▲ 64 points
back
25 comments
> Grateful Dead soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley synthesized “the purest form of LSD ever to hit the street
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.
He also lived and worked with Melissa Cargill during this time, who was a trained chemist at Berkley and also became the mother of one of his children... This usually isn't mentioned very much for some reason.
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.
Very successful from an evolutionary view.
>From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous.
Hmmm
Yeah..
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...
Yeah, he actually wrote extensively about it as well.
yep, reading bears pseudoanonymous posts about experimenting with satisfying his ice cream cravings with various sugar free heavy cream based frozen concoctions are some of my favorite hidden gems that exist on the internet.
Could you possibly link to these?
I enjoy the "essays" that are still up on his website
It doesn't sound that hard for a motivated amateur to synthesize. This is really really really not meant to be advice, but Erowid hosts two sets of instructions for LSD synthesis. The intro of one of them says: "It is rather difficult to make by total synthesis, but with the right starting materials (lysergic acid, ergotamine) it is as easy to produce as your average THC or amphetamine."
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.
Most of the LSD had been made by a few big time chemists...
Owsley, Nick Sand, William Pickard..
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...)
Owsley wad not your average high school dropout. He was a genius
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
Yeah, back in the day there was Owsley, "crystal dealers", the guys who made white blotter, and all the junk underneath that. The legend was that Owsley was sitting on a giant LSD crystal in a freezer in San Francisco somewhere, and the mass per dose was so small he didn't have to make any more ever.
There were far fewer restrictions on obtaining precursors to drug manufacturing as compared to today. It's extremely difficult, but made much easier if you're not doing a total synthesis, for example if you obtain ergotamine tartrate and other precursors.
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.
Is there anything known about LSD production today? Since it is still widely available easily and cheaply.
Well part of the issue is that there are a lot of RCs (Research Chemicals) that dealers often try to pass off as LSD, but are really slight tweaks on the chemical. They tend to be much easier and cheaper to make, so the street market is flooded with them (25i-NBOME is quite prolific). This can be a bit dangerous as there have been some (admittedly anecdotal) horror stories with people using these.
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.
No sane person would discuss such matters, right?
He was a prolific poster on a carnivore-diet type forum way before it was popular. He was genuinely interesting person, he wasnt just a sound engineer, the deads wall of sound was a profound design.
he also did the giant sound system for the dead. this was not always considered as a good thing, not least by the band. not to mention trying to put the band on an all-meat diet.
The founder of Meyer Sound built Monitor Speakers and more for Jefferson Airplane. He holds over 30 patents in the audio realm.
I have "seen" some of that art in person. The Plastik Man CD cover definitely caused issues for some that I know.
Pretty cool little museum, I brought friends that visited SF there.
The proprietor also sells the art, basically repos of cool designs he has on the wall.
What was the request process like for visiting? I’ll be in SF in September and would love to check this out.
I believe I just emailed or called, it was easy, but I can’t remember specifically
Awesome - thanks, will look to do that then!