The LSD Museum (2021)
openculture.com
openculture.com
This is pretty crazy. LSD isn't Meth, you can't just grab a couple things from Home Depot and get to work in your bathroom. LSD requires some expensive, hard to obtain ingredients, equipment, and usually a decent amount of experience as a chemist. How did a sound engineer get this shit to work?
From his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley
> When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.[10] Without having graduated high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year. Despite maintaining a 3.4 grade point average with minimal effort, he dropped out because of his disinclination for slide rules and mechanical drawing. Despite his dearth of formal education, he secured a position as a test engineer with Rocketdyne in Los Angeles; in this capacity, he worked on the SM-64 Navaho supersonic cruise missile. In June 1956, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as an electronics specialist, serving for 18 months (including stints at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Edwards Air Force Base's Rocket Engine Test Facility) before being discharged in 1958. During his service, he secured an amateur radio license and a general radiotelephone operator license.
> Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer.
He then went on to set up LSD labs all over North America, sell drugs to the Beatles, and eventually tried to sell LSD to Chelsea Clinton. Quite a character.
I get the impression most LSD is made and distributed by amateur chemists. Until it was torn down, the undergrad dorm Bexely at MIT was famous for synthesizing LSD (and possibly distributing beyond campus). So it seems like Stanley would have been able to learn to do it with a reasonable amount of effort.
They are each responsible for probably tens of millions of doses.
On Pickard's arrest in late 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard) : According to court testimony, Pickard's lab produced up to a kilogram of LSD approximately every five weeks for short periods. Despite criticism for their methodology, the DEA contends that there was a 99.5% drop in the availability of LSD in the US in the two years following the arrest.[7] Pickard himself has long denied these claims. In his 2007 paper "International LSD Prevalence – Factors Affecting Proliferation and Control", Pickard suggests that since the 1960s, LSD production has always been de-centralized. As to a turn-of-the-century decline in availability due to his own arrest, Pickard highlights the fact that LSD availability had been on the decline since 1996, a fact which he correlates in part with the exponential growth of availability and demand for MDMA and other hallucinogenic drugs.[8] The actual quantity of LSD seized by the DEA remains unclear, with figures ranging from 198.9 grams to 41.3 kilograms (410 million 100 µg hits of LSD).[9]
Nick Sand estimated that he produced about 140 million doses in his lifetime. (https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-nicholas-sand-2017...)
He was making methamphetamine first, and his starting point for LST was iirc ergotamine, of which he bought several kilos when he could.
After release from prison he reinvented himself as a jeweler, and his work was in high demand
Anyone interested in LSD manufacture definitely should check out the Hamilton's Pharmacopeia episode with Casey Hardison. Shortened version here: https://youtu.be/Mj2grxdQLQs He was a bit of a genius too, explains some issues around ergotamine tartrate and also how he got busted. Casey is famous for the self-represented "cognitive liberty" defense of his offenses, which of course failed.
As for real LSD, it's insanely potent, and even a single batch can yield thousands, hundreds of thousands of doses. So you could probably stay pretty mobile while producing large amounts, assuming access to proper ingredients and equipment. See above our fellow polyglot genius who was hauling ass all over the country and supplying most of Rock and Roll with it.
Not to take away from his genius, but this surely helped..
I recently read "Owsley and Me" by Rhoney Stanley, another woman he lived with at the time (The three of them lived together), who also become mother of one of his children, at the same time...
Yes, quite a character.
Hmmm
I enjoy the "essays" that are still up on his website
Called global warming, hole in the ozone, and "your car causes smog" as grand modern myths, while also proclaiming himself "predisposed towards the preservation of our environment".
And in his later years, he developed cancer in his throat, which he blamed on either the few vegetables his parents forced him to eat as a child, or performing cunnilingus on a girl in the 60's who was "clumpy" down there...