Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD (2011)

rollingstone.com

85 pointsbookofjoe57 comments

Paywall-bypassing archive: https://archive.ph/B0R2k

If you find clandestine chemistry interesting, then listen to Hamilton Morris’ podcast. He has interviewed many clandestine chemists, mostly retired. They’re a class of prohibited scientists, hellbent on advancing psycho-chemical knowledge against all the odds.

A sample of recent episodes: “Interview with a clandestine MDA enantiopurifier” “The psychedelic supply chain” “The True Story of the Penis Envy Mushroom”

Stranger stories are hard to find.

"The Hamilton Morris Podcast" (hamiltonmorris.buzzsprout.com) for those intrigued by the above comment like myself.

His biggest contribution may end up being showing the synthesis of the toad venom chemical.

People have been flocking to the southwest US (and maybe northern Mexico?) to try 5-MEO-DMT, which is expressed by the glands of a toad that’s native to the area. Hamilton made a video where he synthesized the active chemical in the toad venom, in a country where it is legal, and he didn’t have to touch any toads to do it.

In the same video, he showed that many toads were run over by increased traffic. While that’s largely an external factor due to urban sprawl, he argues that leaving the toads alone is a good idea, and I agree.

The synthesis for 5-MEO-DMT has been available for decades.

Yes, I didn’t mean to imply that he discovered it. He demonstrated that it’s a low-cost and high-yield process, and not too difficult to do (I don’t think he’s a trained chemist). Bringing that to many people’s attention is the significant contribution.

I might be overstating its significance relative to the rest of his journalism. 5-MEO-DMT is a niche drug, though once the draconian laws preventing research are loosened it may, like other psychedelics, prove to be medically important.

2 books I recommend for anyone interested in the history of this stuff are "Acid Dreams" and "How to Change Your Mind". The latter is a bit more pop-sciency, and the former is probably more factually accurate (though who can say, it's a lot of he-said-she-said). For a fun read on the topic, "The Doors of Perception" is a classic.

Acid Dreams is great

"The Sunshine Makers" (2015) is good. It's the story of Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, who trained under Owsley Stanley and made a lot of "Orange Sunshine" in the Bay Area. They were funded by the same wealthy man who sponsored Timothy Leary at Millbrook.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Scully

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunshine_Makers_(2015_film...

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love story was interesting, a violent motorcycle gang who dropped acid and decided to become gangsters of love and LSD distributers.

If you find psychedelics interesting, obligatory recommendation to read PiHKaL and TiHKaL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiHKAL

Rest in Peace, Sasha.

One of my favorites was his account of the chemical DIPT, which produces only auditory hallucinations. He wasn't able to listen to his favorite music, everything was out of tune. Wild

DiPT is a strange and fascinating one, I hope we can learn more about the mechanism of the auditory hallucinations in the near future

DiPT was almost made illegal recently, and was saved by pushback from researchers. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/dea-cancels-proposed-ban-of-...

I think Owsley was involved with the Grateful Dead’s wall of sound (not to be confused with Spector) too.

If you look into the technical details, it’s was quite a clever hack. I studied physics and don’t think I could have come up with that!

Which part - the double microphones?

Yep, it’s so simple but still crazy IMO but maybe it’s just because I’m not a sound engineer.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnnayb/the-wall-of-sound

An amazing story. Had no idea. Worth a read if into “sound” and how the Dead re/invented it.

Owsley famous yes for LSD.

Less well understood it seems is his contribution to live music amplification. The rock bands with heavy percussion, electric guitars, and amplified vocals in the 1960s were way beyond what was available in 1966. Owsley revolutionised that.

According to him, and I have no other sources.

It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe "Searching for the sound" by Phil Lesh (of the Grateful Dead) featured Owsley prominently, and (again, faulty memory) corroborates that claim.

Pretty weak on background. The introduction of LSD to America was mostly thanks to the CIA's search for a 'truth serum' which involved farming out their collection of powerful hallucinogens and other substances to a variety of institutions, from prisons to army bases to prostitution brothels to universities (along with research into things like sleep deprivation, electroshock, sensory isolation, etc.). While it's unlikely the CIA wanted to help kickstart a socially disruptive psychedelic movement (which was notably anti-authoritarian in nature), that was the consequence. The closest the article comes to mentioning this is:

> "In Berkeley, as well as across the bay in Palo Alto, young people seeking a new way to live had begun using LSD to break down conventional social barriers. Until then, the drug had been available in America only to those conducting serious medical research. In 1959, the poet Allen Ginsberg took LSD for the first time, at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. A year later, the novelist Ken Kesey was given acid at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park as part of a federally funded program in which volunteers were paid twenty dollars a session to ingest hallucinogens."

As far as the psychedelic movement in general, LSD was only one of several substances, such as mescaline and psilocybin, that came to popular attention via a variety of routes, such as Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954), and R Gordon Wasson's 1950s-era research into traditional psychedelic mushroom use in Mexico (a research program also secretly funded by the CIA's MK-ULTRA program).

Apparently the members of the CIA's hallucinogen program used to dose each other all the time in the 1950s, until they found it would cause unpredictable behavior in some people - like a sudden attack of psychedelic-inspired moral conscience, see the Frank Olson incident for example. Sort of a 'while tripping my brains out I suddenly realized that manufacturing biological weapons was wrong!' type of story:

https://wariscrime.com/new/scientist-frank-olson-killed-by-t...

> R Gordon Wasson's 1950s-era research into traditional psychedelic mushroom use in Mexico (a research program also secretly funded by the CIA's MK-ULTRA program).

I don’t think Wasson had anything to do with MKUltra. Any source?

"Wasson's 1956 expedition was funded by the CIA's MK-Ultra subproject 58, as was revealed by documents obtained by John Marks under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents state that Wasson was an 'unwitting' participant in the project."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Gordon_Wasson

Thanks for posting, I appreciate it. However… Makes no sense to me. I just don’t understand how they would fund his trip—let alone secretly. Also, he discovered magic mushrooms the first time— none of the ethnobotanists had yet. How did they know? I will remain skeptical till I get to primary sources.

See here: http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/mkultra... (58-2)

This document states, however, that Wasson had three expeditions prior to CIA involvement.

Apparently this topic is a deep rabbit hole. Here are some very questionable "fringe" theories.

http://www.gordonwasson.com/

https://logosmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6FBA86B0-0C57-9FCA-5CF9...

> Apparently this topic is a deep rabbit hole.

That's when you know you're on the right path — when the answers start getting harder to find, with more time between your certainty.

Wasson did not "discover" magic mushrooms, he was just the first white person to write about taking them. There were earlier reports on mushroom ceremonies, that is why Wasson went there.

Well, considering that magic mushrooms are native to Europe (and Africa and Asia) and there is ZERO Greek, Latin, Sanskrit or modern language textual evidence, I think it is fair to say he discovered magic mushrooms in the same sense as Columbus discovered America.

So, basically, I 100% agree with you. But pretty nuts that no one knew about them in Asian, Africa, Europe and most of the Americas until Wasson!!

Here’s a primary source. Seems they gave $2000 to contribute to the expedition. Weird. Why would the CIA want to catalyze the the psychedelic revolution???

https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/mkultr...

Let's not forget perhaps their most famous alumnus, Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber [1]. It's not clear whether or not they dosed him with psychedelics, but the records of the research done to him were sealed [2], so we only know for sure that they inflicted significant psychological trauma on him.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2000/7/14/murray-center-s...

The study that Kaczynski participated in did not involve LSD and in interviews Kaczynski has denied ever using LSD.

That Atlantic article fascinated me, but 1. It does not really say what you are claiming it says and 2. I disagree with the author's impression he was not psychotic. That whole "I've decided to kill" quote drove it home for me. First sentence is absurd, then the rest of the excerpt is very typical anosognosia.

In fact I've read the manifesto before and I concluded you can't separate his message from his psychosis and violence, and it has a recognizable quality that I've seen before in people close to me with that kind of illness. He was smart, but having such a disorder doesn't mean you're intellectually disabled. Just look at John Nash or Vincent van Gogh.

One of the most interesting figures from this era is Captain Al Hubbard [1]. He was one of the original proponents of the stuff going back to the 1950s. The amount of people in high places he introduced to the stuff went all the way up to Aldous Huxley via Dr. Humphrey Osmond. I once found one of the clinics where a bunch of experiments were done in Vancouver and called it up out of curiosity, nobody in there had any idea about the history of that place.

Pretty crazy how long it took for this kind of research to find its way back into the mainstream. I hope it helps a lot of people. I'm not sure what else will at this point.

[1] https://www.trippingly.net/lsd-studies/2018/5/20/al-hubbard-...

There is no "paywall". This website is just an example of why disabling Javascript by default makes sense.

I use a text-only browser, it does not run Javascript. I have no problem reading this article. Using a text-only browser with no Javascript interpreter is not even necessary.

For example, in Chrome, press F12 to open so-called "Developer Tools". Watch the ridiculously unnecessary number of Javascript-triggered requests made in a feeble attempt to perform telemetry, tracking and serve advertising (after a "real-time" bidding process). All of that making the page slower, less responsive, more resource intensive and ultimately filled with distracting garbage.

To fix, tab into the Developer Tools window somewhere and press Ctrl-P then ">". Type "Javascript". Select "Disable Javascript". Hit Enter.

Now try reloading the page. No ads. No "paywall". No telemetry. No tracking. All that garbage is reliant on Javascript.

Works with the AMP version of the page as well.

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/owsley-stanley-the-king...

uBlock Origin has a very convenient feature that allows you to disable Javascript for individual sites with a couple of clicks. This works very well for the NYTimes and Seattle Times.

For more story about Owsley, acid and The Dead there's another book, "Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III": https://www.amazon.com/Bear-Times-Augustus-Owsley-Stanley/dp...

I highly recommend "LSD - my problem child" by Albert Hofmann, the inventor/discoverer of LSD. It's an interesting insight into the origins of the substance, and the feelings of its 'Father' towards what happened afterwards.

Yes it's a great article. He's a very wise man.

"The late chemist Albert Hofmann discussed his psychedelic research on LSD in the July, 1976 issue of High Times."

"Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann was born January 11, 1906 and died April 29, 2008. In an exclusive interview published in the July, 1976 edition of High Times, Hofmann looked back at his illustrious career."

https://hightimes.com/culture/albert-hofmann-lsd-interview/

In my youth, I used to think psychonauts were cool. Now I realized it's a bunch of pseudoscience that puts the brain and sanity, our most precious resource, at risk.

My advice to young people is: Do not screw around with this bullshit. Eat well, sleep and try to accomplish things without mind altering chemicals. Old age will thank you for it.

Have you had negative or unimpactful experiences with psychedelics? -- I rarely if ever hear that when people think back to their experiences.

College girlfriend of mine was way into LSD and magic mushrooms. Twenty-plus years on I ran into her, and to describe her as paranoid does not even begin to touch it.

I mentioned something I remembered, and suddenly I was The Man, who was I working for, what was I trying to learn?

Maybe not related at all, and I'm just one person, but just night and day difference. I changed my email address and phone number. Had to.

Sounds like schizophrenia. In my experience, there are a whole lot of schizophrenics who've taken psychedelics. I can't imagine what it's like to be schizophrenic, so I also can't imagine what it's like to be schizophrenic and take drugs, but it does seems to hit them extra-hard. I don't think the drugs cause anything that wasn't going to happen anyway, but it seems like people who might be in the early stages of schizophrenia come out the other side of a trip changed forever. Since schizophrenia tends to initially manifest in the late teens and early 20s, and this is the age most people start experimenting with drugs, it could be completely coincidental, but I still think LSD in particular pushes people over the line if they were headed there already.

I had plenty of experiences with various hallucinogens in my late teens/early 20s (decades ago). It didn't "open my mind" or change my life in any positive way. It was fun for a while. I got high and saw weird shit. I had a lot of stupid conversations about nonsense. I had a few bad trips that probably scarred me for life. It can be pretty traumatic. I wouldn't do them again, and I'll never recommend anyone do them. In my experience, the people who are the most vocal about supposed positive effects of hallucinogens (LSD in particular) are the same people who can go to a seminar for some cult like EST or Scientology and come out thinking they have all the answers to some nebulous question about the meaning of life. Maybe I'm just not that malleable. It always seems to me that the people who "get the most" out of LSD are the people who were barely hanging on to an identity beforehand.

> plenty of experiences with various hallucinogens in my late teens/early 20s

Stop.

If you're reading this, don't necessarily do psychs when your brain isn't fully developed.

Don't do psychs more than once or twice a business quarter. Once or twice a year, if possible!

Anyone in their late teens or early 20s is going to roll their eyes right out of their head at this advice. That's when people try drugs. They're not gonna listen to your old ass. In fact, if your advice is "you're not ready, wait until you're older", they're far more likely to try them.

Actually just said maybe wait til your brain's fully developed to do them habitually, and here's a hint at why.

The people rolling their eyes are the ones who "gets it from a guy they trust" and have never heard of or seen a test kit, so....not sure I care what they think!

do you drink coffee?

In my youth, I did too.

Still do.

I don't have the energy or desire for it any more, but I found some of the experiences beautiful, mind-changing and life affirming. Others were simply ludicrous amounts of fun. And a few were merely boring. These days I'm a successful software engineer in a finance-adjacent space, making good money, living the dream.

I don't think LSD is some wonder drug that will save the world, but I do think that there is value in these substances. Young people should be given access to safety advice and clean, measured substances, not scare stories.

Survivorship bias.

Such a claim would be better with evidence. What proportion of people who use LSD end up not 'surviving'? What are the actual, quantifiable harms? And which of those could be mitigated without the oppressive force of the law being in place? How do these harms compare to other substances and activities people undertake?

Right? I've met thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands who have done psychedelics. The bad cases are just the most memorable.

As opposed to your own highly scientific statistically valid findings.

Having a series of psychedelic experiences in my 20s were a significant event in my life and I believe they were absolutely beneficial to my relationship with myself and my relationship with my beliefs.

That you put stock in cool sounding bullshit is your own problem, not that of psychedelics.

Can you provide any solid evidence that recreationally engaging in psychedelic experiences puts "sanity" at risk any more than other common life experiences?

Steve Jobs may have had an issue with that one. He seemed to do OK. :-)

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

Steve Jobs

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