Culture - Where did LSD come from "back in the day" ?

[searcher]

Seems like if you went to any rock concert "back in the day" LSD was pretty easy to find. Some hippy was always selling some somewhere. Now it's all "X" and LSD is nowhere to be found. So was this acid that was so readily available back in the '60's and '70's made in Europe (like Holland or Italy) or in countries that had no "LSD laws"?. Who imported it (Mafia?) Seems like acid was really easy to get back then (street people, hippies).


Was it some college students chemistry project? was it made by "hippy cults"?


Where'd it come from?


Whats your take on where LSD was manufactured and how it got "on the street" back in "the day".

[inoxia]

Well it depends how far back you are talking about. LSD was not made illegal until the late sixties 67 or 68 if my memory serves me. I know it still was not pharmaceutical LSD on the streets but there was some big enthusiasts back then. And with no one seeking them it was everyone’s for the taking.

[Thegreatone]

most acid back in the late 60s early 70s was made by owsley stanly ( the bear) some is made by the familys also.

[dastardlymonkey]

It was mainly produced in the U.S. I am pretty sure that most of it still is.

[ISBN]

It's missing about the first 5 and the last 5 pages. My hands started
cramping up. I'll finish it up later. Typos are mine. To summarize the
answer to your question, most LSD up until 1965 was created by Sandoz
Pharmaceutical (I assume they provided the U.S. Army with their LSD,
but the army also could have made their own). Owsley made most of the
underground acid between 1965-1967. After this, it was mainly produced
by friends and associates of Owsley.



--------

WHO TURNED ON WHOM

From Dr. Albert Hoffman to You--</span><br style="font-style: italic;">
How Western Civilization Got High Again, One Head at a Time</span>

Peter Stafford and Bruce Eisner

October 1977, High Times



...

"In 1960 Dr John Beresford wrote Sanoz from New York and explained that
he was interested in investigating LSD-25's possible effects on
amoebas. Back by return mail came a gram labeled "pharmaceutically
pure" and a bill for $285. Before the year was out, Beresford, Jean
Houston, and Michael Corner had established an LSD research center, the
Agora Scientific Trust. Much of the turning on they performed is
described in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.



"Eventually the gram Beresford bought was split up with an associate,
Michael Hollingshead, who conveyed part of it to Harvard, where he
turned on dozens of scientists and volunteers. He stayed for a while
with Leary at a house that was the site of many psilocybin turn-ons.
Despite this, many were afraid of LSD. One of those declaring himself
most uninterested was Timothy L. By 1962, jazz musician Maynard
Ferguson and his wife Flo wer obviously having such a good time on it
that Hollingshead finally was able to convince Leary to try a spoonful
from his LSD-25 mayonaisse jar.



"In addition to Leary, Hollingshead turned on Paul Krassner, Richard
Alpert, Art Kleps, Ralph Metzner, Donovan Leitch, Keith Richard, the
Yardbirds, and others of the early English rock scene, from a center he
established in London (having been sent there for that purpose by
Leary). Though Leary claims to have turned on very few people
personally, he and some thirty graduate students, young professors and
theologians were, in his words:



...thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard..believing it was a
time (after the shallow, nostalgic Fifties) for far-ou
visions...With...scientific concepts as suggestive text and with LSD as
instrumental sacrament and with prayers for grace, we began to write
and to talk publicly about the possibility of a new philosophy, a new
individual scientific theology



"Soon Hardvard Square became the center of the 'psychedelic
revolution,' with consequences well known. After being forced out of
Harvard, Leary, Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass) and their associates decided
it was time for the psychedelic movement to gfo public and established
their International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF). In 1964
IFIF even opened a pilot LSD training center in Zihuatanejo, Mexico,
and received over 1,500 applications.



"Acid has appeared in many forms, but one of the strangest was one
Alpert went down to retrieve after he and Leary had been thrown out of
their resort hotel Zihuantenjo. To bring it through customs, Alpert put
it in a shaving lotion bottle. At the airport, his luggage was thrown
up on the rack and fell off. He thought that the bottle might have
broken, but didn't dare check until speeding from the airport in a
taxi. Sure enough, the suit the LSD had been wrapped up in was all wet.
One idea was to cut the suit up into square like fabric samples;
instead, it was just hung on the wall, where anyone who wanted to turn
on could suck on it. (A seersucker suit, as it were).



"After Zihuantanelo, this hearty band of experimenters set out for the
Bristish West Indies seeking island sanctuary. Discouraged, they
returned to the U.S., and at the invitation of Peggy and William
Hitchcock--heirs to the Mellon banking fortune--established a
longer-lasting psychedelic vortex in Millbrook, New York. From here
emanataed the PSychedelic Review, early light shows carried to New York
City and other messages transmitted via pilgrims who had made the trek
to visit Castalia Foundation and the League for Spiritual Discovery,
the slightly altered names for IFIF. The high visibilit of such
activites dismayed more conservative investigators, but nonetheless
drew media attention leading to the mass turn-ons of the mid-Sixties.



"In the spring of 1963, according to Beresford, Bobby Kennedy was known
to be taking LSD or psilocybin and providing psychedelic entertainment
for foreign dignitaries in a fashionable New York apartment. JFK
reportedly smoked pot in the White House with Judith Campbell Exner. By
this time, Eric Loeb ran a store with window displays on East Ninth
Street in Manhattan, where he legally sold peyote buds from Arizona,
mescaline, harmaline, and ibogaine. And the Englishmen Gerald Heard had
by now turned on the publisher of Time and Life, Henry Luce, and his
wife, the vivacious playwright Clare Booth Luce.



"Even more public and outrageous than the psychedelic circuses and
celebrations of the Leary clique and upper-class New York society were
the antics of Ken Kesey. Kesey, oddly enough, was turned on by the U.S.
Army, which along with the CIA had been conducting its own turn-ons
from the early Fifties onward. Of course, these turn-ons were given
many times without preparation--yet many, such as Kesey, had good trips
despite the lack of structure, and this may have inspired Kesey's Merry
Pranksters to create their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the namesake of
a Tom Wolfe book. The test turned on many who had little advance
knowledge, from the Fillmore ballroom to a Watts church. Wavy Gravy,
former nightclub comedian Hugh Romeny and one of the Pranksters, denied
that he put the acid in the punch on these occasions.



"Jerry Garcia could be considerd another Army turn-on. The lead
guitarist for the Grateful Dead, a notorious peyote-gulper in his early
Berkeley coffeehouse days, Garcia recounts what caused him to gain the
moniker 'Captain Trips':



[In] '60, '61, '62, I guess, or '63, the government was running a
series of drug tests over at Stanford, and Hunter [the Dead's lyricist]
was one of the participants of these. They gave him mescaline and
psilocybin and LSD and a whole bunch of others and put him in a little
white room and watched him. And there were other people on the scene
who were into that. Kesey. And as soon as these people had had those
drugs they were immediately trying to get them ,trying to find some way
to cop 'em or anything, but there was no illicit market then like there
is now.



"The acid tests beginning in the mid-decade were something entirely
new. Instead of the turn-on being spread from friend to friend,
communal conversions were now the order of the day and a new term was
introducted into the language--'freaking freely.' The first real
'gathering of the tribes' occured on October 16, 1966, the day when
California became the first state to ban LSD. This was the earliest of
what might properly be called the 'Human Be-ins,' and was celebrated by
thousands on both coasts. A wave of media publicity about the
gentleness of this mass turn-on resulted in an even larger gathering in
San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in January 1967. An estimated 10,000
turned on while listening to Leary, Ginsberg, Lenore Kandel, McClure
and many others praise the psychedelic revolution, accompanied by rock
bands from San Francisco, such as Big Brother and the Holding Company,
the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane. Augustus Owsley Stanley III,
already known by his middle name as a great acid maker, dropped by
parachute into the crowd. Longhairs sporting flowers blew bubbles in
the grass. By the time the beautiful, vibrant day, was over, everyone
knew that San Francisco would soon celebrate a 'Summer of Love.'



"The likes of Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Neil Young, Stephen Stills,
Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, Country Joe McDonald and
others formed a loose-knit 'family' of turned-on rock stars on the West
Coast. Chester Anderson has referred to such groups as Sturgeonesque
'homo-gestalts' in Crawdaddy, the earliest rock magazine. Anderson
partially explained why these San Francisco musicians and other
acid-rockers such as the Stones, the Beatles, the Mothers, and the
Doors, not to mention hundred of other bands of similar odd fellows,
were such an ecouragementto the turn-on:



Rock is a legitimate avant-garde art form, with deep roots in the music
of the past (especially the baroque and before), great vitality and
vast potential for growth and development, adaptation, experiment, etc.

It's effects on the younger generation, expecially those efffects most
deplored by type-heads, have all been essentiall y good and healthy so
far.



"With rock's heavy profit orientation today, these principles may sound
a big high-flown, optimistic and idealistic. Yet in the mid-Sixties,
millions thought ofthe Beatles almost as gods (or at least as the four
evangelists), and form onths after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band became available, people argued endlessly about the secret meaning
of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.'



"LSD-25 made its debut in rock in 1962 in a single by the Gamblers. By
1965, Eric Burden and the Animals were crooning their love song, 'To
Sandoz'; the Stones were singing about how 'Something Happened To Me
Yesterday'; the Byrds were harmonizing about how they were 'Eight Miles
High,' and the Beatles had long been advising everyone to 'Turn off
your mind, relax and float downstream. This is not dying...'



"Ginsberg says he was turned on to pot by Al Aronowitz, a pop-rock
writer for the New York Post who also performed the same service for
Bob Dylan. Ginsberg mentions that the Beatles were turned on by Dylan
when their planes crossed at JFK airport. he asked whether they wanted
to turn on, and they were hesitant. Finally, Ringo said he'd try it.
They went behind a hangar, and after returning to the others, Ringo was
asked what he thought of it. He was smiling so much the others decided
to try it too.



"In retrospect, it may seem a strange quirk that the Beatles were
turned on to acid by their dentist-- the 'Dr. Robert' of an early
song--who over dinner slipped it into Paul's and John's coffees. 'He
hadn't know what it was,' one explained later. 'We didn't ask for it,
but later we did say 'thank you.'' Jimi hendrix was another first
turned on in England. He responded by putting 'Purple Haze' at the top
of the charts. In Film About Hendrix, we see his acid taster, who
followed Jimi wherever he went and checked out his tabs to see how good
they were before he tried them. According to many stories, Owsley made
a double-strength, special bach of acid for him, and Jimi once at a
handful of these tabs before going on stage.



"We haven't said anything about the role played by the Fugs,
Steppenwolf, Pearls Before Swine, H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Walker, the
Seeds, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Strawberry Alarm Clock,
Arthur Brown, the Lovin' Spoonful and the Beach Boys, but these and
hundred of other groups all contributed enormously to the turning-on of
the world.



"Grace Slick likes to tell the story of how she and Abbie Hoffman [not
to be confused with Albert Hofmann] were invited to a party for Tricia
Nixon which Richard Nixon attended. They planned to dose Tricky
Dick with some of Owsley's best, contained beneath her fingernail,
before there were stopped at the door by security.



"Hoffman relates his version of becoming another of the Army's turn-ons:



Aldous Huxley told me about LSD back in 1957. And I tried to get it in
1959. I stood in line at a clinic in San Francisco, after Herb Caen had
run an announcement in the Chronicle that if anybody wanted to take a
new experimental drug called LSD-25, he would be paid $150 for his
efforts. Jesus, that emptied Berkely! I got up about six in the
morning, but I was about 1,500 in line so...I didn't get it until 1965.
The acid was supplied by the United States Army. My roomate from
college was an Army psychologist.

...

Edited by: ISBN

[Hyperreal]

Of course, it depends what you mean by 'back in the day'. Most of the LSD in the US, if not the world, was being made by two guys called William Pickard and Clyde Apperson in an enormous lab in Kansas which got busted in 2000. In the 60s, it was Owsley.

[mariecurie]

Bexley House, a dorm at MIT, made a lot of acid back in the day as
well. They had a famous closet where they would produce huge buckets of
LSD and then transfer it to vials or blotter. The feds raided the place
a few decades ago, but everyone got away because the deans warned the
dorm that the feds were coming.<!--
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[42itis]

Well thanks for the memorable post ISBN, man back in those days life was almost sweet, I have more than one fond memorie of being filled with so much joy and happiness for no other reason that I was alive and feeling tremendous insights, 0h the sweet joy of life and love, we got to get that loving feeling back!