Owsley Stanley

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“The Quality And Amount Of Acid Was Effectively The Same”

November 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Owsley Stanley at his arraignment, 1967.

From Erik Davis’ Aeon essay about renewed research into psychodelic drugs, a passage about the way we tend to characterize drugs based on our own fears and desires:

“When the legendary acid chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III was pressing his famously pure LSD into pills for people such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s, he dyed the batches different colours. The colours led to various brand names — Purple Haze, Blue Cheer — which in turn were linked, experientially, to different sorts of effects, even though the quality and amount of acid was effectively the same. Something similar is happening to cannabis today, at least in an increasingly deregulated America, where the red-hot market for ‘medical’ marijuana products has led to a complex and overhyped mythology of targeted effects.

Of course, some of the most powerful stories about psychoactives are told by the state, even if those stories are frequently garbled and contradictory. In the US, for example, the pleasant Polynesian rootkava-kava is available on the herbal shelves, while the pleasant Yemeni stimulant khat is controlled. In the UK, the reverse is true. Of course, the stories told about psychedelics like LSD were more demonising, and in 1967 the US government classified it as a highly controlled substance, a year after it became illegal in California. This regulatory act — a new story, if you will — thrust the compound even deeper into the underground, where its meanings proliferated along a myriad of spiritual, artistic, musical, sexual and social vectors that continue to morph their way through society and culture to this day. However, by definitively transforming LSD into an ‘illegal drug’, the state’s story also brought to a halt a wide range of legitimate, board-certified psychological and pharmacological studies that, in their time, might have reframed Hofmann’s molecule into narratives not so heavily freighted with the baggage of countercultural values.

Today, the meaning of LSD and other psychedelics is once again up for grabs.”

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“Until You Had Tripped, You Were Not Part Of The New Culture”

March 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Owsley Stanley, 1967, San Francisco. (Image by the "San Francisco Chronicle."

Owsley Stanley was the “King of LSD” in the Bay Area during the Summer of Love, dealing a decidedly potent mind-altering mix. He died this past Saturday, after having spent much of the last few decades in seclusion in remote Australia. An excerpt from a Rolling Stone piece about his life:

“When he was fifteen, Owsley spent fifteen months as a voluntary patient in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the poet Ezra Pound was also confined. ‘I was just a neurotic kid,’ he says. ‘My mother died a few months into the experience, but it was there I sorted out my guilt problems about not being able to love my parents, and I came out of it pretty clear.’ After leaving the public high school, where his physics teacher gave him a D for pointing out that she had contradicted the textbook, he attended the University of Virginia for a year. ‘I never took notes when I was in college,’ he says. ‘During the first week of the course, I’d buy my textbooks and read them all through. Then I’d sell them all back to the bookstore at full price as if I’d changed classes, because I never needed to look at them again.’

Over the course of the next fourteen years, Owsley — known to his friends as ‘Bear’ because of his prematurely hairy chest as a teenager — enlisted in the Air Force, became a ham- radio operator, obtained a first-class radiotelephone operator’s license, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and served as a summer-relief broadcast engineer at TV and radio stations in Los Angeles. He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. He also studied ballet, Russian and French.

In 1963, Owsley moved to Berkeley so he could take classes at the university, where the student protest movement was growing. A year later, Mario Savio made his historic Free Speech Movement address from atop a police car to student protesters gathered outside Sproul Hall. 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. Taking acid soon became the watermark. Until you had tripped, you were not part of the new culture. But before Owsley came along, no one could be sure that what they were taking was really even LSD.”

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