of Billy Hitchcock who became a patron of the BEL acid operation, and later turned snitch on them. Later, Bowart regretted writing his book, feeling it ruined his life. That is, he was punished for his expose by the PTB [powers that be].
Acid Dreams excerpts
Billy Hitchcock: Uber-Patron & Snitch
The Brotherhood's association with Hitchcock would have disastrous results for many of the members but at the time it seemed like a match made in heaven.
"...a delegation of Brothers led by John Griggs first made contact with Sand and Scully. The powwow, which had been suggested by Leary, took place at Hitchcock's villa in Sausalito, with the ever-obliging Mr. Billy in attendance. The Brothers were looking for a good connection, and they couldn't have asked for a more righteous brew. A few weeks later Sand traveled south to Idyllwild to finalize the arrangement.
"With the Brotherhood ready to serve as their distribution arm, Sand and Scully embarked upon a full-fledged manufacturing spree. Hitchcock bought some property in Windsor, a small town sixty miles north of San Francisco. He helped Scully move to the premises, hauling large metal drums and wooden crates full of glass beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, rubber tubing, chromatography columns, vacuum evaporators, and bundles of semiprecious compounds --all the equipment necessary for a sophisticated drug lab."
Hitchcock was apparently so impressed with the Brotherhood's operation that he took over as their banker.
"Hitchcock served as banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, although later he insisted he was nothing more than a financial adviser. In truth he had a lot to say about how things were done. According to Scully, he was involved in numerous planning sessions at his house in Sausalito... But Hitchcock never expected to make big money from LSD. He was in it more for the adventure. He enjoyed his status as the behind-the-scenes facilitator who brought people together and made connections."
(ibid, pg. 244) It was all fun and games until 1969 when one of Hitchcock's bag men ran afoul of Customs when re-entering the United States with $100,000 in cash. Customs alerted the IRS who began sniffing around Hitchcock. It was at this point that Mr. Billy felt it best to make a strategic withdraw from the drug trade, but not before hooking the Brotherhood up with another supplier and financial 'advisor.'
Stark Realities
"It was at this point that a mysterious figure named Ronald Hadley Stark appeared on the scene. The first time anyone had heard of Stark was when one of his emissaries turned up in New York to see Hitchcock. The man claimed to represent a large French LSD operation. He was seeking to unload his product through covert channels. Hitchcock, who was then trying to distance himself from the drug trade, directed his visitor to the Brotherhood ranch. A few weeks later Stark and his assistant traveled to Idylwild."
(ibid, pg. 248) Ronald Stark
Stark is a most curious figure whom I shall write more on in a moment. For now, let's wrap up with Hitchcock's saga. The last notable event associated with Hitchcock, before he seemingly disappears from history, occurred in 1973 when he turned state's evidence against Sand and Scully in order to secure immunity from tax evasion and stock market malpractice charges then pending.
"The case against the Brotherhood acid chemists came to trial in San Francisco in November 1973 and lasted thirty-nine days. The trial pitted Billy Hitchcock against his former colleagues, Sand and Scully, who were accused of being the largest suppliers of LSD in the US during the late 1960s. Since Hitchcock had already been granted immunity, the defense strategy was to pin all the blame on him, portraying him as the 'Mr. Big' who single-handedly directed the entire acid operation. Hitchcock, for his part, tried to walk a fine line, giving just enough information to satisfy the prosecutors, but not enough to convict the defendants... The publicity generated by the trial crystallized in a sensational Village Voice article by Mary Jo Worth, 'The Acid Profiteers.' The article depicted Leary as a Madison Avenue huckster who was a front for Hitchcock's money. The whole psychedelic movement, according to Worth, was nothing more than a scam perpetrated by a profit-hungry clique."
(ibid, pg. 277-278) Scully got 20 years while Sand received 15. Hitchcock received a five-year suspended sentence and a $20,000 fine, the very definition of a slap on the wrist. Thus, despite serving as the banker for the largest LSD distribution network in the world at the time, there were no real consequences for William Mellon Hitchcock.
Of course, this would hardly be the first time a rich man escaped justice in this nation, but Hitchcock's ties (both direct and indirect) to so many pivotal individuals and institutions behind the US psychedelic movement is rather striking. Was Hitchcock simply a bored heir looking for a few thrills or maybe even getting back at his upper crust upbringings? This is the view typically taken concerning Hitchcock yet it just doesn't seem to jive with what is known about him. Other than getting high, Hitchcock seemingly wanted no part of the hippie lifestyle many of his associates were embracing at the time. In fact, Hitchcock seems to have gone out of his way to maintain his establishment lifestyle. Further, Hitchcock seems to have few interests beyond making money. He reportedly didn't expect tot make much out the LSD racket yet he seems to have turned a pretty handsome profit anyway. Still, there were surely any number of other things a man with Hitchcock's status could have done to make fast money.
Was Hitchcock then working for some branch of the US Intelligence community throughout the 1960s? Certainly the possibility has much merit. As noted above, the Mellon family has rather extensive ties to the US Intelligence community and Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA from 1966 till 1973, was in regular contact with the Mellon family in Pittsburgh during this time. Incidentally, this was also the same time frame that Mr. Billy became involved with the illegal drug trade.
What's more, Hitchcock had ties to several banks with known CIA connections, some of whom he potentially used to launder funds generated by the Brotherhood.
"While William Hitchcock's intelligence role is not known to any degree of certainty... he certainly surrounded himself with spooks, mobsters and... Republicans. His deep involvement in Castle Bank and Trust is just one such instance. A CIA front in the Bahamas run by former OSS China hand (and former boss of E. Howard Hunt) Paul Helliwell, it was used as a personal bank by Richard Nixon, George .H.W. Bush, and Robert Vesco, as well as by an assortment of Republican movers-and-shakers and the occasional drug runner and Mafia don. Those who enjoy wallowing in Watergate will recall Castle Bank, but perhaps not realize that Billy Hitchcock was an important supporter of the institution. "His similar involvement with Resorts International, a spook-front and private Republican vault, is also well-known. The history of Resorts International has been brilliantly detailed in Jim Hougan's Spooks, and we will not go into any great detail here, but it is enough to say that Resorts is in the middle of not only the Watergate affair but also a vast array of intelligence operations that include anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia bagmen, illegal campaign contributions, and money laundering. The Nixon and Rebozo involvement with Resorts is only the tip of a very old and very dirty iceberg, and Hitchcock has managed to stay quietly in the shadows of these infamous politicos.
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 321) Castle Bank & Trust, a notorious CIA front William Mellon Hitchcock was heavily involved in
And all of this was apparently going on while Hitchcock was allegedly sticking it to the establishment via his drug operations. Or was it the establishment sticking it to the idealists behind the original hippie movement? Consider the man who took over Hitchcock's role in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Ronald Stark. While there is no conclusive evidence that Hitchcock was working for the US Intelligence community, the same cannot be said of Stark.
The fall of the Brotherhood would hardly effect Stark, who would continue as a major international drug dealer for the rest of the 1970s. He relocated to Europe and spent a decent amount of time in Italy hobnobbing with radical groups of both the left and right while continuing to cultivate drug connections spanning the globe. Stark was eventually arrested in Italy on a petty charge stemming from his involvement with various terror organizations. Just as it seemed as if Stark's luck had final run out an Italian judge made a rather startling revelation about him.
"The Italian government subsequently charged Stark with 'armed banditry' for his role in aiding and abetting terrorist activities. But he never stood trial on these charges. True to form, Stark dropped out of sight shortly after he was released from prison in April 1979 on orders from Judge Giorgio Floridia in Bologna. The judge's decision was extraordinary: he released Stark because of 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' that Stark was actually a CIA agent. 'Many circumstances suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services,' Floridia stated."
(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pg. 281)
This is just one of many mysteries surrounding Stark. Another is his alleged association with legendary cult leader Charles Manson. I've written more on Stark's association with Manson here so I shall be brief. Manson's potential links to Starks were first proposed by Maury Terry in the highly controversial The Ultimate Evil. In this work Terry alleges that Manson, as well as David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz (among others), was a member of a nation wide cult connected to drug and (child) sex trafficking, snuff films, and contract killings. This cult, sometimes referred to as the 'Four-P Movement' or simply 'the Children,' was said to have begun as an offshoot of the Process Church of Final Judgement, a British-based outfit founded by ex-Scientologists and active throughout the United States from the mid-1960s till the early 1970s. Supposedly this cult had ties both to organized crime (specifically various 'one-percenter' MCs) as well as the US Intelligence community.
Charles Manson (top) & David Berkowitz (bottom), two of the more notorious figures linked to an underground cult network Ronald Stark may have also had dealings with
According to Terry (via Berkowitz, allegedly) Manson was either a member of, or working for, this cult when the Tate/LaBianca killings occurred.
"Berkowitz informed a fellow inmate that Manson, who belonged to the Los Angeles chapter of the cult, was working 'on orders' when he directed his Family to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders. In The Ultimate Evil, Terry places Manson --two days after the Tate murders --driving a Mercedes-Benz belonging to a big-time LSD dealer, who, in Terry's description, was 'said to have been a former Israeli who had strong links with the intelligence community.' Terry took this to be one of the truly fascinating players in LSD history: Ronald Hadley Stark. In The Ultimate Evil, Stark is identified under the alias of Chris Jetz. "Although not an Israeli, Stark posed as one upon occasion, as he was fluent in several languages, and fond of assuming multiple identities."
(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly, pg. 163)
William Mellon Hitchcock seems to have indirect ties to the whole Process/Manson circle. Hitchcock had some kind of link with Dr. Stephen Ward, the man who most likely ran the sex ring involved in the Profumo Affair. Reportedly one of the women involved in this sex ring (also noted above) was Mary Anne DeGrimston, who would go on to co-found the Process Church of Final Judgement with her husband, Robert. Hitchcock also had indirect ties with the Hell's Angels, who were supplied with STP by Nick Sand, a chemist he was bankrolling at the time. Outlaw MCs have long been associated with conspiracy theories surrounding the Process. Both Manson and the Process actively sought alliances with one percenters as has been well documented.
Mary Anne DeGrimston, co-founder of the Process Church of Final Judgement and a possible member of Dr. Stephen Ward's sing ring.
And finally there's Hitchcock's association with Stark, a man an Italian judge ruled was a US intelligence agent and who seemingly had some kind of connection to Charles Manson. I shall wrap up this installment with a little bit of speculation: If Hitchcock was in fact a US intelligence agent, then was he serving as a handler for various 1960s fringe individuals and movements --i.e. Leary, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Hell's Angels, etc? Is this why then-CIA director Richard Helms was regularly meeting with the Mellon family in Pittsburgh throughout his directorship? Was he keeping tabs on Mr. Billy's operation? If so, was Stark a kind of replacement once Hitchcock became bogged down in legal entanglements? Or was it felt to be expedient to withdraw Hitchcock before things turned violent on the West Coast (i.e. the Manson killings, Altamont, etc) so as not to draw suspicion? After all, a dubious character like Stark being linked to Manson is one thing, but a member of one of America's oldest and richest families? That would certainly raise some interesting questions, such as why the wealthy were seemingly infiltrating left-leaning/populist movements on behalf of US intelligence. http://visupview.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-house-of-mellon-part-ii.html
It is not unfair to say that virtually everyone of the initial Manson Family victims were up knee-deep in the L.A. underworld of organized crime, especially in the drug market. It's also interesting to note that at the time of the Tate/LiBianca killings, a major shakeup in the California hallucinogen market was occurring. For a little further north, at roughly the same time Manson was attending Esalen Institute and few days before the murders, Brotherhood of Eternal Love founder 'Farmer' John Griggs kicked the bucket via an overdose. At the time the Brotherhood were the largest marijuana and hashish smugglers in California.
With Griggs out of the way, the Brotherhood was opened up to the mysterious figure of Ronald Stark, who would turn them into the largest LSD distribution network in the world. Stark in turn was widely suspected of working with US intelligence. This has led some researchers, such as David McGowan, to theorize that the Manson killings were a part of some kind coup for control of the California hallucinogen market. McGowan states:
"Were the Manson killings in reality part of what might be dubbed 'The Great Acid Coup of 1969'? Were they the result of an operation aimed at, among other things, killing off some competitors, intimidating others, and consolidating control of the hallucinogenic drug market? The possibility clearly exists. Police originally were drawn to the theory that the killings were drug related."
(Programmed to Kill, pg. 142)
Investigative journalist Maury Terry came to similar conclusions while researching the Manson case. Terry states:
"A Los Angeles source who was knowledgeable about the Manson set in 1969 said: 'Frykowski was the motive. He had stung his own suppliers for a fair amount of money and that didn't go down well at all with the people at the top of the drug scene here. And to make it worse, he was upsetting the structure of the LSD marketplace by dealing independently, outside the established chain of supply. He was a renegade.' "
(The Ultimate Evil, pg. 489)
For more information on this angle, check out my Cults, Gangs, Dope, and Intelligence article or our YouTube videos on the Brotherhood which can viewed here and here.
"...a delegation of Brothers led by John Griggs first made contact with Sand and Scully. The powwow, which had been suggested by Leary, took place at Hitchcock's villa in Sausalito, with the ever-obliging Mr. Billy in attendance. The Brothers were looking for a good connection, and they couldn't have asked for a more righteous brew. A few weeks later Sand traveled south to Idyllwild to finalize the arrangement.
"With the Brotherhood ready to serve as their distribution arm, Sand and Scully embarked upon a full-fledged manufacturing spree. Hitchcock bought some property in Windsor, a small town sixty miles north of San Francisco. He helped Scully move to the premises, hauling large metal drums and wooden crates full of glass beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, rubber tubing, chromatography columns, vacuum evaporators, and bundles of semiprecious compounds --all the equipment necessary for a sophisticated drug lab."
Hitchcock was apparently so impressed with the Brotherhood's operation that he took over as their banker.
"Hitchcock served as banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, although later he insisted he was nothing more than a financial adviser. In truth he had a lot to say about how things were done. According to Scully, he was involved in numerous planning sessions at his house in Sausalito... But Hitchcock never expected to make big money from LSD. He was in it more for the adventure. He enjoyed his status as the behind-the-scenes facilitator who brought people together and made connections."
(ibid, pg. 244) It was all fun and games until 1969 when one of Hitchcock's bag men ran afoul of Customs when re-entering the United States with $100,000 in cash. Customs alerted the IRS who began sniffing around Hitchcock. It was at this point that Mr. Billy felt it best to make a strategic withdraw from the drug trade, but not before hooking the Brotherhood up with another supplier and financial 'advisor.'
Stark Realities
"It was at this point that a mysterious figure named Ronald Hadley Stark appeared on the scene. The first time anyone had heard of Stark was when one of his emissaries turned up in New York to see Hitchcock. The man claimed to represent a large French LSD operation. He was seeking to unload his product through covert channels. Hitchcock, who was then trying to distance himself from the drug trade, directed his visitor to the Brotherhood ranch. A few weeks later Stark and his assistant traveled to Idylwild."
(ibid, pg. 248) Ronald Stark
Stark is a most curious figure whom I shall write more on in a moment. For now, let's wrap up with Hitchcock's saga. The last notable event associated with Hitchcock, before he seemingly disappears from history, occurred in 1973 when he turned state's evidence against Sand and Scully in order to secure immunity from tax evasion and stock market malpractice charges then pending.
"The case against the Brotherhood acid chemists came to trial in San Francisco in November 1973 and lasted thirty-nine days. The trial pitted Billy Hitchcock against his former colleagues, Sand and Scully, who were accused of being the largest suppliers of LSD in the US during the late 1960s. Since Hitchcock had already been granted immunity, the defense strategy was to pin all the blame on him, portraying him as the 'Mr. Big' who single-handedly directed the entire acid operation. Hitchcock, for his part, tried to walk a fine line, giving just enough information to satisfy the prosecutors, but not enough to convict the defendants... The publicity generated by the trial crystallized in a sensational Village Voice article by Mary Jo Worth, 'The Acid Profiteers.' The article depicted Leary as a Madison Avenue huckster who was a front for Hitchcock's money. The whole psychedelic movement, according to Worth, was nothing more than a scam perpetrated by a profit-hungry clique."
(ibid, pg. 277-278) Scully got 20 years while Sand received 15. Hitchcock received a five-year suspended sentence and a $20,000 fine, the very definition of a slap on the wrist. Thus, despite serving as the banker for the largest LSD distribution network in the world at the time, there were no real consequences for William Mellon Hitchcock.
Of course, this would hardly be the first time a rich man escaped justice in this nation, but Hitchcock's ties (both direct and indirect) to so many pivotal individuals and institutions behind the US psychedelic movement is rather striking. Was Hitchcock simply a bored heir looking for a few thrills or maybe even getting back at his upper crust upbringings? This is the view typically taken concerning Hitchcock yet it just doesn't seem to jive with what is known about him. Other than getting high, Hitchcock seemingly wanted no part of the hippie lifestyle many of his associates were embracing at the time. In fact, Hitchcock seems to have gone out of his way to maintain his establishment lifestyle. Further, Hitchcock seems to have few interests beyond making money. He reportedly didn't expect tot make much out the LSD racket yet he seems to have turned a pretty handsome profit anyway. Still, there were surely any number of other things a man with Hitchcock's status could have done to make fast money.
Was Hitchcock then working for some branch of the US Intelligence community throughout the 1960s? Certainly the possibility has much merit. As noted above, the Mellon family has rather extensive ties to the US Intelligence community and Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA from 1966 till 1973, was in regular contact with the Mellon family in Pittsburgh during this time. Incidentally, this was also the same time frame that Mr. Billy became involved with the illegal drug trade.
What's more, Hitchcock had ties to several banks with known CIA connections, some of whom he potentially used to launder funds generated by the Brotherhood.
"While William Hitchcock's intelligence role is not known to any degree of certainty... he certainly surrounded himself with spooks, mobsters and... Republicans. His deep involvement in Castle Bank and Trust is just one such instance. A CIA front in the Bahamas run by former OSS China hand (and former boss of E. Howard Hunt) Paul Helliwell, it was used as a personal bank by Richard Nixon, George .H.W. Bush, and Robert Vesco, as well as by an assortment of Republican movers-and-shakers and the occasional drug runner and Mafia don. Those who enjoy wallowing in Watergate will recall Castle Bank, but perhaps not realize that Billy Hitchcock was an important supporter of the institution. "His similar involvement with Resorts International, a spook-front and private Republican vault, is also well-known. The history of Resorts International has been brilliantly detailed in Jim Hougan's Spooks, and we will not go into any great detail here, but it is enough to say that Resorts is in the middle of not only the Watergate affair but also a vast array of intelligence operations that include anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia bagmen, illegal campaign contributions, and money laundering. The Nixon and Rebozo involvement with Resorts is only the tip of a very old and very dirty iceberg, and Hitchcock has managed to stay quietly in the shadows of these infamous politicos.
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 321) Castle Bank & Trust, a notorious CIA front William Mellon Hitchcock was heavily involved in
And all of this was apparently going on while Hitchcock was allegedly sticking it to the establishment via his drug operations. Or was it the establishment sticking it to the idealists behind the original hippie movement? Consider the man who took over Hitchcock's role in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Ronald Stark. While there is no conclusive evidence that Hitchcock was working for the US Intelligence community, the same cannot be said of Stark.
The fall of the Brotherhood would hardly effect Stark, who would continue as a major international drug dealer for the rest of the 1970s. He relocated to Europe and spent a decent amount of time in Italy hobnobbing with radical groups of both the left and right while continuing to cultivate drug connections spanning the globe. Stark was eventually arrested in Italy on a petty charge stemming from his involvement with various terror organizations. Just as it seemed as if Stark's luck had final run out an Italian judge made a rather startling revelation about him.
"The Italian government subsequently charged Stark with 'armed banditry' for his role in aiding and abetting terrorist activities. But he never stood trial on these charges. True to form, Stark dropped out of sight shortly after he was released from prison in April 1979 on orders from Judge Giorgio Floridia in Bologna. The judge's decision was extraordinary: he released Stark because of 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' that Stark was actually a CIA agent. 'Many circumstances suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services,' Floridia stated."
(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pg. 281)
This is just one of many mysteries surrounding Stark. Another is his alleged association with legendary cult leader Charles Manson. I've written more on Stark's association with Manson here so I shall be brief. Manson's potential links to Starks were first proposed by Maury Terry in the highly controversial The Ultimate Evil. In this work Terry alleges that Manson, as well as David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz (among others), was a member of a nation wide cult connected to drug and (child) sex trafficking, snuff films, and contract killings. This cult, sometimes referred to as the 'Four-P Movement' or simply 'the Children,' was said to have begun as an offshoot of the Process Church of Final Judgement, a British-based outfit founded by ex-Scientologists and active throughout the United States from the mid-1960s till the early 1970s. Supposedly this cult had ties both to organized crime (specifically various 'one-percenter' MCs) as well as the US Intelligence community.
Charles Manson (top) & David Berkowitz (bottom), two of the more notorious figures linked to an underground cult network Ronald Stark may have also had dealings with
According to Terry (via Berkowitz, allegedly) Manson was either a member of, or working for, this cult when the Tate/LaBianca killings occurred.
"Berkowitz informed a fellow inmate that Manson, who belonged to the Los Angeles chapter of the cult, was working 'on orders' when he directed his Family to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders. In The Ultimate Evil, Terry places Manson --two days after the Tate murders --driving a Mercedes-Benz belonging to a big-time LSD dealer, who, in Terry's description, was 'said to have been a former Israeli who had strong links with the intelligence community.' Terry took this to be one of the truly fascinating players in LSD history: Ronald Hadley Stark. In The Ultimate Evil, Stark is identified under the alias of Chris Jetz. "Although not an Israeli, Stark posed as one upon occasion, as he was fluent in several languages, and fond of assuming multiple identities."
(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly, pg. 163)
William Mellon Hitchcock seems to have indirect ties to the whole Process/Manson circle. Hitchcock had some kind of link with Dr. Stephen Ward, the man who most likely ran the sex ring involved in the Profumo Affair. Reportedly one of the women involved in this sex ring (also noted above) was Mary Anne DeGrimston, who would go on to co-found the Process Church of Final Judgement with her husband, Robert. Hitchcock also had indirect ties with the Hell's Angels, who were supplied with STP by Nick Sand, a chemist he was bankrolling at the time. Outlaw MCs have long been associated with conspiracy theories surrounding the Process. Both Manson and the Process actively sought alliances with one percenters as has been well documented.
Mary Anne DeGrimston, co-founder of the Process Church of Final Judgement and a possible member of Dr. Stephen Ward's sing ring.
And finally there's Hitchcock's association with Stark, a man an Italian judge ruled was a US intelligence agent and who seemingly had some kind of connection to Charles Manson. I shall wrap up this installment with a little bit of speculation: If Hitchcock was in fact a US intelligence agent, then was he serving as a handler for various 1960s fringe individuals and movements --i.e. Leary, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Hell's Angels, etc? Is this why then-CIA director Richard Helms was regularly meeting with the Mellon family in Pittsburgh throughout his directorship? Was he keeping tabs on Mr. Billy's operation? If so, was Stark a kind of replacement once Hitchcock became bogged down in legal entanglements? Or was it felt to be expedient to withdraw Hitchcock before things turned violent on the West Coast (i.e. the Manson killings, Altamont, etc) so as not to draw suspicion? After all, a dubious character like Stark being linked to Manson is one thing, but a member of one of America's oldest and richest families? That would certainly raise some interesting questions, such as why the wealthy were seemingly infiltrating left-leaning/populist movements on behalf of US intelligence. http://visupview.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-house-of-mellon-part-ii.html
It is not unfair to say that virtually everyone of the initial Manson Family victims were up knee-deep in the L.A. underworld of organized crime, especially in the drug market. It's also interesting to note that at the time of the Tate/LiBianca killings, a major shakeup in the California hallucinogen market was occurring. For a little further north, at roughly the same time Manson was attending Esalen Institute and few days before the murders, Brotherhood of Eternal Love founder 'Farmer' John Griggs kicked the bucket via an overdose. At the time the Brotherhood were the largest marijuana and hashish smugglers in California.
With Griggs out of the way, the Brotherhood was opened up to the mysterious figure of Ronald Stark, who would turn them into the largest LSD distribution network in the world. Stark in turn was widely suspected of working with US intelligence. This has led some researchers, such as David McGowan, to theorize that the Manson killings were a part of some kind coup for control of the California hallucinogen market. McGowan states:
"Were the Manson killings in reality part of what might be dubbed 'The Great Acid Coup of 1969'? Were they the result of an operation aimed at, among other things, killing off some competitors, intimidating others, and consolidating control of the hallucinogenic drug market? The possibility clearly exists. Police originally were drawn to the theory that the killings were drug related."
(Programmed to Kill, pg. 142)
Investigative journalist Maury Terry came to similar conclusions while researching the Manson case. Terry states:
"A Los Angeles source who was knowledgeable about the Manson set in 1969 said: 'Frykowski was the motive. He had stung his own suppliers for a fair amount of money and that didn't go down well at all with the people at the top of the drug scene here. And to make it worse, he was upsetting the structure of the LSD marketplace by dealing independently, outside the established chain of supply. He was a renegade.' "
(The Ultimate Evil, pg. 489)
For more information on this angle, check out my Cults, Gangs, Dope, and Intelligence article or our YouTube videos on the Brotherhood which can viewed here and here.
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Owsley came to the making of acid in 1961 after collaborating with one of the earliest manufacturers. Soon he was in business for himself in a makeshift laboratory behind a vacant store in Berkeley, California. His acid varied from early white capsules to what became known as “Owsley tabs,” blue at first, but later- when c heap imitations hit the market-in other colors. Some were stamped with the figure of Batman or Robin, bearing such names as “Midnight Hour,” “White Lightning,” or “Monterey Purple.”
Owsley got into the game due to his inability to procure pharmaceutical LSD-25, and within five years it had made him a millionaire. But he was put out of business following his bust in December 1967 at his Orinda tabbing center. His apprentice, Tim Scully, carried on in association with Nicholas Sand, prolific Brooklyn alchemist. Together they put out most of the fabled “Sunshine” acid.
Sunshine was the second acid to gain a large distribution-world-wide, as a matter of fact. The main source of these orange, crumbly tablets was Laguna Beach, a beautiful art colony on the coast of California. A “clean” scene developed there in the mid-Sixties, with many taking Sandoz on the picturesque sands. Here was where Timothy Leary stayed after touring communes throughout the southwestern United States, the sites of many religious turn-ons.
By 1969, five years after this town·s first head shop was established, large amounts of Sunshine began to be pumped to an acid-hungry population by a group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Actually, the Brotherhood had started several years ·earlier as a religious group. But as dealing became big business, new faces emerged. Brotherhood members made large fortunes from the import of Afghanistan hash, selling it from a center on small street called Woodland Drive. The Brotherhood house burned down after a hookah filled with the best “prima” tipped over. Brotherhood members and Afghani royalty escaped the flames.
ln the Sunshine field, Nick Sand and Timothy Scully were the original suppliers, claiming to have produced the “improved ” acid homologue ALD-52.
By the of the decade, some 35 million doses of LSD-brown from oxidation and decomposition-had come via that European lab of Ronald Stark, presently a fugitive. The largest amount of this appeared on the West Coast late in 1970 (hence the designation “Christmas acid”).
With more people having bad trips as the result of this new impure LSD Leary, at this point, remarked, “The challenge to the dealer is not only must his product be pure and spiritual but he himself must reflect the human light he represents. Therefore, never buy dope, never purchase sacrament from a person that hasn’t got the qualities that you aspire for.” http://bruceeisner.com/writings/2012/01/turned.html
Stark had been working with US intelligence agencies for at least 9 years by the time of his most infamous moment, a legendary meeting with the "hippie mafia" drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (no joke.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of liquid LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. He claimed to have a dedicated lab in France, but it's his political philosophy that really makes Stark such an interesting character:
"He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics."
The Brotherhood was sufficiently impressed to bring Ronald Stark into the fold, and what followed was the Golden Era of cheap, high-quality LSD. From 1969 through 1973, Stark and the Brotherhood dosed a generation and got away with it, too.
According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career. Hippie lore generally gives Owsley Stanley the crown of the Acid King, but by Stanley's own estimates, his total production was a half kilogram. That might not sound like much -- but it adds up to over 5 million hits of acid. You can see why the Army and Navy were so interested in this compound: it is unusually powerful as drug molecules go.
Although the LSD story is closely associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation in Switzerland, most of the CIA's supply was actually domestic. Since at least 1954, the Eli Lilly Company was working under secret contract to keep the various MKNAOMI and ARTICHOKE research projects stocked up with magic mindf**k juice. The figures on their total LSD output are classified.
David Black: "Before clinching the deal with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute."
Obviously this was a big money business, and organized crime involvement was inevitable. Since small batches of LSD have a literally exponential commercial profit margin, technical expertise was highly rewarded. Consider the case of Clyde Apperson, a specialist in quickly setting up a fully functional manufacturing lab just about anywhere. More importantly, he could take them down even faster. For set-up, Apperson would charge $100,000 in cash -- take downs were only $50,000. He was finally busted working in the infamous abandoned missile silo with William Leonard Pickard in 2000.
Everyone's always getting busted, though. The history of LSD is full of incredibly intelligent men making highly stupid decisions. Yet through it all, from Operation Julie to the Sand-Scully case, Ronald Stark just kept on trucking. He was a calculating cameo artist: always on the scene, never holding the bag.
Until he suddenly was: "Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon discovered that "Mr. Abbott" was actually Ronald Stark."-- Source: Acid Dreams, pg. 213
LEARY: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill."
Maybe so -- but probably not. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison in a complicated deal exposing just how serious the Brotherhood network had become. Money from Ronald Stark was paid to the Weather Underground, which is the precise point where the "hippie mafia" became connected to actual hippie terrorists. Leary himself wound up in Algeria under the (very) armed watch of Eldridge Cleaver, himself in exile. A year later, Leary and his wife were in Switzerland, living under the protection of the arms dealer Michel Hauchard. For a story about spiritual thrills, there's definitely a lot of guns involved here.
At one point, though, maybe the Brotherhood really was just a group of hippies with a couple trunks full of weed. The Weather Underground were harmless student activists for awhile, too. Once Stark was brought into the Brotherhood, he quickly took change of the entire operation, establishing secure shipments and managing every aspect of their finances. "Stark warned them that buying real estate openly, as they had done, was much too risky -- but his lawyers could remedy the situation by hiding ownership in a maze of shell companies."
This is a repeated pattern in Stark's operations: he is always ready to create an organization where none exists. After Owsley got busted and the Brotherhood went international, many of the original bay area chemists got wise to what Stark was really doing. "We were definitely very gullible in believing the stuff he told us," as poor Tim Scully would later observe.
The Brotherhood got plugged into Stark's global underground very quickly: massive marijuana imports from the Middle East, shadow bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and he was somehow micro-managing everything. Once he had flooded the West Coast with Afghan weed, Stark turned his attention to New York City, which was completely unprepared for the sheer quantity the Brotherhood supplied. From distribution to organizing street-level dealers, Stark was there, establishing Ordo Ab Chao is his own specific way.
Owsley got into the game due to his inability to procure pharmaceutical LSD-25, and within five years it had made him a millionaire. But he was put out of business following his bust in December 1967 at his Orinda tabbing center. His apprentice, Tim Scully, carried on in association with Nicholas Sand, prolific Brooklyn alchemist. Together they put out most of the fabled “Sunshine” acid.
Sunshine was the second acid to gain a large distribution-world-wide, as a matter of fact. The main source of these orange, crumbly tablets was Laguna Beach, a beautiful art colony on the coast of California. A “clean” scene developed there in the mid-Sixties, with many taking Sandoz on the picturesque sands. Here was where Timothy Leary stayed after touring communes throughout the southwestern United States, the sites of many religious turn-ons.
By 1969, five years after this town·s first head shop was established, large amounts of Sunshine began to be pumped to an acid-hungry population by a group called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Actually, the Brotherhood had started several years ·earlier as a religious group. But as dealing became big business, new faces emerged. Brotherhood members made large fortunes from the import of Afghanistan hash, selling it from a center on small street called Woodland Drive. The Brotherhood house burned down after a hookah filled with the best “prima” tipped over. Brotherhood members and Afghani royalty escaped the flames.
ln the Sunshine field, Nick Sand and Timothy Scully were the original suppliers, claiming to have produced the “improved ” acid homologue ALD-52.
By the of the decade, some 35 million doses of LSD-brown from oxidation and decomposition-had come via that European lab of Ronald Stark, presently a fugitive. The largest amount of this appeared on the West Coast late in 1970 (hence the designation “Christmas acid”).
With more people having bad trips as the result of this new impure LSD Leary, at this point, remarked, “The challenge to the dealer is not only must his product be pure and spiritual but he himself must reflect the human light he represents. Therefore, never buy dope, never purchase sacrament from a person that hasn’t got the qualities that you aspire for.” http://bruceeisner.com/writings/2012/01/turned.html
Stark had been working with US intelligence agencies for at least 9 years by the time of his most infamous moment, a legendary meeting with the "hippie mafia" drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (no joke.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of liquid LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. He claimed to have a dedicated lab in France, but it's his political philosophy that really makes Stark such an interesting character:
"He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics."
The Brotherhood was sufficiently impressed to bring Ronald Stark into the fold, and what followed was the Golden Era of cheap, high-quality LSD. From 1969 through 1973, Stark and the Brotherhood dosed a generation and got away with it, too.
According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career. Hippie lore generally gives Owsley Stanley the crown of the Acid King, but by Stanley's own estimates, his total production was a half kilogram. That might not sound like much -- but it adds up to over 5 million hits of acid. You can see why the Army and Navy were so interested in this compound: it is unusually powerful as drug molecules go.
Although the LSD story is closely associated with the Sandoz pharmaceutical corporation in Switzerland, most of the CIA's supply was actually domestic. Since at least 1954, the Eli Lilly Company was working under secret contract to keep the various MKNAOMI and ARTICHOKE research projects stocked up with magic mindf**k juice. The figures on their total LSD output are classified.
David Black: "Before clinching the deal with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute."
Obviously this was a big money business, and organized crime involvement was inevitable. Since small batches of LSD have a literally exponential commercial profit margin, technical expertise was highly rewarded. Consider the case of Clyde Apperson, a specialist in quickly setting up a fully functional manufacturing lab just about anywhere. More importantly, he could take them down even faster. For set-up, Apperson would charge $100,000 in cash -- take downs were only $50,000. He was finally busted working in the infamous abandoned missile silo with William Leonard Pickard in 2000.
Everyone's always getting busted, though. The history of LSD is full of incredibly intelligent men making highly stupid decisions. Yet through it all, from Operation Julie to the Sand-Scully case, Ronald Stark just kept on trucking. He was a calculating cameo artist: always on the scene, never holding the bag.
Until he suddenly was: "Whatever game Stark was playing took an abrupt turn in February 1975 when Italian police received an anonymous phone call about a man selling drugs in a hotel in Bologna. A few days later at the Grand Hotel Baglioni they arrested a suspect in possession of 4,600 kilos of marijuana, morphine, and cocaine. The suspect carried a British passport bearing the name Mr. Terrence W. Abbott. Italian investigators soon discovered that "Mr. Abbott" was actually Ronald Stark."-- Source: Acid Dreams, pg. 213
LEARY: "The whole concept of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is like a bogeyman invented by the narcs. The brotherhood was about eight surfer kids from Southern California, Laguna Beach, who took the LSD, and they practiced the religion of the worship of nature, and they'd go into the mountains. But they were not bigshots at all. None of them ever drove anything better than a VW bus. They were just kind of in it for the spiritual thrill."
Maybe so -- but probably not. In September 1970, Leary escaped from prison in a complicated deal exposing just how serious the Brotherhood network had become. Money from Ronald Stark was paid to the Weather Underground, which is the precise point where the "hippie mafia" became connected to actual hippie terrorists. Leary himself wound up in Algeria under the (very) armed watch of Eldridge Cleaver, himself in exile. A year later, Leary and his wife were in Switzerland, living under the protection of the arms dealer Michel Hauchard. For a story about spiritual thrills, there's definitely a lot of guns involved here.
At one point, though, maybe the Brotherhood really was just a group of hippies with a couple trunks full of weed. The Weather Underground were harmless student activists for awhile, too. Once Stark was brought into the Brotherhood, he quickly took change of the entire operation, establishing secure shipments and managing every aspect of their finances. "Stark warned them that buying real estate openly, as they had done, was much too risky -- but his lawyers could remedy the situation by hiding ownership in a maze of shell companies."
This is a repeated pattern in Stark's operations: he is always ready to create an organization where none exists. After Owsley got busted and the Brotherhood went international, many of the original bay area chemists got wise to what Stark was really doing. "We were definitely very gullible in believing the stuff he told us," as poor Tim Scully would later observe.
The Brotherhood got plugged into Stark's global underground very quickly: massive marijuana imports from the Middle East, shadow bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and he was somehow micro-managing everything. Once he had flooded the West Coast with Afghan weed, Stark turned his attention to New York City, which was completely unprepared for the sheer quantity the Brotherhood supplied. From distribution to organizing street-level dealers, Stark was there, establishing Ordo Ab Chao is his own specific way.
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ONE RING TO BIND THEM ALL
Despite Leary's warning, LSD was made illegal on October 16, 1966.
Owsley acid was the first large-scale commercialization of LSD. There were other smaller LSD laboratories before Owsley, and there were scores of laboratories that put out LSD at the same time that Owsley did. Some were making LSD of a purer form; the majority made it much worse.
After Owsley was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California, his protege Scully set up a laboratory with Nicholas Sand, another alchemist long involved in the psychedelic scene. They manufactured a quantity of ALD-52 - a cousin to LSD, which they called Sunshine - in large crumbly orange tablets of 270 micrograms or so. [Erowid Note: Though it was claimed at the time that they were producing ALD-52, we now believe that they were, in fact, producing LSD.]
In the spring of 1969, Ron Stark, then a chemist with a European LSD factory who tuned fugitive, allegedly began supplying underground acid to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Since the Brotherhood was also, by this time, distributing ALD-52, and since both drugs were tabbed into identical pills (except for a few early blue tablets of ALD-52), many people didn't realize that there was more than one kind of Sunshine. Many counterfeit versions soon appeared on the market, most of which were impure, according to Scully.
Sand and Scully ceased manufacturing, but Stark went on to produce over 10 kilograms (over 35 million doses in crystal form) of what became the famous Orange Sunshine - the last of which actually appeared in large red and green tablets called "Christmas Acid."
With the Sunshine boom came increased reports of side effects. In addition to stimulant reactions and symptoms akin to those of strychnine poisoning being reported, there seemed to be something missing in the spiritual dimensions of this new underground acid. Michael Hollinshead, who gave Leary his first taste of acid in 1960, later wrote in The Man Who Turned on the World:
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid... http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_writings1.shtml
Around 1954, Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. Only researchers had access to LSD through legitimate channels, but when publicity created a demand for LSD, hip chemists rushed to create a supply. An enterprising Californian called Owsley, for example, is said to have produced more than a million doses of LSD over the next few years. (At 25 micrograms per dose, a million doses of LSD would weigh only nine ounces.) Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. But when Owsley's factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD. http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/PsychologyToday.html
Owsley acid was the first large-scale commercialization of LSD. There were other smaller LSD laboratories before Owsley, and there were scores of laboratories that put out LSD at the same time that Owsley did. Some were making LSD of a purer form; the majority made it much worse.
After Owsley was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California, his protege Scully set up a laboratory with Nicholas Sand, another alchemist long involved in the psychedelic scene. They manufactured a quantity of ALD-52 - a cousin to LSD, which they called Sunshine - in large crumbly orange tablets of 270 micrograms or so. [Erowid Note: Though it was claimed at the time that they were producing ALD-52, we now believe that they were, in fact, producing LSD.]
In the spring of 1969, Ron Stark, then a chemist with a European LSD factory who tuned fugitive, allegedly began supplying underground acid to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Since the Brotherhood was also, by this time, distributing ALD-52, and since both drugs were tabbed into identical pills (except for a few early blue tablets of ALD-52), many people didn't realize that there was more than one kind of Sunshine. Many counterfeit versions soon appeared on the market, most of which were impure, according to Scully.
Sand and Scully ceased manufacturing, but Stark went on to produce over 10 kilograms (over 35 million doses in crystal form) of what became the famous Orange Sunshine - the last of which actually appeared in large red and green tablets called "Christmas Acid."
With the Sunshine boom came increased reports of side effects. In addition to stimulant reactions and symptoms akin to those of strychnine poisoning being reported, there seemed to be something missing in the spiritual dimensions of this new underground acid. Michael Hollinshead, who gave Leary his first taste of acid in 1960, later wrote in The Man Who Turned on the World:
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid... http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_writings1.shtml
Around 1954, Eli Lilly & Company published the details of a new process they had developed for synthesizing lysergic acid (the parent molecule of the ergot alkaloids) cheaply and in bulk. The immediate effect of this breakthrough was to keep down the price of ergot alkaloids, which tip to then had been distributed only by Sandoz. But there were other unanticipated results as well. Vast quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, could now be produced with reasonable ease in any sophisticated chemistry laboratory.At about the same time, a subculture of researchers began to experiment on themselves. Some wanted to experience madness firsthand; others sought a mystical union with the beyond. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were discovered by the media in 1962, and the craze was on. Only researchers had access to LSD through legitimate channels, but when publicity created a demand for LSD, hip chemists rushed to create a supply. An enterprising Californian called Owsley, for example, is said to have produced more than a million doses of LSD over the next few years. (At 25 micrograms per dose, a million doses of LSD would weigh only nine ounces.) Owsley acid became world famous for its high quality. But when Owsley's factory in Berkeley, California, was raided in February 1965, the case was thrown out of court since California law did not specifically regulate LSD. http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/PsychologyToday.html
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Alice D. Millionaire - Kesey & Owsley
The Roots of the Flower People
"Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through LSD experimentation on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic" Isis Cult.
Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of LSD to Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had completed a novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly "free" people are the insane.
Ken Kesey subsequently organized a circle of LSD initiates called "The Merry Pranksters". They toured the country disseminating LSD (often without forewarning the receiving parties), building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule "counterculture."
By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of LSD that a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a "Free Clinic," staffed by:
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmond, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s."
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AquarianConspiracy#Connection
"Back in California, Gregory Bateson had maintained the Huxley operation out of the Palo Alto VA hospital. Through LSD experimentation on patients already hospitalized for psychological problems, Bateson established a core of "initiates" into the "psychedelic" Isis Cult.
Foremost among his Palo Alto recruits was Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of LSD to Kesey. By 1962, Kesey had completed a novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", which popularized the notion that society is a prison and the only truly "free" people are the insane.
Ken Kesey subsequently organized a circle of LSD initiates called "The Merry Pranksters". They toured the country disseminating LSD (often without forewarning the receiving parties), building up local distribution connections, and establishing the pretext for a high volume of publicity on behalf of the still minuscule "counterculture."
By 1967, the Kesey cult had handed out such quantities of LSD that a sizable drug population had emerged, centered in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Here Huxley collaborator Bateson set up a "Free Clinic," staffed by:
- Dr. David Smith -- later a "medical adviser" for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
- Dr. Ernest Dernberg -- an active-duty military officer, probably on assignment through MK-Ultra
- Roger Smith -- a street gang organizer trained by Saul Alinsky. During the Free Clinic period, Roger Smith was the parole officer of the cultist mass murderer Charles Manson
- Dr. Peter Bourne -- formerly President Carter's special assistant on drug abuse. Bourne did his psychiatric residency at the Clinic. He had previously conducted a profiling study of GI heroin addicts in Vietnam.
During the 1960s, the Tavistock Clinic fostered the notion that no criteria for sanity exist and that psychedelic "mind-expanding" drugs are valuable tools of psychoanalysis. In 1967, Tavistock sponsored a Conference on the "Dialectics of Liberation," chaired by Tavistock psychoanalyst Dr. R.D. Laing, himself a popularized author and advocate of drug use. That conference drew a number of people who would soon play a prominent role in fostering terrorism; Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael were two prominent American delegates.
Thus, by 1963, Huxley had recruited his core of "initiates." All of them -- Leary, Osmond, Watts, Kesey, Alpert -- became the highly publicized promoters of the early LSD counterculture. By 1967, with the cult of "Flower People" in Haight-Ashbury and the emergence of the antiwar movement, the United States was ready for the inundation of LSD, hashish and marijuana that hit American college campuses in the late 1960s."
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AquarianConspiracy#Connection
ONE TYPE OF ACID was particularly popular among American ground forces in Vietnam. It was called " orange sunshine," and much of it was smuggled in from southern California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Far from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia a group known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was waging its own holy war of sorts in their tireless efforts to turn the world on to LSD. During their heydey the Brotherhood ran the world's largest illicit LSD ring.
LSD Molecule
The Super-Context
For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. There were a lot of famous and infamous names in the mix, yet curiously, very few of them ever overlap with Ronald Stark. There's no evidence that Al Hubbard and Stark ever even crossed paths. Although, as we'll see, Stark had considerable CIA connections, there's also no evidence that Stark had any connection with, or even knowledge of, the MKULTRA program. Then again, 99% of those files were destroyed in 1973.
Where Stark did connect was a meeting in 1969 with a hippie drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (No, not kidding.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid, baby. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career.
Jim Keith offers a paragraph of details on Stark's twilight years that I've never seen corroborated, or even mentioned, anywhere else. That could just mean he did his job better than most journalists, or it could mean he's repeating rumors and gossip -- either way, for the sake of completeness:
Stark...was seen at the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, and was also present at the student demonstrations and labor strikes in Milan in 1969. In the 1970s he lived a posh lifestyle in Italy, hobnobbing with the Sicilian Mafiosi, espionage agents of various coloration.
For anyone unfamiliar with the tangle of political, scientific, cultural and covert forces behind spread of LSD, this article could get confusing. There were a lot of famous and infamous names in the mix, yet curiously, very few of them ever overlap with Ronald Stark. There's no evidence that Al Hubbard and Stark ever even crossed paths. Although, as we'll see, Stark had considerable CIA connections, there's also no evidence that Stark had any connection with, or even knowledge of, the MKULTRA program. Then again, 99% of those files were destroyed in 1973.
Where Stark did connect was a meeting in 1969 with a hippie drug syndicate called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (No, not kidding.) They were looking for a new supplier and Stark kicked off the meeting by showing them a kilogram of LSD -- for US readers, that's 2.2 pounds of acid, baby. Needless to say, his resume was persuasive. According to a figure quoted by everyone and verified by nobody, Stark made 20 kilograms of LSD in his career.
Jim Keith offers a paragraph of details on Stark's twilight years that I've never seen corroborated, or even mentioned, anywhere else. That could just mean he did his job better than most journalists, or it could mean he's repeating rumors and gossip -- either way, for the sake of completeness:
Stark...was seen at the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, and was also present at the student demonstrations and labor strikes in Milan in 1969. In the 1970s he lived a posh lifestyle in Italy, hobnobbing with the Sicilian Mafiosi, espionage agents of various coloration.
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Aldous Huxley, Al Hubbard, Ronald Stark
Ronald Stark manufactured 50 million hits of black market LSD in the late 1960's and early 1970's. He was later exposed as a CIA informant by Italian authorities. (Ansa)
Ronald Stark manufactured 50 million hits of black market LSD in the late 1960's and early 1970's. He was later exposed as a CIA informant by Italian authorities. (Ansa)
In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters."
The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe's 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.
For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, California-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.
Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.
The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe's 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.
For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, California-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.
Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.
Hollingshead, the man who had given Leary his first LSD experience, had returned from Britain and joined Leary in Laguna. 'The Brotherhood felt they were leading a new society,' he remembered. 'California was the country of the future. It was as if the culture had entered into them. They were responding. Righteous dealing was a sacrament, with Tim as their guru. I have always found them very gracious people, very honest, very wise—but also very naive. It was the Dead-end Kids who took acid and fell in love with beauty.' The Brothers were making money out of dealing, but Hollingshead said: 'Griggs was not thinking in those terms. He was only thinking of getting the psychedelics on the streets so that people could take them. They were totally committed. They had tremendous determination. They were all very tough; once they were moving dope, they were manic. When the stuff came from Mexico they did this non-stop thing...' http://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/books/bel3.htm
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Owsley Mugshot; Chemist Kemp
Halluci-Nation
English supplier of LSD to Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
http://operationjulie.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/94-york-street-london-w1-charles-druce/#respond
Charles Druce is an unlikely figure in the history of LSD. He started his career as a clerk in various chemical merchants’ offices in London, moving up to trading in mail-order LSD in the early to mid-1960s when it was still legal. LSD was being legitimately produced in Czechoslovakia for example, even after Sandoz in Switzerland got cold feet and stopped its own production.
Druce came to the attention of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass), former Harvard professors who set up a legendary psychedelic community in Millbrook, upper New York State. Druce supplied LSD to Leary and Alpert up to around 1966. Alpert would fly over and stay in luxury hotels and pick up the acid in person to take back to the States. The full account of Alpert’s involvement has never been told, and probably won’t ever be, but he had a dare-devil streak that involved for example on one occasion flying his own plane ( a Cessna 172) from Canada to the US high on acid as the last part of his journey. Building a close relationship with Druce, Alpert once presented Druce with a copy of the ‘Psychedelic Experience’, the book he co-authored with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner.
In late 1966, LSD was banned in America and shortly after in the UK. The Brotherhood incorporated as a legal church within weeks. Tim Scully and Nick Sand, chemists associated with Millbrook and the legendary Owsley Stanley in the US, went underground to produce it. Druce - by now owner of Charles Druce Ltd. – was approached by Scully and Sand to supply raw materials. Druce and a colleague, Ronald Craze, created a company – Alban Feeds – to supply Scully and Sand with Ergotamine Tartrate. The first shipment was 2.8 kilos – enough to make around 5.6 million doses of acid.
This arrangement worked well for over a year. Druce also provided specialised equipment, including a spectrometer for Richard Kemp who was by now working with Ronald Stark in France. In his statement to the police following the Operation Julie bust, Kemp recalled going to Druce’s offices near Baker Street to pick up the equipment (in Ronald Stark’s red Ferrari).
But in 1970, living well on substantial advance payments from the US, Druce and Craze were failing to keep the shipments going. The US operation had been busted in Denver, and Alban Feed’s role in supplying raw materials had come to the attention of the police in both the US and the UK. Druce and Craze cooled their involvement with the US.
By this time, Ronald Stark had become involved in the US operation and brought his more direct approach into play. He knew that Druce and Craze had been stockpiling ergotamine tartrate and keeping it in Hamburg – the international trading center for chemicals. He set a trap in place. In due course, tempted by an offer from a Swiss Company, Inland Alkaloids, Druce and Craze entered into a transaction to sell 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate. But Inland Alkaloids was a ‘front’ company, operated at arm’s length by Nick Sand and Ronald Stark, and Druce and Craze found themselves ripped off and in debt to the bank (the Nat West at Crystal Palace).
The 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate went to France where Richard Kemp was by then working with Ron Stark to produce huge quantities of acid. http://www.scribd.com/doc/28898944/Brotherhood-of-Eternal-Love
***
http://operationjulie.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/94-york-street-london-w1-charles-druce/#respond
Charles Druce is an unlikely figure in the history of LSD. He started his career as a clerk in various chemical merchants’ offices in London, moving up to trading in mail-order LSD in the early to mid-1960s when it was still legal. LSD was being legitimately produced in Czechoslovakia for example, even after Sandoz in Switzerland got cold feet and stopped its own production.
Druce came to the attention of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass), former Harvard professors who set up a legendary psychedelic community in Millbrook, upper New York State. Druce supplied LSD to Leary and Alpert up to around 1966. Alpert would fly over and stay in luxury hotels and pick up the acid in person to take back to the States. The full account of Alpert’s involvement has never been told, and probably won’t ever be, but he had a dare-devil streak that involved for example on one occasion flying his own plane ( a Cessna 172) from Canada to the US high on acid as the last part of his journey. Building a close relationship with Druce, Alpert once presented Druce with a copy of the ‘Psychedelic Experience’, the book he co-authored with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner.
In late 1966, LSD was banned in America and shortly after in the UK. The Brotherhood incorporated as a legal church within weeks. Tim Scully and Nick Sand, chemists associated with Millbrook and the legendary Owsley Stanley in the US, went underground to produce it. Druce - by now owner of Charles Druce Ltd. – was approached by Scully and Sand to supply raw materials. Druce and a colleague, Ronald Craze, created a company – Alban Feeds – to supply Scully and Sand with Ergotamine Tartrate. The first shipment was 2.8 kilos – enough to make around 5.6 million doses of acid.
This arrangement worked well for over a year. Druce also provided specialised equipment, including a spectrometer for Richard Kemp who was by now working with Ronald Stark in France. In his statement to the police following the Operation Julie bust, Kemp recalled going to Druce’s offices near Baker Street to pick up the equipment (in Ronald Stark’s red Ferrari).
But in 1970, living well on substantial advance payments from the US, Druce and Craze were failing to keep the shipments going. The US operation had been busted in Denver, and Alban Feed’s role in supplying raw materials had come to the attention of the police in both the US and the UK. Druce and Craze cooled their involvement with the US.
By this time, Ronald Stark had become involved in the US operation and brought his more direct approach into play. He knew that Druce and Craze had been stockpiling ergotamine tartrate and keeping it in Hamburg – the international trading center for chemicals. He set a trap in place. In due course, tempted by an offer from a Swiss Company, Inland Alkaloids, Druce and Craze entered into a transaction to sell 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate. But Inland Alkaloids was a ‘front’ company, operated at arm’s length by Nick Sand and Ronald Stark, and Druce and Craze found themselves ripped off and in debt to the bank (the Nat West at Crystal Palace).
The 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate went to France where Richard Kemp was by then working with Ron Stark to produce huge quantities of acid. http://www.scribd.com/doc/28898944/Brotherhood-of-Eternal-Love
***
During the Kennedy administration Michael Hollingshead gave some of the magic gram he got from Dr. John Beresford to Tim Leary, Donovan, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards and more. By 1962, Jean Houston opened an LSD clinic in Manhattan. Ronald Stark bought 35 million doses in Europe, trafficked by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Pre-dating Tim Leary, Oscar "Oz" Janiger earned his MA in cell physiology at Columbia University and his Osteopathic / MD degree at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers to study LSD's potential for enhancing intellect and creativity. Janiger was particularly interested in the ability of artists to access a state of altered consciousness using this "creativity pill", which he saw as a "marvelous instrument to learn more about the mind."
Working as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, he gave LSD to an estimated 1,000 volunteers (1954-1962) before it was made illegal. He was interested in LSD for its enhancement of creativity, its creation of a new state of consciousness, and for its potential as a tool in therapy. During the time he worked with it, he incorporated LSD into his therapy and also guided sessions for several notable volunteers including Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Janiger's subjects paid $20 for a dose of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceutical.
Janiger concentrated his studies on creativity and artistic functioning. As with any panacea, the cure is also a poison. In LA, the medicine landed on some more profound people than it may have elsewhere. Huxley and Heard morphed the medical model into a new type of religion and ego-centric culture -- the 'naturalistic' rather than clinical approach. The cult of celebrity led the way to be emulated.
Artists began to pour in. Even though he was a medical missionary, Janiger made the obvious point about trip reports: "Nothing is more boring than an individual's personal account of an LSD experiment." Others claimed a single trip was worth four years in art school. We are only fascinated by our own dreamscapes. Our world was simultaneously sublimated and co-opted.
Pre-dating Tim Leary, Oscar "Oz" Janiger earned his MA in cell physiology at Columbia University and his Osteopathic / MD degree at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. He was one of the first researchers to study LSD's potential for enhancing intellect and creativity. Janiger was particularly interested in the ability of artists to access a state of altered consciousness using this "creativity pill", which he saw as a "marvelous instrument to learn more about the mind."
Working as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, he gave LSD to an estimated 1,000 volunteers (1954-1962) before it was made illegal. He was interested in LSD for its enhancement of creativity, its creation of a new state of consciousness, and for its potential as a tool in therapy. During the time he worked with it, he incorporated LSD into his therapy and also guided sessions for several notable volunteers including Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Janiger's subjects paid $20 for a dose of LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceutical.
Janiger concentrated his studies on creativity and artistic functioning. As with any panacea, the cure is also a poison. In LA, the medicine landed on some more profound people than it may have elsewhere. Huxley and Heard morphed the medical model into a new type of religion and ego-centric culture -- the 'naturalistic' rather than clinical approach. The cult of celebrity led the way to be emulated.
Artists began to pour in. Even though he was a medical missionary, Janiger made the obvious point about trip reports: "Nothing is more boring than an individual's personal account of an LSD experiment." Others claimed a single trip was worth four years in art school. We are only fascinated by our own dreamscapes. Our world was simultaneously sublimated and co-opted.
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm of Babinowitz, Boudin and Standard to conduct a feasibility study of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Timothy Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established an LSD cult called the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968.
Toward the end of 1968, Hitchcock expanded the LSD-hashish production operations in the Caribbean with funds provided by the Fiduciary Trust Co. (IOS). In conjunction with J. Vontobel and Co. of Zurich, Hitchcock founded a corporation called 4-Star Anstalt in Liechtenstein. This company, employing "investment funds" (that is, drug receipts) from Fiduciary Trust, bought up large tracts of land in the Grand Bahamas as well as large quantities of ergotamine tartrate, the basic chemical used in the production of LSD.
Hitchcock's personal hand in the LSD connection abruptly ended several years later. Hitchcock had been working closely with Johann F. Parravacini of the Parravacini Bank Ltd in Berne, Switzerland. From 1968, they had together funded even further expansion of the Caribbean-California LSD-hashish ventures. In the early 1970s, as the result of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, both Hitchcock and Parravacini were indicted and convicted of a $40 million stock fraud. Parravacini had registered a $40 million sale to Hitchcock for which Hitchcock had not put down a penny of cash or collateral. This was one of the rare instances in which federal investigators succeeded in getting inside the $200 billion drug fund as it was making its way around the "offshore" banking system. http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AquarianConspiracy#Connection
During this period, Hitchcock joined Timothy Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established an LSD cult called the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love" and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968.
Toward the end of 1968, Hitchcock expanded the LSD-hashish production operations in the Caribbean with funds provided by the Fiduciary Trust Co. (IOS). In conjunction with J. Vontobel and Co. of Zurich, Hitchcock founded a corporation called 4-Star Anstalt in Liechtenstein. This company, employing "investment funds" (that is, drug receipts) from Fiduciary Trust, bought up large tracts of land in the Grand Bahamas as well as large quantities of ergotamine tartrate, the basic chemical used in the production of LSD.
Hitchcock's personal hand in the LSD connection abruptly ended several years later. Hitchcock had been working closely with Johann F. Parravacini of the Parravacini Bank Ltd in Berne, Switzerland. From 1968, they had together funded even further expansion of the Caribbean-California LSD-hashish ventures. In the early 1970s, as the result of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, both Hitchcock and Parravacini were indicted and convicted of a $40 million stock fraud. Parravacini had registered a $40 million sale to Hitchcock for which Hitchcock had not put down a penny of cash or collateral. This was one of the rare instances in which federal investigators succeeded in getting inside the $200 billion drug fund as it was making its way around the "offshore" banking system. http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=AquarianConspiracy#Connection
The Manson Family themselves were involved in the L.A. drug market and were even dealing cocaine in the late 1960s at a time when it was extremely rare in the States. Manson seemingly had some upper scale clients. He also seemingly had a relationship with Stark, who may have been his supplier. I've written much more on Manson's ties to Starks and his other links to intelligence here and here
This puts the Esalen Institute in contact with three of the more notorious cults of the late 60s, one obviously being Manson. Another would be the Process Church of Final Judgement, an off-shoot of Scientology, of which Robert DeGrimston was the co-founder of. For the sake of brevity I will not go into the Process Church to much, but will state that they've had links to numerous serial killers over the years, that also included Son of Sam in addition to Manson. Researchers such as Ed Sanders in the original version of The Family and Maury Terry in The Ultimate Evil have speculated that the Process controlled a national crime syndicate that included drug trafficking, kidnapping, and smut films. Others see them as a giant red herring. Either way, Process members rubbed shoulders with their fair share of notorious figures in the 60s and 70s.
The other late 60s cultic group in association with Esalen was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Timothy Leary, who lectured at Esalen for a time, was their resident guru and was eventually sprung from prison with the Brotherhood's aid. Then there's Ronald Stark, who became the Brotherhood's chief financial backer on his way to becoming one of the largest drug dealers in the world.
The other late 60s cultic group in association with Esalen was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Timothy Leary, who lectured at Esalen for a time, was their resident guru and was eventually sprung from prison with the Brotherhood's aid. Then there's Ronald Stark, who became the Brotherhood's chief financial backer on his way to becoming one of the largest drug dealers in the world.
Nick Sand
Erowid Character Vaults Nick Sand Extended Biography by Jon Hanna v1.0 - Nov 5, 2009
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/sand_nick/sand_nick_biography1.shtml
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/sand_nick/sand_nick_biography1.shtml
Hugo Höppener (Fidus)
Ronald Stark
There have also been persistent claims of connections between the CIA and members of the so-called "Brotherhood of Eternal Love", most focussing on the mysterious figure of Ronald Stark, a reputed criminal who was alleged to have links to both the CIA and to paramilitary organisations including the PLO, as well as allegedly overseeing one of the world's largest LSD manufacturing and distribution rings, which operated in Italy, France and Belgium.
Though no evidence has yet come to light in the West, it is presumed likely that the Soviet government conducted its own experiments on the properties of LSD during the Cold War.
LSD began to be used recreationally in certain (primarily medical) circles. Some psychiatric and medical professionals, acquainted with LSD in their work, began using it themselves and sharing it with friends and associates. Among the first to do so was British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who first gave the drug to author Aldous Huxley and who coined the term "psychedelic" to describe its effects.
LSD historian Jay Stevens, author of the book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, has said that, in the early days of its recreational use, LSD users (who were at that time mostly academics and medical professional people) fell into two broadly delineated groups. The first group, which was essentially conservative and was exemplified by Huxley, felt that LSD was too powerful and too dangerous to allow its immediate and widespread introduction, and that its use ought to be restricted to the 'elite' members of society -- artists, writers, scientists -- who could mediate its gradual distribution throughout society. The second and more radical group, typified by Alpert and Leary, felt that LSD had the power to revolutionize society and that it should be spread as widely as possible and be available to all.
During the 1960s, this second 'group' of casual LSD users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The personalities associated with the subculture, gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary and psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD.
The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. Tom Wolfe wrote a widely read account of these early days of LSD's entrance into the non-academic world in his book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which documented the cross country, acid-fueled voyage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the psychedelic bus "Furthur" and the Pranksters' later experimentation with group use of LSD at the so-called Acid Tests.
The availability of LSD was drastically reduced by the late 1970s due to a combination of governmental controls and law enforcement. The supply of constituent chemicals (notably ergotamine tartrate) were placed under tight surveillance and government funding for LSD research was almost totally eliminated. These efforts were augmented by a series of major busts in England and Europe. One of the most famous was "Operation Julie" in Britain in 1978; it broke up one of the largest LSD manufacturing and distribution operations in the world at that time, headed by chemist Richard Kemp. The group targeted by the Julie task force were reputed to have had links to the mysterious Brotherhood of Eternal Love and to Ronald Stark.
The fifteen defendants included two highly qualified chemists, two doctors of medicine, a teacher, and the American author David Solomon, a friend to Timothy Leary and a reputed "walking encyclopedia of drugs culture". The defendants were caught by a lengthy operation that involved police officers -- one of them named Julie -- who posed as hippies in the Welsh hills and on London council estates. They eventually located two large 'acid factories' in a farmhouse near Tregaron in West Wales and in a house in Hampton Wick. One of the police who raided the London factory reportedly ignored warnings from the occupants about a large amount of LSD that had been spilled in the room, and had to be hospitalized after absorbing the volatile chemical through skin contact.
Several of the conspirators were reputed to have made more than £1 million each and on their arrest they joked with detectives that their business acumen merited a Queen's Award for Exports. Kemp had allegedly become convinced that LSD could "liberate" people's minds and assist harmonious social relationships and it was claimed at the time of his arrest that Kemp and his associates had stockpiled enough LSD to make millions of trips.
Though no evidence has yet come to light in the West, it is presumed likely that the Soviet government conducted its own experiments on the properties of LSD during the Cold War.
LSD began to be used recreationally in certain (primarily medical) circles. Some psychiatric and medical professionals, acquainted with LSD in their work, began using it themselves and sharing it with friends and associates. Among the first to do so was British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who first gave the drug to author Aldous Huxley and who coined the term "psychedelic" to describe its effects.
LSD historian Jay Stevens, author of the book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, has said that, in the early days of its recreational use, LSD users (who were at that time mostly academics and medical professional people) fell into two broadly delineated groups. The first group, which was essentially conservative and was exemplified by Huxley, felt that LSD was too powerful and too dangerous to allow its immediate and widespread introduction, and that its use ought to be restricted to the 'elite' members of society -- artists, writers, scientists -- who could mediate its gradual distribution throughout society. The second and more radical group, typified by Alpert and Leary, felt that LSD had the power to revolutionize society and that it should be spread as widely as possible and be available to all.
During the 1960s, this second 'group' of casual LSD users evolved and expanded into a subculture that extolled the mystical and religious symbolism often engendered by the drug's powerful effects, and advocated its use as a method of raising consciousness. The personalities associated with the subculture, gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary and psychedelic rock musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane soon attracted a great deal of publicity, generating further interest in LSD.
The popularization of LSD outside of the medical world was hastened when individuals such as Ken Kesey participated in drug trials and liked what they saw. Tom Wolfe wrote a widely read account of these early days of LSD's entrance into the non-academic world in his book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which documented the cross country, acid-fueled voyage of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on the psychedelic bus "Furthur" and the Pranksters' later experimentation with group use of LSD at the so-called Acid Tests.
The availability of LSD was drastically reduced by the late 1970s due to a combination of governmental controls and law enforcement. The supply of constituent chemicals (notably ergotamine tartrate) were placed under tight surveillance and government funding for LSD research was almost totally eliminated. These efforts were augmented by a series of major busts in England and Europe. One of the most famous was "Operation Julie" in Britain in 1978; it broke up one of the largest LSD manufacturing and distribution operations in the world at that time, headed by chemist Richard Kemp. The group targeted by the Julie task force were reputed to have had links to the mysterious Brotherhood of Eternal Love and to Ronald Stark.
The fifteen defendants included two highly qualified chemists, two doctors of medicine, a teacher, and the American author David Solomon, a friend to Timothy Leary and a reputed "walking encyclopedia of drugs culture". The defendants were caught by a lengthy operation that involved police officers -- one of them named Julie -- who posed as hippies in the Welsh hills and on London council estates. They eventually located two large 'acid factories' in a farmhouse near Tregaron in West Wales and in a house in Hampton Wick. One of the police who raided the London factory reportedly ignored warnings from the occupants about a large amount of LSD that had been spilled in the room, and had to be hospitalized after absorbing the volatile chemical through skin contact.
Several of the conspirators were reputed to have made more than £1 million each and on their arrest they joked with detectives that their business acumen merited a Queen's Award for Exports. Kemp had allegedly become convinced that LSD could "liberate" people's minds and assist harmonious social relationships and it was claimed at the time of his arrest that Kemp and his associates had stockpiled enough LSD to make millions of trips.
Ronald Hadley Stark was perhaps the largest source of American LSD in the late 1960s after Owsley Stanley's imprisonment in 1967.
Stark arrived in the spring of 1969 at the Laguna Beach, California home of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a biker collective and LSD dealership. Previously unknown to the Brotherhood, he was quickly welcomed when he proffered a kilogram of pure LSD (equivalent to 5 million 200-microgram doses), or so the story goes. What makes this particularly interesting is that there had never been that much LSD produced commercially (by Sandoz Laboratories, the only commercially manufacturer of the drug); there would be little reason for a legitimate laboratory to produce so much and less reason for an illegal operation to produce so much at once. If the story is true, it means that whoever produced the acid intended it for a large number of people and was unconcerned about prosecution. The standard operating procedure for any illegal drug lab is to produce only somewhat more than satisfies immediate demand, for obvious reasons.
The Brotherhood distributed a form of acid known as "Orange Sunshine," which had a reputation of having more unpleasant side-effects than Owsley's product had. Users had a greater incidence of symptoms akin to strychnine poisoning as well as more of a "speedy" feeling to their trips. In the words of Michael Hollinshead (the man who originally turned Leary on):
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid...
My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience - the intellectual response - but was based on direct, first-hand experience (about 30 trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt that there was something it lacked - it was too "electric," too "speedy" and too "mind-shattering." The earlier clarity of "insight" which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment, or even absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as "sublime inflation," a super abundance of emotive energy, but it could not signify more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun.
Ronald Stark was also, allegedly, either a CIA agent or a free agent temporarily in the CIA's employ. Evidence of this came to light when he was arrested in Bologna, Italy for drug trafficking in 1975. Magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered that he be released on the grounds that he was a CIA agent (and had been since 1960). Floridia's evidence was circumstantial, but nonetheless interesting. While imprisoned, Stark was frequently visited by Wendy M. Hansen, from the U.S. consulate in Florence. The police had seized letters to Stark addressed to one of his illegal laboratories in Brussels from Charles C. Adams at the U.S. Embassy in London. Floridia also claimed that Stark had done secret work for the U.S. Defense Department from 1960 to 1962, and that there had been "periodic payments to him from Fort Lee, known to be the site of a CIA office." In 1984 a report was issued by an Italian parliamentary commission to study terrorism in Italy. The report concluded that Stark had been an adventurer who had been employed by the CIA, though it was not specified during what period.
Stark himself made several references to his association to the CIA, though nobody has quoted him as ever saying he worked for them directly. He claimed that he ended his relationship to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and moved operations to Brussels thanks to a CIA tip. He also claimed to have plans to supply LSD to CIA-backed Tibetan guerrillas resisting the Chinese occupation.
There is clearly some possibility the CIA had reason to desire control of the LSD supply in California. Their MKULTRA program had been researching the possibilities of using the drug for mind control purposes since well before recreational use became popular, and had discussed the research potential of an entire community on acid (e.g. the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco). The evidence that they did in fact, conspire to distribute underground LSD, or that Ronald Stark was involved, is tenuous at best, but is certainly worth looking at. In the words of Carl Oglesby, former head of Students for a Democratic Society:
What we have to contemplate nevertheless is the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy.... If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it and de-politicize it.
http://www.skilluminati.com
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)
The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production,when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)
The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protege, Tim Skully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.
Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.
Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)
In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)
When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)
When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realizing how big the business had become.
The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)
Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)
The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production,when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)
The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protege, Tim Skully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.
Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.
Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)
In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)
When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)
When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realizing how big the business had become.
The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)
Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)
In the 60′s Orange Sunshine LSD was manufactured and distributed exclusively by a group known as “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love” who operated out of a beach resort near Los Angeles. The Brotherhood had among it’s drug manufacturers and dealers, one Ronald Stark, who is believed to have manufactured 50 million doses of LSD, and had known connections to the CIA.
It was this very same batch of acid that was available in abundance four months later during the fateful free concert held at Altamont Speedway. Four people died at that concert, one of them after being brutally stabbed to death by a group of Hell’s Angels who had been given access to multiple tabs of Orange Sunshine. Many people who attended that concert noted that the LSD seemed to be “contaminated” and that the general vibe one got from using it was that of extreme negativity, violence, and death. Additionally, Orange Sunshine was in use among American ground forces during the Vietnam war, having been smuggled into that country from the California coast.
It was this very same batch of acid that was available in abundance four months later during the fateful free concert held at Altamont Speedway. Four people died at that concert, one of them after being brutally stabbed to death by a group of Hell’s Angels who had been given access to multiple tabs of Orange Sunshine. Many people who attended that concert noted that the LSD seemed to be “contaminated” and that the general vibe one got from using it was that of extreme negativity, violence, and death. Additionally, Orange Sunshine was in use among American ground forces during the Vietnam war, having been smuggled into that country from the California coast.
EIR
Lycergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was developed in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at Sandoz A.G. — a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S. G. Warburg. While precise documentation is unavailable as to the auspices under which the LSD research was commissioned, it can be safely assumed that British intelligence and its subsidiary U.S. Office of Strategic Services were directly involved. Allen Dulles, the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 when that agency began its covert LSD experiment, MK-ULTRA, was the OSS station chief in Berne, Switzerland throughout the early Sandoz research. One of his OSS assistants was James Warburg, of the same Warburg family, who was instrumental in the 1963 founding of the Institute for Policy Studies, and worked with both Huxley and Robert Hutchins. (10)
Who provided the drugs that swamped the antiwar movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure — which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 — provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
The LSD Connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a 55-room mansion in Millbrook, New York where the entire Leary Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California. (23)
Hitchcock was also a broker for the Lansky syndicate and for the Fiduciary Trust Co., Nassau, Grand Bahamas — a wholly owned subsidiary of Investors Overseas Services. He was formally employed by Delafield and Delafield Investments where he worked on buying and selling vast quantities of stock in the Mary Carter Paint Co. — soon to become Resorts International.
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard (24) to conduct a feasibility study of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established an LSD cult called the Brother hood of Eternal Love and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968. (25)
Who provided the drugs that swamped the antiwar movement and the college campuses of the United States in the late 1960s? The organized crime infrastructure — which had set up the Peking Connection for the opium trade in 1928 — provided the same services in the 1960s and 1970s it had provided during Prohibition. This was also the same network Huxley had established contact with in Hollywood during the 1930s.
The LSD Connection begins with one William "Billy" Mellon Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a graduate of the University of Vienna and a scion of the millionaire Mellon banking family of Pittsburgh. (Andrew Mellon of the same family had been the Treasury Secretary throughout Prohibition.) In 1963, when Timothy Leary was thrown out of Harvard, Hitchcock rented a 55-room mansion in Millbrook, New York where the entire Leary Huxley circle of initiates was housed until its later move back to California. (23)
Hitchcock was also a broker for the Lansky syndicate and for the Fiduciary Trust Co., Nassau, Grand Bahamas — a wholly owned subsidiary of Investors Overseas Services. He was formally employed by Delafield and Delafield Investments where he worked on buying and selling vast quantities of stock in the Mary Carter Paint Co. — soon to become Resorts International.
In 1967, Dr. Richard Alpert put Hitchcock in contact with Augustus Owsley Stanley III. As Owsley's agent, Hitchcock retained the law firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard (24) to conduct a feasibility study of several Caribbean countries to determine the best location for the production and distribution of LSD and hashish.
During this period, Hitchcock joined Leary and his circle in California. Leary had established an LSD cult called the Brother hood of Eternal Love and several front companies, including Mystics Art World, Inc. of Laguna Beach, California. These California-based entities ran lucrative trafficking in Mexican marijuana and LSD brought in from Switzerland and Britain. The British connection had been established directly by Hitchcock, who contracted the Charles Bruce chemical firm to import large quantities of the chemical components of LSD. With financing from both Hitchcock and George Grant Hoag, the heir to the J.C. Penney dry goods fortune, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set up LSD and hashish production-marketing operations in Costa Rica in 1968. (25)
Owsley on Psychedelics
http://www.thebear.org/essays.html#anchor430693
http://www.thebear.org/essays.html#anchor430693
Owsley and Me is a love story set against the background of the Psychedelic Revolution of the '60s. Owsley "Bear" Stanley met her in Berkeley in 1965, when LSD was still legal and he was the world's largest producer and distributor of LSD. Rhoney found herself working in an LSD laboratory, and the third corner in a love triangle. We all know the stories from the '60s—but never from the point of view of a woman finding her way through twisted trails of love, jealousy, and paranoia, all the while personally connecting to the most iconic events and people of her time.
Bear supported the Grateful Dead in their early years and gave away as much LSD as he sold—millions of hits. He designed and engineered the infamous Wall of Sound system of the early '70s, just before he began his two years in prison, with Rhoney raising their infant son. He died one year ago, but the era he helped create is now being rediscovered by a new generation interested in the meaning of it all. Today Rhoney Stanley is a practicing holistic orthodontist in Woodstock, New York. This is her first book.
It's the years 1967 to 1970 that are the heart of the book when Bear and his acolytes practice the very precise arts of mixing chemicals in underground labs and spending time on stages lining up speakers, microphones, cables, and tape recorders. Some of the groups, most notably the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, were very much involved with Bear and his circle. These were the bands that organized the short-lived Carousel Ballroom where rock bands played for free with audiences very high indeed. This was where Bear shaped the Dead's wall of sound, where he created the use of monitor speakers for bands to hear themselves onstage, and where he learned how to capture the clearest high-fidelity concert recordings of the time.
As part of this sound and acid crew, Gissen got to meet, often fleetingly, the big names of the day and has hit-and-run anecdotes about George Harrison, David Crosby, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Jimmy Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez, Elvin Bishop, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (before he became Ram Das) and other luminaries. Then, the '60s wound down, Bear had to spend three years in jail for his drug production, and the rest of the book is a very long denouement.
Bear supported the Grateful Dead in their early years and gave away as much LSD as he sold—millions of hits. He designed and engineered the infamous Wall of Sound system of the early '70s, just before he began his two years in prison, with Rhoney raising their infant son. He died one year ago, but the era he helped create is now being rediscovered by a new generation interested in the meaning of it all. Today Rhoney Stanley is a practicing holistic orthodontist in Woodstock, New York. This is her first book.
It's the years 1967 to 1970 that are the heart of the book when Bear and his acolytes practice the very precise arts of mixing chemicals in underground labs and spending time on stages lining up speakers, microphones, cables, and tape recorders. Some of the groups, most notably the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, were very much involved with Bear and his circle. These were the bands that organized the short-lived Carousel Ballroom where rock bands played for free with audiences very high indeed. This was where Bear shaped the Dead's wall of sound, where he created the use of monitor speakers for bands to hear themselves onstage, and where he learned how to capture the clearest high-fidelity concert recordings of the time.
As part of this sound and acid crew, Gissen got to meet, often fleetingly, the big names of the day and has hit-and-run anecdotes about George Harrison, David Crosby, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Jimmy Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez, Elvin Bishop, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (before he became Ram Das) and other luminaries. Then, the '60s wound down, Bear had to spend three years in jail for his drug production, and the rest of the book is a very long denouement.
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OPERATION JULIE
During the early Seventies the world saw a seemingly inexhaustable supply of high quality LSD. The vast majority of this LSD was made in Britain by two chemists, Richard Kemp and Andy Munro who in turn were part of a large distribution and marketing network. The police initiative to tackle this huge influx of LSD was called Operation Julie and the term has come to encompass both the LSD manufacture and distribution as well as the police investigation.
During the early Seventies the world saw a seemingly inexhaustable supply of high quality LSD. The vast majority of this LSD was made in Britain by two chemists, Richard Kemp and Andy Munro who in turn were part of a large distribution and marketing network. The police initiative to tackle this huge influx of LSD was called Operation Julie and the term has come to encompass both the LSD manufacture and distribution as well as the police investigation.
Cue David Black's Acid: The Secret History of LSD. Those still under the impression that history is little more than the sum total of visible events will greet Black's book with incredulity: the synchronistic connections described in just one paragraph can amaze:
"For laundering, [Bill] Hitchcock used the facilities offered by the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, where he already had a private account at the Castle Bank and Trust. This laundromat [Castle Bank and Trust] for Mafia narcotics trafficking had been co-founded by Edward Halliwell, a CIA asset involved in Air America and Civil Air Transport. These 'airlines' were agency front companies for flying heroin around the Burma Triangle to bankroll covert operations in Indo-China. He made arrangements for the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love, the Californian LSD manufacturing/trafficking organization described in Tendler and May's book of the same name] at Resorts International, a conduit for huge amounts of Mafia money, and at the Fiduciary Trust Company, an offshoot of Investors Overseas Services, headed by the notorious and crooked financier Bernie Cornfeld." (p. 18)
And what about Bernie Cornfeld? Nothing less than sugar daddy to Heidi Fleiss: you can quickly see how this nebulous web of synchronicity starts to add up.
The implications present in Black's book reach to the highest echelons of political power: not only does Black detail the complete history of the CIA's experimentation with LSD in its covert MK-ULTRA project, but we learn that John F. Kennedy's implied mistress, Mary Pinchot, was "turning on" a lot of higher-ups in Washington, D.c. with LSD supplied by Timothy Leary. When Kennedy was assassinated, Pinchot allegedly phoned Leary in a panicked state and said, 'they couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast... They've covered everything up." (p. 61). In October 1964, Pinchot was shot to death in a Georgetown apartment in what appeared to be a "professional hit."
The linchpin of Black's book, however, is the "international man of mystery" Ronald Stark. Stark's involvement with LSD trafficking began in the summer of 1969, when he approached the "hippie mafia" the Brotherhood of Eternal Love with an offer to bankroll their activities:
"In his talks with the Brotherhood, Stark impressed them with his knowledge of scams: smuggling drugs in consignments of Japanese electrical equipment, his use of business fronts in West Africa, and moving money through a maze of shell companies set up by his lawyers on various continents.
However, [Stark] projected himself as interested in a lot more than money. He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics. He intimated, for example, that he had contacts with the Tibetan freedom fighters loyal to the Dalai Lama and with the Japanese Mafia who could help smuggle LSD into Tibet and dose the Chinese occupiers... however, the Idylwild hippies could not have possibly guessed that Ron Stark operated on four continents and compartmentalized his international activities so that those he did business with - be they American hippies, Lebanese warlords, corporate lawyers, British scientists, Japanese Mafioso or Italian train-bombers - would have little knowledge of his 'other' activities. He could speak ten languages fluently and had the 'bottle' [of LSD], cunning, charm, and knowledge to pass himself off in various situations as a businessman, chemist, doctor, art collector, drug dealer, political activist and even as a Palestinian guerilla." (p. 20-21)
Ronald Stark
One of the most interesting sections of the book details Stark's involvement with the "acid gang" responsible for the production of most of the UK's LSD during the 1970's. "Operation Julie" eventually brought the gang down, but the story behind this operation is interesting in its own right. Of all of the characters in Black's book, only the "Julie" chemists Richard Kemp and Christine Bott are as intriguing as Stark: Kemp, once described as a "one in a million brainiac" by a fellow prison inmate, was a Cambridge-educated chemist and left-wing radical who hoped that LSD would inspire societal revolution. Kemp and Bott believed "...industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves." Kemp was also responsible for a dramatic breakthrough in LSD manufacture, which was responsible for the "Julie" acid being the cleanest and strongest ever seen on a large scale in the UK.
The web of synchronicity deepens yet again when Kemp's association with the famed DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick is revealed:
"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD."
It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."
Like Kemp, Stark remains an enigmatic figure throughout the book, and we never get much more than speculation as to who he actually is. Was he a CIA asset? Scion of an ultra-wealthy family? Between Stark's connections to radical groups on four continents (a mind-boggling list that includes the Weather Underground and the IRA) it is difficult to imagine that Stark was not an intelligence asset of some sort: he appeared to operate above the law. At the same time, he evidently exhibited some fuzzy political sympathies that definitely leaned in the direction of "One World Universalism." Stark's apparent tendency to latch on to "convenient" causes is all too indicative of someone operating as an agent of an Illuminati-type organization: if he did have a political agenda, it was certainly a bit more obtuse and sophisticated than anything revolving around simple "national liberation". Black also infers that Stark maintained connections to the P-2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, but the extent of his involvement is not clear.
Perhaps Stark's political orientation can be distilled from one of his few known influences: Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress:
"He saw it as a revolutionary 'handbook', every bit as inspirational as the writings of Che Guevara. Heinlein's novel, a hard-boiled political fairytale set in the year 2075, is about a penal colony on the Moon. The million inhabitants - who are housed in huge domes containing artificial atmospheres - are either Earth deportees or their descendents. They cannot return because once their bodies adapt to the Moon's gravity they can never readapt to the gravity of Earth. This lunar prison is brutally administered by a United Nations-appointed governor, who the revolutionaries try to overthrow. One of them, a character called 'the Prof', explains:
'...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications.'
The conspiracy starts with three eople... these three in turn recruit two other people to form three new cells. This recruitment process continues until a large network of cells is built up. The advantage of the structure is that if cell members do not know each other's sub-cells, then they cannot give them away if captured. The drawback is that if a single cadre is arrested and cannot resist interrogation, then the enemy can arrest the half-a-dozen comrades he or she knows and thus reach the sub-cells. This, it becomes possible for the authorities to break the revolutionaries' chain of command and communications.
A more sophisticated system discussed in Heinlein's book is a pyramid-of-pyramids setup - a sort of 'Internet' without the computers:
'Where vertices are common, each bloke knows one in an an adjoining cell... Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net.'
Damage can be stemmed and repaired because the cell member who discovers a breach in the network can pass warnings without having to know who receives the messages.
The notion of revolutionary organisation as an imitation of a 'natural' and 'organic' hierarchy is not new. Historically, August Blanqui, the most accomplished revolutionary conspirator in 19th century France, had very similar ideas about revolutionary organisation. In Heinlein's futuristic vision, however, the notion is given a neat twist: the conspiracy is helped by a miraculous super-computer, which is so powerful and complex that it 'wakes up' and becomes 'self-conscious'. The computer develops a sense of 'humour' about the 'stupidity' of the colonial administration, plus a 'rational will' to overthrow them.
The conspirators use the computer to set up front companies and fraudulently appropriate funds on the terrestrial stock exchanges. They then use the money to set up secret facilities for development of revolutionary war technology. In this scenario, then Big Brother's Brain, a scientific rationality, can be detached from ruling class control and harnessed to the revolution.
As a 'rational anarchist', the Prof believes that the concept of the State has no existence except as 'physicall exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.' This implies that collaboration with the state is justifiable as a disguise within the strategy of systematic deception of everyone apart from those who are required to be 'in the know' for particular functions.
Stark's keen interest in these ideas is perhaps a pointer to his modus operandi. And if he really did think of himself as a revolutionary who could make use of state agencies and capitalist technology on his own terms, he was not unique in the history of politics. In the 1840's, Pierre Proudhon, a founding father of French socialism (and opponent of Blanqui), dismissed the problem of secret police spies and provocateurs in his movement. Such actions, he claimed, were 'irrelevant' to someone such as himself: a 'new man... whose style is not the barricades but discussion, a man who could sit at a table with the chief of police each evening and take all the spies in the world into his confidence.'
In Ron Stark's case, operating very much in the 20th century, political activism went far beyond discussion. Whilst he could sit at all sorts of tables, he had a certain liking for barricades as well.' (p. 149-151)
In a more base sense, the highly intelligent Stark was probably just having quite a bit of fun: between leading his jet set lifestyle (which included a Manhattan apartment replete with original Picasso paintings), setting up front companies to facilitate the manufacture of LSD, and inhabiting a social milieu replete with the most colorful "characters" that one could imagine, his life was certainly worthy of fiction. Stark was clearly motivated by profit, but if he could justify his actions with idealism, then all the better. Idealism mixed with lucre finds its most potent expression in the drug ideologue: yes, he's helping people find God, but he's also a capitalist.
What follows is Black's own synopsis of the book from Lobster Magazine:
Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist
David Black
Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British 'microdot conspiracy' had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick 'Leapy' Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of 'Julie', Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing them by the powers-that-be. One major player he was especially interested in, New Yorker Ronald Stark, was suspected of having CIA connections.
Ron Stark (1938-84) was first convicted in 1962 for making a false job application for government service and imprisoned for parole violation. Between 1967, when his net wealth was recorded as $3000, and 1968, Stark somehow became a millionaire and moved to a flash residence in Greenwich Village. To some he claimed he to be the scion of the super-rich Whitney family; to others he was the son of a rich bi-chemist. Stark spoke of having studied biochemistry at various Ivy League universities and of having quit a top secret post at the Department of Defense during the Kennedy administration because the work 'disgusted' him. One scientist who knew Stark says he claimed to have been attached to the CIA 'mind control' project - later revealed as MKULTRA.(1)
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)
The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production,when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)
The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protg, Tim Skully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.(4)
Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.
Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)
In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)
When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)
When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realising how big the business had become.
The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)
Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)
An Inspector Lee calls
In November 1974 Inspector 'Leapy' Lee,(11) who had been running Operation STUFF (Stop Unlawful Free Festivals) in Thames Valley, began to have doubts about the official view on LSD use. According to the Home Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that 'the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people'. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who 'denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem'. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that 'since 1970 an illicit organization had been manufacturing around 20,000,000 tiny LSD tablets [a year] and selling them to two-thirds of the world'.(12)
After his arrest in 1977, Richard Kemp insisted that all of the links between the British networks and the BEL had been broken in 1970. 'Leapy' Lee, however, knew that Ron Stark had passed through London in Spring 1973 while on the run from US authorities and had obtained a false passport here.(13) Lee wanted to find out more but was blocked from on high; possibly, he suspected, to prevent questions arising as to why action hadn't been taken years earlier. He had learned that the Home Office drugs inspectorate had submitted a report as early as 1971 which noted the exports of tartrate to America from Britain and furthermore suggested that LSD microdots seized across the world 'originated from one common source which, in all probability, was somewhere in Britain.'
First hints of the Welsh connection
In Spring 1975, when evidence began to point towards an LSD supply source in Wales, Lee learned that the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit had been withholding information from him on 'a number of leads pointing to an LSD conspiracy in the United Kingdom....the information had been withheld from all drug squads except the Metropolitan.' Lee learned that a year previously Dectective Inspectors Godfrey and O'Hanlon of the CDIU had travelled to Canada to hear Kemp's former tableteer, Gerry Thomas, name Kemp, Bott and Solomon as LSD con-spirators. On returning, O'Hanlon was suspended and subsequently sentenced to eight years imprisonment for corruption. D.I. Godfrey did initiate an investigation of a trip by Solomon to Switzerland to meet Leary; but, in Lee's words, the Met then 'botched' a raid on Solomon's London home and missed some documents he had concerning Leary's secret negotiations over a contract for his book On the Run. Godfrey and CDIU lost track of Richard Kemp and Christine Bott.(14)
Lee discovered that an investigation as far back as 1971 had been getting near the truth but had collapsed when the gang under surveillance by the Thames Valley Squad and Customs were robbed of money and drugs by officers of the Met.! According to Detective Constable Martyn Pritchard of the Julie squad, the 1971 investigation did reveal enough to register suspicions 'that a big LSD factory was in business.'(15)
Cue the spooks
That the security services regarded LSD as an issue of 'national security' was confirmed when Lee began to follow leads on Ron Stark and discovered that the security services had been on the trail before him. When Lee went to see the security services about the loan of some high-tech surveillance equipment, he briefed them on 'the suspected international level of LSD trafficking and, more particularly, the probable involvement of terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof and the Angry Brigade'. Lee had noticed that the network he was investigating had 'a cell-like structure similar to that used by terrorist groups'. Lee was referring to the system of pre-arranged meetings places and dead letter-box drops in tins buried under trees to deliver the LSD to the distributors and collect payment.(16)
Lee had begun to suspect terrorist connections when, during surveillance of the Let-It-Be Commune in Wiltshire, a car used by a dealer suspected of working for the LSD network turned out to have been 'linked' in some (unspecified) way to the West German Red Army faction. A check on an associate of the distribution network in Wales showed him to be 'an associate of the Angry Brigade'. Although none of those arrested in Operation Julie were charged with political offences, the supposed 'terrorist connection' did emerge in the pre-trial press coverage. The Daily Mirror ran a piece on how Kemp and his colleagues were 'allegedly' preparing to put LSD into the water supply.(17) Documents from police files on the defendants' alleged political views were also circulated to the media. Richard Kemp, for example, was described as a 'left-wing revolutionary ... his motive for suspected acid activity: a catalyst of British revolution by youth brought on by the use of LSD'. Kemp told the police that he had supported festivals such as Windsor and Glastonbury and had given money to Release, the drugs legal help-line, and had supported 'Head politics' (but refused to name which groups).(18)
In fact the only drug dealers of an significance during this period with terrorist 'connections' of whom we know were Howard Marks - through the maverick Irish 'republican' Jim McCann - and Ron Stark. According to Tendler and May's book on the BEL, FBI reports passed on to the DEA in California and to the British police 'only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was'. Inspector Lee's informant, 'Nancy', 'strongly suspected that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19)
In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the IRA had rejected McCann's efforts to involve them in drugs and that he was using his contacts with republican activists to boost his credibility as a smuggler.(20) Macmillan's scheme went awry when Marks decided to let McCann in on the secret of his 'deal' with MI6. (MI6's admitted involvement later sank the prosecutions of both men.) When the police learned of Marks' operation after his disappearance in 1974, they suspected that until 1973 he had been dealing with the BEL, and from then on with its remnants.
Ron Stark was not far from Marks' and McCann's scene. In 1971 McCann had taken two American journalists from the London-based 'head' magazine, Frendz, to Belfast, and, while showing them round, tried to fire-bomb Queens University and got them all arrested and charged. It was one of the Americans, Alan Marcuson, who subsequently put McCann in touch with Marks through another old Oxford friend, Graham Plinston.(21) In London, Stark, who was sniffing around radical circles, contacted the solicitor representing the American pair. He expressed some interest in McCann and promised financial support, which never came to anything.(22) Stark was thus poking his nose into the Marks-McCann operation nearly two years before MI6's Macmillan recruited Howard Marks.
The questions asked but not answered
Stark was in prison in Italy in 1977 when Macmillan was posted to the British Embassy in Rome. Macmillan would have been in an ideal position at the MI6 station there to help Lee obtain the documents seized by the Italian police when they arrested Stark in 1975.(23) But the papers didn't arrive until a year after Lee made the request, by which time his investigation was being wound up. Stark's papers included formulas for the synthesis of LSD and THC, some of which were identical to Kemp's; documents on the BEL's tartrate dealings in England; letters to Stark at his laboratory in Belgium from Charles Adams, an 'economic counsellor' at the American embassy in London; and draft letters from Stark to Wendy Hansen, American vice-counsel in Florence which discussed the possibility of a coup in Italy (for which, he said, conditions, were not yet ripe).(24)
This raises this question: if Stark, the catalyst of the British LSD explosion, was an American asset, would his agency have allowed him to break the law and endanger the national security of America's most senior partner in NATO? The answer might be 'yes' if the agency had a joint covert operation with their British counterparts - say in the area of 'counter-terrorism' - which was important enough to justify the risks. Stark was in prison in Italy from 1975-79 following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. But he rubbed shoulders in prison with leading members of the Red Brigades, while maintaining contact with secret intelligence agencies on the outside. He is suspected by some of involvement in the Moro kidnapping.
In 1979 Stark appealed against his 14 year sentence. According to the judge who granted him bail and thus allowed him to flee Italy, 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' suggested 'that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services' and had 'entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organizations operating in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups' - a statement which raises as many questions as it answers.(25)
Notes
1. Stewart Tendler and David May, Brotherhood of Eternal Love- From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia; the Story of the LSD Counterculture, Panther, London 1984 pp. 174-5; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, Groven Weidenfeld, New York, 1985 p. 249; Martin A. Lee, 'Rasputin of LSD' in National Reporter, Fall 1988;Dick Lee and Colin Pratt, Operation Julie, W.H. Allen, London 1978 p. 71
2. Tendler and May, op. cit. pp. 174-5
3. Lee and Shlain op. cit. p. 248
4. Lee and Shlain op. cit. pp. 245-6; Tendler and May op. cit. p. 160. See also Timothy Leary's Flashbacks - an Autobiography, 1983.
5. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 350; Tendler and May op. cit. pp. 177-82. Lee and Shlain (p. 288) mistakenly credit Kemp rather than Stark with having produced the kilo Stark took to Idlywild. In fact Stark and Kemp barely met and didn't begin working together on LSD until the end of 1969.
6. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 377
7. Tendler and May op. cit .p. 186; Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 337
8. Ibid. p. 50
9. Tendler and May op. cit. p. 230
10. Ibid. pp. 171
11. For those without a detailed memory of pop trivia, a 'Leapy Lee' had one hit record in Britain around this time. Hence Lee's nickname.
12. Lee and Pratt op. cit. pp. 12-18
13. Ibid. p. 290
14. Ibid p. 47. See also Cox, Shirley and Short, The Fall of Scotland Yard, Penguin, 1977.
15. Martyn Pritchard and Ed Laxton, Busted!, Mirror Books, London, 1978
16. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 100
17. The Leveller April 1978
18. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 290.
19. Ibid p. 337
20. David Leigh, High Times, Heinemann, London 1984, p. 68
21. Ibid. pp. 40-50
22. Tendler and May, op. cit. p. 274
23. Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action, Brandon, Kerry, Ireland, 1983, pp. 223-5 and 258
24. Lee and Pratt op. cit p. 334; Philip Willan, The Puppet-Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, Constable, London, 199, p. 312.
25. Willan, op. cit.p. 309; Lee and Shalin op. cit. p. 281; Martin A. Lee in National Reporter, Fall 1988
"For laundering, [Bill] Hitchcock used the facilities offered by the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, where he already had a private account at the Castle Bank and Trust. This laundromat [Castle Bank and Trust] for Mafia narcotics trafficking had been co-founded by Edward Halliwell, a CIA asset involved in Air America and Civil Air Transport. These 'airlines' were agency front companies for flying heroin around the Burma Triangle to bankroll covert operations in Indo-China. He made arrangements for the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love, the Californian LSD manufacturing/trafficking organization described in Tendler and May's book of the same name] at Resorts International, a conduit for huge amounts of Mafia money, and at the Fiduciary Trust Company, an offshoot of Investors Overseas Services, headed by the notorious and crooked financier Bernie Cornfeld." (p. 18)
And what about Bernie Cornfeld? Nothing less than sugar daddy to Heidi Fleiss: you can quickly see how this nebulous web of synchronicity starts to add up.
The implications present in Black's book reach to the highest echelons of political power: not only does Black detail the complete history of the CIA's experimentation with LSD in its covert MK-ULTRA project, but we learn that John F. Kennedy's implied mistress, Mary Pinchot, was "turning on" a lot of higher-ups in Washington, D.c. with LSD supplied by Timothy Leary. When Kennedy was assassinated, Pinchot allegedly phoned Leary in a panicked state and said, 'they couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast... They've covered everything up." (p. 61). In October 1964, Pinchot was shot to death in a Georgetown apartment in what appeared to be a "professional hit."
The linchpin of Black's book, however, is the "international man of mystery" Ronald Stark. Stark's involvement with LSD trafficking began in the summer of 1969, when he approached the "hippie mafia" the Brotherhood of Eternal Love with an offer to bankroll their activities:
"In his talks with the Brotherhood, Stark impressed them with his knowledge of scams: smuggling drugs in consignments of Japanese electrical equipment, his use of business fronts in West Africa, and moving money through a maze of shell companies set up by his lawyers on various continents.
However, [Stark] projected himself as interested in a lot more than money. He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics. He intimated, for example, that he had contacts with the Tibetan freedom fighters loyal to the Dalai Lama and with the Japanese Mafia who could help smuggle LSD into Tibet and dose the Chinese occupiers... however, the Idylwild hippies could not have possibly guessed that Ron Stark operated on four continents and compartmentalized his international activities so that those he did business with - be they American hippies, Lebanese warlords, corporate lawyers, British scientists, Japanese Mafioso or Italian train-bombers - would have little knowledge of his 'other' activities. He could speak ten languages fluently and had the 'bottle' [of LSD], cunning, charm, and knowledge to pass himself off in various situations as a businessman, chemist, doctor, art collector, drug dealer, political activist and even as a Palestinian guerilla." (p. 20-21)
Ronald Stark
One of the most interesting sections of the book details Stark's involvement with the "acid gang" responsible for the production of most of the UK's LSD during the 1970's. "Operation Julie" eventually brought the gang down, but the story behind this operation is interesting in its own right. Of all of the characters in Black's book, only the "Julie" chemists Richard Kemp and Christine Bott are as intriguing as Stark: Kemp, once described as a "one in a million brainiac" by a fellow prison inmate, was a Cambridge-educated chemist and left-wing radical who hoped that LSD would inspire societal revolution. Kemp and Bott believed "...industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves." Kemp was also responsible for a dramatic breakthrough in LSD manufacture, which was responsible for the "Julie" acid being the cleanest and strongest ever seen on a large scale in the UK.
The web of synchronicity deepens yet again when Kemp's association with the famed DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick is revealed:
"Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD."
It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration."
Like Kemp, Stark remains an enigmatic figure throughout the book, and we never get much more than speculation as to who he actually is. Was he a CIA asset? Scion of an ultra-wealthy family? Between Stark's connections to radical groups on four continents (a mind-boggling list that includes the Weather Underground and the IRA) it is difficult to imagine that Stark was not an intelligence asset of some sort: he appeared to operate above the law. At the same time, he evidently exhibited some fuzzy political sympathies that definitely leaned in the direction of "One World Universalism." Stark's apparent tendency to latch on to "convenient" causes is all too indicative of someone operating as an agent of an Illuminati-type organization: if he did have a political agenda, it was certainly a bit more obtuse and sophisticated than anything revolving around simple "national liberation". Black also infers that Stark maintained connections to the P-2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, but the extent of his involvement is not clear.
Perhaps Stark's political orientation can be distilled from one of his few known influences: Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress:
"He saw it as a revolutionary 'handbook', every bit as inspirational as the writings of Che Guevara. Heinlein's novel, a hard-boiled political fairytale set in the year 2075, is about a penal colony on the Moon. The million inhabitants - who are housed in huge domes containing artificial atmospheres - are either Earth deportees or their descendents. They cannot return because once their bodies adapt to the Moon's gravity they can never readapt to the gravity of Earth. This lunar prison is brutally administered by a United Nations-appointed governor, who the revolutionaries try to overthrow. One of them, a character called 'the Prof', explains:
'...revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science for the few who are competent to practice it. It depends on correct organisation and above all, on communications.'
The conspiracy starts with three eople... these three in turn recruit two other people to form three new cells. This recruitment process continues until a large network of cells is built up. The advantage of the structure is that if cell members do not know each other's sub-cells, then they cannot give them away if captured. The drawback is that if a single cadre is arrested and cannot resist interrogation, then the enemy can arrest the half-a-dozen comrades he or she knows and thus reach the sub-cells. This, it becomes possible for the authorities to break the revolutionaries' chain of command and communications.
A more sophisticated system discussed in Heinlein's book is a pyramid-of-pyramids setup - a sort of 'Internet' without the computers:
'Where vertices are common, each bloke knows one in an an adjoining cell... Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net.'
Damage can be stemmed and repaired because the cell member who discovers a breach in the network can pass warnings without having to know who receives the messages.
The notion of revolutionary organisation as an imitation of a 'natural' and 'organic' hierarchy is not new. Historically, August Blanqui, the most accomplished revolutionary conspirator in 19th century France, had very similar ideas about revolutionary organisation. In Heinlein's futuristic vision, however, the notion is given a neat twist: the conspiracy is helped by a miraculous super-computer, which is so powerful and complex that it 'wakes up' and becomes 'self-conscious'. The computer develops a sense of 'humour' about the 'stupidity' of the colonial administration, plus a 'rational will' to overthrow them.
The conspirators use the computer to set up front companies and fraudulently appropriate funds on the terrestrial stock exchanges. They then use the money to set up secret facilities for development of revolutionary war technology. In this scenario, then Big Brother's Brain, a scientific rationality, can be detached from ruling class control and harnessed to the revolution.
As a 'rational anarchist', the Prof believes that the concept of the State has no existence except as 'physicall exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals.' This implies that collaboration with the state is justifiable as a disguise within the strategy of systematic deception of everyone apart from those who are required to be 'in the know' for particular functions.
Stark's keen interest in these ideas is perhaps a pointer to his modus operandi. And if he really did think of himself as a revolutionary who could make use of state agencies and capitalist technology on his own terms, he was not unique in the history of politics. In the 1840's, Pierre Proudhon, a founding father of French socialism (and opponent of Blanqui), dismissed the problem of secret police spies and provocateurs in his movement. Such actions, he claimed, were 'irrelevant' to someone such as himself: a 'new man... whose style is not the barricades but discussion, a man who could sit at a table with the chief of police each evening and take all the spies in the world into his confidence.'
In Ron Stark's case, operating very much in the 20th century, political activism went far beyond discussion. Whilst he could sit at all sorts of tables, he had a certain liking for barricades as well.' (p. 149-151)
In a more base sense, the highly intelligent Stark was probably just having quite a bit of fun: between leading his jet set lifestyle (which included a Manhattan apartment replete with original Picasso paintings), setting up front companies to facilitate the manufacture of LSD, and inhabiting a social milieu replete with the most colorful "characters" that one could imagine, his life was certainly worthy of fiction. Stark was clearly motivated by profit, but if he could justify his actions with idealism, then all the better. Idealism mixed with lucre finds its most potent expression in the drug ideologue: yes, he's helping people find God, but he's also a capitalist.
What follows is Black's own synopsis of the book from Lobster Magazine:
Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist
David Black
Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British 'microdot conspiracy' had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick 'Leapy' Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of 'Julie', Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing them by the powers-that-be. One major player he was especially interested in, New Yorker Ronald Stark, was suspected of having CIA connections.
Ron Stark (1938-84) was first convicted in 1962 for making a false job application for government service and imprisoned for parole violation. Between 1967, when his net wealth was recorded as $3000, and 1968, Stark somehow became a millionaire and moved to a flash residence in Greenwich Village. To some he claimed he to be the scion of the super-rich Whitney family; to others he was the son of a rich bi-chemist. Stark spoke of having studied biochemistry at various Ivy League universities and of having quit a top secret post at the Department of Defense during the Kennedy administration because the work 'disgusted' him. One scientist who knew Stark says he claimed to have been attached to the CIA 'mind control' project - later revealed as MKULTRA.(1)
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various 'legit' fronts, by 1969 he had become one of the world's leading suppliers of LSD, produced at his illicit labs in Europe. Stark also plugged himself into the counter-culture. In America he hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BEL), a Californian motorcycle gang who had transformed themselves, under the influence of LSD and the inspiration of Timothy Leary, into a registered 'church'. By 1969, the BEL had a sizeable share of the market for a less godly, but hugely lucrative business, LSD and marijuana.(2)
The BEL were short of materials and the capital investment needed to continue LSD production,when, in August 1969, Ron Stark visited their commune with a large bottle of pure liquid LSD, enough for up to ten million trips, and explained that he needed a secure outlet in the US for the LSD he was producing in Europe. He also declared his intention of facilitating the overthrow of both Western capitalism and Eastern Communism by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people and claimed that he had a contact with the Dalai Lama's Tibetan freedom fighters and could get the Japanese mafia to smuggle LSD to dose the Chinese occupiers.(3)
The authors of Acid Dreams, Martin and Lee and Bruce Shlain, note that Ron Stark's 'fateful appearance at the Idylwild ranch', coincided with certain 'unpleasant changes'. Some of the old guard had to 'retire' after skirmishes with the law, notably Stanley Owsley, the maker of 'Orange Sunshine', his protg, Tim Skully (who had originally wanted to give acid away free), and superbrat, Bill Mellon-Hitchcock, the BEL's money-launderer. Not long after Stark turned up, BEL founder, 'Farmer John' Griggs died of poisoning in circumstances his friends regarded as suspicious.(4)
Stark in Britain
Before clinching the deal with the BEL, Stark had been making some contacts in England among the radical psychiatry movement of R.D. Laing and the Tavistock Institute. One of these was David Solomon, an American researcher and writer on LSD and cannabis. Solomon had been working with Richard Kemp, a drop-out science student, and his partner, Dr. Christine Bott, to synthesize some powerful liquid cannabis. Solomon had also obtained a supply of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, for a shot at LSD production, and Kemp managed to make some at a makeshift lab in Liverpool.
Shortly after meeting Stark in Cambridge in Summer 1969, Solomon invited Kemp to come meet 'a man with a million dollar inheritance'. Stark convened a meeting at the Oxford and Cambridge Club on London's Pall Mall with Kemp, Simon Walton, Stark's Scots assistant, plus Solomon and his friend Paul Arnaboldi (then famous as 'Captain Bounty' in the TV chocolate ad). The Great British LSD Plot was thus hatched within weeks of Stark's first meeting with the Brotherhood in California. Stark also introduced Kemp to the Brotherhood's chemists, Nick Sand and Lester Freidman. Kemp was soon working wonders at Stark's lab in Paris and in the first run turned out a kilo of LSD.(5)
In May 1970 Kemp and Stark, with the BEL's chemists, held talks lasting four days on the future of the 'Atlantic Brotherhood'. Kemp was unhappy. He had been assigned to work on a new project to synthesize THC to make a new brand of liquid cannabis as strong as LSD and as cheap to produce. But money promised was not forthcoming, Stark discouraged visits by Kemp's partner Christine Bott, and Kemp felt 'sexually harassed' by the bi-sexual Stark. Worse, Kemp had been pulled up by British Customs during a trip with Walton from France in Stark's Ferrari to buy equipment. During a search of the car, the Customs had found documentation of a massive purchase of the LSD base, ergotamine tartrate, but failed to see its significance.(6)
When Stark moved his laboratory from Paris to Orleans, he claimed he had been warned about an impending raid on the lab when, 'by chance', he ran into an old pal who worked with the CIA station in London. By this time Kemp had had enough and decided to quit working with Stark. He returned to England in late 1970 and teamed up with Henry Todd, an accountant recruited by David Solomon. In mid-1971, as production began in Britain and the distribution network was being set up, Stark crossed the Channel in one last attempt to dissuade Kemp from branching out independently.(7)
When differences between the 'idealist' Kemp and the 'bread-head' Todd became unresolvable - Todd wanted to dilute the elixir to boost profts - it was decided to split into two independent networks. Todd centred his operation on the Thames Valley, while Kemp and Christine Bott moved out of London to North Wales and set up a lab with Paul Arnaboldi at Plas Llysin near Carno.(8) Amazingly, for the first half of the seventies, the British Acid Underground - thanks to to Stark's role as catalyst - happily churned out hundreds of millions of tabs to satisfied customers, without anyone in authority realising how big the business had become.
The BEL scatters
Following a series of raids on the BEL in America, by early 1973 the authorities estimated that some 20 members were in hiding or in exile - including Stark. Timothy Leary ended up in Afghanistan, after fleeing the US, but the US Embassy evidently knew he was coming and got the Afghan authorities to deport him back to the USA. Ron Stark visited Afghanistan at least once with a plan to set up BEL facilities for making hallucinogenic THC derivative from Afghan hash oil. Thanks to Kemp's efforts, Stark had worked out the first eight of the fourteen stages of the THC synthesis. Stark had a minister of the Afghan regime in his pocket to set up a penicillin factory as a front, and a 'contact' with the US embassy: the BEL's chief hash supplier in Kabul, Aman Tokhi, worked there as a 'maintenance supervisor'.(9)
Stark had taken over Bill Mellon-Hitchock's role in the BEL of money-launderer and procurer of LSD production materials. In 1972 Stark's lawyer in Paris, Sam Goekjian, who had drawn up the charters for Stark's front companies, was investigated by IRS agents and asked about Stark's BEL connections. The DEA, who had just rolled-up much of the BEL network in the US, organised a follow-up raid on Stark's Belgian laboratory on the campus of Louvain le Neuve, near Brussels, but Stark escaped, spiriting away the BEL's investments for his own purposes.(10)
An Inspector Lee calls
In November 1974 Inspector 'Leapy' Lee,(11) who had been running Operation STUFF (Stop Unlawful Free Festivals) in Thames Valley, began to have doubts about the official view on LSD use. According to the Home Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that 'the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people'. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who 'denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem'. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that 'since 1970 an illicit organization had been manufacturing around 20,000,000 tiny LSD tablets [a year] and selling them to two-thirds of the world'.(12)
After his arrest in 1977, Richard Kemp insisted that all of the links between the British networks and the BEL had been broken in 1970. 'Leapy' Lee, however, knew that Ron Stark had passed through London in Spring 1973 while on the run from US authorities and had obtained a false passport here.(13) Lee wanted to find out more but was blocked from on high; possibly, he suspected, to prevent questions arising as to why action hadn't been taken years earlier. He had learned that the Home Office drugs inspectorate had submitted a report as early as 1971 which noted the exports of tartrate to America from Britain and furthermore suggested that LSD microdots seized across the world 'originated from one common source which, in all probability, was somewhere in Britain.'
First hints of the Welsh connection
In Spring 1975, when evidence began to point towards an LSD supply source in Wales, Lee learned that the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit had been withholding information from him on 'a number of leads pointing to an LSD conspiracy in the United Kingdom....the information had been withheld from all drug squads except the Metropolitan.' Lee learned that a year previously Dectective Inspectors Godfrey and O'Hanlon of the CDIU had travelled to Canada to hear Kemp's former tableteer, Gerry Thomas, name Kemp, Bott and Solomon as LSD con-spirators. On returning, O'Hanlon was suspended and subsequently sentenced to eight years imprisonment for corruption. D.I. Godfrey did initiate an investigation of a trip by Solomon to Switzerland to meet Leary; but, in Lee's words, the Met then 'botched' a raid on Solomon's London home and missed some documents he had concerning Leary's secret negotiations over a contract for his book On the Run. Godfrey and CDIU lost track of Richard Kemp and Christine Bott.(14)
Lee discovered that an investigation as far back as 1971 had been getting near the truth but had collapsed when the gang under surveillance by the Thames Valley Squad and Customs were robbed of money and drugs by officers of the Met.! According to Detective Constable Martyn Pritchard of the Julie squad, the 1971 investigation did reveal enough to register suspicions 'that a big LSD factory was in business.'(15)
Cue the spooks
That the security services regarded LSD as an issue of 'national security' was confirmed when Lee began to follow leads on Ron Stark and discovered that the security services had been on the trail before him. When Lee went to see the security services about the loan of some high-tech surveillance equipment, he briefed them on 'the suspected international level of LSD trafficking and, more particularly, the probable involvement of terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof and the Angry Brigade'. Lee had noticed that the network he was investigating had 'a cell-like structure similar to that used by terrorist groups'. Lee was referring to the system of pre-arranged meetings places and dead letter-box drops in tins buried under trees to deliver the LSD to the distributors and collect payment.(16)
Lee had begun to suspect terrorist connections when, during surveillance of the Let-It-Be Commune in Wiltshire, a car used by a dealer suspected of working for the LSD network turned out to have been 'linked' in some (unspecified) way to the West German Red Army faction. A check on an associate of the distribution network in Wales showed him to be 'an associate of the Angry Brigade'. Although none of those arrested in Operation Julie were charged with political offences, the supposed 'terrorist connection' did emerge in the pre-trial press coverage. The Daily Mirror ran a piece on how Kemp and his colleagues were 'allegedly' preparing to put LSD into the water supply.(17) Documents from police files on the defendants' alleged political views were also circulated to the media. Richard Kemp, for example, was described as a 'left-wing revolutionary ... his motive for suspected acid activity: a catalyst of British revolution by youth brought on by the use of LSD'. Kemp told the police that he had supported festivals such as Windsor and Glastonbury and had given money to Release, the drugs legal help-line, and had supported 'Head politics' (but refused to name which groups).(18)
In fact the only drug dealers of an significance during this period with terrorist 'connections' of whom we know were Howard Marks - through the maverick Irish 'republican' Jim McCann - and Ron Stark. According to Tendler and May's book on the BEL, FBI reports passed on to the DEA in California and to the British police 'only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was'. Inspector Lee's informant, 'Nancy', 'strongly suspected that Stark was involved with the CIA and had friends in the American Embassy'.(19)
In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already doing business with McCann, or that he knew Marks' name and address had turned up in the address book of arrested IRA volunteer, Dutch Doherty. (The address had been passed onto Doherty by McCann). MI6 did not appear to realise that the IRA had rejected McCann's efforts to involve them in drugs and that he was using his contacts with republican activists to boost his credibility as a smuggler.(20) Macmillan's scheme went awry when Marks decided to let McCann in on the secret of his 'deal' with MI6. (MI6's admitted involvement later sank the prosecutions of both men.) When the police learned of Marks' operation after his disappearance in 1974, they suspected that until 1973 he had been dealing with the BEL, and from then on with its remnants.
Ron Stark was not far from Marks' and McCann's scene. In 1971 McCann had taken two American journalists from the London-based 'head' magazine, Frendz, to Belfast, and, while showing them round, tried to fire-bomb Queens University and got them all arrested and charged. It was one of the Americans, Alan Marcuson, who subsequently put McCann in touch with Marks through another old Oxford friend, Graham Plinston.(21) In London, Stark, who was sniffing around radical circles, contacted the solicitor representing the American pair. He expressed some interest in McCann and promised financial support, which never came to anything.(22) Stark was thus poking his nose into the Marks-McCann operation nearly two years before MI6's Macmillan recruited Howard Marks.
The questions asked but not answered
Stark was in prison in Italy in 1977 when Macmillan was posted to the British Embassy in Rome. Macmillan would have been in an ideal position at the MI6 station there to help Lee obtain the documents seized by the Italian police when they arrested Stark in 1975.(23) But the papers didn't arrive until a year after Lee made the request, by which time his investigation was being wound up. Stark's papers included formulas for the synthesis of LSD and THC, some of which were identical to Kemp's; documents on the BEL's tartrate dealings in England; letters to Stark at his laboratory in Belgium from Charles Adams, an 'economic counsellor' at the American embassy in London; and draft letters from Stark to Wendy Hansen, American vice-counsel in Florence which discussed the possibility of a coup in Italy (for which, he said, conditions, were not yet ripe).(24)
This raises this question: if Stark, the catalyst of the British LSD explosion, was an American asset, would his agency have allowed him to break the law and endanger the national security of America's most senior partner in NATO? The answer might be 'yes' if the agency had a joint covert operation with their British counterparts - say in the area of 'counter-terrorism' - which was important enough to justify the risks. Stark was in prison in Italy from 1975-79 following his involvement with a gang of drug-dealing fascist terrorists. But he rubbed shoulders in prison with leading members of the Red Brigades, while maintaining contact with secret intelligence agencies on the outside. He is suspected by some of involvement in the Moro kidnapping.
In 1979 Stark appealed against his 14 year sentence. According to the judge who granted him bail and thus allowed him to flee Italy, 'an impressive series of scrupulously enumerated proofs' suggested 'that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services' and had 'entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate armed organizations operating in that area and gain contacts and information about European terrorist groups' - a statement which raises as many questions as it answers.(25)
Notes
1. Stewart Tendler and David May, Brotherhood of Eternal Love- From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia; the Story of the LSD Counterculture, Panther, London 1984 pp. 174-5; Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, Groven Weidenfeld, New York, 1985 p. 249; Martin A. Lee, 'Rasputin of LSD' in National Reporter, Fall 1988;Dick Lee and Colin Pratt, Operation Julie, W.H. Allen, London 1978 p. 71
2. Tendler and May, op. cit. pp. 174-5
3. Lee and Shlain op. cit. p. 248
4. Lee and Shlain op. cit. pp. 245-6; Tendler and May op. cit. p. 160. See also Timothy Leary's Flashbacks - an Autobiography, 1983.
5. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 350; Tendler and May op. cit. pp. 177-82. Lee and Shlain (p. 288) mistakenly credit Kemp rather than Stark with having produced the kilo Stark took to Idlywild. In fact Stark and Kemp barely met and didn't begin working together on LSD until the end of 1969.
6. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 377
7. Tendler and May op. cit .p. 186; Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 337
8. Ibid. p. 50
9. Tendler and May op. cit. p. 230
10. Ibid. pp. 171
11. For those without a detailed memory of pop trivia, a 'Leapy Lee' had one hit record in Britain around this time. Hence Lee's nickname.
12. Lee and Pratt op. cit. pp. 12-18
13. Ibid. p. 290
14. Ibid p. 47. See also Cox, Shirley and Short, The Fall of Scotland Yard, Penguin, 1977.
15. Martyn Pritchard and Ed Laxton, Busted!, Mirror Books, London, 1978
16. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 100
17. The Leveller April 1978
18. Lee and Pratt op. cit. p. 290.
19. Ibid p. 337
20. David Leigh, High Times, Heinemann, London 1984, p. 68
21. Ibid. pp. 40-50
22. Tendler and May, op. cit. p. 274
23. Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, British Intelligence and Covert Action, Brandon, Kerry, Ireland, 1983, pp. 223-5 and 258
24. Lee and Pratt op. cit p. 334; Philip Willan, The Puppet-Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, Constable, London, 199, p. 312.
25. Willan, op. cit.p. 309; Lee and Shalin op. cit. p. 281; Martin A. Lee in National Reporter, Fall 1988
Weekend Edition July 1-3, 2011
Brotherhood of Acid - Orange Sunshine and the Sixties, by RON JACOBS
The popular history of the 1960s includes a number of stories that are rife with rumor and unsubstantiated tales. From the possibility of conspiracies that killed two Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the rumors begun by a college student in 1969 that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, the period was an amalgamation of truths and exaggerations. Its history is the same even today.
One of the groups whose history has been always shrouded in mystery is the Laguna Beach, California-based spiritual and drug operation known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Intimately connected to acid guru Timothy Leary and–through circumstance, LSD and money–the Weather Underground and Grateful Dead, this band of Southern California street toughs took LSD and became proselytizers for a new world based on love and spirituality. Their story was the subject of many a stoned conversation, DEA report, and partially informed newspaper article. Given the fact that the folks involved in the Brotherhood were smuggling, manufacturing and distributing illegal substances, it’s easy to understand why no members wanted to talk about the group.
Investigative reporter Nicholas Schou has changed all that. In his recently published book Orange Sunshine: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Mr. Schou provides the most complete history of this 1960s phenomenon to date. Based on numerous interviews, research, and driven by an apparently intense interest in the subject matter, the story told in Orange Sunshine captures the idealistic beginnings of the Brotherhood and its disintegration into just another drug operation with guns, egos and greed.
While reading Schou’s book, one can feel the genuine desire of the group’s founders to change the world through marijuana, LSD, and an alternative way of living outside of the technological suburban nightmare they perceived all around them. The transformation of these founders from pot dealers, addicts, street toughs and surfers who obtained their first acid by robbing a Hollywood personality at gunpoint to a group led by John Griggs– a man Timothy Leary called the holiest man in the world– reads like a novel under Schou’s pen. So are the story’s next chapters as the Brotherhood develops a scheme to smuggle hashish from Afghanistan into the United States and use the profits to set up a utopia in the canyons of southern California, manufacture Orange Sunshine LSD and turn on the world.
About That Orange Sunshine
During its heyday, rumors about Orange Sunshine were as rampant as rumors about Bob Dylan playing at Woodstock. Some were true and some you just hoped were true.
The second time I ever ate acid was in 1971 and the source was a friend of mine who had gone to boarding school in New England and then come to Germany to stay with his parents (who worked for some US corporation). It was a summer afternoon in Gruneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main. My friend took out a little leather bag and produced two orange wafer thin tablets and a piece of green blotter paper that had a drawing of the R. Crumb character Mr. Natural on it.
The orange tabs, this guy began, are Orange Sunshine made by a guy in California who used to be Owsley’s apprentice. You only need half a tab.
In what was probably one of the saner decisions I ever made when it came to LSD, I took his advice and only ate half a tab. Then the melting began.
My buddy R saw the Grateful Dead in 1971 at the shows that would later be culled into the Skullfuck album and insisted until his death that people on the stage at the Fillmore East were shooting balls of paper with Orange Sunshine tablets into the audience.
Even the Village Voice got into the Orange Sunshine circle when it ran an article in the spring of 1971 about a guy who went by the name of Sunshine John. It seems John was somehow connected to the Brotherhood and, as part of its mission to spread Orange Sunshine around the world, was one of its primary distributors on the US east coast. According to the story (and Schou, as well), there was an acid drought in late 1968 because of the arrests of the primary US manufacturers of the drug. Then, along came Orange Sunshine. Tens of thousands of hits began to appear on the streets, at rock concerts and in rural communes. Most of them were given away for free as part of the Brotherhood’s mission to spread peace, love, and acid. As the experiences related above make clear, the acid continued to be manufactured and distributed well into 1971 at least.
The Beginning of the End
Naturally, all this LSD drew the attention of the authorities. Until the early 1970s, most of the anti-narcotics work concerning the brotherhood had been carried out by local police in Laguna Beach. One officer in particular, Nicholas Purcell, was behind most of the arrests and harassment of the Brotherhood and those who distributed its acid and hashish. With the intensification of the war on drugs under Richard Nixon’s White House, Purcell and his cohorts were able to involve California and federal agencies in their mission to destroy the Brotherhood.
Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued to smuggle marijuana products and distribute LSD. Simultaneously many of them were moving to Maui after the ranch in the canyons was raided and Timothy Leary was arrested and their leader John Griggs overdosed on synthetic psylocibin. In addition, the mission to spread peace and love via LSD was foundering. Like so many other spiritually-inclined endeavors, when the Brotherhood lost their spiritual leader, the mission became confused by the more earthly desires of some of those next in line.
Egos and easy money transformed enough of those involved into just another bunch of drug dealers with guns and cocaine. Drugs, too, had ceased to serve a liberatory function. After those first few years of revelation and communion, they were now often just crutches or, even worse, tools of the oppressor.
I knew this when acid and pot dealers I knew began considering guns a necessary tool of the profession. When old-time hippies who had always considered themselves providers of a sacrament began thinking only in terms of dollars, the signs of decay were there. Greed became the watchword for some of its biggest dealers and cynicism replaced the hopes of just a few years earlier. To borrow a phrase popular at the time, like so much of the counterculture, the Brotherhood had become part of the over-the-counterculture. It had succumbed to the all powerful capitalist god of cash.
The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is simultaneously the story of the southern California 1960s counterculture and a metaphor for the phenomenon in its entirety. The story of Orange Sunshine LSD could easily be the story of the later years of the 1960s US counterculture. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that money, ego, and law enforcement trumped everything else in that period known as the Sixties in America, despite the most positive intentions. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/01/orange-sunshine-and-the-sixties/
Brotherhood of Acid - Orange Sunshine and the Sixties, by RON JACOBS
The popular history of the 1960s includes a number of stories that are rife with rumor and unsubstantiated tales. From the possibility of conspiracies that killed two Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to the rumors begun by a college student in 1969 that Beatle Paul McCartney was dead, the period was an amalgamation of truths and exaggerations. Its history is the same even today.
One of the groups whose history has been always shrouded in mystery is the Laguna Beach, California-based spiritual and drug operation known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Intimately connected to acid guru Timothy Leary and–through circumstance, LSD and money–the Weather Underground and Grateful Dead, this band of Southern California street toughs took LSD and became proselytizers for a new world based on love and spirituality. Their story was the subject of many a stoned conversation, DEA report, and partially informed newspaper article. Given the fact that the folks involved in the Brotherhood were smuggling, manufacturing and distributing illegal substances, it’s easy to understand why no members wanted to talk about the group.
Investigative reporter Nicholas Schou has changed all that. In his recently published book Orange Sunshine: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, Mr. Schou provides the most complete history of this 1960s phenomenon to date. Based on numerous interviews, research, and driven by an apparently intense interest in the subject matter, the story told in Orange Sunshine captures the idealistic beginnings of the Brotherhood and its disintegration into just another drug operation with guns, egos and greed.
While reading Schou’s book, one can feel the genuine desire of the group’s founders to change the world through marijuana, LSD, and an alternative way of living outside of the technological suburban nightmare they perceived all around them. The transformation of these founders from pot dealers, addicts, street toughs and surfers who obtained their first acid by robbing a Hollywood personality at gunpoint to a group led by John Griggs– a man Timothy Leary called the holiest man in the world– reads like a novel under Schou’s pen. So are the story’s next chapters as the Brotherhood develops a scheme to smuggle hashish from Afghanistan into the United States and use the profits to set up a utopia in the canyons of southern California, manufacture Orange Sunshine LSD and turn on the world.
About That Orange Sunshine
During its heyday, rumors about Orange Sunshine were as rampant as rumors about Bob Dylan playing at Woodstock. Some were true and some you just hoped were true.
The second time I ever ate acid was in 1971 and the source was a friend of mine who had gone to boarding school in New England and then come to Germany to stay with his parents (who worked for some US corporation). It was a summer afternoon in Gruneburg Park in Frankfurt am Main. My friend took out a little leather bag and produced two orange wafer thin tablets and a piece of green blotter paper that had a drawing of the R. Crumb character Mr. Natural on it.
The orange tabs, this guy began, are Orange Sunshine made by a guy in California who used to be Owsley’s apprentice. You only need half a tab.
In what was probably one of the saner decisions I ever made when it came to LSD, I took his advice and only ate half a tab. Then the melting began.
My buddy R saw the Grateful Dead in 1971 at the shows that would later be culled into the Skullfuck album and insisted until his death that people on the stage at the Fillmore East were shooting balls of paper with Orange Sunshine tablets into the audience.
Even the Village Voice got into the Orange Sunshine circle when it ran an article in the spring of 1971 about a guy who went by the name of Sunshine John. It seems John was somehow connected to the Brotherhood and, as part of its mission to spread Orange Sunshine around the world, was one of its primary distributors on the US east coast. According to the story (and Schou, as well), there was an acid drought in late 1968 because of the arrests of the primary US manufacturers of the drug. Then, along came Orange Sunshine. Tens of thousands of hits began to appear on the streets, at rock concerts and in rural communes. Most of them were given away for free as part of the Brotherhood’s mission to spread peace, love, and acid. As the experiences related above make clear, the acid continued to be manufactured and distributed well into 1971 at least.
The Beginning of the End
Naturally, all this LSD drew the attention of the authorities. Until the early 1970s, most of the anti-narcotics work concerning the brotherhood had been carried out by local police in Laguna Beach. One officer in particular, Nicholas Purcell, was behind most of the arrests and harassment of the Brotherhood and those who distributed its acid and hashish. With the intensification of the war on drugs under Richard Nixon’s White House, Purcell and his cohorts were able to involve California and federal agencies in their mission to destroy the Brotherhood.
Meanwhile, the Brotherhood continued to smuggle marijuana products and distribute LSD. Simultaneously many of them were moving to Maui after the ranch in the canyons was raided and Timothy Leary was arrested and their leader John Griggs overdosed on synthetic psylocibin. In addition, the mission to spread peace and love via LSD was foundering. Like so many other spiritually-inclined endeavors, when the Brotherhood lost their spiritual leader, the mission became confused by the more earthly desires of some of those next in line.
Egos and easy money transformed enough of those involved into just another bunch of drug dealers with guns and cocaine. Drugs, too, had ceased to serve a liberatory function. After those first few years of revelation and communion, they were now often just crutches or, even worse, tools of the oppressor.
I knew this when acid and pot dealers I knew began considering guns a necessary tool of the profession. When old-time hippies who had always considered themselves providers of a sacrament began thinking only in terms of dollars, the signs of decay were there. Greed became the watchword for some of its biggest dealers and cynicism replaced the hopes of just a few years earlier. To borrow a phrase popular at the time, like so much of the counterculture, the Brotherhood had become part of the over-the-counterculture. It had succumbed to the all powerful capitalist god of cash.
The story of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is simultaneously the story of the southern California 1960s counterculture and a metaphor for the phenomenon in its entirety. The story of Orange Sunshine LSD could easily be the story of the later years of the 1960s US counterculture. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that money, ego, and law enforcement trumped everything else in that period known as the Sixties in America, despite the most positive intentions. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/01/orange-sunshine-and-the-sixties/
The Journey Out And In-
Going Out
You are now about to begin the "Great Adventure", the journey out of your mind. You will travel far beyond familiar reality into the level of transcendent awareness. You will leave behind you your Ego, your beloved "personality", which will be returned to you at the end of this voyage. The goal of this trip is ecstasy, to move outside the boundaries of normal perception and consciousness into the far reaches of your nervous system. As you begin this journey, it is important to remember the following basic trusts and beliefs. You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is an infinite range of awareness's for which we now have no words. That awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity. Beyond everything you have learned. Beyond your notions of space and time. Beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them. You must remember that throughout human history, millions have made this voyage. A few. whom we call mystics saints or Buddhas, have made this experience endure and have communicated it to their fellow men. You must remember too, that the experience is safe. At the very worst, you will end up the same person who entered this experience. All the dangers which you have feared are unnecessary productions of your own mind. Whether you experience Heaven or Hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them. Avoid grasping the one or fleeing the other. You must maintain faith and trust in the potentiality of your own nervous system and the billion year old life process. With your Ego left behind you, your brain can't go wrong. Try to keep the memory of a revered teacher or a trusted friend whose name can serve as guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain, trust your traveling companions. Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream."
In order for your consciousness to flow beyond the confines of the normal body-ego it is necessary to undo the bonds which chain you to the external world. To dissolve the imprints which your neurological camera has been carrying around. In other words, it is necessary to eliminate 5 major obstacles to a peaceful dying of the ego: Anxiety, Desire, Anger, Doubt, and Inertia. Eliminate anxious restlessness, avoid unnecessary moving and talking. Instead maintain a calm relaxed awareness, keeping your body, your feelings and intellect still like a quiet pool of water. Eliminate all selfish wishes and desires. There is no room for wants or needs in the state of ego transcendence. Instead, adopt an attitude of joyous acceptance of anything that might occur. An affirmation of the energy process which will sweep you along. Eliminate any anger or ill-will or irritation that you may feel towards anyone because this will prevent letting go and tend to produce a negative experience. Instead, meditate on love and trust towards everyone, especially your traveling companions on this "cosmic journey". Eliminate doubt and suspicious skepticism. A negative attitude will hold you back. Instead, meditate with serine confidence on the unimagined potentials of your nervous system and try to make contact with the basic "life-source" that is within you. Finally, eliminate inertia and laziness. Maintain a state of calm alertness, ready at any moment to move your attention from one focus to another, ready to recognize the stages of the experience as you pass in and out of them.
There are three main stages in this voyage. The first, and most profound, is called the experience of the "Clear Light", or "The Void". Here you merge completely with the basic energy process. There are no thoughts, no images, no hallucinations. No pleasure or fear. No "I" to experience. The drop of water merged with the ocean. There is energy, light, flow. The network of process. You are gone. All boundaries dissolved. The second, and longest phase is called the period of hallucination, of "game" visions and revelations. A part of your ego has reasserted itself and the multitude of sounds, images and thoughts are created and dissipated at fantastic speed. Both Heaven and Hell, Paradise or torture may be experienced. Both come from you. the third phase is that of reentry, or "rebirth" or re-imprinting where your ego strives to return to the body to rebuild its familiar everyday reality.
As you reach unimagined levels of awareness try to remember these three stages and try to recognize where you are. Do not attempt to control or rationalize the experience. Let it flow and enjoy the process. You will be returning soon enough, all to soon. There is plenty of time for figuring it all out later. Turn your attention to your body. Try to become conscious of every cell in your body. Notice how various unusual sensations are pulsating through your limbs. The flow of the energy process may cause your body to tremble or to feel hot or cold or to feel pressure in your head. Just as a space ship passes through the earths atmosphere and is subjected to unusual pressures before it can fly freely through space, so your consciousness when separating from the physical frame of reference may cause you to experience various unusual bodily sensations. These are the landmarks of the transition points of consciousness. They are no cause for alarm. Actually, they can be enjoyed with delight and pleasure. Become one with the trembling and the pulsing. Use it to get out of yourself. Die consciously.
There are many ways in which ego-death may be experienced. You may dissolve like liquid. Or melt like wax. Or shatter like broken glass. Or fragment like a mosaic. Or be pulled to pieces. Or disintegrate into vibrations of pure energy. Let happen what ever happens. Don't struggle or try to control. Accept. Enjoy. Merge. Exalt. Glorify. Glorify. Glorify.
The Journey Out And In-
Coming Back
Coming Back. You are now making the return voyage. You are returning to the world of familiar things. This is a crucial period. The things you see and the people around you may still seem different to you. Do not try to rush your reentry. During the next few hours imprints will be formed which will determine how you will see things in the days to come. Be quiet, and careful. Beware of the photographs you are taking now with your neurological camera. Do not expose yourself to distraction.
You may feel that you have super-normal powers, telepathy or clairvoyance. Don't make the mistake of thinking that these powers are yours through merit. They are merely the natural signs that you are in the reentry phase. Recognize where you are. A Zen master said, my greatest miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink. As your spaceship reenters the atmosphere of the planet, pay attention to where you are landing. This is a unique moment of free choice. The chess pieces that comprise your personality can be arranged in myriad different ways. You may yourself, as an artist, develop the games of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate it or enrich it as you please. An endless multiplicity in the games of life. That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy. Again, one can also do all kinds of other things with it: Make a duty of it, or a battleground. or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier.
As you reenter, it is important to remember the affect of your own attitude. Choose consciously. Be aware of where you are going as you return to routine life. Be impartial. Do not reenter into your old robot out of fear. Do not rush back with desire or craving. Be detached. Choose your "new self" freely, consciously.
You have five centers of conscious functioning. Your thinking center will make it's own new imprint. Your feeling center will make it's own new imprint. Your moving center will make it's own new imprint. Your sexual center will make it's new imprint. Your instinctual center will make it's new imprint. The imprints you are now making will govern much of your life in the days to come. The imprints you are now making of other people will remain strong in the days to come. Don't rush, don't grab, don't hold on to any one pattern of thought or feeling.
Two monks were walking near a brook. They met a girl unable to cross. The first monk picked the girl up and carried her over. They continued their walk in silence. That evening the second monk finally turned to his companion and burst out "you know we are forbidden to even look at women, much less touch one. Why did you do that? The first monk replied "I set her down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?"
Try to remain high as long as possible. If you have started to come down already try to regain the transcendence of the earlier most intense period. This will insure a slow gradual reentry. This is a precious opportunity for gaining insight and understanding. Do not waste it by rushing back to your familiar world out of desire or fear. In order to prevent or postpone the return meditate as follows: think of your protective figure or guide as like the reflection of the moon in water, apparent yet nonexistent. Like illusion produced by magic. With this in mind, contemplate the figure tranquilly, then let the visualized form melt away starting at the extremities. Meditate without thinking upon the void clear light.
If you have not found liberation in this session, there is still time. Meditate as follows: The visions and hallucinations which you are now having , indeed all phenomenon, are in their nature illusions. However reality may appear to you, in truth it is unreal. Dreams, apparitions, non-permanent, non-fixed. Do not be attached or afraid of the products of your own mind. If you take these illusory forms for reality you will wander around in this confused existence. They are like dreams, echoes, cities of clouds, mirages, mirrored forms, not real even for one moment. Hold one pointedly to that frame of thought and the belief that your visions are real will be dissipated. The world will glow for you and liberation attained.
A man dreamed he was a butterfly. He woke up and said "Now I do not know whether I am a man who dreams he is a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams he is a man."
Sometime during this period, your space ship may encounter turbulence as it reenters the atmosphere of the earth. You may feel confused and bewildered. You may wonder about your sanity. You may look at your fellow voyagers and friends and sense that they cannot understand you. You may think "I am dead, what shall I do?" and feel great misery like a fish out of water. You may wonder if you will ever regain your normal self. Familiar places, relatives, people known to you appear now as in a dream or through a glass darkly. If you are having such experiences, thinking will be of no avail. So do not struggle to explain. This experience is the natural result of your own mental program. Such feelings are signs that you are in the third or return phase of the session. trust your guide, trust your companions, trust the natural flow of the process. Recognize calmly without distraction.
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where far below another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. two mice, one white, one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
As you return from your psychedelic session, you see spread out before you the world, your former life. A planet full of fascinating possibilities, objects and events. Each aspect of this return voyage can be a delightful discovery. Soon you will be returning to take your place in worldly affairs. The key to reentry is this: Take it easy, slowly, naturally. Enjoy every second. Don't rush. Don't be attached to your old games. Recognize that you are in the reentry period. Everything that you see and touch can glow with radiance. Each moment, a joyous discovery.
Dr. Timothy Leary
from "The Psychedelic Experience"
Millbrook 1966
Going Out
You are now about to begin the "Great Adventure", the journey out of your mind. You will travel far beyond familiar reality into the level of transcendent awareness. You will leave behind you your Ego, your beloved "personality", which will be returned to you at the end of this voyage. The goal of this trip is ecstasy, to move outside the boundaries of normal perception and consciousness into the far reaches of your nervous system. As you begin this journey, it is important to remember the following basic trusts and beliefs. You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is an infinite range of awareness's for which we now have no words. That awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity. Beyond everything you have learned. Beyond your notions of space and time. Beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them. You must remember that throughout human history, millions have made this voyage. A few. whom we call mystics saints or Buddhas, have made this experience endure and have communicated it to their fellow men. You must remember too, that the experience is safe. At the very worst, you will end up the same person who entered this experience. All the dangers which you have feared are unnecessary productions of your own mind. Whether you experience Heaven or Hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them. Avoid grasping the one or fleeing the other. You must maintain faith and trust in the potentiality of your own nervous system and the billion year old life process. With your Ego left behind you, your brain can't go wrong. Try to keep the memory of a revered teacher or a trusted friend whose name can serve as guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain, trust your traveling companions. Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream."
In order for your consciousness to flow beyond the confines of the normal body-ego it is necessary to undo the bonds which chain you to the external world. To dissolve the imprints which your neurological camera has been carrying around. In other words, it is necessary to eliminate 5 major obstacles to a peaceful dying of the ego: Anxiety, Desire, Anger, Doubt, and Inertia. Eliminate anxious restlessness, avoid unnecessary moving and talking. Instead maintain a calm relaxed awareness, keeping your body, your feelings and intellect still like a quiet pool of water. Eliminate all selfish wishes and desires. There is no room for wants or needs in the state of ego transcendence. Instead, adopt an attitude of joyous acceptance of anything that might occur. An affirmation of the energy process which will sweep you along. Eliminate any anger or ill-will or irritation that you may feel towards anyone because this will prevent letting go and tend to produce a negative experience. Instead, meditate on love and trust towards everyone, especially your traveling companions on this "cosmic journey". Eliminate doubt and suspicious skepticism. A negative attitude will hold you back. Instead, meditate with serine confidence on the unimagined potentials of your nervous system and try to make contact with the basic "life-source" that is within you. Finally, eliminate inertia and laziness. Maintain a state of calm alertness, ready at any moment to move your attention from one focus to another, ready to recognize the stages of the experience as you pass in and out of them.
There are three main stages in this voyage. The first, and most profound, is called the experience of the "Clear Light", or "The Void". Here you merge completely with the basic energy process. There are no thoughts, no images, no hallucinations. No pleasure or fear. No "I" to experience. The drop of water merged with the ocean. There is energy, light, flow. The network of process. You are gone. All boundaries dissolved. The second, and longest phase is called the period of hallucination, of "game" visions and revelations. A part of your ego has reasserted itself and the multitude of sounds, images and thoughts are created and dissipated at fantastic speed. Both Heaven and Hell, Paradise or torture may be experienced. Both come from you. the third phase is that of reentry, or "rebirth" or re-imprinting where your ego strives to return to the body to rebuild its familiar everyday reality.
As you reach unimagined levels of awareness try to remember these three stages and try to recognize where you are. Do not attempt to control or rationalize the experience. Let it flow and enjoy the process. You will be returning soon enough, all to soon. There is plenty of time for figuring it all out later. Turn your attention to your body. Try to become conscious of every cell in your body. Notice how various unusual sensations are pulsating through your limbs. The flow of the energy process may cause your body to tremble or to feel hot or cold or to feel pressure in your head. Just as a space ship passes through the earths atmosphere and is subjected to unusual pressures before it can fly freely through space, so your consciousness when separating from the physical frame of reference may cause you to experience various unusual bodily sensations. These are the landmarks of the transition points of consciousness. They are no cause for alarm. Actually, they can be enjoyed with delight and pleasure. Become one with the trembling and the pulsing. Use it to get out of yourself. Die consciously.
There are many ways in which ego-death may be experienced. You may dissolve like liquid. Or melt like wax. Or shatter like broken glass. Or fragment like a mosaic. Or be pulled to pieces. Or disintegrate into vibrations of pure energy. Let happen what ever happens. Don't struggle or try to control. Accept. Enjoy. Merge. Exalt. Glorify. Glorify. Glorify.
The Journey Out And In-
Coming Back
Coming Back. You are now making the return voyage. You are returning to the world of familiar things. This is a crucial period. The things you see and the people around you may still seem different to you. Do not try to rush your reentry. During the next few hours imprints will be formed which will determine how you will see things in the days to come. Be quiet, and careful. Beware of the photographs you are taking now with your neurological camera. Do not expose yourself to distraction.
You may feel that you have super-normal powers, telepathy or clairvoyance. Don't make the mistake of thinking that these powers are yours through merit. They are merely the natural signs that you are in the reentry phase. Recognize where you are. A Zen master said, my greatest miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink. As your spaceship reenters the atmosphere of the planet, pay attention to where you are landing. This is a unique moment of free choice. The chess pieces that comprise your personality can be arranged in myriad different ways. You may yourself, as an artist, develop the games of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate it or enrich it as you please. An endless multiplicity in the games of life. That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy. Again, one can also do all kinds of other things with it: Make a duty of it, or a battleground. or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier.
As you reenter, it is important to remember the affect of your own attitude. Choose consciously. Be aware of where you are going as you return to routine life. Be impartial. Do not reenter into your old robot out of fear. Do not rush back with desire or craving. Be detached. Choose your "new self" freely, consciously.
You have five centers of conscious functioning. Your thinking center will make it's own new imprint. Your feeling center will make it's own new imprint. Your moving center will make it's own new imprint. Your sexual center will make it's new imprint. Your instinctual center will make it's new imprint. The imprints you are now making will govern much of your life in the days to come. The imprints you are now making of other people will remain strong in the days to come. Don't rush, don't grab, don't hold on to any one pattern of thought or feeling.
Two monks were walking near a brook. They met a girl unable to cross. The first monk picked the girl up and carried her over. They continued their walk in silence. That evening the second monk finally turned to his companion and burst out "you know we are forbidden to even look at women, much less touch one. Why did you do that? The first monk replied "I set her down three hours ago. Are you still carrying her?"
Try to remain high as long as possible. If you have started to come down already try to regain the transcendence of the earlier most intense period. This will insure a slow gradual reentry. This is a precious opportunity for gaining insight and understanding. Do not waste it by rushing back to your familiar world out of desire or fear. In order to prevent or postpone the return meditate as follows: think of your protective figure or guide as like the reflection of the moon in water, apparent yet nonexistent. Like illusion produced by magic. With this in mind, contemplate the figure tranquilly, then let the visualized form melt away starting at the extremities. Meditate without thinking upon the void clear light.
If you have not found liberation in this session, there is still time. Meditate as follows: The visions and hallucinations which you are now having , indeed all phenomenon, are in their nature illusions. However reality may appear to you, in truth it is unreal. Dreams, apparitions, non-permanent, non-fixed. Do not be attached or afraid of the products of your own mind. If you take these illusory forms for reality you will wander around in this confused existence. They are like dreams, echoes, cities of clouds, mirages, mirrored forms, not real even for one moment. Hold one pointedly to that frame of thought and the belief that your visions are real will be dissipated. The world will glow for you and liberation attained.
A man dreamed he was a butterfly. He woke up and said "Now I do not know whether I am a man who dreams he is a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams he is a man."
Sometime during this period, your space ship may encounter turbulence as it reenters the atmosphere of the earth. You may feel confused and bewildered. You may wonder about your sanity. You may look at your fellow voyagers and friends and sense that they cannot understand you. You may think "I am dead, what shall I do?" and feel great misery like a fish out of water. You may wonder if you will ever regain your normal self. Familiar places, relatives, people known to you appear now as in a dream or through a glass darkly. If you are having such experiences, thinking will be of no avail. So do not struggle to explain. This experience is the natural result of your own mental program. Such feelings are signs that you are in the third or return phase of the session. trust your guide, trust your companions, trust the natural flow of the process. Recognize calmly without distraction.
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where far below another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. two mice, one white, one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
As you return from your psychedelic session, you see spread out before you the world, your former life. A planet full of fascinating possibilities, objects and events. Each aspect of this return voyage can be a delightful discovery. Soon you will be returning to take your place in worldly affairs. The key to reentry is this: Take it easy, slowly, naturally. Enjoy every second. Don't rush. Don't be attached to your old games. Recognize that you are in the reentry period. Everything that you see and touch can glow with radiance. Each moment, a joyous discovery.
Dr. Timothy Leary
from "The Psychedelic Experience"
Millbrook 1966
The Acid King By Peter Wilkinson
Rolling Stone Issue 872 July 5, 2001
The Acid Triangle
Most of the Acid consumed in the past thirty years is believed to have been made in temporary basement and warehouse labs in and around San Francisco's Bay Area, a part of California drug agents call the Acid Triangle. The last time those agents made a significant (1 million hits plus) acid bust, in 1993, they identified a supplier who lived in Bolinas, the northernmost point of the triangle. A supplier, that is - not a chemist. The narcs never located the chemist. LSD today is a much lower dose (20 micrograms versus 2oo-plus) than the high-test stuff Augustus Owsley Stanley III sold as orange sunshine'' in the Sixties; more of a party high than an eight-hour trip.
"Triple set - LSD that is reworked three times to in- crease purity -it's not found as often," says Dave Tresmontan, special agent in charge of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement's San Francisco office.
"The LSD today tends to be a little dirtier and not nearly as sophisticated as it once was," It's difficult to tell exactly when Leonard Pickard first involved himself with LSD. BNE believes he was part of the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which operated in and around the Acid Triangle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, selling hashish and LSD cooked by Owsley and other important chemists like Tim Scully and Nick Sand.
The Brotherhood's philosophy, at least the beginning, was simple and beneficent: with LSD, turning people on, expanding consciousness and changing the way people perceived the world took precedence over making
a profit.
When the subject of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love came up one day in the Shawnee County jail, Pickard stopped short of admitting any contact with the group, but did speak of their activities with a certain knowing
reverence: "I understand there have been a few LSD chemists that would never make a batch of LSD ever, ever, without offering prayers for the safety of the people that might use it. And it should act as a good
medicine throughout the world. So I'm told." He added, "I think their mantra was something on the order of, 'Those that say, don't know. And those that know, don't say." Pickard smiled, conspiratorially, as he talked, sitting cross-legged and as calm as a Buddha on a plastic chair in an interview room barely big enough to contain his six-and-a-half-foot frame.
A federal trial in San Francisco in 1973 crippled Brotherhood operations and seemed to fragment the cooking culture, or at least send it further underground. BNE didn't take down a lab of any real size in the Acid
Triangle for years after the Brotherhood case, just a few seizures now and again. "We might find some pretty good chunks, 15,000 hits or 100,000 hits," says Dave Tresmontan. Then, in 1988, reports came into the Bureau of strong chemical smells emanating from a ware- house in the city of Mountain View, California, about forty-five mites south of San Francisco. On December 28th, as the narcs arrived to execute a search
warrant, a tall, pleasant man of forty strolled out of the warehouse, carrying multiple pieces of identification bearing a number of different names. His real name was William Leonard Pickard.
http://tahoejimbo420s.blogspot.com/2010/01/acid-king-by-peter-wilkinson-rolling.html
TIMELINE:
1947 - First report on LSD appears in a Swiss pharmacological journal
1948 - CIA authorized to undertake covert operations
1949 - Dr. Max Rinkel brings LSD to the United States from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and initiates work with LSD in Boston; Nick Bercel commences LSD study in Los Angeles
1950 - CIA launches Project Bluebird
May 1950 - First article about LSD appears in the American Psychiatric Journal
1951 - Captain Al Hubbard turns on to LSD
August 1951 - The CIA's Inspection & Security Staff initiates the Artichoke Project
October 21, 1951 - First documented evidence of CIA experimentation with LSD
1952 - Dr. Humphry Osmond discloses similarity between mescaline and adrenaline molecule; begins experiments with hallucinogenic at a hospital in Saskatchewan
December 1952 - George Hunter White, on loan from the Federal Narcotics Bureau, begins administering LSD to unwitting U.S. citizens at a CIA safehouse in Greenwich Village
January 1953 - Harold Blauer dies of an overdose of MDA during an Army-sponsored drug experiment
April 13, 1953 - The CIA's Technical Services Staff initiates the MK-ULTRA Project
1953 - Dr. Humphry Osmond begins treating alcoholics with LSD
May 1953 - Aldous Huxley's first mescaline experience
November 1953 - Army biochemist Frank Olsen commits suicide after CIA doses him with LSD
1954 - CIA begins Operation MK-PILOT at Lexingon Narcotics Hospital
1954 - Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception published
mid-1954 - Eli Lilly synthesizes LSD at the CIA's behest
1955 - Aldous Huxley's first LSD trip; the publication of Huxley's Heaven and Hell
1955- Army begins testing LSD at Edgewood arsenal
1956? - Dr. Humphry Osmond coins the word "psychedelic"
May 1957 - Life magazine published R. Gordon Wasson's account of his magic mushroom experience
1958 - Army begins BZ experiments
1959 - Josiah Macy Foundation sponsors major scientific congress on LSD
1959 - Allen Ginsberg tries LSD for the first time
1960 - American Indians granted sanctioned use of peyote as a religious matter
Summer 1960 - Timothy Leary turns on to magic mushrooms in Mexico
1961 - US Army initiates LSD interrogations under Operation Third Chance in Western Europe
1962 - U.S. Army launches Operation Derby Hat in Asia
1962 - The Gamblers, a California surfing band, release a song "LSD-25"; underground LSD appears on both coasts; FDA makes first LSD bust
1962 - Dr. Alexander Shulgin records the effects of MMDA ("ecstasy")
1962 - The superhallucinogen BZ becomes part of the US Army's standardized chemical warfare arsenal
1962 - The CIA withdraws support for above-ground LSD research studies
1962 - Congress passes new drug safety regulations and the FDA designates LSD an experimental drug and restricts research
1963 - Williams Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg publish The Yage Letters
May 1963 - Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert fired from Harvard
November 22, 1963 - Aldous Huxley dies shortly after JFK assassination
1964 - Army begins using BZ gas in Vietnam
Summer 1964 - Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' cross-country bus trip
Fall 1964 - Berkeley Free Speech Movement
February 1965 - First big surge of street acid; the assassination of Malcolm X; US begins sustained bombing of North Vietnam
April 1965 - First big SDS march on Washington
1965 - Drug Abuse Control Amendment; LSD research further restricted
1965 - Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited
October 16, 1965 - First Family Dog acid rock dance in San Francisco
1965 - CIA phases out MK-ULTRA, begins MK-SEARCH
January 1966 - The Trips Festival in San Francisco
March 1966 - Life magazine publishes "LSD: The Mind Drug That Got Out of Control"
April 1966 - Sandoz stops supplying LSD to research scientists
April 1966 - G. Gordon Liddy raids the Millbrook estate
Spring 1966 - Senate Hearings about LSD
1966 - Black Panther Party formed
BEL Incorporates
October 6, 1966 - California bans LSD, Love Pageant Rally in the Haight
January 14, 1967 - Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park
1967 - Joint FDA/NIMH Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee formed with strong input from CIA-linked doctors
June 1967 - Monterey Pop Festival
June 1967 - The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Summer 1967 - "Summer of Love"; STP appears on the blackmarket
October 21, 1967 - March on the Pentagon
1967 - Joint CIA-Army drug research program codenamed OFTEN/MK-CHICKWIT
January 1, 1968 - Yippie!
1968 - LSD possession declared a misdemeanor, sale a felony; the British Wootton Report declares marijuana to be relatively harmless
Spring 1968 - Student unrest at Columbia University
March 31, 1968 - LBJ announces he won't seek re-election
April 4, 1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
May 1968 - The Sorbonne uprising in Paris
June 5, 1968 - Senator Robert Kennedy assassinated
June 1969 - SDS unravels
Summer of 1969 - Orange sunshine debuts; Ronald Stark moves in on the illicit acid trade
August 1969 - Woodstock rock festival
Fall 1969 - Operation Intercept; huge antiwar demonstrations around the country
December 1969 - Altamont rock concert; the Manson killings
February 1970 - Leary convicted and jailed
September 12, 1970 - Leary escapes from prison
Spring 1970 - Jackson State and Kent State killings
1970 - LSD becomes a Schedule I drug
1971 - Windowpane acid first appears
August 1972 - Operation BEL
January 17, 1973 - Leary arrested in Afghanistan
November 1973 - Hitchcock turns state evidence to convict Tim Scully and Nick Sand
1973 - MK-SEARCH terminated; OFTEN/MK-CHICKWIT phased out
1947 - First report on LSD appears in a Swiss pharmacological journal
1948 - CIA authorized to undertake covert operations
1949 - Dr. Max Rinkel brings LSD to the United States from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and initiates work with LSD in Boston; Nick Bercel commences LSD study in Los Angeles
1950 - CIA launches Project Bluebird
May 1950 - First article about LSD appears in the American Psychiatric Journal
1951 - Captain Al Hubbard turns on to LSD
August 1951 - The CIA's Inspection & Security Staff initiates the Artichoke Project
October 21, 1951 - First documented evidence of CIA experimentation with LSD
1952 - Dr. Humphry Osmond discloses similarity between mescaline and adrenaline molecule; begins experiments with hallucinogenic at a hospital in Saskatchewan
December 1952 - George Hunter White, on loan from the Federal Narcotics Bureau, begins administering LSD to unwitting U.S. citizens at a CIA safehouse in Greenwich Village
January 1953 - Harold Blauer dies of an overdose of MDA during an Army-sponsored drug experiment
April 13, 1953 - The CIA's Technical Services Staff initiates the MK-ULTRA Project
1953 - Dr. Humphry Osmond begins treating alcoholics with LSD
May 1953 - Aldous Huxley's first mescaline experience
November 1953 - Army biochemist Frank Olsen commits suicide after CIA doses him with LSD
1954 - CIA begins Operation MK-PILOT at Lexingon Narcotics Hospital
1954 - Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception published
mid-1954 - Eli Lilly synthesizes LSD at the CIA's behest
1955 - Aldous Huxley's first LSD trip; the publication of Huxley's Heaven and Hell
1955- Army begins testing LSD at Edgewood arsenal
1956? - Dr. Humphry Osmond coins the word "psychedelic"
May 1957 - Life magazine published R. Gordon Wasson's account of his magic mushroom experience
1958 - Army begins BZ experiments
1959 - Josiah Macy Foundation sponsors major scientific congress on LSD
1959 - Allen Ginsberg tries LSD for the first time
1960 - American Indians granted sanctioned use of peyote as a religious matter
Summer 1960 - Timothy Leary turns on to magic mushrooms in Mexico
1961 - US Army initiates LSD interrogations under Operation Third Chance in Western Europe
1962 - U.S. Army launches Operation Derby Hat in Asia
1962 - The Gamblers, a California surfing band, release a song "LSD-25"; underground LSD appears on both coasts; FDA makes first LSD bust
1962 - Dr. Alexander Shulgin records the effects of MMDA ("ecstasy")
1962 - The superhallucinogen BZ becomes part of the US Army's standardized chemical warfare arsenal
1962 - The CIA withdraws support for above-ground LSD research studies
1962 - Congress passes new drug safety regulations and the FDA designates LSD an experimental drug and restricts research
1963 - Williams Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg publish The Yage Letters
May 1963 - Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert fired from Harvard
November 22, 1963 - Aldous Huxley dies shortly after JFK assassination
1964 - Army begins using BZ gas in Vietnam
Summer 1964 - Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' cross-country bus trip
Fall 1964 - Berkeley Free Speech Movement
February 1965 - First big surge of street acid; the assassination of Malcolm X; US begins sustained bombing of North Vietnam
April 1965 - First big SDS march on Washington
1965 - Drug Abuse Control Amendment; LSD research further restricted
1965 - Bob Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited
October 16, 1965 - First Family Dog acid rock dance in San Francisco
1965 - CIA phases out MK-ULTRA, begins MK-SEARCH
January 1966 - The Trips Festival in San Francisco
March 1966 - Life magazine publishes "LSD: The Mind Drug That Got Out of Control"
April 1966 - Sandoz stops supplying LSD to research scientists
April 1966 - G. Gordon Liddy raids the Millbrook estate
Spring 1966 - Senate Hearings about LSD
1966 - Black Panther Party formed
BEL Incorporates
October 6, 1966 - California bans LSD, Love Pageant Rally in the Haight
January 14, 1967 - Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park
1967 - Joint FDA/NIMH Psychotomimetic Advisory Committee formed with strong input from CIA-linked doctors
June 1967 - Monterey Pop Festival
June 1967 - The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Summer 1967 - "Summer of Love"; STP appears on the blackmarket
October 21, 1967 - March on the Pentagon
1967 - Joint CIA-Army drug research program codenamed OFTEN/MK-CHICKWIT
January 1, 1968 - Yippie!
1968 - LSD possession declared a misdemeanor, sale a felony; the British Wootton Report declares marijuana to be relatively harmless
Spring 1968 - Student unrest at Columbia University
March 31, 1968 - LBJ announces he won't seek re-election
April 4, 1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
May 1968 - The Sorbonne uprising in Paris
June 5, 1968 - Senator Robert Kennedy assassinated
June 1969 - SDS unravels
Summer of 1969 - Orange sunshine debuts; Ronald Stark moves in on the illicit acid trade
August 1969 - Woodstock rock festival
Fall 1969 - Operation Intercept; huge antiwar demonstrations around the country
December 1969 - Altamont rock concert; the Manson killings
February 1970 - Leary convicted and jailed
September 12, 1970 - Leary escapes from prison
Spring 1970 - Jackson State and Kent State killings
1970 - LSD becomes a Schedule I drug
1971 - Windowpane acid first appears
August 1972 - Operation BEL
January 17, 1973 - Leary arrested in Afghanistan
November 1973 - Hitchcock turns state evidence to convict Tim Scully and Nick Sand
1973 - MK-SEARCH terminated; OFTEN/MK-CHICKWIT phased out
The Paris laboratory was so successful that Stark, breaching his own security, showed Kempoff to Sand and Friedman, Sand's professional adviser, at a meeting in Switzerland, where the LSD was delivered for smuggling to the United States. It was the opportunity to set the seal on a loose-knit partnership of Stark and Sand within the Brothers' LSD operation; Kemp remained a subordinate. The meeting looked not only at LSD but also THC, since Friedman was spending a sabbatical year in Israel and Switzerland at various research laboratories, and he passed on to the others his experiences in dealing with the two leadingIsraeli scientists working in the area.
Business concluded, Stark indulged himself by buying a Ferrari 250-GT he saw advertised ina Zurich newspaper. A few weeks after returning to Paris, Kemp was allowed to take the caron to Britain, accompanied by one of Stark's aides. At Dover the customs wanted the dutypaid, although Kemp explained he was driving it for Stark.His passenger offered to take responsibility for the car and produced his passport.Unfortunately, he had been a registered drug addict in Britain with a conviction.
The Britishcustoms officer returned to the car with a search team and they spent the next six hourstaking the Ferrari to pieces, but to no avail.When Kemp finally drove away from the customs post at Dover's ferry terminal, the aideexclaimed merrily at the stupidity of the customs men. On the back seat of the car was hisbriefcase. The customs men had failed to notice documents for the purchase of 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate from Druce.
Ever since his visit from the police after the raid on Scully's Denver laboratory, Druce hadbeen blowing cool on any chemical deliveries. He was constantly pressured to produce asmuch as possible as soon as possible; but Druce, frightened, kept stalling and urgingcaution.
While Sand was in Switzerland, Druce was summoned to see him. Druce tried toplay one last card. He persuaded a young man at Exico, the Czech state company he haddealt with for years, to get a quotation for lysergic acid and travel with him to Switzerland.But Sand was not so easily placated, and Stark's advice was to get what was owed, one wayor another.
Chapter Fourteen
After the trip to Switzerland, Druce returned to London and a seemingly unruffled existencein the summer of 1970. His firm was used as a source of supplies and equipment whichStark could not or did not want to buy on the Continent. Friedman, who had doneconsultancy work in Britain, acted as the go-between for purchases which included aspecialized and expensive piece of scientific apparatus for Kemp. The little local difficultiesof the Swiss trip seemed to be a thing of the past.
But Druce was no longer dealing with people invested with the casual attitude of the original psychedelic outlaws: there was noGriggs to shrug off rip-offs and scams. The smooth-talking Mr. Druce now faced men like Stark — and Stark, in the words of Munson, was a “ real mover. ” He was about to bring hisskills to bear on Druce's non-delivery. The morality of the psychedelic movement could bestretched a very long way in the Badlands where trickery was one of an arsenal of weaponsof survival.First of all, Friedman laid the bait. He suggested to Druce that if he could lay his hands on ergotamine tartrate, he knew a firm in Switzerland which would pay well for a bulk purchase.
Charles Druce Ltd was supposed to specialize in fine chemicals, but Alban Feedshad a remit to dabble in commoner chemicals to bolster its finances and, as it happened,Craze had apparently been stockpiling ergotamine tartrate against a shifting market price. 83 Craze's speculation could have been quite profitable. The price of ergotamine rose and fellbetween $3.50 and $8 per gram. The place to keep it was Hamburg, the internationalmarketplace for the pharmaceutical industry.
Between March 1969 and July 1970, AlbanFeeds bought ergotamine tartrate from a West German firm in regular lots of 1-2 kilos andstored them away to catch the market.The moment seemed ripe when Friedman (via Druce) suggested the Zurich brokerage firmof Inland Alkaloids. Friedman had rung Alban Feeds several times, trying to reach Druceabout outstanding business; but Craze says he made no connection between such calls andthe sudden appearance of a buyer for his stockpile.
Alban Feeds had several telephoneconversations with representatives of Inland Alkaloids. Documents for the sale were finally sent off to Switzerland, but nothing happened. Thepapers were sent again, but still there was silence. The kilos were bought on loan — the chemicals assigned to the bank as collateral — and Craze checked in Hamburg to ensure allwas well. The chemicals were not to be collected without proper authorization but Craze hadnot been specific enough in his instructions and the ergotamine tartrate was gone.
A pleasant young Englishman had walked into. the German firm and presented documents for the order. Dressed in a pinstripe suit and clutching a briefcase, he seemed eminently respectable. The firm released the chemicals which he packed in his briefcase. It was the same man who showed Kemp papers for 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate, and who worked for Stark.
Ergotamine tartrate worth over £ 19,000, and many thousands of pounds more whenconverted into LSD, was on its way to France.Inland Alkaloids was nothing more than a front company with a Swiss postal box number.The directors were Friedman and Stark's man, but the guiding spirits were Stark and Sand.Craze was soon on their trail.
Alban Feeds was overextended and the bank wanted itsmoney back. Within a couple of months, Druce had been ejected from the firm by Craze andthe other partner. In a business putsch, the two then struck at Charles Druce Ltd, using avan to cart away papers in the hope that they could track down what had happened to theirpromising company. Craze wrote threatening letters to Sand, Friedman and Hitchcock.In the autumn of 1970, the three conspirators began a strategy of promises and threats, inthe hope of silencing the English businessman, with meetings scattered all over London.Then they simply faded away.
Craze and the third director went bankrupt and have never recovered financially. Druce justabout stayed afloat, becoming a van driver. If the episode sank the partnership in AlbanFeeds, it did little to improve that between Sand and Stark. After all his trouble Sandthought he should have got the ergotamine, or at least reimbursement but Stark refused,and at one point relations were so strained that Stark thought Sand would kill him.
Two years later Stark, recalling the incident, claimed the ergotamine was still safely tucked away in the free port of Tangiers. It is more likely to have been used in Stark's second Frenchlaboratory. Having moved out of Paris, he had set up base at Orl é ans, but 1970 was notgoing well for Stark. Kemp was being difficult, too.
The Orléans site was in the outhouses of a stomach-potion firm where Kemp had gone backto his work on THC. At Orléans, Kemp became bored and angry: the good life in France hadgrown stale. There was a time when Stark had been fascinating, going into bars and pullingout a pocketful of change from so many countries that he had trouble sorting it out beforepaying for anything. Now Stark seemed merely bizarre. A man with both homo-and heterosexual tastes, his boyfriends flitted in and out of Stark's various homes with impunity. Then one night Stark climbed into Kemp's bed claiming to be ill, and the chemist grewparanoid.
Stark was getting a little too rich for the Briton's taste. Matters were not improved by Stark's contradictory views on security. He never worriedabout his boyfriends but he strongly disapproved of Dr. Christine Bott, Kemp's girlfriend.Kemp had met her while she was still a medical student at Liverpool, and the relationshipblossomed. He introduced her to drugs but she retained her career in England while he wentto France. The trouble began when Kemp brought the tall, blonde girl over for a visit,introducing her to one of Stark's assistants. Stark was furious. He already blamed Kemp forthe customs search at Dover. Kemp gave as good as he got. And where was Stark anyway?
Kemp worked away alone at Orléans while the American and his assistants disappeared. Hekept talking about the Brotherhood but “ these great men ” were never at Orl é ans And whatabout money?One day, Kemp took his lunch break with some of the French chemists working onlegitimate projects, and in conversation one of them innocently showed Kemp a newspaperarticle about illicit drug-making. The Frenchman joked that perhaps he was on the wrongside of the business since others were making millions. Everyone — including Kemp — laughed. Later, Kemp did not think it was particularly funny.
When Stark brought up the possibility of another LSD run, Kemp brought up the possibilityof money. The chemist would not work unless he was paid and his employment put on aregular basis. According to Kemp, Stark would not agree: if Kemp was not going to work, hecould go back to Britain. In despair, Kemp had already sounded out Solomon who had keptin touch, and Arnabaldi in Paris. They had yet to receive the promised transfer fee. Kempwent back to Britain.While Kemp returned home to take a holiday with his girlfriend, Solomon set about thequestion of the transfer fee and approached Stark.
During an angry meeting in a Chinese restaurant — Stark, being Stark, said it served the best Hong Kong food outside Hong Kong — the deal was agreed. Why Stark should decide to pay after such a long delay is not known,but he made Solomon a straight offer of the LSD if Solomon would arrange to collect thecache from Switzerland. A young drug dealer who worked with Solomon was sent to keep the liaison.
The handover took place in a Swiss hotel. The brown jar weighed about as much as a smallpacket of margarine. Inside it was 240 grams of pure crystal LSD, worth £ 1,000,000. Within an hour, the Englishman was on a train heading home. His debt finally paid, Stark left for California and Christmas with the Brothers. With Sand glowering at him, Stark had awkward questions to answer, but no one seemed too fazed by
his mishaps.
The Brothers had special reason to celebrate Christmas that year: once again they had paid their dues to Leary, the guru who had inspired their creation. On 13 September 1970, Leary, one-time psychology professor, psychic magician and convictedprisoner of the State of California, had been transformed into William John McMillan, socially responsible businessman, married with two children and living in Salt Lake City
Business concluded, Stark indulged himself by buying a Ferrari 250-GT he saw advertised ina Zurich newspaper. A few weeks after returning to Paris, Kemp was allowed to take the caron to Britain, accompanied by one of Stark's aides. At Dover the customs wanted the dutypaid, although Kemp explained he was driving it for Stark.His passenger offered to take responsibility for the car and produced his passport.Unfortunately, he had been a registered drug addict in Britain with a conviction.
The Britishcustoms officer returned to the car with a search team and they spent the next six hourstaking the Ferrari to pieces, but to no avail.When Kemp finally drove away from the customs post at Dover's ferry terminal, the aideexclaimed merrily at the stupidity of the customs men. On the back seat of the car was hisbriefcase. The customs men had failed to notice documents for the purchase of 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate from Druce.
Ever since his visit from the police after the raid on Scully's Denver laboratory, Druce hadbeen blowing cool on any chemical deliveries. He was constantly pressured to produce asmuch as possible as soon as possible; but Druce, frightened, kept stalling and urgingcaution.
While Sand was in Switzerland, Druce was summoned to see him. Druce tried toplay one last card. He persuaded a young man at Exico, the Czech state company he haddealt with for years, to get a quotation for lysergic acid and travel with him to Switzerland.But Sand was not so easily placated, and Stark's advice was to get what was owed, one wayor another.
Chapter Fourteen
After the trip to Switzerland, Druce returned to London and a seemingly unruffled existencein the summer of 1970. His firm was used as a source of supplies and equipment whichStark could not or did not want to buy on the Continent. Friedman, who had doneconsultancy work in Britain, acted as the go-between for purchases which included aspecialized and expensive piece of scientific apparatus for Kemp. The little local difficultiesof the Swiss trip seemed to be a thing of the past.
But Druce was no longer dealing with people invested with the casual attitude of the original psychedelic outlaws: there was noGriggs to shrug off rip-offs and scams. The smooth-talking Mr. Druce now faced men like Stark — and Stark, in the words of Munson, was a “ real mover. ” He was about to bring hisskills to bear on Druce's non-delivery. The morality of the psychedelic movement could bestretched a very long way in the Badlands where trickery was one of an arsenal of weaponsof survival.First of all, Friedman laid the bait. He suggested to Druce that if he could lay his hands on ergotamine tartrate, he knew a firm in Switzerland which would pay well for a bulk purchase.
Charles Druce Ltd was supposed to specialize in fine chemicals, but Alban Feedshad a remit to dabble in commoner chemicals to bolster its finances and, as it happened,Craze had apparently been stockpiling ergotamine tartrate against a shifting market price. 83 Craze's speculation could have been quite profitable. The price of ergotamine rose and fellbetween $3.50 and $8 per gram. The place to keep it was Hamburg, the internationalmarketplace for the pharmaceutical industry.
Between March 1969 and July 1970, AlbanFeeds bought ergotamine tartrate from a West German firm in regular lots of 1-2 kilos andstored them away to catch the market.The moment seemed ripe when Friedman (via Druce) suggested the Zurich brokerage firmof Inland Alkaloids. Friedman had rung Alban Feeds several times, trying to reach Druceabout outstanding business; but Craze says he made no connection between such calls andthe sudden appearance of a buyer for his stockpile.
Alban Feeds had several telephoneconversations with representatives of Inland Alkaloids. Documents for the sale were finally sent off to Switzerland, but nothing happened. Thepapers were sent again, but still there was silence. The kilos were bought on loan — the chemicals assigned to the bank as collateral — and Craze checked in Hamburg to ensure allwas well. The chemicals were not to be collected without proper authorization but Craze hadnot been specific enough in his instructions and the ergotamine tartrate was gone.
A pleasant young Englishman had walked into. the German firm and presented documents for the order. Dressed in a pinstripe suit and clutching a briefcase, he seemed eminently respectable. The firm released the chemicals which he packed in his briefcase. It was the same man who showed Kemp papers for 9 kilos of ergotamine tartrate, and who worked for Stark.
Ergotamine tartrate worth over £ 19,000, and many thousands of pounds more whenconverted into LSD, was on its way to France.Inland Alkaloids was nothing more than a front company with a Swiss postal box number.The directors were Friedman and Stark's man, but the guiding spirits were Stark and Sand.Craze was soon on their trail.
Alban Feeds was overextended and the bank wanted itsmoney back. Within a couple of months, Druce had been ejected from the firm by Craze andthe other partner. In a business putsch, the two then struck at Charles Druce Ltd, using avan to cart away papers in the hope that they could track down what had happened to theirpromising company. Craze wrote threatening letters to Sand, Friedman and Hitchcock.In the autumn of 1970, the three conspirators began a strategy of promises and threats, inthe hope of silencing the English businessman, with meetings scattered all over London.Then they simply faded away.
Craze and the third director went bankrupt and have never recovered financially. Druce justabout stayed afloat, becoming a van driver. If the episode sank the partnership in AlbanFeeds, it did little to improve that between Sand and Stark. After all his trouble Sandthought he should have got the ergotamine, or at least reimbursement but Stark refused,and at one point relations were so strained that Stark thought Sand would kill him.
Two years later Stark, recalling the incident, claimed the ergotamine was still safely tucked away in the free port of Tangiers. It is more likely to have been used in Stark's second Frenchlaboratory. Having moved out of Paris, he had set up base at Orl é ans, but 1970 was notgoing well for Stark. Kemp was being difficult, too.
The Orléans site was in the outhouses of a stomach-potion firm where Kemp had gone backto his work on THC. At Orléans, Kemp became bored and angry: the good life in France hadgrown stale. There was a time when Stark had been fascinating, going into bars and pullingout a pocketful of change from so many countries that he had trouble sorting it out beforepaying for anything. Now Stark seemed merely bizarre. A man with both homo-and heterosexual tastes, his boyfriends flitted in and out of Stark's various homes with impunity. Then one night Stark climbed into Kemp's bed claiming to be ill, and the chemist grewparanoid.
Stark was getting a little too rich for the Briton's taste. Matters were not improved by Stark's contradictory views on security. He never worriedabout his boyfriends but he strongly disapproved of Dr. Christine Bott, Kemp's girlfriend.Kemp had met her while she was still a medical student at Liverpool, and the relationshipblossomed. He introduced her to drugs but she retained her career in England while he wentto France. The trouble began when Kemp brought the tall, blonde girl over for a visit,introducing her to one of Stark's assistants. Stark was furious. He already blamed Kemp forthe customs search at Dover. Kemp gave as good as he got. And where was Stark anyway?
Kemp worked away alone at Orléans while the American and his assistants disappeared. Hekept talking about the Brotherhood but “ these great men ” were never at Orl é ans And whatabout money?One day, Kemp took his lunch break with some of the French chemists working onlegitimate projects, and in conversation one of them innocently showed Kemp a newspaperarticle about illicit drug-making. The Frenchman joked that perhaps he was on the wrongside of the business since others were making millions. Everyone — including Kemp — laughed. Later, Kemp did not think it was particularly funny.
When Stark brought up the possibility of another LSD run, Kemp brought up the possibilityof money. The chemist would not work unless he was paid and his employment put on aregular basis. According to Kemp, Stark would not agree: if Kemp was not going to work, hecould go back to Britain. In despair, Kemp had already sounded out Solomon who had keptin touch, and Arnabaldi in Paris. They had yet to receive the promised transfer fee. Kempwent back to Britain.While Kemp returned home to take a holiday with his girlfriend, Solomon set about thequestion of the transfer fee and approached Stark.
During an angry meeting in a Chinese restaurant — Stark, being Stark, said it served the best Hong Kong food outside Hong Kong — the deal was agreed. Why Stark should decide to pay after such a long delay is not known,but he made Solomon a straight offer of the LSD if Solomon would arrange to collect thecache from Switzerland. A young drug dealer who worked with Solomon was sent to keep the liaison.
The handover took place in a Swiss hotel. The brown jar weighed about as much as a smallpacket of margarine. Inside it was 240 grams of pure crystal LSD, worth £ 1,000,000. Within an hour, the Englishman was on a train heading home. His debt finally paid, Stark left for California and Christmas with the Brothers. With Sand glowering at him, Stark had awkward questions to answer, but no one seemed too fazed by
his mishaps.
The Brothers had special reason to celebrate Christmas that year: once again they had paid their dues to Leary, the guru who had inspired their creation. On 13 September 1970, Leary, one-time psychology professor, psychic magician and convictedprisoner of the State of California, had been transformed into William John McMillan, socially responsible businessman, married with two children and living in Salt Lake City
DNA<>LSD
The DNA - LSD connection...
Crick and Watson discover DNA in 1953 - Just about when the Sequoia Seminars Begin...
http://www.geraldheard.com/bio1.htm
Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Sir Julian Huxley
Auldous Huxley and Linus Pauling L.A. 1960
http://metabraingrowthprocess.tribe.net/thread/763d39f5-39dd-4c19-a06e-5426874f1bd5
Nobel Prize genius Crick was high on LSD - when he discovered the secret of life
Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Mail on Sunday (London)
August 8, 2004
BY ALUN REES
FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced thedouble-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.
Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies.
In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.
It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp{associated with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love } , who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD.
Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.
'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.
'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.
He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
Linus Pauling was working on the structure of DNA too:
"Linus Pauling and the Race For DNA - A documentary history"
Linus Pauling, 1950
Francis Crick, 1955 James Watson, 1955
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick
...
Linus Pauling was the first to identify[20] the 3.6 amino acids per helix turn ratio of the α helix.
Stimulated by their discussions with Wilkins and what Watson learned by attending a talk given by Franklin about her work on DNA, Crick and Watson produced and showed off an erroneous first model of DNA. Their hurry to produce a model of DNA structure was driven in part by Watson's belief that they were competing against Linus Pauling. Given Pauling's recent success in discovering the Alpha helix, it was not unreasonable to worry that Pauling might also be the first to determine the structure of DNA.[28]
http://www.idmu.co.uk/lsd.htm
Operation Julie - The best acid ever?
The late 1970s saw Operation Julie, which netted some 1.5kg of LSD, enough for 7.5 million 1970s doses of the drug, or up to 20-30 million doses at today"s levels. These were small tablets or "microdots" of high purity and potency, produced in a remote farmhouse in Wales. The "conspirators" were arrested and jailed in 1978 following an intensive police surveillance operation led by Dick Lee, who along with undecover officers, subsequently resigned from the police. Although presented as a great success, the operation started almost by accident:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, one of the groups formed by Leary and funded by Bill Hitchcock, a millionaire property dealer, in the wake of the prohibition of LSD in the USA in 1965, was disbanded following a police bust. One of the members, Ron Stark, flew to London and met Richard Kemp, a Cambridge chemistry student. Stark provided 7.4 kioos of ergotamine tartrate, a precursor for LSD synthesis, from which Kemp made 1.7 kilos of LSD, using a process known as the "wrinkle" which allowed production of 99.7% pure acid. This was sufficient to make 8.5 million doses of 200µg each.
In 1974, Gerald Thomas, a cannabis smuggler earlier thrown out of the group for unreliability, was arrested in Canada and gave the names of Kemp, Christine Bott, and Henry Todd as being involved with "the biggest acid lab in the world".
Kemp and Bott moved to Wales where they set up a lab in a remote farmhouse, whereas Todd and Andrew Munro, an inorganic chemist, set up shop in a basement in Seymour Road, London producing inferior quality LSD in 100µg black microdots. Kemp"s bad luck started when his Range Rover was involved in a fatal accident, and was impounded by police. By chance, Dick Lee was visiting the area, noticed the owner of the vehicle, and searched in finding a note with reference to hydrazine hydrate, a chemical used in LSD synthesis. From that point on Kemp and the cottage were put under surveillance.
The two labs, operating independently but stated to be part of the same conspiracy, were raided on 26th March 1977. The welsh operation had already shut down, and undercover officers had missed seeing Bott burying the equipment in the garden. Even so, there was little hard evidence when the defendants were arrested, most coming from confessions. The 17 defendants pleaded guilty at Bristol Crown Court and were sentenced to a total of 130years imprisonment, with Kemp and Todd each receiving 13 years. The author, David Solomon (Marijuana Papers) received 10 years for providing raw materials, Munro received 10 years, and Bott 9 years.
Although there were persistent rumours that the group had stashed away several million doses, none reappeared years later following the release of the main protagonists. Following Julie, the price of LSD rose sharply, from around 50p to over £1 per tablet. By this time, LSD had fallen out of fashion, the preferred drug among youth culture in the late 1970s being alcohol. Punks regarded LSD and cannabis as drugs of the unfashionable and wimpish hippies, their preferred drugs being "sulphate" (amphetamine) and Special Brew.
Operation Julie UK - LSD and the Brotherhood
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/faqs/faq_clandestine_chemistry.shtml
...
"Operation Julie", Dick Lee & Colin Pratt. London: W.H.Allen (1978).
Out of Print. Covers the tracking and 1977 take-down of the U.K. organization led by Richard Kemp that formed from the regrouping of the post-indictment remnants of the BEL. The Kemp ring allegedly manufactured 60% of the world's LSD at the time, amounting to tens of millions of hits over a several year period.
The motive of the ring's leadership was the expectation that widespread use of LSD by Britain's youth would catalyze leftist Revolution, leading to the overthrow of the aging and morally bankrupt
For the temerity of admitting this to post-arrest police, sentences totaled 170 years in prison.
Their bust was immortalized in the delightful electric guitar/piano medley, "Julie's in the Drug Squad" by the Clash (on the "Give 'em Enough Rope" album).
The most recent LSD bust of note occurred in Bolinas, California in July 1993, and was the largest seizure of LSD in U.S. history: 1.5 million dosage units bought over a four year period.
Consistent with the unusual patterns associated with LSD trafficking, not only did the distribution ring consist entirely of women, including a grandmother in her fifties, but all refused to testify in exchange for reduced sentences.
http://wild-bohemian.com/bolinas.htm
CDPRC Protests Bolinas LSD Bust - 20 Jul 93
BOLINAS, CALIFORNIA: Drug reform activists are calling for an end to harassment of LSD and psychedelic drugs following the government's announcement of its biggest-ever LSD bust in Bolinas on June 29. Local residents expressed shock at the arrest of Sage Appel, 50, Marcella Whitefield, 27, George Horvath, 33, and Neal Dry, 38. who were well-regarded in the community.
Bolinas, a countercultural enclave on the coast north of San Francisco, has been the object of ongoing DEA harassment and an involuntary training ground for narcotics agents, who ride through the hills in tie-dye shirts on trail bikes looking for marijuana gardens.
The defendants, who are accused of operating a major nationwide LSD distribution network that sold over one million doses of crystal LSD to undercover agents over a period of four years, face a minimum of twelve years to life under current federal sentencing laws.
...
The Gerald Heard - Linus Pauling connection - Esalen (1961):
http://www.watchman.org/na/nlpexpo.htm
Mind Control in the 1990's: Neuro-Linguistic Programming - Rick Branch
...
In 1961 Michael Murphy and Richard Price opened a new residential community which came to be known as Esalen.
Located in California's Big Sur area, Esalen "helped mid-wife much of what came to be known as the human-potential movement. Seminar leaders in Esalen's first three years included Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Arnold Toynbee, Linus Pauling, Norman O. Brown, Carl Rogers, Paul Tillich, Rollo May, and a young graduate student named Carlos Castaneda," (The Aquarian Conspiracy, p. 137; emphasis mine).
The Hollywood Hospital Ross McLean Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond- Linus Pauling connection :
http://www.orthomolecular.org/history/index.shtml
Linus Pauling wrote: "In 1967, I happened to read a number of papers published by two psychiatrists in Saskatchewan, Canada. Dr. Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphry Osmond. (T)here was something extraordinary about their work. They were giving very large amounts of niacin to the schizophrenic patients, as much as 17,000 milligrams per day, which is 1,000 times the RDA. I was astonished that niacin and ascorbate, with the striking physiological property, when given in very small amounts, of preventing death from pellagra and scurvy, should be so lacking in toxicity that 1,000 times the effective daily intake could be taken by a person without harm. This meant that these substances were quite different from drugs, which are usually given to patients in amounts not much smaller than the lethal dosages.
I thought that these substances, normally present in the human body, and required for good health and life, deserved a name to distinguish them from ordinary Pharmaceuticals, and I decided to call them 'orthomolecular' substances." (Linus Pauling in His Own Words: Selections from his Writings, Speeches and Interviews, edited by Barbara Marinacci. NY: Simon and Shuster, 1995.)
Dr. Humphry Osmond's remarkable medical career included decades of distinguished psychiatric practice and a prodigious output of writing and research. He is widely recognized as a pioneer investigator into the chemistry of consciousness. Along with Dr. John Smythies, Osmond developed the theory that schizophrenics suffer due to endogenous production of an adrenalin-based hallucinogen. This led to the Hoffer-Osmond Adreno-chrome Hypothesis in the early 1950s, the very origin of orthomolecular medicine. The popular press may today remember Humphry Osmond for coining the term "psychedelic," but countless thousands of grateful patients will remember him as the co-discoverer of niacin therapy for schizophrenia. A bibliography of Dr. Osmond's work is posted at http://www.doctoryourself.com/biblio_osmond.html
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2342794/an_obituary_for_dr_abram_hoffer.html?cat=68
Dr. Abram Hoffer and Linus Pauling were friends. Each influenced the other. When Pauling started orthomolecular medicine in 1968, he cited articles by Hoffer & Osmond on psychiatry.
...
Hoffer wrote a chapter in the Linus Pauling book "Orthomolecular Psychiatry" (1). Hoffer advocated the use of niacin in psychiatry in this chapter. At that time Hoffer was working with Humphrey Osmond, who also contributed to this outstanding book. Osmond died before Hoffer.
Bill Wilson ( AA )
Hoffer was interested in alcoholism.
"From the day he was freed of lifelong tension and insomnia by taking 3000 milligrams of niacin daily, Bill Wilson became a powerful runner with us. Bill helped me organize the first Schizophrenic's Anonymous group in Saskatoon, which was very successful. Bill introduced the orthomolecular concepts to a large number of AA members, especially in the United States." Hoffer
...
Hoffer & Osmond. In Ref. 10 they blamed schizophrenia on the "M-substance", which was an unknown amine similar to mescaline. Their rationale for this was that mescaline produced similar symptoms to schizophrenia. In 1952 Osmond thought that the "M-substance" was DMPEA (11). This brilliant theory was ahead of its time, so it was largely ignored. Osmond was so mad that he moved from the UK to Canada. The other UK psychiatrists ignored Osmond's theory except for Smythies and Harley-Mason, who was a chemist. Hoffer thought that the Osmond/Smythies theory was brilliant, which it was.
http://www.orthomolecular.org/library/jom/1994/pdf/1994-v09n01-p007.pdf
Chronic Schizophrenic Patients Treated Ten Years Or More A.Hoffer, Ph.D. M.D.1
We (Dr. H. Osmond and I), began to use nicotinic acid nicotinamide and ascorbic acid in
large doses for treating acute schizophrenics in 1951. Based upon the results obtained from pilot
studies, we began the first double blind therapeutic trials in the history of psychiatry in 1953. By then we knew that these vitamins were safe even in multigram doses, that they could be taken for long periods of time, and that the side effects were minimal and easily dealt with.
Even after the media forgot about it, LSD remained the drug most frequent- ly submitted to street-drug analysts like Pharm Chem Lab until 1974, when it was replaced by cocaine. But there was no longer any LSD scene as there had been in the Sixties and early Seventies. Users of LSD had learned its values and were moving on, although some occasionally take a trip to remind themselves what it was like. For some people LSD remains a yoga for self-therapy, stimulation towards creativity in art and relationships and heightened sensual pleasure. People turning on to LSD for the first time in the mid-Seventies are probably more prepared for the experience than were their Sixties' counter- parts. Acid freak-outs rarely require medical attention anymore. Although LSD remains a Schedule I substance with restricted uses, legal LSD research may soon return to the precrisis levels of the Fifties. Research is especially favored with certain subject groups: the terminally ill (after the example of Huxley and the work of Dr. Eric Kast), autistic children, severe cases of alcoholism and opiate addiction and mental cases that don't respond to conventional drugs and therapies. LSD's discoverer predicted that the earliest foreseeable legal marketing of LSD would be in 25-microgram doses to alleviate depression.
Summary of the Notes --
1) Appreciation for the psychotropic effects of ergot is older than the human race.
2) In human pre-history, ergot was extensively used as an aid for mothers in childbirth and less frequently in the death process.
3) The close association between ergot and the fertility rites at Eleusis transformed this ancient birthing application into an enduring cult practice.
4) As the dominant cult for Athens, the Eleusinian Mysteries and ergot begin to became central to critical aspects of 2000+ years of Western culture.
5) One of the subjects investigated at Eleusis was the relationship between dosage of a "poison" and one's fate. What may be medicinal at small doses can become psychotropic and then lethal at higher doses - as shaped by one's personal relationship to the Gods.
6) Following the end of ceremonies at Eleusis after Goths destroyed the sanctuary around 400, these ergot-based initiatory practices were preserved in the Greek community in Constantinople and elsewhere.
7) Early crusaders carried a version of these ergot-based practices back to southern France along with the relics of St. Anthony the Hermit (desert father of monasticism) in the 11th century. Centered near Arles, on the east side of the Rhone, the hospice escaped the Albigensian Crusade.
8) Based around this knowledge and these artifacts, a Roman Catholic monastic order known as the Hospital Order of St. Anthony (aka Antonians or Antonites) was established under the rule of Augustine in 1247 and spread its influence from London to Jerusalem and beyond. According to Sandoz' corporate history, the Antonites eventually had two hospitals in Basel.
9) This Order was assigned the public role of countering the effects of ergot poisoning, otherwise known as St. Anthony's Fire, through operating what may have been the first worldwide pharmacy as well as the specialized use of amputation. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the order was responsible for caring for the sick of the papal household.
10) Privately this Order continued to practice initiations, with the acceptance and participation of Church authorities, based partly on the use of ergot-derived preparations. In addition, there were various related "military" orders related to the Antonites, including the Knights of Saint Anthony.
11) There is widespread artistic evidence of these religious practices, particularly in the work of Antonite-related painters Hieronymus Bosch (see his c.1500 "Temptation of St. Anthony" triptych in Lisbon) and Mathis Neithardt (aka "Grunewald," see the c.1515 Isenheim Altar polyptich, now in Colmar.) W.A. Stoll later mentions the Isenheim Altar in his 1947 account of the effects of LSD.
12) In the 18th century, the Roman church became increasingly threatened by "secret" initiatory societies -- as shown by the 1738 order excommunicating Catholics who belonged to Masonic Lodges -- culminating in the anti-clerical role of the "Illuminati" in the French Revolution.
13) In 1777, after having been nearly wiped out during the Reformation, a failed reform of the order in 1630 and confiscation of its properties in the French Revolution, the Antonites were canonically merged into the Knights of Malta, which in turn was broken up (and partially re-Romanized) after Napolean captured Malta in 1798.
14) There is evidence that these Mysteries-derived and at times ergot-based initiatory practices did not disappear with the Antonites and found their way into 19th century Theosophical and Rosicrucian groups as well as those involved in "Greek" oriented classical studies.
15) In 1847 at Columbia College in New York, the "Greek" fraternity St. Anthony Hall (aka Delta Psi) was formed to continue this "secret tradition" and Col. Henry Steele Olcott -- who was later join with Madame Blavatsky to form Theosophy -- was one of four 1849 pledges at Columbia.
16) In 1866 at the University of Leipzig, Frederich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde became ergot-based initiates of a "neo-Eleusinian" group that was devoted to understanding early Greek culture by actually living as the Greeks did.
17) In 1872 in Basel, Nietzsche published his first work, "Birth of Tragedy," based on his close association with his mentor and prominent Basel citizen Johann Jacob Bachofen -- in which he counterpoises Dionysis (i.e. Eleusis) with Apollo.
18) Nietzsche, who was removed from the streets of Turin in 1889 and presumed to have "gone mad," was known to have been a wide-ranging drug taker, in part for his infirmities. Among the compounds citied is a preparation that is presumed to have included cannabis and opium as well as an ergot-derivative, ostensibly meant for migraines.
19) In 1896 in Wiemar, German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner was invited to become Nietzsche's archivist by his sister, giving him access to Nietzsche's private papers. Steiner had previously studied the esoteric aspects of Goethe's work and had begun publishing his own theosophical writings in 1894.
20) In 1897 in Munich, Ludwig Klages (another Leipzig graduate), Stefan George, Otto Gross and others started a group known as the "Cosmic Circle." Explicitly based on recreating "Eleusinian" cult activity and implicitly on using drugs to achieve "ecstatic" states, the circle also popularized the works of Bachofen and Nietzsche.
21) In 1918 in Basel, Sandoz scientist Arthur Stoll isolates the ergot alkaloid Ergotamine, which is later offered as Gynergen, intended to be used in birthing to stop post-pardum hemorrhaging as well as for severe migraine headaches.
22) In 1922 in Dornach, Rudolf Steiner's original wooden Goetheanum "cathedral" is burned to the ground, presumed to be on orders from Steiner's rival "magician, " Adolf Hitler. Steiner's Anthroposophy continues to have its headquarters outside Basel to this day, following Steiner's death in 1925.
23) In 1927 in Basel, Sandoz hired 21 year-old Albert Hofmann to work as an organic chemist. Hofmann, who was born in 1906 in Baden and studied in Zurich, later describes a series of natural "mystical" experiences he had as a youth, perhaps similar to those described by Capt. Al Hubbard in his youth.
Mark Stahlman
[email protected].
1) Appreciation for the psychotropic effects of ergot is older than the human race.
2) In human pre-history, ergot was extensively used as an aid for mothers in childbirth and less frequently in the death process.
3) The close association between ergot and the fertility rites at Eleusis transformed this ancient birthing application into an enduring cult practice.
4) As the dominant cult for Athens, the Eleusinian Mysteries and ergot begin to became central to critical aspects of 2000+ years of Western culture.
5) One of the subjects investigated at Eleusis was the relationship between dosage of a "poison" and one's fate. What may be medicinal at small doses can become psychotropic and then lethal at higher doses - as shaped by one's personal relationship to the Gods.
6) Following the end of ceremonies at Eleusis after Goths destroyed the sanctuary around 400, these ergot-based initiatory practices were preserved in the Greek community in Constantinople and elsewhere.
7) Early crusaders carried a version of these ergot-based practices back to southern France along with the relics of St. Anthony the Hermit (desert father of monasticism) in the 11th century. Centered near Arles, on the east side of the Rhone, the hospice escaped the Albigensian Crusade.
8) Based around this knowledge and these artifacts, a Roman Catholic monastic order known as the Hospital Order of St. Anthony (aka Antonians or Antonites) was established under the rule of Augustine in 1247 and spread its influence from London to Jerusalem and beyond. According to Sandoz' corporate history, the Antonites eventually had two hospitals in Basel.
9) This Order was assigned the public role of countering the effects of ergot poisoning, otherwise known as St. Anthony's Fire, through operating what may have been the first worldwide pharmacy as well as the specialized use of amputation. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the order was responsible for caring for the sick of the papal household.
10) Privately this Order continued to practice initiations, with the acceptance and participation of Church authorities, based partly on the use of ergot-derived preparations. In addition, there were various related "military" orders related to the Antonites, including the Knights of Saint Anthony.
11) There is widespread artistic evidence of these religious practices, particularly in the work of Antonite-related painters Hieronymus Bosch (see his c.1500 "Temptation of St. Anthony" triptych in Lisbon) and Mathis Neithardt (aka "Grunewald," see the c.1515 Isenheim Altar polyptich, now in Colmar.) W.A. Stoll later mentions the Isenheim Altar in his 1947 account of the effects of LSD.
12) In the 18th century, the Roman church became increasingly threatened by "secret" initiatory societies -- as shown by the 1738 order excommunicating Catholics who belonged to Masonic Lodges -- culminating in the anti-clerical role of the "Illuminati" in the French Revolution.
13) In 1777, after having been nearly wiped out during the Reformation, a failed reform of the order in 1630 and confiscation of its properties in the French Revolution, the Antonites were canonically merged into the Knights of Malta, which in turn was broken up (and partially re-Romanized) after Napolean captured Malta in 1798.
14) There is evidence that these Mysteries-derived and at times ergot-based initiatory practices did not disappear with the Antonites and found their way into 19th century Theosophical and Rosicrucian groups as well as those involved in "Greek" oriented classical studies.
15) In 1847 at Columbia College in New York, the "Greek" fraternity St. Anthony Hall (aka Delta Psi) was formed to continue this "secret tradition" and Col. Henry Steele Olcott -- who was later join with Madame Blavatsky to form Theosophy -- was one of four 1849 pledges at Columbia.
16) In 1866 at the University of Leipzig, Frederich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde became ergot-based initiates of a "neo-Eleusinian" group that was devoted to understanding early Greek culture by actually living as the Greeks did.
17) In 1872 in Basel, Nietzsche published his first work, "Birth of Tragedy," based on his close association with his mentor and prominent Basel citizen Johann Jacob Bachofen -- in which he counterpoises Dionysis (i.e. Eleusis) with Apollo.
18) Nietzsche, who was removed from the streets of Turin in 1889 and presumed to have "gone mad," was known to have been a wide-ranging drug taker, in part for his infirmities. Among the compounds citied is a preparation that is presumed to have included cannabis and opium as well as an ergot-derivative, ostensibly meant for migraines.
19) In 1896 in Wiemar, German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner was invited to become Nietzsche's archivist by his sister, giving him access to Nietzsche's private papers. Steiner had previously studied the esoteric aspects of Goethe's work and had begun publishing his own theosophical writings in 1894.
20) In 1897 in Munich, Ludwig Klages (another Leipzig graduate), Stefan George, Otto Gross and others started a group known as the "Cosmic Circle." Explicitly based on recreating "Eleusinian" cult activity and implicitly on using drugs to achieve "ecstatic" states, the circle also popularized the works of Bachofen and Nietzsche.
21) In 1918 in Basel, Sandoz scientist Arthur Stoll isolates the ergot alkaloid Ergotamine, which is later offered as Gynergen, intended to be used in birthing to stop post-pardum hemorrhaging as well as for severe migraine headaches.
22) In 1922 in Dornach, Rudolf Steiner's original wooden Goetheanum "cathedral" is burned to the ground, presumed to be on orders from Steiner's rival "magician, " Adolf Hitler. Steiner's Anthroposophy continues to have its headquarters outside Basel to this day, following Steiner's death in 1925.
23) In 1927 in Basel, Sandoz hired 21 year-old Albert Hofmann to work as an organic chemist. Hofmann, who was born in 1906 in Baden and studied in Zurich, later describes a series of natural "mystical" experiences he had as a youth, perhaps similar to those described by Capt. Al Hubbard in his youth.
Mark Stahlman
[email protected].
|
|
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(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
This site does not advocate or encourage any illegal activity.
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
(c)2013, Aquarian Temple BEL, BrotherhoodofEternal Love.org
This site does not advocate or encourage any illegal activity.
"Official" History Site
Peace * Love * Groovy
