“Frankly, I hoped he’d never test our palship by calling on that favor. I didn’t want anything to do with his current scene, which consisted of hanging around with some truly sordid speed freaks, such as a guy who’d stand around all evening jerkily leafing through nudist magazines—front to back, back to front, front to back again—muttering, ‘Process. It’s all process,’ while the other speed freaks in the room argued about who was alerting the police they imagined to be watching their every move by casting a shadow on the window shade.”
On the night that the Green Factory on Virginia Street was raided, one of Owsley’s friends walked by the house and then alerted Perry that it might have been busted. Perry then called the police to ask if another friend who had been minding the house for Owsley had been arrested. After being informed that the friend was now in jail, Perry quickly got in touch with Melissa, “who reflected for about a minute and a half before pouring a pound or so of methedrine down a Berkeley storm drain with the cheerful resignation she could always summon in a pinch.”
Secure in the knowledge that all the incriminating evidence concerning what he had actually been doing at the Green Factory had now neatly been disposed of, Owsley presented his case with impunity in court and walked away completely unscathed from this particular brush with the law.
Unwilling to quit when he was ahead, Owsley then presented himself “at the property lockup to regain my lab gear. I was stonewalled. The leading officer of the drug squad refused to release my property, telling me to ‘Go get a court order.’ They had never had anyone ask for a return of evidence before. I assume that all those who managed to beat their cases had just abandoned the gear.
“My opinion was that the act of abandoning my claim was the equivalent of admitting that I was really guilty and they had just missed the evidence. In a few days, my lawyer obtained a court order naming the drug agency and the officer in charge by name. The cops were clearly wrong by retaining my property as evidence once the case had been dismissed and the court agreed.”
Returning to the police station, Owsley again demanded that he be given back his property. “‘Where is your court order?’ the smug bastard asked. I laid it on the counter and got a great rush from seeing his face as he read it. It was a really stupid career move on his part to engage me like that because it brought disgrace on the police and they pinned it on him by name. After that, I never had any further trouble from the drug squad.”
What Owsley did not also tell the officer at the time was that during the raid, the drug cops had “overlooked the residue of my initial, unsuccessful attempt to cook acid as well as a bottle of waste water containing traces of real methamphetamine base left over from a steam distillation I had undertaken months before and forgotten about in the clutter, which had also hid it from the cops.”
Unable to retrieve the books she needed to study for her courses at the university from the house on Virginia Street because of the bust, Melissa Cargill withdrew from school. “To be honest,” she would later say, “my studies had suffered and become less meaningful as Owsley, drugs, and music became more interesting.”
Intent on continuing to pursue what so far had been their fairly unsuccessful attempts to synthesize LSD, the two of them left Berkeley and headed for Los Angeles. Using his Bear Research Group stationery, Owsley then began buying large amounts of the raw material he would need to make the purest acid ever to hit the streets in America.
5
Making Acid
Setting up shop in a rented two-bedroom house at 2205 Lafler Road in Los Angeles not far from the campus of Cal State LA, Owsley ordered one hundred grams of lysergic monohydrate from the Cyclo Chemical Corporation as well as another forty grams from the International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation (ICN). Along with each request, Owsley also submitted a signed affidavit stating he would use the material for research purposes only.
The first hundred-gram bottle of lysergic monohydrate, for which Owsley paid $4,000 in $100 bills by drawing upon his apparently endless cash reserve from the sale of methedrine in Berkeley, arrived on March 30, 1965. The substance he was sent by ICN, which had been founded and was then being run by the aptly named Milan Panic, who would later serve as the prime minister of Yugoslavia, was “a nasty brown powder” that Owsley promptly returned after discovering that it was of no use to him at all in making LSD.
By May, Owsley and Melissa had successfully synthesized their first batch of LSD, which Owsley then began distributing by taking orders for it by mail at a Sunset Boulevard address. As word on the street began spreading about the incredible power and purity of his product, Owsley used the proceeds from the sales to buy three more hundred-gram bottles of lysergic monohydrate from the Cyclo Chemical Corporation, thereby bringing his total investment in the project to $16,000, the equivalent of about $120,000 today.
Despite how impressive his work in the laboratory had been, Owsley would insist to the end of his days that he was never a chemist. “There’s no more chemistry to making LSD than to baking a bloody cake. You just have to know how to do it. What parts to use, what temperature to set the oven.… Most of it is published, and that which isn’t published is available to an investigative mind. The correct and accepted term for those who make the entheogens is cook—I like to think of it as sort of gourmet chef, master of fine mental cuisine.”
By now, Owsley had also already immersed himself in The Kybalion: Hermetic Philosophy, a book he had found in the Shambhala bookstore in Berkeley in the fall of 1964. Originally published in 1908, The Kybalion was an exploration and explanation of alchemy that had most likely been written by Paul Foster Case, Michael Whitty, and William Walker Atkinson, who had chosen to call themselves the Three Initiates.
Although the Free Speech Movement on the campus of the University of California in Berkeley, which would spawn similar protests at other institutions of higher learning all across America in years to come, was then at its peak, Owsley was already marching to the beat of a very different drummer. Completely ignoring the continuing series of student demonstrations that eventually resulted in a mass arrest as “a college kid thing,” Owsley plunged so deeply into The Kybalion that it soon became the guide he used to steer through every aspect of his life.
“If you were not ready, the book was absolutely meaningless. It either meant everything to you or it meant nothing because it said the lips of wisdom were closed except to the ear of understanding. For me, it was the key to alchemy and to understanding what the universe was all about because it put all the things I then experienced on acid into total context.
“Alchemy was mental transformation. It was never about transforming substances. Those were all allegories. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. It was always about that. Alchemy didn’t begin talking about turning lead into gold until it had to deal with the Church during the early Middle Ages.”
The widely used occult phrase “as above, so below” soon became the foundation of Owsley’s belief that whatever happened on any physical, emotional, or mental level while he was tripping was not a fantasy. “I’d take a bit of acid, and Melissa would say, ‘No, this is real. You’ve got to deal with it.’ ‘Oh, okay. It’s not the drug. It must be something I didn’t know about.’ Once I accepted something that I wouldn’t have received normally as being real, different things happened, and that was the key to it all.”
Owsley also soon came to believe that his state of mind while he was making acid would affect the result. “LSD is something that goes from being absolutely inert to so powerful that twenty-five micrograms will cause a change in your consciousness. You’re concentrating a lot of mental energy on one package. And if you believe, as I did, that the universe is a mental thing, a creation in the mind of a being that is actually creating time and space, then everything is mental. So when I had something that would affect the minds of thousands and thousands of people in the palm of my hand, how could I not believe that?
”
While it has been widely reported that Owsley and Melissa came up with 1.5 million doses of LSD during their time in LA, he would later dispute this claim. “I never, ever estimated how many doses the stash might make as I had no idea what my real yield might be. The potential might have been about a little more than 1.2 million doses but we only got out about 800,000 in all formats, of which about half were given away for free.” At an average price of $3 a dose, it was still a huge amount of money, some of which Owsley liked to carry around with him in $100 bills that he kept in his boots.
Still pretty much a rank amateur at the difficult business of synthesizing LSD, Owsley used sulfur trioxide as the reagent. The highly corrosive chemical could also cause serious burns if it was inhaled or ingested while being handled. The material was also “difficult to get rid of,” and Owsley would later remember “dropping some off a bridge one time and watching it combine with the moisture in the air to form a huge cloud of sulfuric acid.”
The LSD he was now making had side effects as well. “When you start to work with it, you absorb it and you get high. You have to back off for a day, and the next day you get more of it and it doesn’t do anything. And by about the third or fourth day, you could probably drink a gram of it and nothing would happen. But it does space you out, and you get further and further from reality as the weeks go on. I found out that about three weeks was all I could handle. At a time.”
The immediate widespread popularity of the LSD that Owsley was now producing in bulk soon made him realize he was embarking on a journey that few people had ever before undertaken. “I started doing this acid thing, and the first thing that I sat down and thought about was—‘You know, a lot of people are in jail because of doing this. This is very dangerous. This is like venturing into a battlefield with a lot of guns you have never even looked at.’ I had no idea what I had to do to protect myself or how to negotiate. I had no idea who was good and who wasn’t.
“And so I had to focus all of my incredible concentration on figuring this out as fast as possible. I developed ways of talking to people while watching their expressions and listening to their answers while formulating the next thing I would say based on what they had said, and then watching the way in which they reacted to that. I had spent a year in acting training, and that helped me learn how to do this.”
Although it was not his preferred method of doing business, Owsley would sometimes sell LSD directly to people whom he trusted, who would then go off and resell the acid on their own. “I never fronted anything to anyone since I felt that fronting dope made the two people ‘partners’ whereas exchanging money for the material was just a straightforward business transaction between independent operators.”
While he was in Los Angeles, Owsley sold some of his newly made LSD to a talented Berkeley-based folk guitarist named Perry Lederman, who then “told people I had made it, and that was how my name got attached to it. I said, ‘Oh, fuck, Perry, why did you do that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I had nothing to do with that and I did everything I could to stay out of it. I wouldn’t even let people take pictures of me. I wasn’t trying to create a fucking myth—I was just trying to stay out of jail.”
What neither Owsley nor Melissa knew at the time was that Captain Alfred Tremblay, the commander of the Los Angeles narcotics division, had already begun regularly emptying the garbage cans outside their house on Lafler Road. A year later, when he appeared before a Senate subcommittee in Washington, DC, Tremblay testified that he knew LSD had been manufactured and distributed from that address. Tremblay also displayed several order forms he had retrieved from Owsley’s garbage, including one from Portland, Oregon, with a request for forty capsules and the postscript “love to Melissa.”
By the time Owsley and Melissa returned to Berkeley in April 1965, he had, in Charles Perry’s words, “become a rather vocal disparager of methedrine.” Nonetheless, Charles Perry later recalled that Owsley showed up at one of the “little ostentatiously informal gatherings” at which “Bay Area psychedelic chemists” liked to show off “their accomplishments. From the way Owsley talked about them, I gathered there was some spirit of sharing, some simple enthusiasm, and a certain tincture of competitiveness.
“Owsley proudly produced methedrine (or maybe some other amphetamine) which he had synthesized not from chemical precursors but from the ephedra plant. I don’t know where he got it but a number of species grow wild and I believe Ephedra funerea (Mormon tea) was actually available in health food and herbalist stores. So it was organic meth. He would have done this purely for the pleasure of the accomplishment because by that time he had come to oppose amphetamines as a high.”
In a gesture of friendship during this same period, Owsley handed Perry a capsule of his newly minted LSD. Forty minutes after ingesting it, Perry was “two-dimensional, fading into the Wall of the World Womb, which turned into the wall of an Egyptian tomb, and I was a painting of an ancient Egyptian on a tomb wall with hieroglyphics sprouting from my elbows and knees and disappearing down the wall too fast for my two-dimensional eyes ever to read.”
Panicked, Perry walked a mile and a half to find a girl from the rooming house so she could help talk him down from his trip. When Perry told Owsley the next day that the LSD had turned him into a painting, he said, “Oh, that’s right.… You had one of those first ones. Hey, they were too heavy. You should have only taken half.”
Many years later, Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow attended a conference where he met Albert Hofmann. When Barlow told Hofmann of his connection with the Grateful Dead, the Swiss chemist asked him if he knew this Owsley fellow.
After Barlow said that he did, Hofmann told him that although he had seen quite a lot of formations of LSD, he was quite impressed with what Owsley had done as he was the only one who had ever got the crystallization process correct. On every level, it was the ultimate confirmation that Owsley had come up with the real thing.
6
Pranksters and Angels
In what would eventually come to be recognized as an iconic evening in the formation of the counterculture in America, the Hells Angels turned up in force on August 7, 1965, to party with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at Kesey’s sprawling wood-frame house in La Honda. Hunter Thompson, who had already written about the motorcycle gang for The Nation magazine and was then researching his forthcoming book about them, was there. So too were Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, who would later write a short, elegiac poem about the event.
Based in large part on a fifteen-page report that had been issued in March by the California attorney general as well as extensive coverage in mass-circulation magazines such as Newsweek, Life, and Time, the Hells Angels had already achieved an astonishing level of nationwide notoriety as a terrifying band of outlaws who only loved their motorcycles and were always ready to wreak havoc at a moment’s notice on anyone who got in their way.
Because of Kesey’s utter fearlessness and incredible personal charisma, as well as the huge amount of beer and LSD that the Pranksters had laid on for the event, the wildly out-of-control party, which included a gang bang that both Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe later described in great detail, was a roaring success. The event was also seen as proof that acid was so powerful an elixir that it could transform even the most fearsome band of outlaws imaginable into relatively peaceful human beings.
In truth, the Merry Pranksters and the Hells Angels had almost nothing in common. Despite how crazy the Pranksters could sometimes get while tripping, they were for the most part well-educated dropouts who saw themselves as part of a significant social experiment. Five years before Tom Wolfe would coin the term, their odd alliance with the Hells Angels was an early form of radical chic.
While it may now be difficult to understand why a band of psychedelic loonies would want to reach out to an outlaw motorcycle gang for any reason whatsoever, it should be remembered that much of what went on during
the 1960s was motivated by an unceasing quest for authenticity. Whatever else anyone might have had to say about the Hells Angels, they were definitely real, often in the most terrifying way imaginable.
Despite the widely held belief that LSD could transform lions into lambs, nine weeks after the Hells Angels had taken acid at Kesey’s party, they violently attacked a large group of marchers in Oakland led by Allen Ginsberg who were peacefully protesting against the war in Vietnam. As they mauled the demonstrators, the Angels shouted, “Go back to Russia, you fucking Communists!”
Safely ensconced in the LSD scene in Berkeley that he was largely responsible for having created, Owsley had for months been resisting the efforts of a black friend named Gaylord to accompany him down to La Honda to visit Kesey. Based on all that Owsley knew about the Hells Angels, he considered them “to be the most violent guys I’d ever heard about. The thought of going down there and hanging out with them didn’t sound like it was going to be safe, and certainly not fun.”
After hopping into Gaylord’s car one day in October 1965, Owsley finally made the fifty-five-mile journey that would irrevocably alter his life. Then thirty years old, the same age as Owsley, Kesey was a powerfully built man who had been a champion wrestler in high school and then at the University of Oregon. Having already achieved national fame by writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey had also recently been busted for possession of marijuana. While all this might have intimidated someone who was meeting him for the first time, that person would not have been Owsley.
Sidling right up to Kesey, he introduced himself by saying, “I’m Owsley.” Having never heard the name before, Kesey just stared at him as if to say, “Okay. Fine. You’re Owsley. So?” After a few moments of awkward silence, Owsley handed Kesey several hits of LSD. “Before I got there, some guy named John the Chemist had been making their acid. When I met him, Kesey already had a good supply and so was not very interested in what I had, suspicion being one of his strong suits.”
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