Nicholas Sand
Acid Alchemist
A Quarter Billion Hits Later...
"I am a “criminal.” I am a fugitive. I have been for 40 years. But I have been true to myself and my friends. It has been hard. But I have a vision. Someday, somewhere, I will establish the University for Psychedelic Studies. There will be a department of psychedelic botany and chemistry. There will be a beautiful park and temple with lawns and ponds, peacocks, swans, and wildlife walking fearlessly. There will be pavilions for initiation. There will be a department of entheogenic worship. There will be a school of psychedelic medicine and curing. There will be acres of psychedelic herb gardens. There will be places to dance and places to meditate. There will be a school of yoga, tantra, and a “Mystery” school. A school for breathing, for art, music, for meditation, for ecological and planetary studies as well as applications. A school for love and one for beauty. There will be no government inspectors or police. They will not be necessary. There will be guides, friends, helpers, and lovers. On the new level of consciousness struggling to be born now, this will be how it is, for the old way of competition, murder, and exploitation is fast becoming an impossible situation. This planet must be lovingly cared for or we are all doomed. We are the guardians of life and planetary harmony. This is where we are going. That is what I have seen in my visions, and that is what I have been working for all of my life. That is what I will continue to do until my last breath.
Care to dance?" - Nick Sand
The resounding success of the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference last weekend, which with its 2,800 attendees from over 40 countries was the largest psychedelic conference in history (and a sure sign of the continuing main-streaming of psychedelic culture), was tempered by the sobering news that Nicholas Sand – arguably the greatest underground chemist in history, and a genuine hero to many of us in the psychedelic movement – had left this world and moved on into the light at the age of 75. ‘The Buddha from Brooklyn’, Nick’s accomplishments are many and legendary; most famously as the first recognized underground chemist to synthesize both DMT and LSD, as Timothy Leary’s alchemist for the League of Spiritual Discovery at Millbrook, as the co-inventor (with Tim Skully) of the Orange Sunshine LSD that has been estimated to amount to 75% of the LSD ever made, and as the man who figured out how to smoke DMT. Milestones in Psychedelic History, ironically these accomplishments would have remained mostly unknown had Nick not been captured in Canada in 1996 (along with the most sophisticated psychedelic laboratory ever discovered). After having led the underground life of a fugitive for more than 25 years, Nick was returned to the USA to complete his sentence for an arrest in 1971 (when he was caught with a mobile lab in the back of an 18 wheeler) for which he had skipped both bail and the USA.
As unjust a crime as the time Nick spent in prison was, it was in many ways a curious boon for the psychedelic community-at-large, for the articles he wrote on DMT while in prison (under the nom-de-plume ∞ Ayes were instant classics, and after Nick’s release in 2000, he appeared at MAPS conferences, and memorably at Entheon Village in Burning Man, where he was always gracious with his time and energy to the numerous younger psychonauts who wanted to shake his hand and thank him for what he had done. There has never been anyone I have more enjoyed talking about psychedelics with than Nick (other than perhaps my one memorable lunch with Alexander Shulgin before his stroke) and I have incorporated many of the things that Nick has told me into my own talks, so when the Ozora Festival in Hungary last year asked me for suggestions for their excellent Speaker Series, Nick Sand was my first choice. At first the organizers didn’t really get it, but to my delight they ended up bringing Nick and his incredible wife Usha to Ozora for the week where he was a huge hit, and I got to spend several days picking his brains as much as I dared, something of a personal dream come true. During this time I got the impression that despite the well-deserved recognition he was receiving, Nick probably would have far preferred to remain underground in his spotless laboratory, for while he was free, his hands were shackled from making the sacred compounds that he made so well in his personal attempt to liberate the world. For although for much of his life Nick Sand was an outlaw, he was never a criminal; the LSD and other compounds he created were in truth a holy crusade in which he believed he could help to change the world. And while many men and women in history have wanted to change the world, in my opinion, few were ever as successful.
Nick died on April 24th, 2017, the day after he had addressed the MAPS conference in Oakland after the showing of ‘The Sunshine Makers’, a movie about him and Tim Skully made by Cosmos Fielding, the son of Lady Amanda Fielding of The Beckley Foundation. Addressing the adoring crowd after a standing ovation, with many of his countless friends in attendance, Nick’s final words to the audience were both a question and a challenge – “Who are you, who are we, what are we doing here? Are we here to make war, or are we here to make Love?” – and then he went home after what was perhaps his finest moment and died peacefully in his sleep that night as the conference was dispersing. A death fitting of a Tibetan Rinpoche, it was classic Nick Sand to the end.
Personally, I am still a little in shock – Nick was one of my greatest heroes, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have ever met the man, let alone to call him a friend. My first reaction after I returned from the MAPS conference was to tell Reality Sandwich that I would like to write something about Nick, but my friend Casey William Hardison – who knew Nick much better, far longer, and was imprisoned for LSD manufacture himself – beat me to it with the following memorial that says all that I might have said and probably more, so I am encouraging Reality Sandwich to run that tribute instead. Farewell Nick, thank you for all that you did, I hope to see you one day again in the Love and the Light.
– James Oroc for Reality Sandwich, April 27th, 2017
As unjust a crime as the time Nick spent in prison was, it was in many ways a curious boon for the psychedelic community-at-large, for the articles he wrote on DMT while in prison (under the nom-de-plume ∞ Ayes were instant classics, and after Nick’s release in 2000, he appeared at MAPS conferences, and memorably at Entheon Village in Burning Man, where he was always gracious with his time and energy to the numerous younger psychonauts who wanted to shake his hand and thank him for what he had done. There has never been anyone I have more enjoyed talking about psychedelics with than Nick (other than perhaps my one memorable lunch with Alexander Shulgin before his stroke) and I have incorporated many of the things that Nick has told me into my own talks, so when the Ozora Festival in Hungary last year asked me for suggestions for their excellent Speaker Series, Nick Sand was my first choice. At first the organizers didn’t really get it, but to my delight they ended up bringing Nick and his incredible wife Usha to Ozora for the week where he was a huge hit, and I got to spend several days picking his brains as much as I dared, something of a personal dream come true. During this time I got the impression that despite the well-deserved recognition he was receiving, Nick probably would have far preferred to remain underground in his spotless laboratory, for while he was free, his hands were shackled from making the sacred compounds that he made so well in his personal attempt to liberate the world. For although for much of his life Nick Sand was an outlaw, he was never a criminal; the LSD and other compounds he created were in truth a holy crusade in which he believed he could help to change the world. And while many men and women in history have wanted to change the world, in my opinion, few were ever as successful.
Nick died on April 24th, 2017, the day after he had addressed the MAPS conference in Oakland after the showing of ‘The Sunshine Makers’, a movie about him and Tim Skully made by Cosmos Fielding, the son of Lady Amanda Fielding of The Beckley Foundation. Addressing the adoring crowd after a standing ovation, with many of his countless friends in attendance, Nick’s final words to the audience were both a question and a challenge – “Who are you, who are we, what are we doing here? Are we here to make war, or are we here to make Love?” – and then he went home after what was perhaps his finest moment and died peacefully in his sleep that night as the conference was dispersing. A death fitting of a Tibetan Rinpoche, it was classic Nick Sand to the end.
Personally, I am still a little in shock – Nick was one of my greatest heroes, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have ever met the man, let alone to call him a friend. My first reaction after I returned from the MAPS conference was to tell Reality Sandwich that I would like to write something about Nick, but my friend Casey William Hardison – who knew Nick much better, far longer, and was imprisoned for LSD manufacture himself – beat me to it with the following memorial that says all that I might have said and probably more, so I am encouraging Reality Sandwich to run that tribute instead. Farewell Nick, thank you for all that you did, I hope to see you one day again in the Love and the Light.
– James Oroc for Reality Sandwich, April 27th, 2017
The undaunted spirit and psychedelic warrior of love and light, Nick Sand, the outlaw chemist, died in his sleep on Monday April 24th at the age of 75.
Most famous for the Orange Sunshine brand of LSD distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Nick Sand was responsible for the manufacture of over 250 million doses of acid. He was also the first chemist on record to have synthesized DMT for widespread recreational use by psychedelic enthusiasts. Nick serendipitously discovered and promoted the fact that the chemical is effectively active when smoked or vaporized. For those that knew him, it was apparent that he was shameless in his alchemical pursuits. He had no regrets: through LSD, DMT, other psychedelics and spiritual practices, he had freed his mind.
Nick’s chemical career began shortly after his first mescaline experience in 1961. As lifelong enthusiast of the psychedelic path, he once remarked that he was, “doing this from my heart out of faith that this was the right thing to do. Everywhere I went I gave it away and I saw what it did to people and I said, ‘This is good.’” As a former incarcerated acid chemist, I understand where he’s coming from. I, too, share the ideals, the passion, and the shamelessness.
Taught the secrets of high-purity LSD manufacture by “Bear” Owsley and Tim Scully, Nick believed:
“When LSD is made in high purity, a certain magic obtains for the person who journeys with preparation and intention. Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip. There are no guarantees which corridors will open for you, but the odds are better with intelligent choices. For chemists, also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative: a path unto itself. This is alchemy.”
Rhoney Stanley, the former wife and LSD lab-mate of Bear, said Tuesday that “[Nick] was always optimistic, always thought the best would happen and he had a huge passion, a sexual passion, a love passion, a spiritual passion, and a psychedelic passion. He’s the first one who started talking about us as if we were psychedelic commandos and warriors.”
Tim Scully explained that they were doing it because they thought that “acid could save the world. Almost everybody who got turned on became deeply skeptical of the authorities and the politicians.”
The mother of his godson Aidan remarked, “Nick didn’t care about the stupid politics shit, he’d just laugh at it.”
Jon Hanna said Nick “became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience.”
The reality of living life as an outlaw, however, came face-to-face with that principled stand. As a result, Nick and many of his lab mates would serve time in penitentiaries as penance for their services to humanity.
This led to quite possibly the funniest and yet most endearing aspect of the shameless proselytizing nature of Nick Sand: He found a way to smuggle in and dose many prisoners at McNeil Island Penitentiary with psychedelics during his stay there. “We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.
On appeal from that original sentence, in 1977, Nick went on the run for two decades, continuing to manifest as many doses of LSD and other psychedelics as humanly possible. As a businessman, a former associate and co-conspirator said, “Nick was aware, alert and considerate. He wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of, every mouth that mattered was fed. He cared about consciousness, purity, evolution of the spirit. He made sure that we made it to that same place together.”
Rearrested in British Columbia in 1996, Nick served time in prison through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the original 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded.
At the 2001 Mind States Conference in Berkeley, California–a few months
after his release from prison–Nick explained:
“When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history.
Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration.
To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap.
What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones.
It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole.”
That is about as neat and concise an encapsulation of the purposive use of LSD as I have ever come across.
This Easter at Shulgin Farm, Nick approached looking frail and a bit unsteady in his gait, but grinning ear to ear, he leaned on me and quipped, “Hi Casey, I’m not dead yet!”
I thought it funny at the time, but I had a weird premonition. I followed him into the house and was lucky to be part of this final conversation with Ann Shulgin, the underground psychotherapist pioneer and wife of famed and prolific, lawful psychedelic chemist, Sasha Shulgin. Over a bowl of organic blueberries yesterday, Ann said, “Nick was a dear friend and we are all going to miss him terribly.”
Nick and Ann Shulgin, Easter 2017. Photo by Casey Hardison
This last Saturday, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference put on by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and The Beckley Foundation in Oakland, California, Nick showed up for the screening of the new movie by Cosmo Feilding Mellen, The Sunshine Makers, about him, Tim Scully, Bear Owsley, and their manufacture of LSD. Nick’s closing remarks to the audience, his last public words, posited that LSD helps to answer our questions:
“Who are you, who are we, what are we doing here, are we here to make war or are we here to make love?”
Nick received a standing ovation, many hugs and kind words. Mike Randall, a former LSD prisoner and leader of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love relayed that Nick said he’d never had a day like that.
I believe it was a kind of completion for him—he could see his work had produced spectacular results and psychedelics had become mainstream. High on the crowd’s love, our love, having lived a proud, free and shameless life, he had a good death. May the four winds blow him safely home.
This essay was originally published on Psymposia
Most famous for the Orange Sunshine brand of LSD distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Nick Sand was responsible for the manufacture of over 250 million doses of acid. He was also the first chemist on record to have synthesized DMT for widespread recreational use by psychedelic enthusiasts. Nick serendipitously discovered and promoted the fact that the chemical is effectively active when smoked or vaporized. For those that knew him, it was apparent that he was shameless in his alchemical pursuits. He had no regrets: through LSD, DMT, other psychedelics and spiritual practices, he had freed his mind.
Nick’s chemical career began shortly after his first mescaline experience in 1961. As lifelong enthusiast of the psychedelic path, he once remarked that he was, “doing this from my heart out of faith that this was the right thing to do. Everywhere I went I gave it away and I saw what it did to people and I said, ‘This is good.’” As a former incarcerated acid chemist, I understand where he’s coming from. I, too, share the ideals, the passion, and the shamelessness.
Taught the secrets of high-purity LSD manufacture by “Bear” Owsley and Tim Scully, Nick believed:
“When LSD is made in high purity, a certain magic obtains for the person who journeys with preparation and intention. Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip. There are no guarantees which corridors will open for you, but the odds are better with intelligent choices. For chemists, also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative: a path unto itself. This is alchemy.”
Rhoney Stanley, the former wife and LSD lab-mate of Bear, said Tuesday that “[Nick] was always optimistic, always thought the best would happen and he had a huge passion, a sexual passion, a love passion, a spiritual passion, and a psychedelic passion. He’s the first one who started talking about us as if we were psychedelic commandos and warriors.”
Tim Scully explained that they were doing it because they thought that “acid could save the world. Almost everybody who got turned on became deeply skeptical of the authorities and the politicians.”
The mother of his godson Aidan remarked, “Nick didn’t care about the stupid politics shit, he’d just laugh at it.”
Jon Hanna said Nick “became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience.”
The reality of living life as an outlaw, however, came face-to-face with that principled stand. As a result, Nick and many of his lab mates would serve time in penitentiaries as penance for their services to humanity.
This led to quite possibly the funniest and yet most endearing aspect of the shameless proselytizing nature of Nick Sand: He found a way to smuggle in and dose many prisoners at McNeil Island Penitentiary with psychedelics during his stay there. “We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.
On appeal from that original sentence, in 1977, Nick went on the run for two decades, continuing to manifest as many doses of LSD and other psychedelics as humanly possible. As a businessman, a former associate and co-conspirator said, “Nick was aware, alert and considerate. He wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of, every mouth that mattered was fed. He cared about consciousness, purity, evolution of the spirit. He made sure that we made it to that same place together.”
Rearrested in British Columbia in 1996, Nick served time in prison through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the original 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded.
At the 2001 Mind States Conference in Berkeley, California–a few months
after his release from prison–Nick explained:
“When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history.
Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration.
To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap.
What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones.
It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole.”
That is about as neat and concise an encapsulation of the purposive use of LSD as I have ever come across.
This Easter at Shulgin Farm, Nick approached looking frail and a bit unsteady in his gait, but grinning ear to ear, he leaned on me and quipped, “Hi Casey, I’m not dead yet!”
I thought it funny at the time, but I had a weird premonition. I followed him into the house and was lucky to be part of this final conversation with Ann Shulgin, the underground psychotherapist pioneer and wife of famed and prolific, lawful psychedelic chemist, Sasha Shulgin. Over a bowl of organic blueberries yesterday, Ann said, “Nick was a dear friend and we are all going to miss him terribly.”
Nick and Ann Shulgin, Easter 2017. Photo by Casey Hardison
This last Saturday, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference put on by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and The Beckley Foundation in Oakland, California, Nick showed up for the screening of the new movie by Cosmo Feilding Mellen, The Sunshine Makers, about him, Tim Scully, Bear Owsley, and their manufacture of LSD. Nick’s closing remarks to the audience, his last public words, posited that LSD helps to answer our questions:
“Who are you, who are we, what are we doing here, are we here to make war or are we here to make love?”
Nick received a standing ovation, many hugs and kind words. Mike Randall, a former LSD prisoner and leader of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love relayed that Nick said he’d never had a day like that.
I believe it was a kind of completion for him—he could see his work had produced spectacular results and psychedelics had become mainstream. High on the crowd’s love, our love, having lived a proud, free and shameless life, he had a good death. May the four winds blow him safely home.
This essay was originally published on Psymposia
THE SUNSHINE MAKERS
Showtimes
9:45 PM, Wed Nov 18, 2015 | Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
Buy Tickets
1:00 PM, Thu Nov 19, 2015 | IFC Center
Buy Tickets
Expected to Attend: Director Cosmo Feilding Mellen
WORLD PREMIERE A real-life Breaking Bad for the psychedelic set, The Sunshine Makers reveals the entertaining, untold story of Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, the unlikely duo at the heart of 1960s American drug counterculture. United in a utopian mission to save the planet through the consciousness- raising power of LSD, these underground chemists manufactured a massive amount of acid, including the gold standard for quality LSD, Orange Sunshine, as they tried to stay one step ahead of the feds.
Section:Viewfinders
Themes: BiographyCrimeScience
Director: Cosmo Feilding Mellen
Producer: George Chignel, Nicole Stott, Connie Littlefield
Cinematographer: Will Pugh
Editor: Nicholas Packer
Music: The Heliocentrics
Running Time: 90
Language: English
Country: UK
Year: 2015
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Sand
Nick Sand (born May 10, 1941)[1] is a cult figure in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996 for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. [2][3] Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York and was credited as the "first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT".[4]
Nick Sand (born May 10, 1941)[1] is a cult figure in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996 for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. [2][3] Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York and was credited as the "first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT".[4]
THE JOY OF COOKING
When Nicholas Sand was about 16 his dad was working as a chemist for the government developing nuclear weapons and how he had this amazing lab in his basement where Sand could experiment. He and his friends would sit around and experiment and eventually developed LSD that they began shooting up. At the time there were about 15-25 people in the US that were doing this. He told me that one day Aldous Huxley came to lecture at his college and that there were only about 10 kids that showed up to listen. After the lecture Sand asked Huxley to come to his house to see what him and his friends have been working on. While Huxley was reluctant at first he finally agreed to check it out and couldn’t believe was he was seeing when he got there . Only a handful of people in the world were experimenting with this at the time. Sand was onto something incredible and they all tested out his new LSD concoction. He also told me that while Huxley was there Sands mom came downstairs with sandwiches for everyone while they were all “Turning On”
http://childrenoftheearth.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/orange-sunshine/
http://childrenoftheearth.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/orange-sunshine/
He was a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and one of the manufacturers of Orange Sunshine (which was actually an analog of LSD and therefore not illegal at the time). He is also a practitioner of yoga, the Kabballah, meditation, Krishna consciousness, Sufism, aikido, Tai Chi, and Zen, as well as having studied the teachings of Krishnamurti, Milarepa, Ramakrishna, Rajneesh, and other great philosophers. In the early years of psychedelic exploration, Sand was one of the original guides at the Millbrook commune, where thousands of individuals were turned on. From 1996 until late 2000, he was a prisoner of the War on Drugs--first in Canada and then in the USA
Nick Sand (born 1942) is a low-profile hero in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996. Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York.
Sand grew up in Brooklyn, New York and by his late teens he was already aware of the LSD scene developing around Greenwich Village. While attending Brooklyn College, Sand became interested in the teachings of Gurdjieff, the study of different cultures, and various Eastern philosophers. Graduating in 1966 with a degree in Anthropology and Sociology, Sand followed Leary and Alpert to Millbrook and became a guide to the Psychedelic realm. In this role he initiated many people who came to Millbrook in a relaxed and sacred set and setting.
Sand's San Francisco Lab was operational by July 1967. Sand wanted to make LSD but was lacking the necessary precursors. Owsley had given him a formula for STP and would tablet Sand's product from his own lab in Orinda.
In December 1968 Sand purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California, at that time a small town in rural Sonoma County. There he and Tim Scully, another psychedelic chemist, set up a large LSD lab. Scully and Sand produced over 3.6 million tablets of LSD, which was distributed under the name "Orange Sunshine". Sand was prosecuted for LSD manufacture following a lengthy investigation by federal narcotics agents in the early 1970s. He was found guilty and sentenced, in 1976, to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.
Nick Sand (born 1942) is a low-profile hero in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996. Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York.
Sand grew up in Brooklyn, New York and by his late teens he was already aware of the LSD scene developing around Greenwich Village. While attending Brooklyn College, Sand became interested in the teachings of Gurdjieff, the study of different cultures, and various Eastern philosophers. Graduating in 1966 with a degree in Anthropology and Sociology, Sand followed Leary and Alpert to Millbrook and became a guide to the Psychedelic realm. In this role he initiated many people who came to Millbrook in a relaxed and sacred set and setting.
Sand's San Francisco Lab was operational by July 1967. Sand wanted to make LSD but was lacking the necessary precursors. Owsley had given him a formula for STP and would tablet Sand's product from his own lab in Orinda.
In December 1968 Sand purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California, at that time a small town in rural Sonoma County. There he and Tim Scully, another psychedelic chemist, set up a large LSD lab. Scully and Sand produced over 3.6 million tablets of LSD, which was distributed under the name "Orange Sunshine". Sand was prosecuted for LSD manufacture following a lengthy investigation by federal narcotics agents in the early 1970s. He was found guilty and sentenced, in 1976, to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.
- I felt the work I was doing was so important for humanity that I was willing to take the risks of being the alchemist, hiding away in his laboratory, making chemicals.
- Q. How many hits do you think were made of orange sunshine? A. (starts calculating doses in his head) ... 10 million doses per kilo times 14 kilos ... what's 10 million times 14? It's a large number.
- Narrator: Arrested in 1972, he escaped to Canada while on appeal. For two decades Sand lived the life of a fugitive. Until 1996 when drug enforcement officials shut him down for good. By this time he estimates that he and colleagues made a quarter of a billion doses. He has no regrets and still refers to LSD not just as a drug but as a sacrament.
New Maps of Hyperspace > Episode Four >
Nicholas Sands interview from Rak Razam
Nick Sand, famed LSD chemist who developed "Orange Sunshine" tells of his part in the acid movement of the sixties and beyond in a sizzling conversation... Sand trained with Mazatec mushroom shamaness Maria Sabina and received his first illuminations in cosmic glossalalia with her, deciding to first synthesize psilocybin... When that proved too expensive to produce he turned his hand to DMT, creating the first street use of the tryptamine in the US and turning people on, including Richard Alpert from Millbrook... Sand went on to become the Chief Alchemist for the League of Spiritual Discovery–and was prosecuted for following his religion under his constitutional rights... The rest is history, and a very colorful one at that! Learn the secrets of pizeoluminescent-LSD as the inner light, the sacrafice the acid chemists took personally for their work, how Sand survived life in prison, his Eckhart Tolle connection–and how Richard Milhouse Nixon was dosed with acid, and much, much more in this very provoking interview. https://vimeo.com/21188229
Nicholas Sands interview from Rak Razam
Nick Sand, famed LSD chemist who developed "Orange Sunshine" tells of his part in the acid movement of the sixties and beyond in a sizzling conversation... Sand trained with Mazatec mushroom shamaness Maria Sabina and received his first illuminations in cosmic glossalalia with her, deciding to first synthesize psilocybin... When that proved too expensive to produce he turned his hand to DMT, creating the first street use of the tryptamine in the US and turning people on, including Richard Alpert from Millbrook... Sand went on to become the Chief Alchemist for the League of Spiritual Discovery–and was prosecuted for following his religion under his constitutional rights... The rest is history, and a very colorful one at that! Learn the secrets of pizeoluminescent-LSD as the inner light, the sacrafice the acid chemists took personally for their work, how Sand survived life in prison, his Eckhart Tolle connection–and how Richard Milhouse Nixon was dosed with acid, and much, much more in this very provoking interview. https://vimeo.com/21188229
Nicholas Sand was found in Canada, along with the greatest psychedelic lab in the world ("literally better than the Health Canada lab"), producing LSD, DMT, Ecstasy and Nexus. For 23 years he had been a fugitive, escaping a severe sentence in the U.S. and becoming a one man psychedelic force of nature, showering his designer drugs on the sleeping crowds of monkeys that currently inhabit most of the land masses of this Planet Earth. Last week, Nicholas Sand was sent back to San Francisco to face the same judge who convicted him back in 1974. His fate is out of our hands, completely beyond our control. The huge cold monster that overlooks public safety ("the peace of the cemeteries") has him in its claws and it won't let go. Here is what we have to say about this. Conti sits, up in the safety of his bench, where he has waited for so many years. At every step of the way he has protected, he has served as guardian: what we know to be true shall continue to be true,what we know to be false shall continue to be false.
And the truth is that the vision that was laid down 12,000 years ago and has been kept through the shedding of the blood of millions of men, women and children in thousands of wars, is the one truth, the only possible reality and the only one that can be accepted.
To fall from reality is to fall from grace.
Nicholas Sand was taught a secret process, a sequence of actions so dangerous, so overwhelming, that they can only be performed away from the eyes of the crowds, in hidden forests that others only whisper about. The product of these actions is a trace, an engraving in the fabric of nature that can seek out the most intimate regions of your mind and open them up to the infinite worlds, the storms of possibility in which you washed for certain moments when you were young (but you were taken away to dry and rest, "forget about the storms you saw, they never happened"). http://www.sfbardo.com/sand.html
And the truth is that the vision that was laid down 12,000 years ago and has been kept through the shedding of the blood of millions of men, women and children in thousands of wars, is the one truth, the only possible reality and the only one that can be accepted.
To fall from reality is to fall from grace.
Nicholas Sand was taught a secret process, a sequence of actions so dangerous, so overwhelming, that they can only be performed away from the eyes of the crowds, in hidden forests that others only whisper about. The product of these actions is a trace, an engraving in the fabric of nature that can seek out the most intimate regions of your mind and open them up to the infinite worlds, the storms of possibility in which you washed for certain moments when you were young (but you were taken away to dry and rest, "forget about the storms you saw, they never happened"). http://www.sfbardo.com/sand.html
Historically, LSD solutions were first sold on sugar cubes, but practical considerations forced a change to tablet form. Appearing in 1968 as an orange tablet measuring about 6 mm across "Sunshine" acid was the first largely available form of LSD after its possession was made illegal. Tim Scully, a prominent chemist, made some of it, but said that most "Sunshine" in the USA came by way of Ronald Stark, who imported approximately thirty-five million doses from Europe.
Better Living Through Chemistry
You don't know Nick, but you may be familiar with his work. "I mean we were criminals, but we were criminals having fun, people who got together and decided yeah we are doing a job, we are turning on the world. But we never hurt anyone. We never made bad drugs."
- Nicholas Sand: Chemist, Visionary, Felon
Beginning in New York and Berkeley in the early 1960s, chemists Nick Sand and Tim Scully created the finest black market LSD ever sold. They continued to do so even after making LSD became a felony in 1966.
In 1970, after four years of living underground and facing serious criminal charges, Tim Scully got out of chemical manufacture. A former child science prodigy, Scully began a new career building biofeedback technology and working in computer design. He earned his PhD during his four years in prison.
Nick Sand was on a mission: he continued making chemicals for the black market until 1996, when the RCMP finally caught up with him in Vancouver. Sand also served four years in prison; in Canada and in the United States. Judge Samuel Conti, who had convicted him to fifteen years in 1974, was brought out of retirement to convict Sand a second time.
Sand and Scully are our guides to the counter culture, the chemist's craft, and the long-term effects of psychedelics.
This film will feature additional filmic treasures such as home movies made at the Long Reach Ranch, RCMP crime scene video, and candid shots of Sand and Scully working in the lab.
You don't know Nick, but you may be familiar with his work. "I mean we were criminals, but we were criminals having fun, people who got together and decided yeah we are doing a job, we are turning on the world. But we never hurt anyone. We never made bad drugs."
- Nicholas Sand: Chemist, Visionary, Felon
Beginning in New York and Berkeley in the early 1960s, chemists Nick Sand and Tim Scully created the finest black market LSD ever sold. They continued to do so even after making LSD became a felony in 1966.
In 1970, after four years of living underground and facing serious criminal charges, Tim Scully got out of chemical manufacture. A former child science prodigy, Scully began a new career building biofeedback technology and working in computer design. He earned his PhD during his four years in prison.
Nick Sand was on a mission: he continued making chemicals for the black market until 1996, when the RCMP finally caught up with him in Vancouver. Sand also served four years in prison; in Canada and in the United States. Judge Samuel Conti, who had convicted him to fifteen years in 1974, was brought out of retirement to convict Sand a second time.
Sand and Scully are our guides to the counter culture, the chemist's craft, and the long-term effects of psychedelics.
This film will feature additional filmic treasures such as home movies made at the Long Reach Ranch, RCMP crime scene video, and candid shots of Sand and Scully working in the lab.
Tim Scully first met William “Billy” Mellon Hitchcock, grandson of William Larimer Mellon and great-great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, through Owsley in April 1967. They became friends and Billy loaned Scully $12,000 for the second Denver lab in 1968. The product from the lab was distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love; Scully was connected with the Brotherhood via Billy Hitchcock.
Sand started a company with his friend disguised as a perfume company – the real intent of the company was to manufacture Mescaline and DMT. Sand was starting to attract the attention of police because of his lengthy visits to Milbrook and when Owsley visited Milbrook in April 1967 Sand was inspired to head to San Francisco.
Sand’s San Francisco Lab was operational by July 1967. Sand wanted to make LSD but was lacking the necessary precursors. Owsley had given him a formula for STP and would tablet Sand’s product from his own lab in Orinda.
In December 1968 Sand purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California, at that time a small town in rural Sonoma County. There he and Tim Scully, another psychedelic chemist, set up a large LSD lab. Scully and Sand produced over 3.6 million tablets of LSD, which was distributed under the name “Orange Sunshine”.
Sand was prosecuted for LSD manufacture following a lengthy investigation by federal narcotics agents in the early 1970s. He was found guilty and sentenced, in 1976, to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.
Sand’s attorney appealed his conviction and Sand was released on $50,000 bail. While out of custody he went underground in 1976 and remained a fugitive from federal agents for two decades.
Sand started a company with his friend disguised as a perfume company – the real intent of the company was to manufacture Mescaline and DMT. Sand was starting to attract the attention of police because of his lengthy visits to Milbrook and when Owsley visited Milbrook in April 1967 Sand was inspired to head to San Francisco.
Sand’s San Francisco Lab was operational by July 1967. Sand wanted to make LSD but was lacking the necessary precursors. Owsley had given him a formula for STP and would tablet Sand’s product from his own lab in Orinda.
In December 1968 Sand purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California, at that time a small town in rural Sonoma County. There he and Tim Scully, another psychedelic chemist, set up a large LSD lab. Scully and Sand produced over 3.6 million tablets of LSD, which was distributed under the name “Orange Sunshine”.
Sand was prosecuted for LSD manufacture following a lengthy investigation by federal narcotics agents in the early 1970s. He was found guilty and sentenced, in 1976, to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.
Sand’s attorney appealed his conviction and Sand was released on $50,000 bail. While out of custody he went underground in 1976 and remained a fugitive from federal agents for two decades.
Timothy Leary on Nick Sand
Question: After moving west to California in the late 60s, you became connected with a group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. In 1973, Nicholas Sand, a chemist for the Brotherhood, was arrested in
St. Louis for operating two LSD laboratories. Indictments in California around the same time also named Ronald H. Stark, who allegedly operated an LSD lab in Belgium. In the book Acid Dreams, the authors name Stark as being a CIA informant. In retrospect, do you believe the CIA was involved in putting acid out on the street to preempt a possible political revolution?
Leary: I don’t know about that. But it’s a matter of fact that most of the LSD in America in the late 50s and early 60s was brought in by the CIA and given around to hospitals to find out if these drugs could be used for brainwashing or for military purposes.
You talked about Nicholas Sand. 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. Nick Sand was a very skillful chemist. He made LSD that the Brotherhood used. He was a very talented chemist.
The guy Stark. I was accused of heading this ring. I never met Stark. Never knew he existed. I heard he’s a European money launderer. But that was not relevant to what was going on out here. What is relevant
to your question is … yes, the CIA did distribute LSD. As a matter of fact, the DEA (the Drug Enforcement Agency) is out there right now setting up phony busts, setting up people, selling dope. And it’s well known that during the Reagan administration Ollie North was shipping up tons of cocaine to buy money to give to the Contras and the Iranians.
Scully grew up in Pleasant Hill, which was across the Bay from San Francisco. In eighth grade he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer. During high school he spent summers working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on physics problems. In his junior year of high school, Scully completed a small linear accelerator in the school science lab (he was trying to make gold atoms from mercury) which was pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. Scully skipped his senior year of high school and went directly to U.C. Berkeley majoring in mathematical physics. After two years at Berkeley, Scully took a leave of absence in 1964 because his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand. Tim Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965.
Scully knew the government would move quickly to suppress LSD distribution, and he wanted to obtain as much of the main precursor chemical, lysergic acid, as possible. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The 30-year-old Owsley took the 21 year old Scully as his apprentice[3] and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.
Owsley took Scully to the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966, and they built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In July 1966 Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement. Tim Scully worked there as Owsley’s apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”
Question: After moving west to California in the late 60s, you became connected with a group called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. In 1973, Nicholas Sand, a chemist for the Brotherhood, was arrested in
St. Louis for operating two LSD laboratories. Indictments in California around the same time also named Ronald H. Stark, who allegedly operated an LSD lab in Belgium. In the book Acid Dreams, the authors name Stark as being a CIA informant. In retrospect, do you believe the CIA was involved in putting acid out on the street to preempt a possible political revolution?
Leary: I don’t know about that. But it’s a matter of fact that most of the LSD in America in the late 50s and early 60s was brought in by the CIA and given around to hospitals to find out if these drugs could be used for brainwashing or for military purposes.
You talked about Nicholas Sand. 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. Nick Sand was a very skillful chemist. He made LSD that the Brotherhood used. He was a very talented chemist.
The guy Stark. I was accused of heading this ring. I never met Stark. Never knew he existed. I heard he’s a European money launderer. But that was not relevant to what was going on out here. What is relevant
to your question is … yes, the CIA did distribute LSD. As a matter of fact, the DEA (the Drug Enforcement Agency) is out there right now setting up phony busts, setting up people, selling dope. And it’s well known that during the Reagan administration Ollie North was shipping up tons of cocaine to buy money to give to the Contras and the Iranians.
Scully grew up in Pleasant Hill, which was across the Bay from San Francisco. In eighth grade he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer. During high school he spent summers working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on physics problems. In his junior year of high school, Scully completed a small linear accelerator in the school science lab (he was trying to make gold atoms from mercury) which was pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. Scully skipped his senior year of high school and went directly to U.C. Berkeley majoring in mathematical physics. After two years at Berkeley, Scully took a leave of absence in 1964 because his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand. Tim Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965.
Scully knew the government would move quickly to suppress LSD distribution, and he wanted to obtain as much of the main precursor chemical, lysergic acid, as possible. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The 30-year-old Owsley took the 21 year old Scully as his apprentice[3] and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.
Owsley took Scully to the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966, and they built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In July 1966 Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement. Tim Scully worked there as Owsley’s apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% free of impurities. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”
Better Living Through Chemistry
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/conceptafilm/better-living-through-chemistry-the-documentary
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/conceptafilm/better-living-through-chemistry-the-documentary
http://www.theoaktreereview.com/tim_scully.html
Tim Scully manufactured San Francisco's purest and most potent LSD in the mid-1960s. He worked under the tutelage of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the eccentric Grateful Dead patron and acid enthusiast who's reds and greens and blues made Haight-Ashbury the acid Mecca. Scully, an engineer by training, designed sound equipment for the Dead. Both travelled with the Merry PrankstersScully, of course, rigged the sound system on Kesey's bus.
After Owsley's arrest in 1967, Scully synthesized LSD for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a spiritual group that sought to turn the entire world onto acid. The police eventually caught up with Scully, but before he was imprisoned, he started his own company designing biofeedback machines. In the late 1980s Scully began
consulting for Autodesk (ADSK), writing device drivers for video displays and other equipment. He retired from the company as a senior software engineer in 2005. He renounced drugs in 1970
Sources: Lee, Martin A. Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties and Beyond (Grove Press
A correspondence with Tim Scully
In 1966, Tim Scully lived with and built sound equipment for the Grateful Dead. He is also known as the sidekick of Owsley "Bear" Stanley, perhaps the most well-known manufacturer of LSD in the 1960s. The two set up a lab in Point Richmond, California, and started making acid together. Scully and Owsley parted company at the end of 1967 when Owsley was arrested. Scully set up his own lab and during this time he was briefly associated with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an organisation that was using LSD as a religious sacrament and distributed Scully's acid. A year later he set up a third lab with Nick Sand, another chemist making psychedelics. Scully's persona as one of the major acid manufacturers of the hippie era finally caught up with him, and he spent several years in prison in the 1970s.
In 2003, I got in touch with Tim Scully. Back then, I was making research on The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and my main reason for getting in touch with Scully was to learn more of his days with the organization. We corresponded by e-mail. The the text below is an edited version of these messages.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams tells us their story of The Brotherhood, and also frequently mention you. The book gives the impression that you once were a very devoted man, with a firm belief in the inherent spiritual qualities of acid.
— I can't speak for everyone. Although when we took LSD we felt that we all understood each other and agreed on some deep level, I now think that feeling was sometimes an illusion.
— When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place, at a time when it was very troubled, e.g. the war in Vietnam . I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. I thought of LSD as an entheogen , though that term was not in use at the time. I also believed that this is what the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love] members believed.
— Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn't carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in Acid Dreams, that LSD is an amplifier. Given the proper set and setting it can be a powerful entheogen. But with different set and setting it can be an interrogation aid for the CIA or a party drug or any number of other things. So I think a good cultural context is needed for entheogens to function, such as in Huxley's Island or as in primitive cultures.
— I have also learned that although many idealists were drawn to make and distribute LSD, that this scene was and is also a magnet for con artists. I think Ron Stark probably was a world class example. I'm currently skeptical of the theory that he was a CIA agent, by the way.
— I only had close contacts with a few brothers during the time I was making acid, for security reasons. And the years I was making acid were from 1966-1970, with only the period from late 1968-mid 1970 overlapping with the Brotherhood. My main contacts were with John Griggs, Mike Randell and Ed May. I believe they were all sincere in sharing my beliefs. Of the three, only Mike Randell is still alive now. Since then, I have seen the testimony of several former brothers who became informers. I have read of the alleged involvement of some Brothers in dealing hard drugs. I don't have any personal knowledge of the accuracy of this last allegation. I was always of the opinion that forcing entheogens into the same channels as other drugs would corrupt some people, and that certainly happened to some people. It is too bad we weren't able to give them away.
— I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience. A few obviously did not and I feel bad about them. I think a higher percentage of the people who made or sold LSD were harmed by doing so.
— With regard to the accuracy of Tendler and May's book [The Brotherhood of Eternal Love], in many areas I am impressed with the research they did. I hope the Tendler and May book was inaccurate in saying that in later years the Brothers lost their idealism. Since I wasn't in touch with them, I don't know.
You say that you only were in close contact with three of the Brothers. I understand your position as a major acid chemist was unique and that the security you mentioned was of great importance, but did you see yourself as a "Brother" or just somebody helping them doing a righteous thing?
— Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the '60s. There wasn't nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network.
— I don't have a clear sense of how formal the Brotherhood was, but I suspect that it also was pretty informal, with various "members" doing their own thing but sharing resources. They made me an honorary member, giving me a necklace with a symbol which the members would recognize. But it was an extremely loose association.
The psychedelic counterculture of today is now an underground phenomena and probably very different from what it was in the Sixties. It is more likely that people pick up a book by Terence McKenna rather than reading Timothy Leary's manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. McKenna made a big impact in the 1990s, but instead of LSD opting for the use of Psilocybin mushrooms and also DMT, saying LSD simply isn't very spiritual in nature. McKenna's view on acid as less spiritual seems to have become somewhat established.
Could this shift in attitude possibly have anything to do with the degradation in the quality of acid? There are recent reports showing that the LSD of today is much weaker and also of inferior quality, while your Orange Sunshine was said to be even purer than that of the Sandoz laboratories.
— Yes, Bear and I both made every effort to make the purest possible LSD. We aimed to get 3600 doses per gram of pure crystalline LSD. We always dispersed it on tribasic calcium phosphate which was thereafter diluted with lactose. In the earliest period, Bear put the resulting mixture in #5 geletin capsules. Later we switched to tablets, either tablet triturates or compression molded, depending on the equipment we had available. The tribasic calcium phosphate had a strong affinity for the LSD and kept it evenly distributed throughout the tablet or capsule. This protected the labile LSD from decomposition due to exposure to UV light, extreme Ph, etc. Tablets were harder to counterfit or adulterate.
— There was one small batch of acid which Bear combined with 1mg of STP as an experiment. He concluded that STP was a bad idea and reverted to pure LSD.
— I gather from reading on the web that modern acid is usually distributed on blotters, a cheap but very bad distribution method since it leaves the acid vulnerable to rapid decomposition, and that a typical dose is not 50 micrograms. I don't have much information yet on the purity of present-day street acid, though I'm looking for published reports.
— I'd expect several factors to influence the kind of trips people have. Certainly the size of dose makes a big difference. After that I would rank set and setting with impurities coming in last, assuming they are not unusually toxic. That doesn't mean I think purity is unimportant. I just suspect that the other factors may be substantially more of an influence in this case. One blessing of the small doses popular now is that extreme bad trips are more rare.
Do you think acid will be around in the future and if so, will this drug be relevant in any spiritual or scientific way rather than just being the party drug it has become?
— I have met many people who are still using LSD for spiritual purposes. I doubt that will stop. If the current drug war ever abates, I think it is likely that scientific and medical research would resume. I also think that more frivolous uses of LSD will also continue.
You still claim that it would have been better to give the acid away rather than selling it. Was this way of thinking shared by others in the community? Viewing LSD as a religious sacrament, like the early Brothers from Anaheim did, also makes the idea of selling it absurd. In what way did people justify charging money for it?
— Without a wealthy patron to finance the production and distribution, selling it was the most straightforward way of financing the costs, which were very substantial. The raw materials were very hard to buy and involved bribes, smuggling, etc. There were ever increasing legal expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Setting up and operating a good clandestine lab is not cheap either. Tableting is also expensive. The last tablet machine I was involved with, in 1970, cost $15,000. I read that one costing $100,000 was confiscated in one of Nick's labs. A substantial fraction, perhaps 1/3, of the acid I made was given away.
— Nevertheless, it appears to me that some people were corrupted by the money that flowed through the pipeline. And certainly having LSD in the same milieu as cocaine and heroin, particularly when government propoganda made every effort to erase the distinctions between drugs, led all too many people into deep trouble with hard drugs.
— During the years when I was making LSD, I was very concerned with the likelihood that the authorities would make raw materials completely impossible to obtain at some point. I felt that we were in a race with time to garner enough raw material to make enough acid to turn on the world before it became impossible. I think others shared this view and labs scaled up as rapidly as raw materials and resources permitted.
— At the time, we fantasized about various free distribution methods. One unrealized fantasy was to buy one of those postcard advertising inserts for a mass-market magazine such as LIFE and, after publication, tell everyone that there was a dose of LSD hidden on each postcard. But we never had the where-with-all to make that happen.
Out of curiosity, I'd also like to know how long you stayed on The Merry Pranksters' Bus ? According to Acid Dreams you helped them install the sound equipment, is this right?
— I designed and built sound equipment for the Dead, lived with them and worked as a roadie for about the first 6 or 7 months of 1966. Then when the Point Richmond lab started up, the Dead wanted Bear and I to move out, so we did.
By Henrik Dahl
Tim Scully manufactured San Francisco's purest and most potent LSD in the mid-1960s. He worked under the tutelage of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the eccentric Grateful Dead patron and acid enthusiast who's reds and greens and blues made Haight-Ashbury the acid Mecca. Scully, an engineer by training, designed sound equipment for the Dead. Both travelled with the Merry PrankstersScully, of course, rigged the sound system on Kesey's bus.
After Owsley's arrest in 1967, Scully synthesized LSD for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a spiritual group that sought to turn the entire world onto acid. The police eventually caught up with Scully, but before he was imprisoned, he started his own company designing biofeedback machines. In the late 1980s Scully began
consulting for Autodesk (ADSK), writing device drivers for video displays and other equipment. He retired from the company as a senior software engineer in 2005. He renounced drugs in 1970
Sources: Lee, Martin A. Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties and Beyond (Grove Press
A correspondence with Tim Scully
In 1966, Tim Scully lived with and built sound equipment for the Grateful Dead. He is also known as the sidekick of Owsley "Bear" Stanley, perhaps the most well-known manufacturer of LSD in the 1960s. The two set up a lab in Point Richmond, California, and started making acid together. Scully and Owsley parted company at the end of 1967 when Owsley was arrested. Scully set up his own lab and during this time he was briefly associated with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an organisation that was using LSD as a religious sacrament and distributed Scully's acid. A year later he set up a third lab with Nick Sand, another chemist making psychedelics. Scully's persona as one of the major acid manufacturers of the hippie era finally caught up with him, and he spent several years in prison in the 1970s.
In 2003, I got in touch with Tim Scully. Back then, I was making research on The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and my main reason for getting in touch with Scully was to learn more of his days with the organization. We corresponded by e-mail. The the text below is an edited version of these messages.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams tells us their story of The Brotherhood, and also frequently mention you. The book gives the impression that you once were a very devoted man, with a firm belief in the inherent spiritual qualities of acid.
— I can't speak for everyone. Although when we took LSD we felt that we all understood each other and agreed on some deep level, I now think that feeling was sometimes an illusion.
— When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place, at a time when it was very troubled, e.g. the war in Vietnam . I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. I thought of LSD as an entheogen , though that term was not in use at the time. I also believed that this is what the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love] members believed.
— Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn't carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in Acid Dreams, that LSD is an amplifier. Given the proper set and setting it can be a powerful entheogen. But with different set and setting it can be an interrogation aid for the CIA or a party drug or any number of other things. So I think a good cultural context is needed for entheogens to function, such as in Huxley's Island or as in primitive cultures.
— I have also learned that although many idealists were drawn to make and distribute LSD, that this scene was and is also a magnet for con artists. I think Ron Stark probably was a world class example. I'm currently skeptical of the theory that he was a CIA agent, by the way.
— I only had close contacts with a few brothers during the time I was making acid, for security reasons. And the years I was making acid were from 1966-1970, with only the period from late 1968-mid 1970 overlapping with the Brotherhood. My main contacts were with John Griggs, Mike Randell and Ed May. I believe they were all sincere in sharing my beliefs. Of the three, only Mike Randell is still alive now. Since then, I have seen the testimony of several former brothers who became informers. I have read of the alleged involvement of some Brothers in dealing hard drugs. I don't have any personal knowledge of the accuracy of this last allegation. I was always of the opinion that forcing entheogens into the same channels as other drugs would corrupt some people, and that certainly happened to some people. It is too bad we weren't able to give them away.
— I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience. A few obviously did not and I feel bad about them. I think a higher percentage of the people who made or sold LSD were harmed by doing so.
— With regard to the accuracy of Tendler and May's book [The Brotherhood of Eternal Love], in many areas I am impressed with the research they did. I hope the Tendler and May book was inaccurate in saying that in later years the Brothers lost their idealism. Since I wasn't in touch with them, I don't know.
You say that you only were in close contact with three of the Brothers. I understand your position as a major acid chemist was unique and that the security you mentioned was of great importance, but did you see yourself as a "Brother" or just somebody helping them doing a righteous thing?
— Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the '60s. There wasn't nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network.
— I don't have a clear sense of how formal the Brotherhood was, but I suspect that it also was pretty informal, with various "members" doing their own thing but sharing resources. They made me an honorary member, giving me a necklace with a symbol which the members would recognize. But it was an extremely loose association.
The psychedelic counterculture of today is now an underground phenomena and probably very different from what it was in the Sixties. It is more likely that people pick up a book by Terence McKenna rather than reading Timothy Leary's manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. McKenna made a big impact in the 1990s, but instead of LSD opting for the use of Psilocybin mushrooms and also DMT, saying LSD simply isn't very spiritual in nature. McKenna's view on acid as less spiritual seems to have become somewhat established.
Could this shift in attitude possibly have anything to do with the degradation in the quality of acid? There are recent reports showing that the LSD of today is much weaker and also of inferior quality, while your Orange Sunshine was said to be even purer than that of the Sandoz laboratories.
— Yes, Bear and I both made every effort to make the purest possible LSD. We aimed to get 3600 doses per gram of pure crystalline LSD. We always dispersed it on tribasic calcium phosphate which was thereafter diluted with lactose. In the earliest period, Bear put the resulting mixture in #5 geletin capsules. Later we switched to tablets, either tablet triturates or compression molded, depending on the equipment we had available. The tribasic calcium phosphate had a strong affinity for the LSD and kept it evenly distributed throughout the tablet or capsule. This protected the labile LSD from decomposition due to exposure to UV light, extreme Ph, etc. Tablets were harder to counterfit or adulterate.
— There was one small batch of acid which Bear combined with 1mg of STP as an experiment. He concluded that STP was a bad idea and reverted to pure LSD.
— I gather from reading on the web that modern acid is usually distributed on blotters, a cheap but very bad distribution method since it leaves the acid vulnerable to rapid decomposition, and that a typical dose is not 50 micrograms. I don't have much information yet on the purity of present-day street acid, though I'm looking for published reports.
— I'd expect several factors to influence the kind of trips people have. Certainly the size of dose makes a big difference. After that I would rank set and setting with impurities coming in last, assuming they are not unusually toxic. That doesn't mean I think purity is unimportant. I just suspect that the other factors may be substantially more of an influence in this case. One blessing of the small doses popular now is that extreme bad trips are more rare.
Do you think acid will be around in the future and if so, will this drug be relevant in any spiritual or scientific way rather than just being the party drug it has become?
— I have met many people who are still using LSD for spiritual purposes. I doubt that will stop. If the current drug war ever abates, I think it is likely that scientific and medical research would resume. I also think that more frivolous uses of LSD will also continue.
You still claim that it would have been better to give the acid away rather than selling it. Was this way of thinking shared by others in the community? Viewing LSD as a religious sacrament, like the early Brothers from Anaheim did, also makes the idea of selling it absurd. In what way did people justify charging money for it?
— Without a wealthy patron to finance the production and distribution, selling it was the most straightforward way of financing the costs, which were very substantial. The raw materials were very hard to buy and involved bribes, smuggling, etc. There were ever increasing legal expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Setting up and operating a good clandestine lab is not cheap either. Tableting is also expensive. The last tablet machine I was involved with, in 1970, cost $15,000. I read that one costing $100,000 was confiscated in one of Nick's labs. A substantial fraction, perhaps 1/3, of the acid I made was given away.
— Nevertheless, it appears to me that some people were corrupted by the money that flowed through the pipeline. And certainly having LSD in the same milieu as cocaine and heroin, particularly when government propoganda made every effort to erase the distinctions between drugs, led all too many people into deep trouble with hard drugs.
— During the years when I was making LSD, I was very concerned with the likelihood that the authorities would make raw materials completely impossible to obtain at some point. I felt that we were in a race with time to garner enough raw material to make enough acid to turn on the world before it became impossible. I think others shared this view and labs scaled up as rapidly as raw materials and resources permitted.
— At the time, we fantasized about various free distribution methods. One unrealized fantasy was to buy one of those postcard advertising inserts for a mass-market magazine such as LIFE and, after publication, tell everyone that there was a dose of LSD hidden on each postcard. But we never had the where-with-all to make that happen.
Out of curiosity, I'd also like to know how long you stayed on The Merry Pranksters' Bus ? According to Acid Dreams you helped them install the sound equipment, is this right?
— I designed and built sound equipment for the Dead, lived with them and worked as a roadie for about the first 6 or 7 months of 1966. Then when the Point Richmond lab started up, the Dead wanted Bear and I to move out, so we did.
By Henrik Dahl
Nick Sand Extended Biography by Jon Hanna v1.0 -
Nov 5, 2009 Citation: Hanna J. "Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand Extended Biography".
Erowid.org. Nov 5, 2009.
Nick Sand, Jan 2001
Photo by Jon Hanna Nick Sand grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. His father taught chemistry at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, and contributed to the Manhattan Project and to SAM (substitute alloy materials), which focused on the separation of uranium isotopes in order to extract the only fissionable isotope, uranium-235. Watching the destruction brought about by such work, Sand felt that there had to be a better way. One of his father's PhD students, an Indian Raja, taught Sand yoga at the age of 15. This inspired a deep and abiding interest in spirituality, and over the last five decades Sand has been a student of the Kabballah, meditation, Krishna consciousness, Sufism, aikido, T'ai Chi, Zen, and Tantra, as well as having studied the teachings of Krishnamurti, Milarepa, Ramakrishna, Rajneesh, and other philosophers.
Sand married his first wife, Melly, while he was still in college, studying anthropology. In 1961 he first took mescaline, which sparked a life-long interest in psychedelic sacraments. During his undergraduate days, Sand put together a laboratory and successfully synthesized mescaline and several short-acting tryptamines. His attic became a new sort of temple, as Sand started turning everyone he knew on to these obscure entheogens. After meeting Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) at a lecture at Brooklyn College, Sand invited Alpert to see his lab. Sand was then summoned to Millbrook, the commune home to Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. At Millbrook, Sand met John Griggs (founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) and Owsley Stanley (creator of the first underground lab producing pure LSD1). At this point Sand began dividing his time between finishing his BA, making psychedelics, and guiding initiates in his attic and at Millbrook. He graduated from college in 1966. During a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. This decision—to give up a career in anthropology and go underground to produce LSD—ultimately resulted in the break-up of his marriage. Sand became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good. He left New York in 1967, and headed to the San Francisco Bay Area to set up a lab, where he manufactured DOM (known at the time under the street name "STP") and MDA.
From 1968 through 1969 in Windsor, California, Sand worked in an illicit lab with Tim Scully, who taught Sand how to manufacture LSD. Their material was distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a legendary band of dealers on a mission to enlighten the world. Just like Owsley before them, Scully and Sand both felt that it was extremely important to create a product of the highest purity at a standardized dose; these goals resulted in one of the most beloved "brands" of acid in the late 1960s: tiny orange barrels containing 300 micrograms of LSD, called "Orange Sunshine ". In 2007, an ex-DEA agent who spent time analyzing Sand's acid in the 1960s remarked, "It was always high quality, and it was always a good dose."2
Although infamous because of his black-market LSD production, Sand was also the first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT. Sand and a lab colleague were the first people to notice that DMT exhibits piezoluminescence: when hardened DMT that had collected in a tray was being chipped out with a hammer and screwdriver in a brightly lit room, the blows emitted massive amounts of colored light. Sand was also the first person to realize that synthetic DMT could be smoked for effect; prior to this, self-experimenters were injecting DMT. This discovery came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it.
Eventually Sand and Scully were arrested. Sand was told by his lawyer, Michael Kennedy, that their bust influenced the government in their massive effort to combine numerous drug control agencies (the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) under one umbrella with greater power: the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years (later reduced to 10 years; he was released after 3.5 years); that same year Sand was sentenced to 15 years, but he jumped bail and relocated to Canada, where he set up a new lab. Sand met his current partner, Usha, via an international blind date arranged by a mutual friend who knew that they shared a passionate interest in psychedelics.
Sand was arrested again in 1996 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. His lab there produced assorted psychedelics and, at the time of the bust, had 43 grams of LSD on site. The lab was so impressive that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video. Samples of drugs seized at the lab tested at over 100% pure, which is clearly not possible. Alexander Shulgin has speculated that the government's reference standards must have degraded and been less pure than Sand's illicit product. Sand served time in prison from 1996 through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded. While in prison, Sand wrote a manuscript called Psychedelic Secrets, which lays out his thoughts on the best approaches for trippers to take when exploring their minds; he also wrote a guidebook containing his production syntheses techniques for popular psychedelics. (Both books are as yet unpublished.)
After his release, Sand gave a speech at the Mind States II conference in 2001 titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness". He received a standing ovation, and has spoken at numerous events since that time. In his personal exploration of psychedelics, Sand has long been a proponent of psychopharmacological synergy. In 2006 he gave a talk at Burning Man titled "Synergistic Combinations in the Future", describing some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects.
Notes # Although an earlier production lab for LSD was set up by Bernard Roseman and Bernard Copley, the product that they synthesized was reported to have been of questionable purity. In 1962, Roseman and Copley were charged with smuggling in relation to their LSD production, as manufacturing was not illegal at the time (Stafford P. Psychedelics Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, page 50, 1992).
Nov 5, 2009 Citation: Hanna J. "Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand Extended Biography".
Erowid.org. Nov 5, 2009.
Nick Sand, Jan 2001
Photo by Jon Hanna Nick Sand grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. His father taught chemistry at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, and contributed to the Manhattan Project and to SAM (substitute alloy materials), which focused on the separation of uranium isotopes in order to extract the only fissionable isotope, uranium-235. Watching the destruction brought about by such work, Sand felt that there had to be a better way. One of his father's PhD students, an Indian Raja, taught Sand yoga at the age of 15. This inspired a deep and abiding interest in spirituality, and over the last five decades Sand has been a student of the Kabballah, meditation, Krishna consciousness, Sufism, aikido, T'ai Chi, Zen, and Tantra, as well as having studied the teachings of Krishnamurti, Milarepa, Ramakrishna, Rajneesh, and other philosophers.
Sand married his first wife, Melly, while he was still in college, studying anthropology. In 1961 he first took mescaline, which sparked a life-long interest in psychedelic sacraments. During his undergraduate days, Sand put together a laboratory and successfully synthesized mescaline and several short-acting tryptamines. His attic became a new sort of temple, as Sand started turning everyone he knew on to these obscure entheogens. After meeting Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) at a lecture at Brooklyn College, Sand invited Alpert to see his lab. Sand was then summoned to Millbrook, the commune home to Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. At Millbrook, Sand met John Griggs (founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) and Owsley Stanley (creator of the first underground lab producing pure LSD1). At this point Sand began dividing his time between finishing his BA, making psychedelics, and guiding initiates in his attic and at Millbrook. He graduated from college in 1966. During a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. This decision—to give up a career in anthropology and go underground to produce LSD—ultimately resulted in the break-up of his marriage. Sand became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good. He left New York in 1967, and headed to the San Francisco Bay Area to set up a lab, where he manufactured DOM (known at the time under the street name "STP") and MDA.
From 1968 through 1969 in Windsor, California, Sand worked in an illicit lab with Tim Scully, who taught Sand how to manufacture LSD. Their material was distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a legendary band of dealers on a mission to enlighten the world. Just like Owsley before them, Scully and Sand both felt that it was extremely important to create a product of the highest purity at a standardized dose; these goals resulted in one of the most beloved "brands" of acid in the late 1960s: tiny orange barrels containing 300 micrograms of LSD, called "Orange Sunshine ". In 2007, an ex-DEA agent who spent time analyzing Sand's acid in the 1960s remarked, "It was always high quality, and it was always a good dose."2
Although infamous because of his black-market LSD production, Sand was also the first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT. Sand and a lab colleague were the first people to notice that DMT exhibits piezoluminescence: when hardened DMT that had collected in a tray was being chipped out with a hammer and screwdriver in a brightly lit room, the blows emitted massive amounts of colored light. Sand was also the first person to realize that synthetic DMT could be smoked for effect; prior to this, self-experimenters were injecting DMT. This discovery came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it.
Eventually Sand and Scully were arrested. Sand was told by his lawyer, Michael Kennedy, that their bust influenced the government in their massive effort to combine numerous drug control agencies (the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) under one umbrella with greater power: the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years (later reduced to 10 years; he was released after 3.5 years); that same year Sand was sentenced to 15 years, but he jumped bail and relocated to Canada, where he set up a new lab. Sand met his current partner, Usha, via an international blind date arranged by a mutual friend who knew that they shared a passionate interest in psychedelics.
Sand was arrested again in 1996 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. His lab there produced assorted psychedelics and, at the time of the bust, had 43 grams of LSD on site. The lab was so impressive that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video. Samples of drugs seized at the lab tested at over 100% pure, which is clearly not possible. Alexander Shulgin has speculated that the government's reference standards must have degraded and been less pure than Sand's illicit product. Sand served time in prison from 1996 through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded. While in prison, Sand wrote a manuscript called Psychedelic Secrets, which lays out his thoughts on the best approaches for trippers to take when exploring their minds; he also wrote a guidebook containing his production syntheses techniques for popular psychedelics. (Both books are as yet unpublished.)
After his release, Sand gave a speech at the Mind States II conference in 2001 titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness". He received a standing ovation, and has spoken at numerous events since that time. In his personal exploration of psychedelics, Sand has long been a proponent of psychopharmacological synergy. In 2006 he gave a talk at Burning Man titled "Synergistic Combinations in the Future", describing some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects.
Notes # Although an earlier production lab for LSD was set up by Bernard Roseman and Bernard Copley, the product that they synthesized was reported to have been of questionable purity. In 1962, Roseman and Copley were charged with smuggling in relation to their LSD production, as manufacturing was not illegal at the time (Stafford P. Psychedelics Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition, page 50, 1992).
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/show_image.php?image=lsd/lsd_blotter_sunshine.gif
http://www.punkerslut.com/articles/creat..._acid.html
Tim Scully and Nick Sand
The Creators of Orange Sunshine Acid
A Look Into the Legal Case and the Personal Activities of the 1960's Greatest LSD Chemists
By Punkerslut
An Introduction to the Defendants Tim Scully and Nick Sand
"The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;"
--Percy Shelley, 1813
"Queen Mab," Book VII
On, September 13, 1976, two individuals stood before Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, both charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD." They were also charged with tax evasion, based on "the nonreporting of income derived from this activity." [*1] It was not simply LSD that they were responsible for creating -- it was the legendary, underground "Orange Sunshine" acid. The trial itself became as amazing as the two people involved. They deserve a brief introduction.
Nick Sand was an Anthropology and Sociology student in Brooklyn, New York City, when he took Mescaline in 1961. He also often visited Millbrook, the communal home of Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. According to an Erowid article providing a summary of this chemist, "during a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. He became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good." [*2] In 1967, he left New York and moved to San Francisco, where he produced DOM ("STP") and MDA (an analogue of MDMA, or "ecstasy").
In 1969, Nick Sand worked with Tim Scully in Windsor, California, producing millions of doses of the Orange Sunshine LSD. Sand was also the first chemist to synthesize DMT and to suggest smoking as a method, which "came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it." [*3] This is an impressive accomplishment, because DMT is often considered among the few psychedelics exceeding LSD in the raw intensity of its experience.
Image: Photograph of Nick Sand as a young Anthropology Student,
by Gene Bernofsky, 1967,
From Erowid.org
Robert Timothy Scully, or more commonly just Tim Scully, was a co-worker with Nick Sand in the Orange Sunshine laboratory. When only 13 years old, Scully designed and built a computer in 1958 that received honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair. [*4] A few years later, at another science fair, he attempted "to make gold from mercury by use of thermal neutrons," whereby he would create "a neutron flux by a deuteron-deuteron interaction." [*5]
Image: Photograph of Tim Scully (Top-Right),
from the Oakland Tribune, 1961,
From Erowid.org
From the early 1960's to about 1966, he did work in electrical engineering, designing detection and measurement systems for radiation and the nuclear content of soil. And after that, he spent a few months on the road with the Grateful Dead, "doing electronic design of custom audio systems including direct electrical recording of their instruments." [*6] [*7]
While touring the country with the Dead, Scully met Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another famous LSD chemist of the 1960's -- nicknamed "Bear." For the most part, Stanley relied on storebought LSD manufactured by Sandoz, then marketed as a psychiatric tool for psychoanalysis. However, by the middle 1960's, this wasn't an option anymore, so he, "unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66." The 1965 batch was impure, but when Scully and Stanley teamed up, Scully claimed that they perfected a pure process...
"Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (Purple Haze) and white (White Lightning) of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product." [*8]
In 1967, Tim Scully set up a lab for Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Denver, Colorado. [*9] However, Stanley's work was short-lived, as he "was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California." [*10] From his time between 1965 and 1967, though, Stanley produced 1.25 million doses of LSD, while at the same time being an enthusiast, financier, and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead; Bob Weir from the Dead said of him, "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything." [*11]
In fact, in 1966, Stanley was raided by police for producing Methamphetamine, which turned out to be incorrect -- so Stanley successfully sued the police. After his trial in 1967, he was let out on bail, until he was arrested again in 1970 for possession of Marijuana. His bail was revoked and he served two years at Terminal Island. When asked about his experiences in a 2007 interview, Stanley said...
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society - only my society and the one making the laws are different." [*12]
After the arrest of his partner, Tim Scully set up another LSD laboratory in Denver in 1968. Only one year later, in 1969, it was raided by the police, though the search was eventually ruled illegal. It was here that Nick Sand was taught the pure method for LSD production. [*13] Besides synthesizing psychedelic drugs, Scully also did some work on "the design of high vacuum flash evaporators and systems for preparative column chromatography." That very year, he founded his own electronics company in California, Aquarius Electronics. [*14] But, his activity was interrupted with the 1969 raid, and the case that delayed for years before reaching court.
During this time, Scully was also accepting funding from William Hitchcock, the son of a wealthy family, for the laboratory. To quote Scully on his activity during this period before the '69 raid...
"Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the '60s. There wasn't nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network." [*15]
Nick Sand was a member of "a secretive group of hippie acid dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love." [*16] It was through this organization, active until just a few years ago (2009), that Sand was able to widely distribute his products. [*17] The purpose of the group was "the aim of transforming the world into a peaceful utopia by promoting consciousness-expanding drug experimentation through LSD, including their famous homemade acid, Orange Sunshine." [*18] At his trial, Tim Scully said that his intention was to "turn on the world" and as far as LSD chemists go, "we were doing a public service." [*19]
Just What Is ALD-52?
"Nicholas Sand was charged in two counts with income tax evasion, in one count with conspiracy to violate federal drug laws relating to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), in one count with conspiracy to defraud the United States in the collection of taxes, and in two counts with substantive drug violations, the manufacture and distribution of LSD. Robert Timothy Scully was charged in one count with income tax evasion, in the same two conspiracy counts as Sand, and in three drug related counts, one charging the manufacture and two the sale of LSD."
--Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, 1976
United States of America v. Nicholas Sand and Robert Timothy Scully
The case against these two began in 1973, and they were both convicted in 1974, where Tim Scully was sentenced to 20 years and Nick Sand was sentenced to 15 years. [*20] On September 13th, 1976, the United States Federal Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, reviewed and ruled on the final appeal of the two defendants. [*21] The charges were the manufacture and distribution of LSD "during 1968, 1969, and 1970."
However, there was no LSD. The chemical that Sand and Scully were producing was ALD-52. It is "a psychotropic organic compound, which the defendants claim was the licit chemical N-acetyl lysergic acid diethylamide (ALD-52)." [*22] When water is added to it, ALD-52 undergoes Hydrolysis, [*23] [*24] which turns it into LSD -- but ALD-52 itself is not illegal.
However, the government tampered with the ALD-52 and exposed it to moist atmospheres, turning it into LSD. Judge Duniway admitted this and claimed that it was a completely legitimate form of preserving evidence, as well as using it in court. To quote him in the case...
"If they [the defendants] were manufacturing a legal but perfect substitute for LSD, it was their obligation, not that of the government, to preserve evidence of that accomplishment. Having failed to do so, they cannot now complain because the ALD-52 might have been better preserved had the government indicted earlier." [*25]
The defendants are going to be tried for evidence that was admittedly tampered with by the United States government. As Duniway remarked, "Whatever prejudice defendants suffered was a product of their own negligence." [*26] It's not certain if Judge Duniway was expecting that the suspects would go to the police department and regularly maintain the chemistry work in the evidence locker. The judge doesn't really go so far as to say exactly what kind of obligation their "negligence" was from.
Since it required at least four years for this type of decomposition to occur, the attorneys for Sand and Scully argued that the case violated their right to a speedy and public trial. (The Sixth Amendment.) However, according to Judge Duniway, this rule only applies where the delay has some effect on the trial. Later, he does admit that the delay caused the Hydrolysis of the ADL-52 into LSD, but this isn't considered as effecting the trial. As Duniway stated at the trial...
"¬...the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment may require dismissal of the indictment if the defendant is able to demonstrate either that the delay was the product of deliberate action by law enforcement officials to gain a tactical advantage over the defendant, or that it resulted in such substantial prejudice to the accused that a fair trial is no longer possible." [*27]
The defendants were expected to prove that the tampering of evidence by government officials was done intentionally by them. "...allegation that the delay was wilful was 'implicit' in their moving papers. In general we require that a party do more than suggest or imply an objection in order to preserve it on appeal." [*28] There would be no case against the defendants for possession of LSD without such tampering. But this alone does not prove that it was done maliciously, and therefore, the fixed evidence cannot be barred from court. So rules the judge on behalf of the law.
Another difficulty in the delay is that many of the friends of Nick Sand and Tim Scully, during that period, were no longer around. Yet, the judge makes an assumption about why kinds of "acquaintances" these defendants would have: "...it is not clear that their testimony would more likely have been helpful than harmful to Sand and Scully." [*29]
In the end, though, Duniway relied on the court's chemistry-knowledge: "The government maintained below, and argues here, that ALD-52 cannot be produced without first manufacturing LSD." [*30] The defendants, on the other hand, one of them being an exceptionally brilliant chemist, "had devised a method of producing ALD-52 without passing through an intermediate stage in which LSD was produced." [*31] The judge claimed this was impossible, though it is definitely possible to produce chemicals by using alternative, intermediate stages. [*32] [*33] [*34] In fact, when Sand was arrested, he was found with papers that included the synthesis instructions for more than one hundred, different psychedelic drugs that were publicly unknown. [*35]
It All Goes Back to Billy Hitchcock
"A substantial fraction, perhaps one third, of the acid I made was given away."
--Tim Scully, 2003
The Oak Tree Review [*36]
The "LSD" found on Nick Sand and Tim Scully was not LSD. But, the court ordered itself to imagine this to be the case. Even with that, there was still some lurking doubt in its mind, so it had to prop up a witness. This is where Billy Hitchcock, the international multimillionaire and financier of Timothy Leary, comes into play.
It turns out that Hitchcock had been lying for years to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The authorities were not concerned at all about this activity, until they knew they could use Hitchcock as a material witness against Sand and Scully. Someone who had just pled guilty to lying multiple times in court now became the cornerstone of the entire case for the prosecution. To quote LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain...
"Hitchcock was not a particularly strong witness at the San Francisco trial. He acknowledged that his own drug usage had been extensive, and he listed all the substances he had experimented with over the years, including LSD and heroin. Mr. Billy had already pleaded guilty to income tax evasion and violation of SEC regulations, but he had not yet been sentenced for these charges. The defense contended that Hitchcock had been promised leniency in his other cases if he lied in this one. Although he admitted that he had perjured himself four times during Internal Revenue and SEC investigations and before a federal grand jury, his testimony was deemed reliable enough to send both of the defendants to the pen." [*37]
Even the judge claimed that Hitchcock's testimony was essential to the prosecution of the two LSD chemists. "The government argues that it did not have sufficient evidence to indict until Hitchcock agreed to testify against Sand and Scully," [*38] Judge Duniway said. And why should the government believe the defendants? "...the defendants offer only their unsupported conclusory allegations," [*39] Duniway concluded.
Maybe someone who has perjured themselves and is being given leniency in other crimes might only offer "unsupported conclusory" allegations. In the end, the judge looked at two professional and trained chemists, and disregarded their testimony in favor of the testimony of a heroin-using, tax-evading millionaire. There is much to suggest that Hitchcock did not even believe in the testimony he gave -- behind the court's back, he put up money for Tim Scully's legal fees. [*40]
There was actually much more to it than that. Hitchcock was being charged with using a Swiss bank to move millions of dollars from the drug trade into legal channels, what the IRS had declared "the biggest tax evasion caper in U.S. history." The same bank involved had worked with the CIA previously in hiring terrorist groups in underdeveloped countries, for example, the "secret war against Fidel Castro." [*41] When the IRS moved in, the CIA intervened and prohibited it from carrying out its full investigation of Hitchcock. The amount of money involved in Hitchcock's Swiss bank scandal, from 1965 to 1971, amounted to forty million dollars. [*42]
The government gave up a multimillionaire involved with banks financing CIA-sponsored terrorists -- in favor of prosecuting two LSD chemists. For his cooperation, Billy Hitchcock received a five-year reduced sentence and a $20,000 fine. [*43] There is also the difficulty that Hitchcock was no chemist, and his testimony amounted to hearsay, since he had only been told by Sand or Scully that they were making or using "acid." However, the hearsay exception was allowed only for accusations against Sand and Scully, with Duniway prohibiting cross-examination: "...a co-conspirator's declaration can be introduced by either party and may be used to exculpate as well as inculpate the accused. We rejected this argument..." [*44]
Timothy Leary: "What knowledge do you wish?"
Billy Hitchcock: "...(hesitant pause)... How can I make more money on the stock market?" [*45]
Did Someone Say "Legality"?
"It is now no longer a question of accumulating scientific truths and discoveries. We need above everything to spread the truths already mastered by science, to make them part of our daily life, to render them common property. We have to order things so that all, so that the mass of mankind, may be capable of understanding and applying them; we have to make science no longer a luxury but the foundation of every man's life. This is what justice demands."
--Peter Kropotkin, 1880
"An Appeal to the Young"
The investigation that led to the arrest of Nick Sand and Timothy Scully resulted from information gained by three illegal search and seizures by the police. The legal phrase for describing this evidence is "tainted," since even if it was obtained legitimately, knowledge about it only came about illegitimately. To quote Judge Duniway on this matter...
"...they contend that they were not given the opportunity, guaranteed them by Alderman v. United States, 1969, 394 U.S. 165, 89 S.Ct. 961, 22 L.Ed.2d 176, to demonstrate that evidence that the government used against them, not itself illegally obtained, was discovered through the exploitation of an illegal search." [*46]
The judge ruled against the defendants on this matter, though, "the defendants had not demonstrated a sufficient connection between a prior illegal search and the evidence sought to be suppressed..." [*47] Or, to quote Duniway fully...
"The defendants did not at trial, and do not on this appeal, identify particular items which should have been analyzed for taint. Rather, they argued that 'there has been so much illegality that the presumption of regularity of the Government should lapse; (it) should have the burden of going forward and justifying (its) sources.' We cannot agree." [*48]
The evidence obtained from the illegal searches in the Denver and Missouri raids led to the legal searches that resulted in the current prosecution. Government surveillance, when it was wide enough, might be considered illegal, Duniway argued. However, "In the case at bar there were three illegal seizures, but there was no wiretapping." [*49] If the government had gone so far in its criminality as to do some wiretapping, on top of three illegal search-and-seizures, then the state is infringing on your right to privacy. Even if wiretapping was used, it's not likely that the state, or the financial supporters of terrorism, are going to hand it over.
The defense argued rather rationally, "illegally secured information [led] the government to substantially intensify an investigation [making] all evidence subsequently uncovered (a product) '. . . of that illegality.'" [*50] A trial based on illegal evidence, then, might seem itself somewhat illegal. Even though the legal raid did use information from the illegal raids, the judge asked them to prove "that the government utilized illegally secured information to obtain more than defendants' identities." [*51] Illegally obtained evidence is admissible when it relates to someone's "identity," for example, proving that someone committed a crime, and this is decidedly convenient for the prosecution.
In fact, Judge Duniway admitted that the prosecution's main case was the "...mention of a prior prosecution based on illegally seized evidence..." There was some admission of a mistake, though, "...we must conclude that in this circumstance any error was harmless." [*52] The defendants have to prove that the evidence used against them came illegally. Except, of course, evidence that proves that they were directly responsible for the crimes involved. And, when that comes out, even then, they are responsible for proving that it was not harmless.
Throughout the trial, both Sand and Scully wanted to testify on their own behalf. However, when they stated this, the prosecution threatened in court to ask them about evidence that had been obtained illegally from their searches. This kept them from testifying on their own behalf, the threat of presenting even more illegal evidence against them. Such a procedure is completely legal, however. According to Judge Duniway, "The prosecution's threat to use illegally seized evidence to impeach defendants' testimony was not an impermissible restraint on their constitutional right to testify on their own behalf." [*53]
Topping off the Trial with a Banker's Testimony
"I felt the work I was doing was so important for humanity that I was willing to take the risks of being the alchemist, hiding away in his laboratory, making chemicals."
--Nick Sand, 2009
"Inside LSD" by National Geographic [*54] [*55] [*56]
The prosecution was building up an interesting case. The evidence presented against the defendants was either admittedly tampered with or obtained illegally. The prize witness against the two defendants had lied five times in an SEC and IRS scandal involving $40 million and was only testifying to get a reduced sentence. This case wouldn't be complete, though, unless a mouthpiece was brought before the court who spoke on behalf of the Swiss bank; that is, an attorney represented the financial interests funding terrorism.
According to Duniway, "The district court admitted a large volume of business records from the Paravicini Bank of Berne, Switzerland. These records, introduced by the government, were authenticated by Eugene Patry, a bank vice-chairman." [*57] Patry was the sole witness representing the Paravicini Bank. The prosecution presented some bank documents before Patry and asked him to authenticate them, which he did. "The government made a sufficient showing of the authenticity of the records through Patry's testimony." [*58] The records alleged that the defendants were guilty of that accompanying charge of LSD production: tax evasion.
The defense asked a question of Patry in cross-examination about the bank documents, and Patry responded that he had no idea what those documents were about that he had just authenticated. All that he could say was that they were authentic, whereas the defense wanted to know why they were "so inherently unreliable and so incomplete." [*59] This defense felt this was unfair, since this was "amounted to an abridgement of appellant's Sixth Amendment rights to confront the witnesses against them." [*60] The judge, however, ruled that the testimony of Patry was reliable and shouldn't be questioned. To quote Duniway again...
"As we have held, the person testifying need not have personal knowledge of the contents of the document. United States v. Saputski, 9 Cir., 1974, 496 F.2d 140, 142. Neither is it necessary that the witness personally know the time, place, and manner in which the record was made." [*61]
The documents of a corporate bank are accepted without any way to cross-examine them. Documents can't answer questions, and the person authenticating and verifying the document doesn't know what the document is. At the same time, the defense wasn't able to call any of its actual human witnesses, because of the undue delay in starting the trial. Written, legal papers hold more sway than the opinions of actual living beings. With this added to their heroin-using tax evader and their illegal evidence, the prosecution felt that it's case was complete.
Judge Duniway affirmed the decision of the lower courts in convicting Tim Scully and Nick Sand. [*62] Scully was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, Sand received fifteen. [*63] In the words of Duniway, "While harsh, the sentences meted out to Sand and Scully were less than the maximum; hence, the scope of our review is limited almost to the vanishing point." [*64] The judge's concluding statements were indicative of his overall attitude...
"The defendants' statement of facts is incorrect. Hence, we need not consider whether a district judge must consider the possibility of rehabilitation in passing sentence. The judge did consider, albeit disparagingly, the rehabilitative role of the criminal law, but concluded that these defendants were unrehabilitatable." [*65]
Did the government ever really believe that these two individuals actually possessed LSD, the offense that they were charged with? They are charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD," but never does the judge point to the accused, and say, "I accuse you of manufacturing and distributing LSD." With all of the evidence, such a statement would have been ridiculous. The two defendants were found guilty, anyway.
"The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact. No magistrate then, (as he is one of the society) can, with justice, inflict on any other member of the same society punishment that is not ordained by the laws."
--Cesare Beccaria, 1764
"Of Crimes and Punishments," Chapter 3
Whatever Happened to the Chemists?
"But how can the one liberate the many? By first liberating his own being. He does this not by elevating himself, but by lowering himself. He lowers himself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into himself, he becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth. Completely emancipated from his former false life, he discovers his original pure nature, which is the pure nature of the universe. Freely and spontaneously releasing his divine energy, he constantly transcends complicated situations and draws everything around him back into an integral oneness. Because he is a living divinity, when he acts, the universe acts."
--Lao Tzu, c. 600 BC
"Hua Hu Ching," Part 77
For Nick Sand, there was only one option. As a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, he had a duty. While out on $50,000 bail, Nick Sand left the country. [*66] It would be a very long time before he returned. During the trial, Tim Scully had been working on his own creations, which he had to end now with the upholding of his conviction. But from 1971 to 1976, Scully was working on...
"...innovative biofeedback and physiological monitoring instruments and systems, including microcomputer based systems for educational, medical and process control. This work involved analog and digital circuit design, using discrete components and integrated circuits. I learned assembly language programming techniques and high level languages." [*67]
Tim Scully sold the stock in his company and retired to life in prison at McNeil Island Penitentiary. During his time here, he was allowed to enroll in a Ph.D. program at the Humanistic Psychology Institute. Here, he developed...
"...biofeedback systems and techniques for use in drug rehabilitation programs. I eventually built an 8080A microcomputer physiological monitoring system for analyzing EEG, EMG, GSR/BSR and skin temperature and did some basic research on the identification of specific patterns of physiological response associated with specific emotional states." [*68]
Much of Scully's time was spent working with drug rehabilitation programs that integrated his biofeedback systems. He even made a twelve hour video seminar to train facilitators of these systems for the Federal Prison Industries. On the side, he also taught Tai-Chi. [*69] This biofeedback system did not make much headlines. This was until Robin, a young woman with cerebral palsy, was able to use these systems to allow her to speak with the rest of the world. Scully was named Man of the Year by the Washington State Jaycees. To quote The Hour, a Connecticut newspaper...
"Scully first met Robin, the cerebral palsy victim, in California when he was free on bond awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to possess, manufacture, sell and distribute narcotics.
"Robin was able to control only side movement of one knee. Scully worked up a computer device that allows her to use movement to select words to appear on a television screen. She therefore is able to 'speak' sentences in rapid fashion." [*70]
In 1977, Scully's sentenced was reduced to ten years, with parole most likely available in 1980. In 1979, Scully graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology, his dissertation titled: "Physiological Pattern Analysis: A Key to Improved Biofeedback Systems for the Voluntary Control of Events in Consciousness." Scully was transferred out of McNeil Island before 1980, though, being moved to a half-way house in San Francisco in August, two must after obtaining his Ph.D. [*71] For a twenty year sentence, Scully was imprisoned for only three and a half years, and when he finished, he came out with a doctorate. So much for "unrehabilitatable."
Throughout the 1980's to the early 2000's, Scully has been working on biofeedback and computer systems. [*72] In 2005, Tim Scully retired, though he's doing some minor consulting work and writing a book "on the underground history of LSD." [*73]
Nicholas Sand relocated to Canada. He was set up on an international blind date with another chemist by one of his friends. It wasn't long after meeting Usha that the two began making LSD together. [*74] For roughly twenty years, Nick Sand formed the core of international LSD manufacturing, producing about 250 million doses. [*75]
In 1996, he was arrested in Vancouver, Canada, [*76] where his laboratory was found with 42 grams of LSD, or roughly 200,000 moderate doses. Samples of the LSD tested above 100% pure by the government's chemists, which is impossible. Psychedelic guru and chemist Alexander Shulgin suggested that the government must have degraded standards. The lab was considered so well managed and built, that "the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video." [*77]
In San Francisco, Nick Sand was found guilty of jumping bail, which added five years imprisonment to his previous sentence of fifteen years -- and this is besides the charges in Canada. [*78] He was 55 years-old. While imprisoned in Canada, Sand wrote a 600-paged book titled Psychedelic Secrets, which contained guidelines for those wishing to maximize their psychedelic experience. In a letter, he wrote concerning the awful conditions...
"Meanwhile overcrowding intensifies in here and the authorities attempt to squeeze everything out of their slaves that they can. Many things are not provided, like soap and toothpaste and all articles of toiletry and snacks, etc. They even sell fruit here." [*79]
By late 2000, Nicholas Sand was given an early release from prison, serving just under four years. As early as 2001, he gave a speech at the Mind States II conference, titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness." In 2006, he gave a speech at Burning Man, "Synergistic Combinations in the Future," where he talked about "some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects." He has also written a second book containing his syntheses techniques for producing psychedelics, though both are still unpublished. [*80]
Image: Nick Sand, Photograph by Jon Hanna, Nov, 2009
Photograph from Erowid.org
"The judge is lost when he ceases to be mechanical, when he 'is forsaken by the rules of evidence.' Then he no longer has anything but an opinion like everybody else; and, if he decides according to this opinion, his action is no longer an official action....
"What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? The state cannot forbear the claim to determine the individual's will, to speculate and count on this. For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. The state is not thinkable without lordship and servitude; for the state must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the 'will of the state.'"
--Max Stirner, 1845
"The Ego and Its Own," Part 2, Chapter II, Section 1
Punkerslut,
Resources
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*2. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (May 10, 1941 - ), published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*3. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*4. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*5. Photograph of Tim Scully with his Linear Accelerator, published by the Tribune, 1961, republished by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*6. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*7. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview.com .
*8. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*9. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*10. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*11. "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area," by Joel Selvin, Thursday, July 12, 2007, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com .
*12. "Owsley Stanley - '60s counterculture icon - dies: 'Bear' helped Grateful Dead, made LSD (Owsley Stanley 1935-2011), March 14, 2011, By Aidin Vaziri, SFGate.com .
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*14. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*15. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview .
*16. "'Hippie Mafia' Hash Smuggler Arrested," by Nick Schou, Thursday, November 12, 2009, published by the High Times, HighTimes.com .
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*18. "Case Closed on 'Hippie Mafia' Smugglers," by Nick Schou, Thursday, December 3, 2009, HighTimes.com .
*19. "William Pickard's long, strange trip / Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a missile silo in Kansas," by Seth Rosenfeld, June 10, 2001, SFGate.com .
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*21. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. OpenJurist.org .
*22. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 3. OpenJurist.org .
*23. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- S -- solvolysis," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
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*25. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*26. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*27. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 6. OpenJurist.org .
*28. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 8. OpenJurist.org .
*29. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 24. OpenJurist.org .
*30. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*31. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. The Honorable James M. Burns, United States District Judge for the District of Oregon, sitting by designation, Section 1. OpenJurist.org .
*32. Counter example: "Structural Comparison of the Two Alternative Transition States for Folding of TI I27," by Christian D. Geierhaas, Robert B. Best, Emanuele Paci, Michele Vendruscolo, and Jane Clarke, published by Biophysical Journal, Volume 91, Issue 1, 263-275, 1 July 2006, Cell.com .
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*34. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- T -- transition structure," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
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*39. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
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*45. "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer, Publisher: Citadel (June 1, 2000), ISBN-10: 0806512229, ISBN-13: 978-0806512228, page 186, Books.Google.com .
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*47. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 17. OpenJurist.org .
*48. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 20. OpenJurist.org .
*49. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 21. OpenJurist.org .
*50. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 22. OpenJurist.org .
*51. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 23. OpenJurist.org .
*52. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 37. OpenJurist.org .
*53. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 36. OpenJurist.org .
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*57. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 25. OpenJurist.org .
*58. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*59. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*60. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*61. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*62. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 42. OpenJurist.org .
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*65. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 41. OpenJurist.org .
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*68. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
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*76. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*77. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*78. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*79. "First Letter from Nick Sand," by Nick sand, April 1999, published by Serendipity, Serendipity.li .
*80. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
Tim Scully and Nick Sand
The Creators of Orange Sunshine Acid
A Look Into the Legal Case and the Personal Activities of the 1960's Greatest LSD Chemists
By Punkerslut
An Introduction to the Defendants Tim Scully and Nick Sand
"The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;"
--Percy Shelley, 1813
"Queen Mab," Book VII
On, September 13, 1976, two individuals stood before Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, both charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD." They were also charged with tax evasion, based on "the nonreporting of income derived from this activity." [*1] It was not simply LSD that they were responsible for creating -- it was the legendary, underground "Orange Sunshine" acid. The trial itself became as amazing as the two people involved. They deserve a brief introduction.
Nick Sand was an Anthropology and Sociology student in Brooklyn, New York City, when he took Mescaline in 1961. He also often visited Millbrook, the communal home of Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. According to an Erowid article providing a summary of this chemist, "during a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. He became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good." [*2] In 1967, he left New York and moved to San Francisco, where he produced DOM ("STP") and MDA (an analogue of MDMA, or "ecstasy").
In 1969, Nick Sand worked with Tim Scully in Windsor, California, producing millions of doses of the Orange Sunshine LSD. Sand was also the first chemist to synthesize DMT and to suggest smoking as a method, which "came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it." [*3] This is an impressive accomplishment, because DMT is often considered among the few psychedelics exceeding LSD in the raw intensity of its experience.
Image: Photograph of Nick Sand as a young Anthropology Student,
by Gene Bernofsky, 1967,
From Erowid.org
Robert Timothy Scully, or more commonly just Tim Scully, was a co-worker with Nick Sand in the Orange Sunshine laboratory. When only 13 years old, Scully designed and built a computer in 1958 that received honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair. [*4] A few years later, at another science fair, he attempted "to make gold from mercury by use of thermal neutrons," whereby he would create "a neutron flux by a deuteron-deuteron interaction." [*5]
Image: Photograph of Tim Scully (Top-Right),
from the Oakland Tribune, 1961,
From Erowid.org
From the early 1960's to about 1966, he did work in electrical engineering, designing detection and measurement systems for radiation and the nuclear content of soil. And after that, he spent a few months on the road with the Grateful Dead, "doing electronic design of custom audio systems including direct electrical recording of their instruments." [*6] [*7]
While touring the country with the Dead, Scully met Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another famous LSD chemist of the 1960's -- nicknamed "Bear." For the most part, Stanley relied on storebought LSD manufactured by Sandoz, then marketed as a psychiatric tool for psychoanalysis. However, by the middle 1960's, this wasn't an option anymore, so he, "unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66." The 1965 batch was impure, but when Scully and Stanley teamed up, Scully claimed that they perfected a pure process...
"Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (Purple Haze) and white (White Lightning) of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product." [*8]
In 1967, Tim Scully set up a lab for Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Denver, Colorado. [*9] However, Stanley's work was short-lived, as he "was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California." [*10] From his time between 1965 and 1967, though, Stanley produced 1.25 million doses of LSD, while at the same time being an enthusiast, financier, and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead; Bob Weir from the Dead said of him, "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything." [*11]
In fact, in 1966, Stanley was raided by police for producing Methamphetamine, which turned out to be incorrect -- so Stanley successfully sued the police. After his trial in 1967, he was let out on bail, until he was arrested again in 1970 for possession of Marijuana. His bail was revoked and he served two years at Terminal Island. When asked about his experiences in a 2007 interview, Stanley said...
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society - only my society and the one making the laws are different." [*12]
After the arrest of his partner, Tim Scully set up another LSD laboratory in Denver in 1968. Only one year later, in 1969, it was raided by the police, though the search was eventually ruled illegal. It was here that Nick Sand was taught the pure method for LSD production. [*13] Besides synthesizing psychedelic drugs, Scully also did some work on "the design of high vacuum flash evaporators and systems for preparative column chromatography." That very year, he founded his own electronics company in California, Aquarius Electronics. [*14] But, his activity was interrupted with the 1969 raid, and the case that delayed for years before reaching court.
During this time, Scully was also accepting funding from William Hitchcock, the son of a wealthy family, for the laboratory. To quote Scully on his activity during this period before the '69 raid...
"Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the '60s. There wasn't nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network." [*15]
Nick Sand was a member of "a secretive group of hippie acid dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love." [*16] It was through this organization, active until just a few years ago (2009), that Sand was able to widely distribute his products. [*17] The purpose of the group was "the aim of transforming the world into a peaceful utopia by promoting consciousness-expanding drug experimentation through LSD, including their famous homemade acid, Orange Sunshine." [*18] At his trial, Tim Scully said that his intention was to "turn on the world" and as far as LSD chemists go, "we were doing a public service." [*19]
Just What Is ALD-52?
"Nicholas Sand was charged in two counts with income tax evasion, in one count with conspiracy to violate federal drug laws relating to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), in one count with conspiracy to defraud the United States in the collection of taxes, and in two counts with substantive drug violations, the manufacture and distribution of LSD. Robert Timothy Scully was charged in one count with income tax evasion, in the same two conspiracy counts as Sand, and in three drug related counts, one charging the manufacture and two the sale of LSD."
--Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, 1976
United States of America v. Nicholas Sand and Robert Timothy Scully
The case against these two began in 1973, and they were both convicted in 1974, where Tim Scully was sentenced to 20 years and Nick Sand was sentenced to 15 years. [*20] On September 13th, 1976, the United States Federal Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, reviewed and ruled on the final appeal of the two defendants. [*21] The charges were the manufacture and distribution of LSD "during 1968, 1969, and 1970."
However, there was no LSD. The chemical that Sand and Scully were producing was ALD-52. It is "a psychotropic organic compound, which the defendants claim was the licit chemical N-acetyl lysergic acid diethylamide (ALD-52)." [*22] When water is added to it, ALD-52 undergoes Hydrolysis, [*23] [*24] which turns it into LSD -- but ALD-52 itself is not illegal.
However, the government tampered with the ALD-52 and exposed it to moist atmospheres, turning it into LSD. Judge Duniway admitted this and claimed that it was a completely legitimate form of preserving evidence, as well as using it in court. To quote him in the case...
"If they [the defendants] were manufacturing a legal but perfect substitute for LSD, it was their obligation, not that of the government, to preserve evidence of that accomplishment. Having failed to do so, they cannot now complain because the ALD-52 might have been better preserved had the government indicted earlier." [*25]
The defendants are going to be tried for evidence that was admittedly tampered with by the United States government. As Duniway remarked, "Whatever prejudice defendants suffered was a product of their own negligence." [*26] It's not certain if Judge Duniway was expecting that the suspects would go to the police department and regularly maintain the chemistry work in the evidence locker. The judge doesn't really go so far as to say exactly what kind of obligation their "negligence" was from.
Since it required at least four years for this type of decomposition to occur, the attorneys for Sand and Scully argued that the case violated their right to a speedy and public trial. (The Sixth Amendment.) However, according to Judge Duniway, this rule only applies where the delay has some effect on the trial. Later, he does admit that the delay caused the Hydrolysis of the ADL-52 into LSD, but this isn't considered as effecting the trial. As Duniway stated at the trial...
"¬...the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment may require dismissal of the indictment if the defendant is able to demonstrate either that the delay was the product of deliberate action by law enforcement officials to gain a tactical advantage over the defendant, or that it resulted in such substantial prejudice to the accused that a fair trial is no longer possible." [*27]
The defendants were expected to prove that the tampering of evidence by government officials was done intentionally by them. "...allegation that the delay was wilful was 'implicit' in their moving papers. In general we require that a party do more than suggest or imply an objection in order to preserve it on appeal." [*28] There would be no case against the defendants for possession of LSD without such tampering. But this alone does not prove that it was done maliciously, and therefore, the fixed evidence cannot be barred from court. So rules the judge on behalf of the law.
Another difficulty in the delay is that many of the friends of Nick Sand and Tim Scully, during that period, were no longer around. Yet, the judge makes an assumption about why kinds of "acquaintances" these defendants would have: "...it is not clear that their testimony would more likely have been helpful than harmful to Sand and Scully." [*29]
In the end, though, Duniway relied on the court's chemistry-knowledge: "The government maintained below, and argues here, that ALD-52 cannot be produced without first manufacturing LSD." [*30] The defendants, on the other hand, one of them being an exceptionally brilliant chemist, "had devised a method of producing ALD-52 without passing through an intermediate stage in which LSD was produced." [*31] The judge claimed this was impossible, though it is definitely possible to produce chemicals by using alternative, intermediate stages. [*32] [*33] [*34] In fact, when Sand was arrested, he was found with papers that included the synthesis instructions for more than one hundred, different psychedelic drugs that were publicly unknown. [*35]
It All Goes Back to Billy Hitchcock
"A substantial fraction, perhaps one third, of the acid I made was given away."
--Tim Scully, 2003
The Oak Tree Review [*36]
The "LSD" found on Nick Sand and Tim Scully was not LSD. But, the court ordered itself to imagine this to be the case. Even with that, there was still some lurking doubt in its mind, so it had to prop up a witness. This is where Billy Hitchcock, the international multimillionaire and financier of Timothy Leary, comes into play.
It turns out that Hitchcock had been lying for years to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The authorities were not concerned at all about this activity, until they knew they could use Hitchcock as a material witness against Sand and Scully. Someone who had just pled guilty to lying multiple times in court now became the cornerstone of the entire case for the prosecution. To quote LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain...
"Hitchcock was not a particularly strong witness at the San Francisco trial. He acknowledged that his own drug usage had been extensive, and he listed all the substances he had experimented with over the years, including LSD and heroin. Mr. Billy had already pleaded guilty to income tax evasion and violation of SEC regulations, but he had not yet been sentenced for these charges. The defense contended that Hitchcock had been promised leniency in his other cases if he lied in this one. Although he admitted that he had perjured himself four times during Internal Revenue and SEC investigations and before a federal grand jury, his testimony was deemed reliable enough to send both of the defendants to the pen." [*37]
Even the judge claimed that Hitchcock's testimony was essential to the prosecution of the two LSD chemists. "The government argues that it did not have sufficient evidence to indict until Hitchcock agreed to testify against Sand and Scully," [*38] Judge Duniway said. And why should the government believe the defendants? "...the defendants offer only their unsupported conclusory allegations," [*39] Duniway concluded.
Maybe someone who has perjured themselves and is being given leniency in other crimes might only offer "unsupported conclusory" allegations. In the end, the judge looked at two professional and trained chemists, and disregarded their testimony in favor of the testimony of a heroin-using, tax-evading millionaire. There is much to suggest that Hitchcock did not even believe in the testimony he gave -- behind the court's back, he put up money for Tim Scully's legal fees. [*40]
There was actually much more to it than that. Hitchcock was being charged with using a Swiss bank to move millions of dollars from the drug trade into legal channels, what the IRS had declared "the biggest tax evasion caper in U.S. history." The same bank involved had worked with the CIA previously in hiring terrorist groups in underdeveloped countries, for example, the "secret war against Fidel Castro." [*41] When the IRS moved in, the CIA intervened and prohibited it from carrying out its full investigation of Hitchcock. The amount of money involved in Hitchcock's Swiss bank scandal, from 1965 to 1971, amounted to forty million dollars. [*42]
The government gave up a multimillionaire involved with banks financing CIA-sponsored terrorists -- in favor of prosecuting two LSD chemists. For his cooperation, Billy Hitchcock received a five-year reduced sentence and a $20,000 fine. [*43] There is also the difficulty that Hitchcock was no chemist, and his testimony amounted to hearsay, since he had only been told by Sand or Scully that they were making or using "acid." However, the hearsay exception was allowed only for accusations against Sand and Scully, with Duniway prohibiting cross-examination: "...a co-conspirator's declaration can be introduced by either party and may be used to exculpate as well as inculpate the accused. We rejected this argument..." [*44]
Timothy Leary: "What knowledge do you wish?"
Billy Hitchcock: "...(hesitant pause)... How can I make more money on the stock market?" [*45]
Did Someone Say "Legality"?
"It is now no longer a question of accumulating scientific truths and discoveries. We need above everything to spread the truths already mastered by science, to make them part of our daily life, to render them common property. We have to order things so that all, so that the mass of mankind, may be capable of understanding and applying them; we have to make science no longer a luxury but the foundation of every man's life. This is what justice demands."
--Peter Kropotkin, 1880
"An Appeal to the Young"
The investigation that led to the arrest of Nick Sand and Timothy Scully resulted from information gained by three illegal search and seizures by the police. The legal phrase for describing this evidence is "tainted," since even if it was obtained legitimately, knowledge about it only came about illegitimately. To quote Judge Duniway on this matter...
"...they contend that they were not given the opportunity, guaranteed them by Alderman v. United States, 1969, 394 U.S. 165, 89 S.Ct. 961, 22 L.Ed.2d 176, to demonstrate that evidence that the government used against them, not itself illegally obtained, was discovered through the exploitation of an illegal search." [*46]
The judge ruled against the defendants on this matter, though, "the defendants had not demonstrated a sufficient connection between a prior illegal search and the evidence sought to be suppressed..." [*47] Or, to quote Duniway fully...
"The defendants did not at trial, and do not on this appeal, identify particular items which should have been analyzed for taint. Rather, they argued that 'there has been so much illegality that the presumption of regularity of the Government should lapse; (it) should have the burden of going forward and justifying (its) sources.' We cannot agree." [*48]
The evidence obtained from the illegal searches in the Denver and Missouri raids led to the legal searches that resulted in the current prosecution. Government surveillance, when it was wide enough, might be considered illegal, Duniway argued. However, "In the case at bar there were three illegal seizures, but there was no wiretapping." [*49] If the government had gone so far in its criminality as to do some wiretapping, on top of three illegal search-and-seizures, then the state is infringing on your right to privacy. Even if wiretapping was used, it's not likely that the state, or the financial supporters of terrorism, are going to hand it over.
The defense argued rather rationally, "illegally secured information [led] the government to substantially intensify an investigation [making] all evidence subsequently uncovered (a product) '. . . of that illegality.'" [*50] A trial based on illegal evidence, then, might seem itself somewhat illegal. Even though the legal raid did use information from the illegal raids, the judge asked them to prove "that the government utilized illegally secured information to obtain more than defendants' identities." [*51] Illegally obtained evidence is admissible when it relates to someone's "identity," for example, proving that someone committed a crime, and this is decidedly convenient for the prosecution.
In fact, Judge Duniway admitted that the prosecution's main case was the "...mention of a prior prosecution based on illegally seized evidence..." There was some admission of a mistake, though, "...we must conclude that in this circumstance any error was harmless." [*52] The defendants have to prove that the evidence used against them came illegally. Except, of course, evidence that proves that they were directly responsible for the crimes involved. And, when that comes out, even then, they are responsible for proving that it was not harmless.
Throughout the trial, both Sand and Scully wanted to testify on their own behalf. However, when they stated this, the prosecution threatened in court to ask them about evidence that had been obtained illegally from their searches. This kept them from testifying on their own behalf, the threat of presenting even more illegal evidence against them. Such a procedure is completely legal, however. According to Judge Duniway, "The prosecution's threat to use illegally seized evidence to impeach defendants' testimony was not an impermissible restraint on their constitutional right to testify on their own behalf." [*53]
Topping off the Trial with a Banker's Testimony
"I felt the work I was doing was so important for humanity that I was willing to take the risks of being the alchemist, hiding away in his laboratory, making chemicals."
--Nick Sand, 2009
"Inside LSD" by National Geographic [*54] [*55] [*56]
The prosecution was building up an interesting case. The evidence presented against the defendants was either admittedly tampered with or obtained illegally. The prize witness against the two defendants had lied five times in an SEC and IRS scandal involving $40 million and was only testifying to get a reduced sentence. This case wouldn't be complete, though, unless a mouthpiece was brought before the court who spoke on behalf of the Swiss bank; that is, an attorney represented the financial interests funding terrorism.
According to Duniway, "The district court admitted a large volume of business records from the Paravicini Bank of Berne, Switzerland. These records, introduced by the government, were authenticated by Eugene Patry, a bank vice-chairman." [*57] Patry was the sole witness representing the Paravicini Bank. The prosecution presented some bank documents before Patry and asked him to authenticate them, which he did. "The government made a sufficient showing of the authenticity of the records through Patry's testimony." [*58] The records alleged that the defendants were guilty of that accompanying charge of LSD production: tax evasion.
The defense asked a question of Patry in cross-examination about the bank documents, and Patry responded that he had no idea what those documents were about that he had just authenticated. All that he could say was that they were authentic, whereas the defense wanted to know why they were "so inherently unreliable and so incomplete." [*59] This defense felt this was unfair, since this was "amounted to an abridgement of appellant's Sixth Amendment rights to confront the witnesses against them." [*60] The judge, however, ruled that the testimony of Patry was reliable and shouldn't be questioned. To quote Duniway again...
"As we have held, the person testifying need not have personal knowledge of the contents of the document. United States v. Saputski, 9 Cir., 1974, 496 F.2d 140, 142. Neither is it necessary that the witness personally know the time, place, and manner in which the record was made." [*61]
The documents of a corporate bank are accepted without any way to cross-examine them. Documents can't answer questions, and the person authenticating and verifying the document doesn't know what the document is. At the same time, the defense wasn't able to call any of its actual human witnesses, because of the undue delay in starting the trial. Written, legal papers hold more sway than the opinions of actual living beings. With this added to their heroin-using tax evader and their illegal evidence, the prosecution felt that it's case was complete.
Judge Duniway affirmed the decision of the lower courts in convicting Tim Scully and Nick Sand. [*62] Scully was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, Sand received fifteen. [*63] In the words of Duniway, "While harsh, the sentences meted out to Sand and Scully were less than the maximum; hence, the scope of our review is limited almost to the vanishing point." [*64] The judge's concluding statements were indicative of his overall attitude...
"The defendants' statement of facts is incorrect. Hence, we need not consider whether a district judge must consider the possibility of rehabilitation in passing sentence. The judge did consider, albeit disparagingly, the rehabilitative role of the criminal law, but concluded that these defendants were unrehabilitatable." [*65]
Did the government ever really believe that these two individuals actually possessed LSD, the offense that they were charged with? They are charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD," but never does the judge point to the accused, and say, "I accuse you of manufacturing and distributing LSD." With all of the evidence, such a statement would have been ridiculous. The two defendants were found guilty, anyway.
"The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact. No magistrate then, (as he is one of the society) can, with justice, inflict on any other member of the same society punishment that is not ordained by the laws."
--Cesare Beccaria, 1764
"Of Crimes and Punishments," Chapter 3
Whatever Happened to the Chemists?
"But how can the one liberate the many? By first liberating his own being. He does this not by elevating himself, but by lowering himself. He lowers himself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into himself, he becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth. Completely emancipated from his former false life, he discovers his original pure nature, which is the pure nature of the universe. Freely and spontaneously releasing his divine energy, he constantly transcends complicated situations and draws everything around him back into an integral oneness. Because he is a living divinity, when he acts, the universe acts."
--Lao Tzu, c. 600 BC
"Hua Hu Ching," Part 77
For Nick Sand, there was only one option. As a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, he had a duty. While out on $50,000 bail, Nick Sand left the country. [*66] It would be a very long time before he returned. During the trial, Tim Scully had been working on his own creations, which he had to end now with the upholding of his conviction. But from 1971 to 1976, Scully was working on...
"...innovative biofeedback and physiological monitoring instruments and systems, including microcomputer based systems for educational, medical and process control. This work involved analog and digital circuit design, using discrete components and integrated circuits. I learned assembly language programming techniques and high level languages." [*67]
Tim Scully sold the stock in his company and retired to life in prison at McNeil Island Penitentiary. During his time here, he was allowed to enroll in a Ph.D. program at the Humanistic Psychology Institute. Here, he developed...
"...biofeedback systems and techniques for use in drug rehabilitation programs. I eventually built an 8080A microcomputer physiological monitoring system for analyzing EEG, EMG, GSR/BSR and skin temperature and did some basic research on the identification of specific patterns of physiological response associated with specific emotional states." [*68]
Much of Scully's time was spent working with drug rehabilitation programs that integrated his biofeedback systems. He even made a twelve hour video seminar to train facilitators of these systems for the Federal Prison Industries. On the side, he also taught Tai-Chi. [*69] This biofeedback system did not make much headlines. This was until Robin, a young woman with cerebral palsy, was able to use these systems to allow her to speak with the rest of the world. Scully was named Man of the Year by the Washington State Jaycees. To quote The Hour, a Connecticut newspaper...
"Scully first met Robin, the cerebral palsy victim, in California when he was free on bond awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to possess, manufacture, sell and distribute narcotics.
"Robin was able to control only side movement of one knee. Scully worked up a computer device that allows her to use movement to select words to appear on a television screen. She therefore is able to 'speak' sentences in rapid fashion." [*70]
In 1977, Scully's sentenced was reduced to ten years, with parole most likely available in 1980. In 1979, Scully graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology, his dissertation titled: "Physiological Pattern Analysis: A Key to Improved Biofeedback Systems for the Voluntary Control of Events in Consciousness." Scully was transferred out of McNeil Island before 1980, though, being moved to a half-way house in San Francisco in August, two must after obtaining his Ph.D. [*71] For a twenty year sentence, Scully was imprisoned for only three and a half years, and when he finished, he came out with a doctorate. So much for "unrehabilitatable."
Throughout the 1980's to the early 2000's, Scully has been working on biofeedback and computer systems. [*72] In 2005, Tim Scully retired, though he's doing some minor consulting work and writing a book "on the underground history of LSD." [*73]
Nicholas Sand relocated to Canada. He was set up on an international blind date with another chemist by one of his friends. It wasn't long after meeting Usha that the two began making LSD together. [*74] For roughly twenty years, Nick Sand formed the core of international LSD manufacturing, producing about 250 million doses. [*75]
In 1996, he was arrested in Vancouver, Canada, [*76] where his laboratory was found with 42 grams of LSD, or roughly 200,000 moderate doses. Samples of the LSD tested above 100% pure by the government's chemists, which is impossible. Psychedelic guru and chemist Alexander Shulgin suggested that the government must have degraded standards. The lab was considered so well managed and built, that "the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video." [*77]
In San Francisco, Nick Sand was found guilty of jumping bail, which added five years imprisonment to his previous sentence of fifteen years -- and this is besides the charges in Canada. [*78] He was 55 years-old. While imprisoned in Canada, Sand wrote a 600-paged book titled Psychedelic Secrets, which contained guidelines for those wishing to maximize their psychedelic experience. In a letter, he wrote concerning the awful conditions...
"Meanwhile overcrowding intensifies in here and the authorities attempt to squeeze everything out of their slaves that they can. Many things are not provided, like soap and toothpaste and all articles of toiletry and snacks, etc. They even sell fruit here." [*79]
By late 2000, Nicholas Sand was given an early release from prison, serving just under four years. As early as 2001, he gave a speech at the Mind States II conference, titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness." In 2006, he gave a speech at Burning Man, "Synergistic Combinations in the Future," where he talked about "some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects." He has also written a second book containing his syntheses techniques for producing psychedelics, though both are still unpublished. [*80]
Image: Nick Sand, Photograph by Jon Hanna, Nov, 2009
Photograph from Erowid.org
"The judge is lost when he ceases to be mechanical, when he 'is forsaken by the rules of evidence.' Then he no longer has anything but an opinion like everybody else; and, if he decides according to this opinion, his action is no longer an official action....
"What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? The state cannot forbear the claim to determine the individual's will, to speculate and count on this. For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. The state is not thinkable without lordship and servitude; for the state must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the 'will of the state.'"
--Max Stirner, 1845
"The Ego and Its Own," Part 2, Chapter II, Section 1
Punkerslut,
Resources
*1. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. OpenJurist.org .
*2. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (May 10, 1941 - ), published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*3. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*4. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*5. Photograph of Tim Scully with his Linear Accelerator, published by the Tribune, 1961, republished by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*6. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*7. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview.com .
*8. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*9. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*10. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*11. "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area," by Joel Selvin, Thursday, July 12, 2007, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com .
*12. "Owsley Stanley - '60s counterculture icon - dies: 'Bear' helped Grateful Dead, made LSD (Owsley Stanley 1935-2011), March 14, 2011, By Aidin Vaziri, SFGate.com .
*13. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*14. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*15. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview .
*16. "'Hippie Mafia' Hash Smuggler Arrested," by Nick Schou, Thursday, November 12, 2009, published by the High Times, HighTimes.com .
*17. "ALD-52 Info," published by Lycaeum.org, September 15, 2000, Lycaeum.org.
*18. "Case Closed on 'Hippie Mafia' Smugglers," by Nick Schou, Thursday, December 3, 2009, HighTimes.com .
*19. "William Pickard's long, strange trip / Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a missile silo in Kansas," by Seth Rosenfeld, June 10, 2001, SFGate.com .
*20. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*21. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. OpenJurist.org .
*22. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 3. OpenJurist.org .
*23. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- S -- solvolysis," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*24. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- H -- hydrolysis," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*25. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*26. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*27. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 6. OpenJurist.org .
*28. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 8. OpenJurist.org .
*29. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 24. OpenJurist.org .
*30. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*31. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. The Honorable James M. Burns, United States District Judge for the District of Oregon, sitting by designation, Section 1. OpenJurist.org .
*32. Counter example: "Structural Comparison of the Two Alternative Transition States for Folding of TI I27," by Christian D. Geierhaas, Robert B. Best, Emanuele Paci, Michele Vendruscolo, and Jane Clarke, published by Biophysical Journal, Volume 91, Issue 1, 263-275, 1 July 2006, Cell.com .
*33. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- T -- transition state," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*34. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- T -- transition structure," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*35. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*36. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview.com .
*37. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com
*38. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*39. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*40. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*41. "Wages Of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, And The Underworld Economy," R. T. Naylor, January 7, 2005, Cornell University Press; ISBN-10: 0801489601, ISBN-13: 978-0801489600, Books.Google.com .
*42. "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer, Publisher: Citadel (June 1, 2000), ISBN-10: 0806512229, ISBN-13: 978-0806512228, page 186, Books.Google.com .
*43. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com
*44. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 34. OpenJurist.org .
*45. "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer, Publisher: Citadel (June 1, 2000), ISBN-10: 0806512229, ISBN-13: 978-0806512228, page 186, Books.Google.com .
*46. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 16. OpenJurist.org .
*47. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 17. OpenJurist.org .
*48. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 20. OpenJurist.org .
*49. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 21. OpenJurist.org .
*50. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 22. OpenJurist.org .
*51. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 23. OpenJurist.org .
*52. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 37. OpenJurist.org .
*53. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 36. OpenJurist.org .
*54. "Trippin Tuesday: Inside LSD (Updated)," by On The Bus, Tue Nov 03, 2009, published by Docudharma, video originally by National Geographic, DocuDharma.com .
*55. "The Man Who Manufactured 250,000,000 Hits of LSD," by Marc Campbell, October 18, 2010, published by DangerousMinds.net, video originally by National Geographic, DangerousMinds.net .
*56. "Nick Sand on National Geographic: Underground LSD Lab," published by dmtsite, video originally by National Geographic, DMTSite.com .
*57. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 25. OpenJurist.org .
*58. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*59. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*60. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*61. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*62. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 42. OpenJurist.org .
*63. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*64. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 39. OpenJurist.org .
*65. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 41. OpenJurist.org .
*66. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*67. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*68. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*69. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*70. "Inmate Named Man of Year," published by the Hour, Norwalk, Connecticut, Friday, Feb. 2, 1979, News.Google.com .
*71. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*72. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*73. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*74. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*75. "Nick Sand on National Geographic: Underground LSD Lab," published by dmtsite, video originally by National Geographic, DMTSite.com .
*76. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*77. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*78. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*79. "First Letter from Nick Sand," by Nick sand, April 1999, published by Serendipity, Serendipity.li .
*80. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
SF GATE
LSD Fugitive From '70s Busted for Lab in Canada
Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 19, 1996
To Canadian Mounties who arrested him in Port Coquitlam last fall on drug charges, David Roy Shepard was a cipher: Two months of intensive investigation had revealed only that he was 55 years old and had no personal history.
This month, after sending the mystery man's fingerprints to the FBI, the Mounties found out why. Shepard was really Nicholas Sand, a U.S. drug guru from Santa Rosa who went underground in 1976 to avoid serving a 15-year federal prison term for flooding the country with high-quality LSD.
Now Sand sits in jail in British Columbia, awaiting trial on charges of operating one of the largest LSD labs in North American history -- a facility capable of generating enough acid to dose every man, woman and child in Canada 1 1/2 times. And while he waits, federal law enforcement officials are taking steps to bring him back to the United States.
Dennis Michael Nerney, an assistant U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, said his office is already putting together paperwork seeking Sand's extradition. The documents will be used by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of International Affairs to petition the Canadian government for Sand's return.
In late September, Sand was arrested in Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, during a police raid on a house Sand was using as his home and drug laboratory. Authorities who had tapped Sand's phone and watched the house for several months before the raid found 43 grams of crystalline LSD -- enough to make 45 million doses -- as well as large quantities of other exotic "designer drugs," including Ecstasy and Nexus.
"The amount of LSD seized was absolutely humongous," said one law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. "I think the biggest seizure previously was 40 grams."
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Sand's laboratory contained hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high-quality chemical processing equipment and laboratory glassware. The total value of the drugs seized was more than $6 million, and the laboratory contained precursor chemicals that could have been used to produce more than $51 million worth of other drugs.
The facility had "the largest production capacity of any laboratory ever seized in Canada," said Sergeant K.D. Ross of the Mounted Police.
Sand, who has not been cooperating with investigators, is next scheduled to appear in court in Canada in January. If convicted of the charges, he faces as much as 10 years in Canadian prison, but it is likely the Canadian government will move for his deportation as an undesirable alien after trial.
In 1974, Sand was convicted of producing LSD and laundering millions of dollars worth of profits from the drug after a lengthy federal jury trial in San Francisco. He was released on bail while he appealed the conviction. While free, he fled the country, and he has been a federal fugitive ever since.
Sand's appeal was unsuccessful, and he still faces his entire 15- year prison sentence plus a $10,000 fine from his earlier conviction.
Sand, an associate of LSD pioneers Stanley Owsley and Timothy Leary, headed an acid network that stretched from California to the Netherlands and is believed to have manufactured much of the LSD sold in the United States during the early 1970s. His laboratories -- located in Sonoma County, Colorado, Missouri and Belgium -- produced more than 1.5 million doses of LSD. Much of the drug was marketed through an organization known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
At his sentencing in 1976, Sand told U.S. District Court Judge Sam Conte, "I am very sorry for the things I have done, and I would never do anything like that again." However, Canadian law enforcement sources said Sand was arrested for manufacturing illegal drugs in British Columbia in 1990 and once again became a fugitive after his release on bail.
"He apparently just goes to a safety-deposit box and pulls out documents that allow him to take on another identity," Ross said.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/LSD-Fugitive-From-70s-Busted-for-Lab-in-Canada-2955156.php#ixzz2UFxbBUGE
LSD Fugitive From '70s Busted for Lab in Canada
Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 19, 1996
To Canadian Mounties who arrested him in Port Coquitlam last fall on drug charges, David Roy Shepard was a cipher: Two months of intensive investigation had revealed only that he was 55 years old and had no personal history.
This month, after sending the mystery man's fingerprints to the FBI, the Mounties found out why. Shepard was really Nicholas Sand, a U.S. drug guru from Santa Rosa who went underground in 1976 to avoid serving a 15-year federal prison term for flooding the country with high-quality LSD.
Now Sand sits in jail in British Columbia, awaiting trial on charges of operating one of the largest LSD labs in North American history -- a facility capable of generating enough acid to dose every man, woman and child in Canada 1 1/2 times. And while he waits, federal law enforcement officials are taking steps to bring him back to the United States.
Dennis Michael Nerney, an assistant U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, said his office is already putting together paperwork seeking Sand's extradition. The documents will be used by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of International Affairs to petition the Canadian government for Sand's return.
In late September, Sand was arrested in Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, during a police raid on a house Sand was using as his home and drug laboratory. Authorities who had tapped Sand's phone and watched the house for several months before the raid found 43 grams of crystalline LSD -- enough to make 45 million doses -- as well as large quantities of other exotic "designer drugs," including Ecstasy and Nexus.
"The amount of LSD seized was absolutely humongous," said one law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. "I think the biggest seizure previously was 40 grams."
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Sand's laboratory contained hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high-quality chemical processing equipment and laboratory glassware. The total value of the drugs seized was more than $6 million, and the laboratory contained precursor chemicals that could have been used to produce more than $51 million worth of other drugs.
The facility had "the largest production capacity of any laboratory ever seized in Canada," said Sergeant K.D. Ross of the Mounted Police.
Sand, who has not been cooperating with investigators, is next scheduled to appear in court in Canada in January. If convicted of the charges, he faces as much as 10 years in Canadian prison, but it is likely the Canadian government will move for his deportation as an undesirable alien after trial.
In 1974, Sand was convicted of producing LSD and laundering millions of dollars worth of profits from the drug after a lengthy federal jury trial in San Francisco. He was released on bail while he appealed the conviction. While free, he fled the country, and he has been a federal fugitive ever since.
Sand's appeal was unsuccessful, and he still faces his entire 15- year prison sentence plus a $10,000 fine from his earlier conviction.
Sand, an associate of LSD pioneers Stanley Owsley and Timothy Leary, headed an acid network that stretched from California to the Netherlands and is believed to have manufactured much of the LSD sold in the United States during the early 1970s. His laboratories -- located in Sonoma County, Colorado, Missouri and Belgium -- produced more than 1.5 million doses of LSD. Much of the drug was marketed through an organization known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
At his sentencing in 1976, Sand told U.S. District Court Judge Sam Conte, "I am very sorry for the things I have done, and I would never do anything like that again." However, Canadian law enforcement sources said Sand was arrested for manufacturing illegal drugs in British Columbia in 1990 and once again became a fugitive after his release on bail.
"He apparently just goes to a safety-deposit box and pulls out documents that allow him to take on another identity," Ross said.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/LSD-Fugitive-From-70s-Busted-for-Lab-in-Canada-2955156.php#ixzz2UFxbBUGE
An Introduction to the Defendants Tim Scully and Nick Sand
"The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth;"
--Percy Shelley, 1813
"Queen Mab," Book VII
On, September 13, 1976, two individuals stood before Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, both charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD." They were also charged with tax evasion, based on "the nonreporting of income derived from this activity." [*1] It was not simply LSD that they were responsible for creating -- it was the legendary, underground "Orange Sunshine" acid. The trial itself became as amazing as the two people involved. They deserve a brief introduction.
Nick Sand was an Anthropology and Sociology student in Brooklyn, New York City, when he took Mescaline in 1961. He also often visited Millbrook, the communal home of Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. According to an Erowid article providing a summary of this chemist, "during a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. He became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good." [*2] In 1967, he left New York and moved to San Francisco, where he produced DOM ("STP") and MDA (an analogue of MDMA, or "ecstasy").
In 1969, Nick Sand worked with Tim Scully in Windsor, California, producing millions of doses of the Orange Sunshine LSD. Sand was also the first chemist to synthesize DMT and to suggest smoking as a method, which "came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it." [*3] This is an impressive accomplishment, because DMT is often considered among the few psychedelics exceeding LSD in the raw intensity of its experience.
Image: Photograph of Nick Sand as a young Anthropology Student,
by Gene Bernofsky, 1967,
From Erowid.org
Robert Timothy Scully, or more commonly just Tim Scully, was a co-worker with Nick Sand in the Orange Sunshine laboratory. When only 13 years old, Scully designed and built a computer in 1958 that received honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair. [*4] A few years later, at another science fair, he attempted "to make gold from mercury by use of thermal neutrons," whereby he would create "a neutron flux by a deuteron-deuteron interaction." [*5]
Image: Photograph of Tim Scully (Top-Right),
from the Oakland Tribune, 1961,
From Erowid.org
From the early 1960's to about 1966, he did work in electrical engineering, designing detection and measurement systems for radiation and the nuclear content of soil. And after that, he spent a few months on the road with the Grateful Dead, "doing electronic design of custom audio systems including direct electrical recording of their instruments." [*6] [*7]
While touring the country with the Dead, Scully met Augustus Owsley Stanley III, another famous LSD chemist of the 1960's -- nicknamed "Bear." For the most part, Stanley relied on storebought LSD manufactured by Sandoz, then marketed as a psychiatric tool for psychoanalysis. However, by the middle 1960's, this wasn't an option anymore, so he, "unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66." The 1965 batch was impure, but when Scully and Stanley teamed up, Scully claimed that they perfected a pure process...
"Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (Purple Haze) and white (White Lightning) of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product." [*8]
In 1967, Tim Scully set up a lab for Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Denver, Colorado. [*9] However, Stanley's work was short-lived, as he "was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California." [*10] From his time between 1965 and 1967, though, Stanley produced 1.25 million doses of LSD, while at the same time being an enthusiast, financier, and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead; Bob Weir from the Dead said of him, "He's good for a different point of view at about any given time. He's brilliant. He knows everything." [*11]
In fact, in 1966, Stanley was raided by police for producing Methamphetamine, which turned out to be incorrect -- so Stanley successfully sued the police. After his trial in 1967, he was let out on bail, until he was arrested again in 1970 for possession of Marijuana. His bail was revoked and he served two years at Terminal Island. When asked about his experiences in a 2007 interview, Stanley said...
"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society - only my society and the one making the laws are different." [*12]
After the arrest of his partner, Tim Scully set up another LSD laboratory in Denver in 1968. Only one year later, in 1969, it was raided by the police, though the search was eventually ruled illegal. It was here that Nick Sand was taught the pure method for LSD production. [*13] Besides synthesizing psychedelic drugs, Scully also did some work on "the design of high vacuum flash evaporators and systems for preparative column chromatography." That very year, he founded his own electronics company in California, Aquarius Electronics. [*14] But, his activity was interrupted with the 1969 raid, and the case that delayed for years before reaching court.
During this time, Scully was also accepting funding from William Hitchcock, the son of a wealthy family, for the laboratory. To quote Scully on his activity during this period before the '69 raid...
"Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the '60s. There wasn't nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network." [*15]
Nick Sand was a member of "a secretive group of hippie acid dealers and hashish smugglers known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love." [*16] It was through this organization, active until just a few years ago (2009), that Sand was able to widely distribute his products. [*17] The purpose of the group was "the aim of transforming the world into a peaceful utopia by promoting consciousness-expanding drug experimentation through LSD, including their famous homemade acid, Orange Sunshine." [*18] At his trial, Tim Scully said that his intention was to "turn on the world" and as far as LSD chemists go, "we were doing a public service." [*19]
Image: Painting of Galileo Galilei Facing the Inquisition.
The accused is charged with studying the forbidden sciences of Mathematics and Physics.
Painting by Cristiano Banti, 1857.
Just What Is ALD-52?
"Nicholas Sand was charged in two counts with income tax evasion, in one count with conspiracy to violate federal drug laws relating to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), in one count with conspiracy to defraud the United States in the collection of taxes, and in two counts with substantive drug violations, the manufacture and distribution of LSD. Robert Timothy Scully was charged in one count with income tax evasion, in the same two conspiracy counts as Sand, and in three drug related counts, one charging the manufacture and two the sale of LSD."
--Judge Benjamin C. Duniway, 1976
United States of America v. Nicholas Sand and Robert Timothy Scully
The case against these two began in 1973, and they were both convicted in 1974, where Tim Scully was sentenced to 20 years and Nick Sand was sentenced to 15 years. [*20] On September 13th, 1976, the United States Federal Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, reviewed and ruled on the final appeal of the two defendants. [*21] The charges were the manufacture and distribution of LSD "during 1968, 1969, and 1970."
However, there was no LSD. The chemical that Sand and Scully were producing was ALD-52. It is "a psychotropic organic compound, which the defendants claim was the licit chemical N-acetyl lysergic acid diethylamide (ALD-52)." [*22] When water is added to it, ALD-52 undergoes Hydrolysis, [*23] [*24] which turns it into LSD -- but ALD-52 itself is not illegal.
However, the government tampered with the ALD-52 and exposed it to moist atmospheres, turning it into LSD. Judge Duniway admitted this and claimed that it was a completely legitimate form of preserving evidence, as well as using it in court. To quote him in the case...
"If they [the defendants] were manufacturing a legal but perfect substitute for LSD, it was their obligation, not that of the government, to preserve evidence of that accomplishment. Having failed to do so, they cannot now complain because the ALD-52 might have been better preserved had the government indicted earlier." [*25]
The defendants are going to be tried for evidence that was admittedly tampered with by the United States government. As Duniway remarked, "Whatever prejudice defendants suffered was a product of their own negligence." [*26] It's not certain if Judge Duniway was expecting that the suspects would go to the police department and regularly maintain the chemistry work in the evidence locker. The judge doesn't really go so far as to say exactly what kind of obligation their "negligence" was from.
Since it required at least four years for this type of decomposition to occur, the attorneys for Sand and Scully argued that the case violated their right to a speedy and public trial. (The Sixth Amendment.) However, according to Judge Duniway, this rule only applies where the delay has some effect on the trial. Later, he does admit that the delay caused the Hydrolysis of the ADL-52 into LSD, but this isn't considered as effecting the trial. As Duniway stated at the trial...
"...the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment may require dismissal of the indictment if the defendant is able to demonstrate either that the delay was the product of deliberate action by law enforcement officials to gain a tactical advantage over the defendant, or that it resulted in such substantial prejudice to the accused that a fair trial is no longer possible." [*27]
The defendants were expected to prove that the tampering of evidence by government officials was done intentionally by them. "...allegation that the delay was wilful was 'implicit' in their moving papers. In general we require that a party do more than suggest or imply an objection in order to preserve it on appeal." [*28] There would be no case against the defendants for possession of LSD without such tampering. But this alone does not prove that it was done maliciously, and therefore, the fixed evidence cannot be barred from court. So rules the judge on behalf of the law.
Another difficulty in the delay is that many of the friends of Nick Sand and Tim Scully, during that period, were no longer around. Yet, the judge makes an assumption about why kinds of "acquaintances" these defendants would have: "...it is not clear that their testimony would more likely have been helpful than harmful to Sand and Scully." [*29]
In the end, though, Duniway relied on the court's chemistry-knowledge: "The government maintained below, and argues here, that ALD-52 cannot be produced without first manufacturing LSD." [*30] The defendants, on the other hand, one of them being an exceptionally brilliant chemist, "had devised a method of producing ALD-52 without passing through an intermediate stage in which LSD was produced." [*31] The judge claimed this was impossible, though it is definitely possible to produce chemicals by using alternative, intermediate stages. [*32] [*33] [*34] In fact, when Sand was arrested, he was found with papers that included the synthesis instructions for more than one hundred, different psychedelic drugs that were publicly unknown. [*35]
It All Goes Back to Billy Hitchcock
"A substantial fraction, perhaps one third, of the acid I made was given away."
--Tim Scully, 2003
The Oak Tree Review [*36]
The "LSD" found on Nick Sand and Tim Scully was not LSD. But, the court ordered itself to imagine this to be the case. Even with that, there was still some lurking doubt in its mind, so it had to prop up a witness. This is where Billy Hitchcock, the international multimillionaire and financier of Timothy Leary, comes into play.
It turns out that Hitchcock had been lying for years to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The authorities were not concerned at all about this activity, until they knew they could use Hitchcock as a material witness against Sand and Scully. Someone who had just pled guilty to lying multiple times in court now became the cornerstone of the entire case for the prosecution. To quote LSD historians Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain...
"Hitchcock was not a particularly strong witness at the San Francisco trial. He acknowledged that his own drug usage had been extensive, and he listed all the substances he had experimented with over the years, including LSD and heroin. Mr. Billy had already pleaded guilty to income tax evasion and violation of SEC regulations, but he had not yet been sentenced for these charges. The defense contended that Hitchcock had been promised leniency in his other cases if he lied in this one. Although he admitted that he had perjured himself four times during Internal Revenue and SEC investigations and before a federal grand jury, his testimony was deemed reliable enough to send both of the defendants to the pen." [*37]
Even the judge claimed that Hitchcock's testimony was essential to the prosecution of the two LSD chemists. "The government argues that it did not have sufficient evidence to indict until Hitchcock agreed to testify against Sand and Scully," [*38] Judge Duniway said. And why should the government believe the defendants? "...the defendants offer only their unsupported conclusory allegations," [*39] Duniway concluded.
Maybe someone who has perjured themselves and is being given leniency in other crimes might only offer "unsupported conclusory" allegations. In the end, the judge looked at two professional and trained chemists, and disregarded their testimony in favor of the testimony of a heroin-using, tax-evading millionaire. There is much to suggest that Hitchcock did not even believe in the testimony he gave -- behind the court's back, he put up money for Tim Scully's legal fees. [*40]
There was actually much more to it than that. Hitchcock was being charged with using a Swiss bank to move millions of dollars from the drug trade into legal channels, what the IRS had declared "the biggest tax evasion caper in U.S. history." The same bank involved had worked with the CIA previously in hiring terrorist groups in underdeveloped countries, for example, the "secret war against Fidel Castro." [*41] When the IRS moved in, the CIA intervened and prohibited it from carrying out its full investigation of Hitchcock. The amount of money involved in Hitchcock's Swiss bank scandal, from 1965 to 1971, amounted to forty million dollars. [*42]
The government gave up a multimillionaire involved with banks financing CIA-sponsored terrorists -- in favor of prosecuting two LSD chemists. For his cooperation, Billy Hitchcock received a five-year reduced sentence and a $20,000 fine. [*43] There is also the difficulty that Hitchcock was no chemist, and his testimony amounted to hearsay, since he had only been told by Sand or Scully that they were making or using "acid." However, the hearsay exception was allowed only for accusations against Sand and Scully, with Duniway prohibiting cross-examination: "...a co-conspirator's declaration can be introduced by either party and may be used to exculpate as well as inculpate the accused. We rejected this argument..." [*44]
Timothy Leary: "What knowledge do you wish?"
Billy Hitchcock: "...(hesitant pause)... How can I make more money on the stock market?" [*45]
Did Someone Say "Legality"?
"It is now no longer a question of accumulating scientific truths and discoveries. We need above everything to spread the truths already mastered by science, to make them part of our daily life, to render them common property. We have to order things so that all, so that the mass of mankind, may be capable of understanding and applying them; we have to make science no longer a luxury but the foundation of every man's life. This is what justice demands."
--Peter Kropotkin, 1880
"An Appeal to the Young"
The investigation that led to the arrest of Nick Sand and Timothy Scully resulted from information gained by three illegal search and seizures by the police. The legal phrase for describing this evidence is "tainted," since even if it was obtained legitimately, knowledge about it only came about illegitimately. To quote Judge Duniway on this matter...
"...they contend that they were not given the opportunity, guaranteed them by Alderman v. United States, 1969, 394 U.S. 165, 89 S.Ct. 961, 22 L.Ed.2d 176, to demonstrate that evidence that the government used against them, not itself illegally obtained, was discovered through the exploitation of an illegal search." [*46]
The judge ruled against the defendants on this matter, though, "the defendants had not demonstrated a sufficient connection between a prior illegal search and the evidence sought to be suppressed..." [*47] Or, to quote Duniway fully...
"The defendants did not at trial, and do not on this appeal, identify particular items which should have been analyzed for taint. Rather, they argued that 'there has been so much illegality that the presumption of regularity of the Government should lapse; (it) should have the burden of going forward and justifying (its) sources.' We cannot agree." [*48]
The evidence obtained from the illegal searches in the Denver and Missouri raids led to the legal searches that resulted in the current prosecution. Government surveillance, when it was wide enough, might be considered illegal, Duniway argued. However, "In the case at bar there were three illegal seizures, but there was no wiretapping." [*49] If the government had gone so far in its criminality as to do some wiretapping, on top of three illegal search-and-seizures, then the state is infringing on your right to privacy. Even if wiretapping was used, it's not likely that the state, or the financial supporters of terrorism, are going to hand it over.
The defense argued rather rationally, "illegally secured information [led] the government to substantially intensify an investigation [making] all evidence subsequently uncovered (a product) '. . . of that illegality.'" [*50] A trial based on illegal evidence, then, might seem itself somewhat illegal. Even though the legal raid did use information from the illegal raids, the judge asked them to prove "that the government utilized illegally secured information to obtain more than defendants' identities." [*51] Illegally obtained evidence is admissible when it relates to someone's "identity," for example, proving that someone committed a crime, and this is decidedly convenient for the prosecution.
In fact, Judge Duniway admitted that the prosecution's main case was the "...mention of a prior prosecution based on illegally seized evidence..." There was some admission of a mistake, though, "...we must conclude that in this circumstance any error was harmless." [*52] The defendants have to prove that the evidence used against them came illegally. Except, of course, evidence that proves that they were directly responsible for the crimes involved. And, when that comes out, even then, they are responsible for proving that it was not harmless.
Throughout the trial, both Sand and Scully wanted to testify on their own behalf. However, when they stated this, the prosecution threatened in court to ask them about evidence that had been obtained illegally from their searches. This kept them from testifying on their own behalf, the threat of presenting even more illegal evidence against them. Such a procedure is completely legal, however. According to Judge Duniway, "The prosecution's threat to use illegally seized evidence to impeach defendants' testimony was not an impermissible restraint on their constitutional right to testify on their own behalf." [*53]
Topping off the Trial with a Banker's Testimony
"I felt the work I was doing was so important for humanity that I was willing to take the risks of being the alchemist, hiding away in his laboratory, making chemicals."
--Nick Sand, 2009
"Inside LSD" by National Geographic [*54] [*55] [*56]
The prosecution was building up an interesting case. The evidence presented against the defendants was either admittedly tampered with or obtained illegally. The prize witness against the two defendants had lied five times in an SEC and IRS scandal involving $40 million and was only testifying to get a reduced sentence. This case wouldn't be complete, though, unless a mouthpiece was brought before the court who spoke on behalf of the Swiss bank; that is, an attorney represented the financial interests funding terrorism.
According to Duniway, "The district court admitted a large volume of business records from the Paravicini Bank of Berne, Switzerland. These records, introduced by the government, were authenticated by Eugene Patry, a bank vice-chairman." [*57] Patry was the sole witness representing the Paravicini Bank. The prosecution presented some bank documents before Patry and asked him to authenticate them, which he did. "The government made a sufficient showing of the authenticity of the records through Patry's testimony." [*58] The records alleged that the defendants were guilty of that accompanying charge of LSD production: tax evasion.
The defense asked a question of Patry in cross-examination about the bank documents, and Patry responded that he had no idea what those documents were about that he had just authenticated. All that he could say was that they were authentic, whereas the defense wanted to know why they were "so inherently unreliable and so incomplete." [*59] This defense felt this was unfair, since this was "amounted to an abridgement of appellant's Sixth Amendment rights to confront the witnesses against them." [*60] The judge, however, ruled that the testimony of Patry was reliable and shouldn't be questioned. To quote Duniway again...
"As we have held, the person testifying need not have personal knowledge of the contents of the document. United States v. Saputski, 9 Cir., 1974, 496 F.2d 140, 142. Neither is it necessary that the witness personally know the time, place, and manner in which the record was made." [*61]
The documents of a corporate bank are accepted without any way to cross-examine them. Documents can't answer questions, and the person authenticating and verifying the document doesn't know what the document is. At the same time, the defense wasn't able to call any of its actual human witnesses, because of the undue delay in starting the trial. Written, legal papers hold more sway than the opinions of actual living beings. With this added to their heroin-using tax evader and their illegal evidence, the prosecution felt that it's case was complete.
Judge Duniway affirmed the decision of the lower courts in convicting Tim Scully and Nick Sand. [*62] Scully was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, Sand received fifteen. [*63] In the words of Duniway, "While harsh, the sentences meted out to Sand and Scully were less than the maximum; hence, the scope of our review is limited almost to the vanishing point." [*64] The judge's concluding statements were indicative of his overall attitude...
"The defendants' statement of facts is incorrect. Hence, we need not consider whether a district judge must consider the possibility of rehabilitation in passing sentence. The judge did consider, albeit disparagingly, the rehabilitative role of the criminal law, but concluded that these defendants were unrehabilitatable." [*65]
Did the government ever really believe that these two individuals actually possessed LSD, the offense that they were charged with? They are charged with "manufacture and distribution of LSD," but never does the judge point to the accused, and say, "I accuse you of manufacturing and distributing LSD." With all of the evidence, such a statement would have been ridiculous. The two defendants were found guilty, anyway.
"The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact. No magistrate then, (as he is one of the society) can, with justice, inflict on any other member of the same society punishment that is not ordained by the laws."
--Cesare Beccaria, 1764
"Of Crimes and Punishments," Chapter 3
Whatever Happened to the Chemists?
"But how can the one liberate the many? By first liberating his own being. He does this not by elevating himself, but by lowering himself. He lowers himself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into himself, he becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth. Completely emancipated from his former false life, he discovers his original pure nature, which is the pure nature of the universe. Freely and spontaneously releasing his divine energy, he constantly transcends complicated situations and draws everything around him back into an integral oneness. Because he is a living divinity, when he acts, the universe acts."
--Lao Tzu, c. 600 BC
"Hua Hu Ching," Part 77
For Nick Sand, there was only one option. As a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, he had a duty. While out on $50,000 bail, Nick Sand left the country. [*66] It would be a very long time before he returned. During the trial, Tim Scully had been working on his own creations, which he had to end now with the upholding of his conviction. But from 1971 to 1976, Scully was working on...
"...innovative biofeedback and physiological monitoring instruments and systems, including microcomputer based systems for educational, medical and process control. This work involved analog and digital circuit design, using discrete components and integrated circuits. I learned assembly language programming techniques and high level languages." [*67]
Tim Scully sold the stock in his company and retired to life in prison at McNeil Island Penitentiary. During his time here, he was allowed to enroll in a Ph.D. program at the Humanistic Psychology Institute. Here, he developed...
"...biofeedback systems and techniques for use in drug rehabilitation programs. I eventually built an 8080A microcomputer physiological monitoring system for analyzing EEG, EMG, GSR/BSR and skin temperature and did some basic research on the identification of specific patterns of physiological response associated with specific emotional states." [*68]
Much of Scully's time was spent working with drug rehabilitation programs that integrated his biofeedback systems. He even made a twelve hour video seminar to train facilitators of these systems for the Federal Prison Industries. On the side, he also taught Tai-Chi. [*69] This biofeedback system did not make much headlines. This was until Robin, a young woman with cerebral palsy, was able to use these systems to allow her to speak with the rest of the world. Scully was named Man of the Year by the Washington State Jaycees. To quote The Hour, a Connecticut newspaper...
"Scully first met Robin, the cerebral palsy victim, in California when he was free on bond awaiting sentencing for conspiracy to possess, manufacture, sell and distribute narcotics.
"Robin was able to control only side movement of one knee. Scully worked up a computer device that allows her to use movement to select words to appear on a television screen. She therefore is able to 'speak' sentences in rapid fashion." [*70]
In 1977, Scully's sentenced was reduced to ten years, with parole most likely available in 1980. In 1979, Scully graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology, his dissertation titled: "Physiological Pattern Analysis: A Key to Improved Biofeedback Systems for the Voluntary Control of Events in Consciousness." Scully was transferred out of McNeil Island before 1980, though, being moved to a half-way house in San Francisco in August, two must after obtaining his Ph.D. [*71] For a twenty year sentence, Scully was imprisoned for only three and a half years, and when he finished, he came out with a doctorate. So much for "unrehabilitatable."
Throughout the 1980's to the early 2000's, Scully has been working on biofeedback and computer systems. [*72] In 2005, Tim Scully retired, though he's doing some minor consulting work and writing a book "on the underground history of LSD." [*73]
Image: Tim Scully and his cat Merlin, at work in Albion, California,
Photograph from Little River Airport
Nicholas Sand relocated to Canada. He was set up on an international blind date with another chemist by one of his friends. It wasn't long after meeting Usha that the two began making LSD together. [*74] For roughly twenty years, Nick Sand formed the core of international LSD manufacturing, producing about 250 million doses. [*75]
In 1996, he was arrested in Vancouver, Canada, [*76] where his laboratory was found with 42 grams of LSD, or roughly 200,000 moderate doses. Samples of the LSD tested above 100% pure by the government's chemists, which is impossible. Psychedelic guru and chemist Alexander Shulgin suggested that the government must have degraded standards. The lab was considered so well managed and built, that "the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video." [*77]
In San Francisco, Nick Sand was found guilty of jumping bail, which added five years imprisonment to his previous sentence of fifteen years -- and this is besides the charges in Canada. [*78] He was 55 years-old. While imprisoned in Canada, Sand wrote a 600-paged book titled Psychedelic Secrets, which contained guidelines for those wishing to maximize their psychedelic experience. In a letter, he wrote concerning the awful conditions...
"Meanwhile overcrowding intensifies in here and the authorities attempt to squeeze everything out of their slaves that they can. Many things are not provided, like soap and toothpaste and all articles of toiletry and snacks, etc. They even sell fruit here." [*79]
By late 2000, Nicholas Sand was given an early release from prison, serving just under four years. As early as 2001, he gave a speech at the Mind States II conference, titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness." In 2006, he gave a speech at Burning Man, "Synergistic Combinations in the Future," where he talked about "some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects." He has also written a second book containing his syntheses techniques for producing psychedelics, though both are still unpublished. [*80]
Image: Nick Sand, Photograph by Jon Hanna, Nov, 2009
Photograph from Erowid.org
"The judge is lost when he ceases to be mechanical, when he 'is forsaken by the rules of evidence.' Then he no longer has anything but an opinion like everybody else; and, if he decides according to this opinion, his action is no longer an official action....
"What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? The state cannot forbear the claim to determine the individual's will, to speculate and count on this. For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. The state is not thinkable without lordship and servitude; for the state must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the 'will of the state.'"
--Max Stirner, 1845
"The Ego and Its Own," Part 2, Chapter II, Section 1
Resources
*1. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. OpenJurist.org .
*2. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (May 10, 1941 - ), published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*3. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*4. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*5. Photograph of Tim Scully with his Linear Accelerator, published by the Tribune, 1961, republished by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*6. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*7. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview.com .
*8. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*9. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*10. "LSD Purity," by Bruce Eisner, published in High Times, January 1977 Issue, published online at Bruce Eisner's Writings 2004, BruceEisner.com .
*11. "For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area," by Joel Selvin, Thursday, July 12, 2007, published by the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com .
*12. "Owsley Stanley - '60s counterculture icon - dies: 'Bear' helped Grateful Dead, made LSD (Owsley Stanley 1935-2011), March 14, 2011, By Aidin Vaziri, SFGate.com .
*13. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*14. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*15. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview .
*16. "'Hippie Mafia' Hash Smuggler Arrested," by Nick Schou, Thursday, November 12, 2009, published by the High Times, HighTimes.com .
*17. "ALD-52 Info," published by Lycaeum.org, September 15, 2000, Lycaeum.org.
*18. "Case Closed on 'Hippie Mafia' Smugglers," by Nick Schou, Thursday, December 3, 2009, HighTimes.com .
*19. "William Pickard's long, strange trip / Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a missile silo in Kansas," by Seth Rosenfeld, June 10, 2001, SFGate.com .
*20. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*21. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. OpenJurist.org .
*22. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 3. OpenJurist.org .
*23. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- S -- solvolysis," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*24. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- H -- hydrolysis," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*25. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*26. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 11. OpenJurist.org .
*27. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 6. OpenJurist.org .
*28. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 8. OpenJurist.org .
*29. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 24. OpenJurist.org .
*30. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*31. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. The Honorable James M. Burns, United States District Judge for the District of Oregon, sitting by designation, Section 1. OpenJurist.org .
*32. Counter example: "Structural Comparison of the Two Alternative Transition States for Folding of TI I27," by Christian D. Geierhaas, Robert B. Best, Emanuele Paci, Michele Vendruscolo, and Jane Clarke, published by Biophysical Journal, Volume 91, Issue 1, 263-275, 1 July 2006, Cell.com .
*33. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- T -- transition state," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*34. "IUPAC -- Gold Book -- alphabetical index -- T -- transition structure," IUPAC, Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. (the "Gold Book"), Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1997), IUPAC.org .
*35. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*36. "A correspondence with Tim Scully," published by the Oax Tree Review, 2003, TheOakTreeReview.com .
*37. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com
*38. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*39. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 12. OpenJurist.org .
*40. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*41. "Wages Of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, And The Underworld Economy," R. T. Naylor, January 7, 2005, Cornell University Press; ISBN-10: 0801489601, ISBN-13: 978-0801489600, Books.Google.com .
*42. "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer, Publisher: Citadel (June 1, 2000), ISBN-10: 0806512229, ISBN-13: 978-0806512228, page 186, Books.Google.com .
*43. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com
*44. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 34. OpenJurist.org .
*45. "Aquarius Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture That Changed America," by Peter O. Whitmer, Publisher: Citadel (June 1, 2000), ISBN-10: 0806512229, ISBN-13: 978-0806512228, page 186, Books.Google.com .
*46. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 16. OpenJurist.org .
*47. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 17. OpenJurist.org .
*48. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 20. OpenJurist.org .
*49. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 21. OpenJurist.org .
*50. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 22. OpenJurist.org .
*51. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 23. OpenJurist.org .
*52. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 37. OpenJurist.org .
*53. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 36. OpenJurist.org .
*54. "Trippin Tuesday: Inside LSD (Updated)," by On The Bus, Tue Nov 03, 2009, published by Docudharma, video originally by National Geographic, DocuDharma.com .
*55. "The Man Who Manufactured 250,000,000 Hits of LSD," by Marc Campbell, October 18, 2010, published by DangerousMinds.net, video originally by National Geographic, DangerousMinds.net .
*56. "Nick Sand on National Geographic: Underground LSD Lab," published by dmtsite, video originally by National Geographic, DMTSite.com .
*57. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 25. OpenJurist.org .
*58. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*59. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*60. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 31. OpenJurist.org .
*61. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 30. OpenJurist.org .
*62. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 42. OpenJurist.org .
*63. "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond," by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Jan 21, 1994, ISBN-10: 9780802130624, ISBN-13: 978-0802130624, Publisher: Grove Press, page 278. Books.Google.com .
*64. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 39. OpenJurist.org .
*65. United States of America v. Nicholas Sand, United States of America v. Tim Scully, Sept. 13, 1976, Court Numbers: 541 F.2d 1370, 77-1 USTC P 9438, Nos. 74-2012, 74-2338. Section 41. OpenJurist.org .
*66. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*67. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*68. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*69. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*70. "Inmate Named Man of Year," published by the Hour, Norwalk, Connecticut, Friday, Feb. 2, 1979, News.Google.com .
*71. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*72. Robert Timothy Scully, Ph. D., Curriculum Vitae, from the Little River Airport Pilot's Association. Jefro.net .
*73. Erowid Character Vaults: Tim Scully (August 27, 1944 - ), published by Erowid, 2005, Erowid.org .
*74. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*75. "Nick Sand on National Geographic: Underground LSD Lab," published by dmtsite, video originally by National Geographic, DMTSite.com .
*76. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*77. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .
*78. "SAN FRANCISCO / Elusive Maker Of LSD Guilty Of Skipping Bail," published by the San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1998, SFGate.com .
*79. "First Letter from Nick Sand," by Nick sand, April 1999, published by Serendipity, Serendipity.li .
*80. Erowid Character Vaults: Nick Sand (Extended Biography), by Jon Hanna, v. 1.0, Nov. 5, 2009, published by Erowid, Erowid.org .

"I am a “criminal.” I am a fugitive. I have been for 40 years. But I have been true to myself and my friends. It has been hard. But I have a vision. Someday, somewhere, I will establish the University for Psychedelic Studies. There will be a department of psychedelic botany and chemistry. There will be a beautiful park and temple with lawns and ponds, peacocks, swans, and wildlife walking fearlessly. There will be pavilions for initiation. There will be a department of entheogenic worship. There will be a school of psychedelic medicine and curing. There will be acres of psychedelic herb gardens. There will be places to dance and places to meditate. There will be a school of yoga, tantra, and a “Mystery” school. A school for breathing, for art, music, for meditation, for ecological and planetary studies as well as applications. A school for love and one for beauty. There will be no government inspectors or police. They will not be necessary. There will be guides, friends, helpers, and lovers. On the new level of consciousness struggling to be born now, this will be how it is, for the old way of competition, murder, and exploitation is fast becoming an impossible situation. This planet must be lovingly cared for or we are all doomed. We are the guardians of life and planetary harmony. This is where we are going. That is what I have seen in my visions, and that is what I have been working for all of my life. That is what I will continue to do until my last breath. Care to dance?" - Nick Sand