Tim Scully
Orange Sunshine Alchemist
Turning Mold into Gold
VIDEO - https://vimeo.com/75282865
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
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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://www.theoaktreereview.com/tim_scully.html
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. Tabletting 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 propaganda 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 wherewithall 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.
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. Tabletting 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 propaganda 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 wherewithall 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.
2005
Tim Scully From Wikipedia
Robert "Tim" Scully (born August 27, 1944) is best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974.[1] His best known product, dubbed "Orange Sunshine", was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969.[2]
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% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Owsley and Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab. Later Owsley started to tablet the product in Orinda, California but was arrested before he completed that work. Owsley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic in Denver which they called STP. STP was initially distributed at the summer solstice festival in 1967: 5,000 tablets (20 milligrams each) which quickly acquired a bad reputation. Owsley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Owsley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities; Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after Owsley was arrested on Christmas Eve 1967.
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.
The second Denver lab was discovered by the police while Scully was out of town. His lab assistants were arrested there when they returned a few days later. Scully was not arrested at that time.
In December 1968 Nick Sand (through an intermediary) purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California where he and Tim Scully set up a large LSD lab. Tim Scully and Nick Sand (another psychedelic chemist) produced over 3.6 million tablets (300 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "Orange Sunshine" by the summer of 1969. In May 1969 Tim Scully was arrested in California for the 1968 Denver lab. The search was eventually ruled illegal, but Scully decided to retire from clandestine chemistry and pursue electronic design instead. In 1969 Scully formed his own corporation, Aquarius Electronics, and he was president and sole designer from 1971-1976.
The government had been building a case against Tim Scully's partner in the Windsor lab, Nick Sand, since late 1971. In early 1973 Billy Hitchcock was threatened with 24 years in prison for tax evasion if he didn't help the government convict the prime movers of the LSD cartel. Billy provided evidence and testified against Tim Scully and Nick Sand and they were both indicted in April 1973. Scully's defense was that he was producing ALD-52, which was legal, and not the controlled substance LSD-25.[4] Scully lost the case and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1974. Scully's appeals ran out in late 1976, so he sold his stock in his company and began serving prison time in early 1977.
Scully spent his time in prison helping design and build biofeedback and interface systems for the non-vocal handicapped. Scully's sentence was reduced to 10 years and he was released on parole from prison in 1980. Since his release from prison Scully (2005 pic) has published eight articles on the topic of biofeedback and as many on technical computer topics. He retired from his years of work with Autodesk in 2005 and is currently researching a book on the underground history of LSD. He has written a chronology of his life.
References
Robert "Tim" Scully (born August 27, 1944) is best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974.[1] His best known product, dubbed "Orange Sunshine", was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969.[2]
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% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "White Lightning". LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Owsley and Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab. Later Owsley started to tablet the product in Orinda, California but was arrested before he completed that work. Owsley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic in Denver which they called STP. STP was initially distributed at the summer solstice festival in 1967: 5,000 tablets (20 milligrams each) which quickly acquired a bad reputation. Owsley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Owsley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities; Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after Owsley was arrested on Christmas Eve 1967.
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.
The second Denver lab was discovered by the police while Scully was out of town. His lab assistants were arrested there when they returned a few days later. Scully was not arrested at that time.
In December 1968 Nick Sand (through an intermediary) purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California where he and Tim Scully set up a large LSD lab. Tim Scully and Nick Sand (another psychedelic chemist) produced over 3.6 million tablets (300 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed "Orange Sunshine" by the summer of 1969. In May 1969 Tim Scully was arrested in California for the 1968 Denver lab. The search was eventually ruled illegal, but Scully decided to retire from clandestine chemistry and pursue electronic design instead. In 1969 Scully formed his own corporation, Aquarius Electronics, and he was president and sole designer from 1971-1976.
The government had been building a case against Tim Scully's partner in the Windsor lab, Nick Sand, since late 1971. In early 1973 Billy Hitchcock was threatened with 24 years in prison for tax evasion if he didn't help the government convict the prime movers of the LSD cartel. Billy provided evidence and testified against Tim Scully and Nick Sand and they were both indicted in April 1973. Scully's defense was that he was producing ALD-52, which was legal, and not the controlled substance LSD-25.[4] Scully lost the case and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1974. Scully's appeals ran out in late 1976, so he sold his stock in his company and began serving prison time in early 1977.
Scully spent his time in prison helping design and build biofeedback and interface systems for the non-vocal handicapped. Scully's sentence was reduced to 10 years and he was released on parole from prison in 1980. Since his release from prison Scully (2005 pic) has published eight articles on the topic of biofeedback and as many on technical computer topics. He retired from his years of work with Autodesk in 2005 and is currently researching a book on the underground history of LSD. He has written a chronology of his life.
References
- ^ Inmate Named Man of the Year at The Hour, February 2, 1979
- ^ Waiting for the man: the story of drugs and popular music, by Harry Shapiro, 1988, Quartet Books
- ^ William Pickard's long, strange trip / Suspected LSD trail leads from the Bay Area's psychedelics era to a missile silo in Kansas from the San Francisco Chronicle, page 2, June 12, 2001, by Seth Rosenfeld: "There was a break, and I walked out into the hall, and he introduced himself as a fellow chemist," recalled Scully, once an "apprentice" to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the most infamous psychedelic sorcerer of the '60s."
- ^ United States v. Sand at Open Jurist
Erowid Character Vaults
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/scully_tim/scully_tim.shtml
Tim Scully Aug 27, 1944 - Summary Tim Scully is best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974. His best known product, dubbed "Orange Sunshine", was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969. Scully worked with Owsley Stanley and Nick Sand in the late 1960s. During his LSD manufacturing career, Scully worked in four labs (documented in his 1973 trial):
His entire life, Tim Scully has been interested in cutting edge technology and computers. As a teen in 1958, he earned an honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair for designing and building a small computer. He later received recognition for building a small linear accelerator pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. He was trying to make gold atoms from mercury.
Scully has been a pilot much of his adult life and has worked in biofeedback and interface systems for people with disabilities. He has published eight articles on the topic of biofeedback and as many on technical computer topics. He retired from his years of work with Autodesk in 2005 and is currently researching a book on the underground history of LSD.
Author of (Articles)Scully T. Biofeedback and some of its non-medical uses. AHP Newsletter, December 1976: 1-2. Reprinted in J. Brennecke and R. Amick (Eds.) Readings to accompany psychology and human experience, 1978, New York: Glencoe Press. Scully T. 8080 matrix subroutines. People's Computers, 1977, 6(1):41. Scully T. Computerized biofeedback and stress management. Creative Computing, 1979, 5(12): 88-94. Scully T, et al. Autodesk Device Interface (ADI) driver development toolkit v4.2, 1992. Sausalito: Autodesk, Inc. (790 pages) Links Tim Scully's Curriculum Vitae Tim Scully's Publication List Tim Scully Member Profile of Little River Airport
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Tim Scully Aug 27, 1944 - Summary Tim Scully is best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974. His best known product, dubbed "Orange Sunshine", was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969. Scully worked with Owsley Stanley and Nick Sand in the late 1960s. During his LSD manufacturing career, Scully worked in four labs (documented in his 1973 trial):
- With Bear (Owsley) in a Pt. Richmond, CA lab in 1966, as his apprentice
- With Bear in a first Denver lab (set up by Scully) in 1967
- On his own in a second Denver lab in 1968
- In a Windsor, CA lab, which he set up in 1969 (where Orange Sunshine was made and where Nick Sand learned the process)
His entire life, Tim Scully has been interested in cutting edge technology and computers. As a teen in 1958, he earned an honorable mention at a San Francisco Bay Area science fair for designing and building a small computer. He later received recognition for building a small linear accelerator pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. He was trying to make gold atoms from mercury.
Scully has been a pilot much of his adult life and has worked in biofeedback and interface systems for people with disabilities. He has published eight articles on the topic of biofeedback and as many on technical computer topics. He retired from his years of work with Autodesk in 2005 and is currently researching a book on the underground history of LSD.
Author of (Articles)
