631 - Tim Scully and Orange Sunshine

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Tim Scully

Tim Scully & Nick Sandcirca 2015Photo: @headsnews

Date this lecture was recorded: October 12, 2019.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Tim Scully.]

“The LSD experience doesn’t really carry a message with it. It’s an amplifier. And it’s much more dependent on set and setting than I believed at first. I should have paid more attention to what people like Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner had been saying.”

“It also slowly became clear, from observing my friends who’d taken a lot of acid, and some of whom were still behaving like assholes, that taking LSD was not a cure for being an asshole.”

“I think that maybe Huxley might have been right. Huxley wanted to turn the world on from the top down.”

“I still think it’s much better, if you’re going to take a substantial dose of a psychedelic, to do it in a quiet, calm, controlled environment, preferably with a very limited number of people present.”
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Tim Scully

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon.

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And today we have a real

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treat in store for us because one of our fellow salonners, Eric Sinclair, has recorded an important

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interview for us. As it turns out, Eric once worked with the legendary and I should add long

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retired LSD chemist, Tim Scully. Now over the past 15 years that I’ve been podcasting from here in the salon,

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a lot of different people have shared their words and wisdom with us, and now at long last we are

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honored to have Tim Scully with us as well. Just now I went to the psychedelicsalon.com website

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and on the podcast page I checked the category drop-down menu to see how many different speakers have been featured here.

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Well, much to my pleasant surprise, Tim Scully now becomes the 200th guest to join us,

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albeit via the recorded interview with him that Eric was kind enough to conduct for us.

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I should also mention that Eric is the proprietor of the popular Stuffstonerslike.com website,

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and if you get a chance to visit his site, you’ll find a lot of useful information there.

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So a big thank you goes out to Eric for sending me this interview to play.

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Now before I begin playing, however, I’d like to say a few words about how important Tim Scully’s

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early work has been to the psychedelic community. Those who only have a

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surface understanding of what we now think of as the 60s may think that Nick Sand was the only

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person responsible for the creation of the legendary Orange Sunshine LSD. Well, I can tell

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you from personal experience that in every conversation I had with Nick about Orange

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Sunshine, he always, as in always, went way out of

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his way to let me know that while he did make a lot of pure LSD, it was Tim Scully who taught him

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the art of his work. It was always important to Nick that Tim Scully received the lion’s share

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of the credit for creating Orange Sunshine. And I can add that Nick Sand, along with Dr. Tom, both of whom are no

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longer with us in body, were two of the original members of the Psychedelic Salon, and this was

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several years before I began the podcast. Back then, the salon was just a few of us old heads

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who had a secure communications platform, something that was outside of anything the public had

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available at the time. And each week, we’d get together one evening and tell our tales, our tall tales, I should

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add.

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And again, every time Orange Sunshine was mentioned, Nick was quick to bring up Tim

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Scully’s name.

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Tim is an elder’s elder, and I’m really looking forward to listening to this interview for

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a second time right now because, well, it’s just full of interesting little tidbits that I hadn’t known about before. And now this may only apply to me,

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but in a few minutes, you’re going to hear Tim Scully admit that early on in his use of LSD,

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he tuned out anything that was negative that he heard about it. And he called this selective

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perception. The reason this stands out for me is because, well,

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that’s exactly the way I also approached it in the early days of my use.

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You see, in my personal experience, I had nothing but great experiences with LSD.

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And I had a lot of them.

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So it was easy for me to discount anything that I heard about it that was negative.

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That was a serious mistake on my part,

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and I hope that if

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you find yourself in a similar position that you take heed. These are very powerful substances,

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and if you must proceed, then proceed with great caution, because we’re going to need a whole lot

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more elders in the immediate future, and I’m assuming that you’re going to be one of them.

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In fact, I’m thinking about giving you a quiz at the end of this interview

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to ask if you remember the name of the lawyer, a lawyer of all people, who set Owsley on his path.

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As you know, without Owsley, much of the history of the 60s would never have happened.

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And I’m pointing this out not only because from time to time lawyers do unexpectedly good things, like the lawyer that first turned me on to my very first psychoactive drug, MDMA,

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or ecstasy as it was known back then.

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But the other reason I’m making a big deal about this

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is to point out what powerful ramifications can sometimes come out of a simple gesture,

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like giving a tab of acid to a friend.

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So be aware of what you’re doing if you decide to

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become involved in this journey, because once you begin to walk this path, you also assume the

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responsibility for your actions. Enough said and enough of me. Now let’s join Eric and Tim and

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listen in on their fascinating conversation. Hello and welcome.

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This is Eric Sinclair from StuffedStonersLike.com

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and today I have a very special treat for you.

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An interview with one of the most legendary chemists

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to ever create LSD.

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Mr. Tim Scully, who among other materials

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produced over 3.5 million tablets

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of 99.99% pure LSD

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that was distributed under the name Orange Sunshine. He was the subject of the

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2015 British documentary The Sunshine Makers, and about a dozen years ago, he and I worked

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together at Autodesk, a software developer in Northern California. During the mid-60s,

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Scully lived with and built sound equipment for the Grateful Dead. While at it, he became the

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sidekick of Owsley Bear Stanley,

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the Dead’s audio engineer that went on to build the band’s famous wall of sound.

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Prior to that, however, Bear was the most popular manufacturer of LSD during the 60s.

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In fact, Bear was the first known private individual to manufacture mass quantities

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of the substance, and it’s alleged that he learned the technique from

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his chemist girlfriend, Melissa Cargill. In 1966, Scully and Owsley set up a lab in Point Richmond,

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California, and started making acid together. However, the two parted ways at the end of 67

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when Owsley was arrested. Scully then set up his own lab, and during this time, he was briefly

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associated with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The Brotherhood guys started out as a motorcycle gang, but after they held up at

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gunpoint a movie producer that had some LSD, they had a change of heart, tossing out their guns to

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become non-violent acid dealers. They used acid as a religious sacrament and vowed to help distribute

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Scully’s LSD in an effort to transform the world into a softer, gentler, and more caring place.

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So as to not just turn on the United States, which would lead to a defensive weakness,

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the Brotherhood scattered Scully’s acid across the four winds, even getting it into Vietnam and behind the Iron Curtain.

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A year later, Scully set up a third lab with the late Nick Sand, another celebrated clandestine chemist who was credited as the first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT, another amazing psychedelic material.

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Unfortunately, Scully’s reputation as one of the major acid manufacturers of the hippie era finally caught up with him and he spent several years in prison during the 70s.

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of the hippie era, finally caught up with him and he spent several years in prison during the 70s.

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Scully was 20 in 1965 when he took acid for the very first time, and the experience, he said,

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was like getting struck by lightning. Instantly, he decided that his purpose was to make as much LSD as he could and give it away for free. If he would have succeeded, he would have made about

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750 million doses of the purest LSD known to man and distributed it

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to anyone who wanted it. A noble cause that’s still impacting society more than a half century

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later. So without any further ado, please enjoy the following interview that I conducted with

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Tim Scully on Saturday, October 12th, 2019. I guess what I wanted to begin with was, so can you start by telling me when you were first turned on to psychedelics and what that experience was like for you?

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right after filing my taxes.

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And it was, I mean, to steal a phrase from Lee Fielding,

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it was like getting struck by lightning.

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It totally redirected my life.

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What I experienced, apart from the usual visual effects and so on,

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was a very intense sense of connectedness and oneness with everyone and everything.

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And to me, that was, it’s hard to explain,

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because the psychedelic experience can carry with it an incredibly intense feeling of significance that’s hard to communicate in words.

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And that’s certainly what happened for me.

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It just felt really important and significant.

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And it also felt to me as though if everyone shared this experience, it would be much harder

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for people to be mean with each other.

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And if everyone shared that experience, it would be much harder for people to be destructive and careless with the environment because we feel more of a

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connection to everything and all living things and thus be less likely to be as thoughtless in

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our behavior i agree so knowing these things and experiencing, is this what led up to you somewhat devoting your life to producing psychedelics?

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Well, unlike Nick Sand, who did devote his life to making psychedelics,

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I felt as though I sort of signed up for a tour in the Peace Corps or whatever.

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But I didn’t feel like I was making a lifetime commitment.

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or whatever, but I didn’t feel like I was making a lifetime commitment.

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But I did set out, when I came down from that first acid trip,

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which I had taken with a friend, Don Douglas,

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who had gotten me interested in psychedelics originally,

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he and I said to each other that we should share this experience with everyone,

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and I said, well, we could make a lot of this stuff and give it away.

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And so that’s what I set out to do, is to make a lot of it and give it away.

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But I never intended that I would make it my life’s work.

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I always thought I’d go back to my regularly scheduled activities at some point fairly soon.

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I had no idea how many years it was going to take.

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I love that you were going to give it away.

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So how did you go about learning how to make LSD?

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Well, I started out the way I started out trying to learn anything.

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I went to the library.

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So I went to the UC library and read up about LSD,

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ergot alkaloids, lysergic acid.

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I rapidly got the sense that the biggest problem was going to be getting the raw material.

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And it seemed to me, one of the feelings that Don and I both had after our first acid trip was that governments would be very opposed to a lot of people taking LSD because one of the feelings we came away from the experience with

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was a deep sense of skepticism about the motives of large organizations in general,

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corporations, governments, and so on.

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And we felt that most governments would probably try to restrict availability of the raw materials fairly quickly

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once they realized the effect that LSD would have on people.

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Of course, we were projecting what we thought LSD would do with people.

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I mean, it didn’t come with a label on the pill saying this is what it will do.

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pill saying this is what it will do.

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I got my exercise by jumping to conclusions, thinking that the LSD experience carried with it a message, which

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was the message that Don and I got. That eventually turned out not

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to be completely true, but it took me quite a while to realize that.

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Well, what was it that, how did you realize that?

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Well, it took a long time because, you know, I mean, I got pretty rapidly, deeply committed to the idea that LSD was going to save the world and that I should make a lot of it.

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And I burned a lot of bridges in the process of setting out to make a lot of acid.

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make a lot of acid. And I think that that contributed to a process of selective perception, which made me relatively blind to things that contradicted my beliefs and made it much easier

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for me to see things that supported my beliefs. It’s sort of like if you buy a Volkswagen,

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all of a sudden you see everybody who’s driving Volkswagens and you hear all the good things about them. So when I heard bad things about LSD in the first few years

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that I was on this journey, I would think, oh, that’s just government propaganda. Or,

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oh, that person’s an exception that he’s behaving badly after taking a lot of acid.

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that he’s behaving badly after taking a lot of acid.

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But over time, I mean, at first,

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the scene in the Haight-Ashbury flowered and grew, I thought, nicer and nicer

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as we spread more acid around in it in 1966, 1967.

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But then it started slowly turning darker.

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You know, 1968, 69 69 it got darker and darker so that well in the early years i could walk down the streets in the hate ashbury and almost

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everybody had a smile on their lips and a gleam in their eye that look was the same gleam

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that other people who take an lsd had. We all shared something in common that we could see in each other’s faces.

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But by the later 60s, I started seeing a lot more faces

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that looked like expressions of quiet desperation

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and people who were really in a bad place.

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And for a little while I said, okay, well, somehow they got into taking bad drugs.

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You know, the government has put out a lot of propaganda

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to try to encourage everybody to believe that all drugs were equally bad,

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which led a lot of people to fall into the fallacy of thinking,

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well, if all drugs are equally bad and I’ve smoked pot and taken acid and they were fine,

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that probably means that all drugs are equally good,

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so I’ll go out and take heroin or cocaine or whatever.

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And so a lot of people got into a lot of trouble with very bad drugs.

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And at first I attributed some of that to government propaganda,

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but I slowly came to the conclusion, kind of reluctantly, very reluctantly,

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but I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the LSD experience doesn’t really carry a message with it.

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It’s an amplifier, and it’s much more dependent on set and setting than I believed at first.

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I should have paid more attention to what people like Tim Leary and Ralph Metzger

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had been saying in their research in the early 60s about set and setting.

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And furthermore, it also slowly became clear from observing my friends

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who had taken a lot of acid, and some of whom were still behaving like assholes,

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that taking LSD was not a cure for being an asshole.

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And at first I had thought that it was going to be this magical elixir

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that would transform people and change their behavior in a really big way.

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Now there’s been some relatively recent research done

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looking at the difference in people’s opinions and beliefs

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if they’ve taken psychedelics and if they haven’t.

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And it is true that people who’ve taken psychedelics

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tend to be more liberal politically.

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They tend to be more environmentally aware.

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And their beliefs and maybe to some extent their behavior

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have been shifted a little bit in the direction that i hoped they would move a lot but the effect was much much weaker than i

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thought it would be so that’s it that’s a shaggy dog answer to that short question no i really

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appreciate that um would there be anything that you would do differently having known that um the outcome that other drugs would would

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probably would uh infiltrate the scene you know how would you i i mean i when i first took acid

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i thought the right thing to do was to make to scatter it to the four winds to make LSD available to everybody as freely as possible with no boundaries.

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Okay. In later years, I mean, long after I stopped making LSD, there’s quite a few

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years where I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the drug scene. I basically turned my

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attention away from it. But in the late 90s, I started getting interested in

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trying to understand what had happened

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and understand what my friends had done after I dropped out

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and understand more what the effects of our work had been.

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Having done all of that, I got the sense that I think that maybe Huxley might have been right.

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Huxley wanted to turn the world on from the top down. He thought that the best thing to do was to turn on political leaders,

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princes of the church, important thinkers, and not to… He and people like Al Hubbard tended to be strongly opposed to the idea of turning the world on from the bottom up.

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And I interviewed a lot of people, my friends, and their children.

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And it was very interesting talking to the children of people who had been involved in making acid.

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talking to the children of people who’d been involved in making acid. Most of the kids that I spoke with had a lot of resentment about what their parents

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did. They felt like they were neglected, that their parents turned them on to

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drugs at an early age and that that was a bad thing for them to have been given

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drugs when they were nowhere near being adults.

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At the time, they didn’t have any complaints.

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But later, in retrospect, they blamed a lot of their problems in life on the fact that they’d been given drugs early on in their life.

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And I met quite a few people, young people,

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who were very, very strongly of the opinion that if psychedelics are good, they

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should be reserved for people who are fully adult.

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And there’s been a fair amount of research done over the years since then that indicates

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that the effects on immature brains are noticeably different than the effects on mature brains.

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And I think there’s some consensus among scientists and medical people that it’s not a good idea

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to have pre-adult people, very young people, take psychedelic drugs.

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young people take psychedelic drugs. So if I knew then what I know now, I would have tried to rethink at least the distribution strategy and not be quite as cavalier about it.

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Well, how do you feel about the modern age commercialization of things like psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs,

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it seems like we’re going that direction.

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How does that make you feel?

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Well, one of my regrets for many years was that by scattering acid to the four winds in large quantities,

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we created so much political back pressure that the legitimate

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research was stopped. And that side effect, in my opinion, was a really bad one because there was a

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lot of good work being done, a lot of work in Canada, particularly by people like Hoffer and

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Osmond, where they were having a lot of success at treating problems like alcoholism,

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and they had to give up their work because of the political climate changing so drastically.

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So I’m happy to see that research has resumed and that there’s a climate where there’s an opportunity for scientists

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and medical people to pick up the threads that were set aside so many years ago.

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I understand.

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Your approach was to give it away, and someone like Big Pharma, who’s coming up with something like esketamine,

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their approach is to sell it for, I think it’s $800 a dose or something.

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Is there some way to, uh, hybridize the two maybe? I mean, I mean, giving people the opportunity to

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experience, uh, something that would change their life for, um, for free, just, you know,

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for free, just, you know, I understand why you would want to do that.

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But how do you feel about just having it kind of inaccessible?

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I mean, we’ve seen the marijuana industry is kind of going through these growing pains, and it’s difficult for those who were producing marijuana to find work,

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and it’s difficult for those who are consuming marijuana to find

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quality

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products.

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How does that…

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How do you see

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maybe the best

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path forward

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to giving the most

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folks the opportunity

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to experience something like LSD?

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Well, you know, back before it was illegal in the early 60s, there were clinics that

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offered guided psychedelic experiences for people. And they typically charged something like $400 or$ 500 in pre-1965 dollars,

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which would be, you know, like many thousands of dollars now.

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And, you know, so I’m not absolutely convinced.

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I mean, I’ve got a lot of feelings about it.

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Let me first of all back up and tell you why I wanted to give it away.

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When I set out to find some LSD to take, I had to search around a lot.

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And the dealer that I found who had some LSD also would have been happy to sell me barbiturates, amphetamines, opiates, and a lot of other really bad drugs.

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I mean, the LSD was in this exact same distribution channel with a lot of harmful substances.

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And I felt that that put the experience in a dark aura around the experience.

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the experience in a dark aura around the experience.

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I didn’t want people to be getting LSD from people who were selling hard narcotics because I didn’t think that was a good association and I thought it might lead to trouble.

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I also didn’t want to see a large flow of money involved

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because I thought it might corrupt the people involved,

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the people making or selling the drugs.

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And I think some of that did tend to happen.

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From my study of the history of underground LSD manufacturing,

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some manufacturers definitely got corrupted by the money,

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and some dealers definitely got corrupted by the money,

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so that when they couldn’t get LSD to sell, they would turn to hard narcotics and start selling them because they really wanted to have that flow of easy money.

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In the same vein, there are people who have been growing pot and have been making a lot of money doing it in the black market who did not want to see marijuana legalized because they saw their rice bowls getting broken.

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And I have some sympathy for that, but I have a lot more sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of people who got put in jail for various marijuana crimes who would no longer be getting

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put in prison, and many of whom might get out of prison as the laws are changing in

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one jurisdiction after another.

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as the laws are changing in one jurisdiction after another.

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And I feel that a lot more harm is done to people by keeping drugs illegal than is done by removing the legal restrictions.

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And I hope that the people who are making a good living growing pot

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can turn their attentions in another direction and make their a good living

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doing something else um you know yeah i sympathize that big corporations we live in a capitalist

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economy and at the moment capitalism is run amok uh we have a president who wants it to run a mark

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and a senate that wants it to run a mark But keeping drugs illegal is not a good solution to that

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problem. Yeah, I completely agree. I wanted to go back a little. Let me throw in one more thing.

00:25:52 ►

That is, during the years when, and in jurisdictions where drugs were or are illegal now,

00:25:58 ►

people who are buying them on the street are in the position of not having any real reliable information about what they’re getting or how pure it is. And when drugs are legalized and they’re being made by corporations,

00:26:13 ►

they may make an obscene profit. But on the other hand, the chances are much higher,

00:26:17 ►

not 100%, but much higher that they’re actually going to deliver the drug they claim to be selling

00:26:22 ►

and it’ll be much closer to being pure than most street drugs are.

00:26:28 ►

That’s a great point.

00:26:30 ►

Let’s talk a little bit about purity, from what I understand.

00:26:34 ►

So you had met, I guess I want to back up to meeting Owsley and talk about learning.

00:26:43 ►

Is this who taught you how to create LSD?

00:26:47 ►

Or tell me about how that happened

00:26:50 ►

and what his involvement was, if you would.

00:26:54 ►

Well, I spent 1965 from April 15th

00:27:00 ►

to almost the end of the year

00:27:02 ►

trying to find a source of raw material for making LSD

00:27:07 ►

and putting the word out in various ways.

00:27:15 ►

And a woman that I knew, a young woman that I knew named Diana,

00:27:21 ►

went to a party at Ken Kesey’s and met elsley there and they got to know each other

00:27:28 ►

uh in a closet there because that was the only room that had a door that would close

00:27:33 ►

because the pranksters weren’t into privacy they didn’t have doors on their bedrooms or bathrooms

00:27:39 ►

and after they got to know each other and um advantage of their privacy, they got to talking.

00:27:48 ►

And Diana mentioned that she knew this guy who had been trying for many months to find a source of raw material for making LSD.

00:27:55 ►

And he was a guy who would make his living doing electronics.

00:27:58 ►

And he did exotic electronics design work.

00:28:01 ►

Not long after that, Owsley came knocking on my door, partly I think

00:28:07 ►

because he was looking for Diana again, but also because he wanted to talk about electronics.

00:28:13 ►

He also knew I had, in the course of my search for raw material, I had come across a chemist

00:28:21 ►

who had said that he would help me make LSD if I could find their own material,

00:28:27 ►

but he would do it for money. He wasn’t interested in saving the world through LSD.

00:28:32 ►

And later I met some hustlers who claimed that they could find some lysergic acid,

00:28:39 ►

who met my chemist friend and convinced him to start making speed for them,

00:28:43 ►

because they were speed

00:28:45 ►

freaks and they wanted to go out and sell methadrine while they were supposedly searching

00:28:49 ►

for lysergic acid. So Asley had heard about all that and he wanted me to tell my chemist friend

00:28:56 ►

to stop making speed and instead to make DMT. And he brought with him a little glass pipe and a supply of fine English mint

00:29:06 ►

leaves and some crystals of DMT. And he turned Don and me onto DMT, which was a very interesting

00:29:15 ►

experience. And we both said, oh, well, absolutely. We’d be delighted to tell our friend about

00:29:21 ►

DMT because the raw material for that was relatively easy to get at the time.

00:29:26 ►

And neither one of us approved of speed, so we thought that was a really great idea.

00:29:34 ►

Meanwhile, Bear and I, Owsley was starting to call himself Bear by then. Bear and I talked

00:29:41 ►

to electronics for a while. He had no interest whatsoever in telling me about where to get lysergic acid

00:29:47 ►

or in taking me on as an apprentice in his lab at that time.

00:29:51 ►

But he went off with me leaving me with the feeling that I would see him again at some point.

00:29:57 ►

He’d come knocking on my door again.

00:29:59 ►

Meanwhile, he went to another acid test at Muir Beach with the pranksters

00:30:03 ►

where the Grateful Dead were playing.

00:30:07 ►

And he took a lot of acid.

00:30:09 ►

Everybody took an acid test.

00:30:10 ►

Everybody takes a lot of acid.

00:30:12 ►

And he got very high.

00:30:13 ►

And he experienced a mental link-up, a gestalt entity that sometimes formed around the pranksters and the Grateful Dead,

00:30:22 ►

formed around the pranksters and the Grateful Dead,

00:30:25 ►

where a lot of the people who are high on acid would start having the experience of interlinked minds,

00:30:30 ►

where they were sharing a single consciousness.

00:30:33 ►

And that experience blew Bear’s mind,

00:30:36 ►

and he thought, oh, well, the Grateful Dead are this incredible band

00:30:40 ►

that will change the world,

00:30:42 ►

and he’s got to do something to spread their influence around

00:30:49 ►

because he thought that the magical experience that he had was due to the Grateful Dead combining

00:30:56 ►

what they did with LSD. So a few months later, Bear would knock on my door again and invited Don and me to go to the Trips Festival

00:31:08 ►

that happened in Longshoreman’s Hall, where the Grateful Dead were going to play.

00:31:14 ►

And we all took acid, and it was a mob scene, you know, a very large crowd,

00:31:22 ►

almost everyone very high, because Bear had given away lots of acid.

00:31:27 ►

Up until then, all my acid trips had been with one or two other people

00:31:32 ►

sitting quietly in front of a fireplace, you know, very Atheronian and not Dionysian,

00:31:39 ►

the way the Grateful Dead do it.

00:31:41 ►

So that was a completely different experience. And then a few days after that, I think that’s

00:31:50 ►

the first time that I took acid with Bear, but not that we had a lot of intense communication

00:31:57 ►

because in a mob scene, it’s pretty hard to do that. But a few days later, he invited

00:32:02 ►

me to go to what he called an acid test that took place at Sound City, which is a company that recorded, it’s a recording studio.

00:32:13 ►

And the Franksters had arranged to be at Sound City to do what they usually did at an acid test with a lot of other people present, with only themselves

00:32:25 ►

and the Grateful Dead, so that they could record a phonograph record.

00:32:30 ►

And Bear brought us there, handed out a bunch of mesclun, so we all took half a gram of

00:32:36 ►

mesclun each.

00:32:37 ►

I had a chance to get high with the Grateful Dead and the Franksters and Bear and hear and see sort of what they did at an asset test

00:32:46 ►

if there weren’t any outside people present.

00:32:51 ►

At the end of that time, Phil Wesch said to Bear,

00:32:56 ►

how would you like to become our manager?

00:32:57 ►

And Bear said, no, I don’t want to do that.

00:32:59 ►

But how about becoming our sound man?

00:33:02 ►

And he said, yeah, I could do that.

00:33:01 ►

well, how about becoming our sound man?

00:33:04 ►

And he said, yeah, I could do that.

00:33:10 ►

And then he turned around and invited Don and me to go along with him.

00:33:13 ►

He wanted me to help him do the electronics design for the Grateful Dead.

00:33:20 ►

And Don could come along to help assemble the equipment. And he was very good at driving trucks.

00:33:23 ►

And he could haul the stuff we would build around from gig to gig.

00:33:28 ►

So I traveled with Bear and the Grateful Dead for almost six months.

00:33:35 ►

The first couple of months in L.A. when we were with the acid test, taking acid together every weekend.

00:33:42 ►

And after several months of doing that, he decided that he knew me well enough and he could trust me,

00:33:48 ►

so he agreed to let me work as his apprentice in the next lab he set up,

00:33:53 ►

which was the Point Richmond lab that he opened up around August of 1966.

00:34:01 ►

Okay.

00:34:09 ►

And that’s where he taught me all of his tricks for making really pure LSD and good yield. It’s also he gave me a lot of lessons on what to do about security and how

00:34:17 ►

to elude surveillance and so on.

00:34:20 ►

I understand.

00:34:20 ►

But that’s the lab that made the LSD that was tabulated as white lightning.

00:34:27 ►

Okay.

00:34:27 ►

And that was…

00:34:29 ►

Go ahead.

00:34:30 ►

No, go ahead.

00:34:31 ►

So in October 1966, a new state law went into effect in California making LSD illegal.

00:34:42 ►

And Baer decided to shut down the lab before processing all of his raw material.

00:34:50 ►

While it was still possible to buy it on the open market,

00:34:53 ►

he had bought a very large amount of lysergic acid, almost a pound.

00:35:00 ►

And he only processed about 100 grams in the Point Richmond lab,

00:35:05 ►

and before that he’d had a lab in L.A. where he processed a smaller amount.

00:35:09 ►

So he still had several hundred grams left.

00:35:12 ►

And I wanted him, I wanted us to set up another lab as quickly as possible

00:35:18 ►

because I thought we should scale up and try to find more raw material quickly

00:35:21 ►

before it became completely unobtainable.

00:35:25 ►

But Bear wasn’t in a big hurry to do that.

00:35:27 ►

Anyway, he needed a tablet, the stuff we’d made in the Point Richmond lab.

00:35:33 ►

We’d done a little hand tableting in the lab,

00:35:35 ►

but most of the product was still pure crystalline LSD and needed to be tableted.

00:35:41 ►

So he assigned Don and me the job of finding a place to set up a tablet press.

00:35:48 ►

He had managed to buy a tablet press from the Acme Machinery Company. That’s something

00:35:53 ►

that always tickled me because if you ever watched a Roadrunner cartoon, you knew that

00:35:58 ►

the Roadrunner always bought his equipment from the Acme Machinery Company.

00:36:01 ►

Yep, absolutely. It was pretty out of the box.

00:36:04 ►

But there really was an Acme Machinery Company. Yep, absolutely. It was pretty out of the box. But there really was an Acme Machinery Company,

00:36:06 ►

and it made little tablet machines, among other things,

00:36:09 ►

and Bear managed to buy one from them.

00:36:11 ►

So once we got that,

00:36:13 ►

we found a place for Bear’s tableting thing.

00:36:17 ►

Don and I took off to look for a place for another lab,

00:36:20 ►

and we eventually ended up settling on Denver

00:36:23 ►

after a bunch of adventures

00:36:25 ►

because the laws hadn’t changed in Colorado yet.

00:36:29 ►

There were a lot of houses there that had full basements with attached garages,

00:36:35 ►

which was sort of the arrangement that the Point Richmond lab had,

00:36:38 ►

so that you could pull into the garage, close the door,

00:36:40 ►

unload all the stuff into the lab, and nobody would see what you were doing.

00:36:44 ►

And the lab would been in the basement.

00:36:47 ►

So Don and I worked on setting up a lab there and went back to Bear and said,

00:36:53 ►

okay, bring your raw material, we’re all ready.

00:36:56 ►

But meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Bear had been turned on by Sasha Shulgin to a drug that Sasha called DOM, which later

00:37:08 ►

came on the street to be called STP. And Bayer was very enthusiastic about the idea of a

00:37:15 ►

psychedelic that wasn’t yet illegal. He went through a brief honeymoon period of thinking

00:37:21 ►

that these new designer drugs that Sasha was coming up with were a good answer.

00:37:29 ►

So when Don and I came back from Denver with a lab more or less ready to go, plumbing, electrical,

00:37:37 ►

and so forth, all done, he said, here, try this, and gave each of us 30 milligrams of STP, which was his guess as to what the right dose would be.

00:37:48 ►

He had given us about 10 times of the right dose, so that was a pretty cataclysmic experience.

00:37:55 ►

We came down from that and said, well, that seemed a little much, and it lasted a long time.

00:38:01 ►

But on the other hand, Bear had the liturgic gas we couldn’t make any lsd until he came

00:38:06 ►

up with it and he wanted us to make stp so don and i looked at each other and thought well it doesn’t

00:38:12 ►

really feel like the best thing to do but okay at the end justifies the means if we do this then

00:38:18 ►

he’ll let us do that so it would it gathered more glassware and chemicals and doing and throwing from the lab and retooled it for making STP.

00:38:28 ►

I spent quite a while figuring out how to do it from a recipe written on a 3x5 note card that left out a lot of details.

00:38:36 ►

But we made a little STP for him.

00:38:39 ►

And then by that point, what Bear hadn’t told me was that Melissa had put the lysergic acid in a safe

00:38:46 ►

deposit box, and either she had been unable to remember the phony name she rented the safe

00:38:51 ►

deposit box in, or she wasn’t able to remember which bank it was, but somehow there was a problem

00:38:56 ►

accessing it, which she hadn’t wanted to come up to, but she finally remembered. So he came and

00:39:01 ►

said, okay, now the time is right, I’ll bring the lysergic acid.

00:39:10 ►

And we processed all the rest of his lysergic acid in the first Denver lab in 1967.

00:39:13 ►

How much was that yield?

00:39:20 ►

I think that yielded somewhere between 200 and 300 grams. I’m not sure. A lot of it was captured.

00:39:25 ►

Again, we didn’t do any tableting there. And after the lab was closed,

00:39:32 ►

Bear took the acid away and I went off to look for more raw material. Bear set up a tableting facility in Orinda, which got busted. And a fairly large amount of the acid got confiscated

00:39:39 ►

there, almost half of it, I think, along with a good chunk of the STP, most of the STP we’d made.

00:39:46 ►

But, you know, I’d say between 200 and 300 grams, roughly.

00:39:51 ►

Wow.

00:39:51 ►

How many hits would that translate to?

00:39:54 ►

The barest standard was 3,600 doses to a gram.

00:39:57 ►

Okay.

00:40:00 ►

So that’s 100 grams is 360,000 doses a kilo with 3.6 million and so on.

00:40:07 ►

Wow.

00:40:09 ►

So I know that I’m reading Shulgin’s book that the STP got out and it was mic’d really high.

00:40:17 ►

Was that the problem?

00:40:19 ►

Can you refresh my memory a little bit on that one? Well, when Bear, unbeknownst to us,

00:40:26 ►

Bear kept a deep dark secret for years

00:40:28 ►

because he didn’t want to get Sasha in hot water.

00:40:31 ►

Okay.

00:40:31 ►

But Sasha had given him something like 50 grams of STP.

00:40:36 ►

So he put some of it up in capsules at first,

00:40:38 ►

which is what he gave us.

00:40:40 ►

Then he tableted a little bit of it and put some out.

00:40:45 ►

The capsules were 30 milligrams. Then he trieded a little bit of it and put some out. The capsules were 30 milligrams.

00:40:47 ►

Then he tried 20 milligram tablets.

00:40:49 ►

Then he tried 10 milligram tablets.

00:40:52 ►

By that time, I think he was tableting the stuff we made in Denver.

00:40:57 ►

And, you know, he eventually, I mean, I think the consensus was that maybe 3 to 5 milligrams was a more reasonable dose.

00:41:06 ►

But it took a while to get to there.

00:41:08 ►

And meanwhile, he’d spread around quite a bit, given away quite a bit of it.

00:41:12 ►

So there was a summer solstice party that happened in Golden Gate Park

00:41:17 ►

where he gave away a lot of 10 milligram tablets.

00:41:20 ►

And there were people who got into trouble because they thought they’d take some and

00:41:25 ►

they thought they weren’t getting that high so they’d take some more because it took a

00:41:29 ►

long time to come on.

00:41:30 ►

Right, it was a couple hours I think.

00:41:32 ►

Yeah, you’d keep getting high for two or maybe even three hours depending on the size dose

00:41:37 ►

you took.

00:41:38 ►

Yeah, so people misjudged, just like with eating pot. People who eat marijuana derivatives often overdose

00:41:46 ►

because they misjudge how high they’re going to get, thinking that they didn’t take enough

00:41:51 ►

and then they’ll take more, and then all of a sudden realize that they really overdid

00:41:56 ►

it. So a lot of people had unpleasant experiences with that, and that left me feeling really guilty about having participated in making SCP.

00:42:09 ►

I never really felt that it had the same…

00:42:13 ►

The SCP experience, for me at least, didn’t lead to the same sense of connectedness that I thought was the most important aspect of the LSD experience, the sense of oneness with everything.

00:42:26 ►

What mic do you think would…

00:42:30 ►

How many mics do you need to take, or does someone need to take, do you think, to reach

00:42:34 ►

that level of oneness?

00:42:39 ►

I could get there on 150.

00:42:42 ►

Bear’s usual does, which was closer to 300,

00:42:46 ►

would unquestionably

00:42:47 ►

do it for anyone.

00:42:52 ►

But of course, it depends on

00:42:53 ►

set and setting, and a dose like that,

00:42:57 ►

Bear and I

00:42:58 ►

violently disagreed,

00:43:00 ►

although he had all the power, so

00:43:01 ►

I disagreed quietly,

00:43:03 ►

mostly. But he really all the power, so I disagreed quietly, mostly.

00:43:07 ►

But he really liked the idea of handing out free acid at acid tests and at rock and roll dances.

00:43:16 ►

And I was not of the opinion that that was a good environment for people to have to take a high-dose LSD experience.

00:43:29 ►

environment for people to have to take a high dose LSD experience. And I still think that’s much better if you’re going to take a substantial dose of a psychedelic to do it in a quiet,

00:43:35 ►

calm, controlled environment, preferably with a very limited number of people present,

00:43:42 ►

a very limited number of people present,

00:43:46 ►

ideally with an experienced guide or someone you trust.

00:43:52 ►

And doing it at a rock and roll dance with hundreds of people and strobe lights and liquid projection and all the other cool things

00:43:56 ►

aren’t necessarily a recipe for a good first experience for somebody who hasn’t got a sense of how to navigate high-dose LSD

00:44:10 ►

experiences.

00:44:12 ►

So I don’t know.

00:44:15 ►

That’s just an opinion.

00:44:18 ►

Yeah, I appreciate that.

00:44:20 ►

Let’s talk about your DMT experience, that first DMT experience,

00:44:29 ►

and then why was LSD, why did that eclipse DMT?

00:44:30 ►

Why did DMT spread?

00:44:37 ►

Well, first of all, there are practical issues. A dose of DMT is many, many milligrams,

00:44:48 ►

is many, many milligrams, the equivalent of many thousands of doses of LSD,

00:44:51 ►

or a thousand doses in terms of weight.

00:44:56 ►

So the sheer bulk of drug that you’re talking about is much greater.

00:45:03 ►

Second of all, the experience, there are plenty of people who are in love with DMT and who believe that it’s the greatest psychedelic going.

00:45:06 ►

And, of course, you know that a lot of people are into oral DMT in the form of ayahuasca,

00:45:11 ►

which is a somewhat different experience than smoking it. It lasts longer.

00:45:17 ►

I don’t know. Anyway, that’s a long story.

00:45:19 ►

But my experience of DMT was that it was relatively cold.

00:45:24 ►

It didn’t open my heart.

00:45:27 ►

It wasn’t, again, it didn’t lead to that same sense of connectedness.

00:45:31 ►

If it connected you with anything, it might connect you with alien entities.

00:45:34 ►

But it didn’t seem like a drug experience that had a lot of potential for making people more compassionate.

00:45:44 ►

Now, I’m sure there are DMT fans.

00:45:47 ►

Nick Sand was a passionate DMT fan.

00:45:49 ►

He would have violently disagreed with my opinion.

00:45:53 ►

He did make a lot of DMT, as much as he could,

00:45:56 ►

but practically speaking, you can’t make millions of doses of DMT

00:46:00 ►

unless you have a big factory

00:46:02 ►

and you have access to unlimited amounts of raw materials,

00:46:06 ►

which did start becoming restricted fairly quickly.

00:46:10 ►

I see. I wanted to speak a little bit about the purity.

00:46:14 ►

So from what I understand, the orange sunshine that you had created was 99% pure.

00:46:23 ►

Can you kind of speak about what that means?

00:46:26 ►

Well,

00:46:27 ►

Baer believed in making extremely pure LSD.

00:46:33 ►

He was a believer in traditional alchemy,

00:46:39 ►

and he believed that the intentions that went into making the LSD were as important as the physical operations that went into doing it.

00:46:50 ►

And he believed that making it as pure as possible helped focus those intentions.

00:46:57 ►

So he had, on a mystical level, he had a whole belief system around why it was important.

00:47:06 ►

belief system around why it was important. Setting all of that aside, the impurities that may be in LSD in some cases are apparently can significantly influence the experience that

00:47:17 ►

people have. I say apparently because it’s very hard to run a controlled experiment without setting up careful double-blind experiments.

00:47:28 ►

It’s very hard to test or compare the effects of different batches of LSD

00:47:35 ►

because set and setting, expectation, all of those effects are so powerful

00:47:41 ►

that they can overwhelm any effects caused by impurities or by dose size or other things.

00:47:50 ►

Well, dose size makes a big difference if you change it large enough.

00:47:54 ►

You know, the difference between 100 micrograms and 300 micrograms is like night and day.

00:48:06 ►

small changes in dose are harder to differentiate in the face of different expectations that people might have.

00:48:12 ►

So was Orange Sunshine miked at 300?

00:48:16 ►

I’m sorry?

00:48:17 ►

So was Orange Sunshine, were they miked at 300 each one of the tabs?

00:48:24 ►

The agreement that Nick and I had, Nick did the tableting.

00:48:27 ►

The agreement we had was that there were going to be 300 micrograms per tablet.

00:48:32 ►

I believe most of the orange sunshine that got, most of the stuff that we made,

00:48:37 ►

I know the stuff that I made in the Windsor lab mostly was tableted at 300 micrograms.

00:48:44 ►

David Mantel did most of the tableting. And

00:48:48 ►

many years later he told me that Nick came in with some blank lactose that just had dye

00:48:53 ►

in it and no acid and dumped it in to the hopper to dilute the powder. And then he took

00:49:01 ►

some extra tablets. You know, he basically knocked some of it down from 300 to 200 micrograms

00:49:08 ►

because he wanted to get some extra profit.

00:49:11 ►

I don’t know whether that story is true or not,

00:49:14 ►

but I believe that generally most of it was tableted at 300 micrograms during the early years.

00:49:22 ►

Now, the label Orange Sunshine has been applied

00:49:26 ►

to acid that were made in at least three different labs

00:49:29 ►

by different chemists at different times

00:49:32 ►

and different degrees of purity

00:49:35 ►

because the Brotherhood found

00:49:36 ►

that that brand sold very well.

00:49:40 ►

They initially sold as Orange Sunshine

00:49:44 ►

the acid that Nick and I made in the Windsor lab,

00:49:47 ►

and that was somewhere north of 4 million doses.

00:49:51 ►

About a year later, a fellow named Ron Stark appeared on the scene

00:49:55 ►

with a fairly large amount of not very pure LSD,

00:49:59 ►

which he wanted to find distribution for,

00:50:02 ►

which ended up being distributed through the Brotherhood.

00:50:05 ►

That’s a long story.

00:50:07 ►

And that first batch from him, we insisted on purifying,

00:50:12 ►

and Nick ended up doing that.

00:50:14 ►

Nick ended up doing the purification and tableting of Ron’s acid.

00:50:18 ►

So that second batch, I believe, was equal in purity to what we made in Windsor

00:50:24 ►

and was probably tableted

00:50:26 ►

at the same dose.

00:50:29 ►

I see.

00:50:29 ►

By the time that tableting was being done, I had dropped out, so I wasn’t personally

00:50:34 ►

present, so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

00:50:37 ►

A year or two later, over the next couple of years, Ron Stark’s lab in Europe turned out quite a bit more acid, which was tableted

00:50:46 ►

by the Brotherhood and not further purified by anyone. At the same time, Nick had set

00:50:53 ►

up a lab in St. Louis, Missouri, where he made more acid, which he did purify, and which

00:50:59 ►

he tableted with the same tablet machine that was used to do the last part of the orange sunshine run.

00:51:12 ►

And I believe he did that at the same dose level. At some point, they started cutting the doses back from 300 to 200 to 100. But I can’t tell you exactly when that happened.

00:51:18 ►

I see. Do you think some of the notoriety that’s attributed to orange sunshine,

00:51:24 ►

is that because of the high dose? or is that because of the purity?

00:51:29 ►

Well, I do believe that people generally appreciate pure LSD,

00:51:36 ►

and if they’re given a choice, that’s what they’ll go for.

00:51:40 ►

I also think that, you know, so I don’t know what to say since we’re all guessing.

00:51:51 ►

Can you maybe explain what purity is, what that means?

00:51:57 ►

What’s left in it that would make it unpure and how does that affect someone?

00:52:02 ►

and how does that affect someone?

00:52:07 ►

Well, it depends very, very much on who made the acid and what method they used for making it.

00:52:10 ►

There are quite a few different methods of doing it.

00:52:14 ►

Bear and I and Nick at first all used the Garbrecht method.

00:52:20 ►

That method produces LSD before you purify it that is a mixture of LSD, iso-LSD, and some unreacted lysergic acid.

00:52:33 ►

So it needs to be purified by preparative column chromatography and then by crystallization to make it really pure.

00:52:40 ►

The preparative column chromatography separates the iso-LSD from the normal LSD,

00:52:44 ►

The preparative column chromatography separates the ISO LSD from the normal LSD,

00:52:50 ►

and if you care about yield, you can recycle the ISO LSD by racemizing it and turning it mostly back into normal LSD, which then requires further chromatography.

00:52:57 ►

So you end up having a little recycling loop running in your lab.

00:53:02 ►

But the first LSD that Bayer took was made by a fellow named Douglas George,

00:53:09 ►

who was an engineer and physicist, who had gone to a lecture where he heard a psychologist

00:53:16 ►

talk about the wonders of psychedelics, who cited a patent for an easy, quote, easy, unquote, process for making LSD.

00:53:28 ►

And Douglas George was interested, so he went out and got the chemicals together and tried to cook some.

00:53:34 ►

And he didn’t bother doing the purification steps because he thought, well, the dose is so small,

00:53:41 ►

any impurities would be inconsequential.

00:53:45 ►

And then he gave away the acid that he made.

00:53:48 ►

It was sort of green goo that he, I’m not sure how he dosed it out,

00:53:53 ►

maybe on sugar cubes, one way or another,

00:53:58 ►

but it took quite a lot of the green goo that he made in order to produce,

00:54:09 ►

to get you high, because it was very impure.

00:54:15 ►

So the first acid that Owsley took was that stuff from Douglas George. He didn’t really get charmed and captivated by LSD until a friend of his, his lawyer, Al Matthews, gave him a dose of pure Sandoz LSD.

00:54:36 ►

And the way he described it, the difference was like the difference between day and night.

00:54:41 ►

And that after taking pure LSD, he realized that what he needed to do was make LSD

00:54:46 ►

so he would have LSD that he knew was pure to take.

00:54:50 ►

Now, if you want to know what’s in M-Pure LSD, in some processes,

00:54:55 ►

it could be unreacted ergot alkaloids.

00:54:59 ►

You know, people who are using the Hoffman method with hydrazine might have unreacted ergot alkaloids in there along

00:55:07 ►

with LSD and iso-LSD and who knows what else.

00:55:14 ►

Some of those chemicals can have adverse effects at small doses.

00:55:21 ►

And who knows maybe Bayer had some insight

00:55:26 ►

in saying that

00:55:28 ►

people’s intentions certainly make a difference

00:55:31 ►

too

00:55:31 ►

I think the people who take the

00:55:34 ►

trouble to purify the LSD

00:55:36 ►

that they make so that it’s very pure

00:55:38 ►

are at least somewhat more likely

00:55:41 ►

to have pure intentions

00:55:42 ►

in what they’re doing

00:55:44 ►

that’s a great answer so you know somewhat more likely to have pure intentions in what they’re doing.

00:55:46 ►

That’s a great answer.

00:55:52 ►

So, you know, let’s talk a little bit about just the microdosing scene now.

00:55:54 ►

What are your thoughts on that?

00:56:02 ►

Well, you know, I stopped taking acid in 1970 when I dropped out.

00:56:06 ►

So I haven’t tried the modern mitral dosing regime.

00:56:08 ►

I can tell you that in the

00:56:10 ►

labs that I worked in,

00:56:12 ►

we would usually get exposed

00:56:14 ►

to LSD relatively early

00:56:16 ►

on in the process. And as a

00:56:18 ►

result, we’d have a mild

00:56:19 ►

altered state

00:56:22 ►

all the time that we were working in the lab.

00:56:25 ►

Which might be a little bit like microdosing.

00:56:31 ►

If you take LSD, as you probably know,

00:56:36 ►

you rapidly build up a tolerance to it.

00:56:39 ►

So it takes a larger and larger dose to do anything,

00:56:41 ►

and after a while, even a large dose doesn’t seem to do much.

00:56:45 ►

And you have to stop taking it for a while before it can have an effect again

00:56:50 ►

now in the lab we could at times get exposed to relatively large doses so that might be

00:56:57 ►

roughly akin to microdosing but i see anything any opinions i give you about that are purely speculation

00:57:05 ►

well you had an early interest in computers

00:57:08 ►

and it seems as if

00:57:10 ►

the microdosing trend

00:57:13 ►

is really big

00:57:14 ►

among computer

00:57:15 ►

users and just those

00:57:18 ►

who are making computers

00:57:20 ►

what do you think is

00:57:21 ►

what’s the connection

00:57:23 ►

why do you think that those two schools, why do they go together?

00:57:30 ►

Well, I spent almost 20 years working for Autodesk as a software developer, and there were a fair number of people there who had taken psychedelics.

00:57:42 ►

a fair number of people there who had taken psychedelics.

00:57:46 ►

So I agree that people who take psychedelics seem to be attracted to writing software or designing hardware.

00:57:53 ►

Do you think any of your early LSD experiences

00:57:56 ►

gave you any extra abilities or led you down that path, perhaps?

00:58:03 ►

Well, again, I haven’t tried taking acid since I’ve been writing software,

00:58:08 ►

so it’s hard for me to tell you that.

00:58:11 ►

But, I mean, I’d say that there are insights that I gained from having taken acid many times

00:58:17 ►

that I still have, and I feel like I got the message and I hung up the phone.

00:58:21 ►

That doesn’t mean I lost the message.

00:58:24 ►

Maybe I’ve learned things from psychedelics that helped me in writing software. Or maybe it’s, I think

00:58:31 ►

I’m somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum, and a lot of people who get involved in writing

00:58:39 ►

software seem as though they have at least a touch of Asperger’s, which tends to have the positive effect of making it easy to focus and concentrate on complex problems.

00:58:54 ►

It tends to have the negative effect of imparting relatively poor social skills.

00:59:03 ►

Yeah, that makes me think of

00:59:07 ►

someone like Eddie Van Halen or those folks that just

00:59:10 ►

hone their craft and then have

00:59:12 ►

less social skills because they spent so much time

00:59:16 ►

honing their craft.

00:59:18 ►

I wanted to jump a little bit ahead and talk about

00:59:22 ►

tell me about the biofeedback and some of those

00:59:26 ►

efforts that you were involved

00:59:28 ►

in. Well,

00:59:30 ►

toward the end of it, after I

00:59:32 ►

got busted for the second Denver lab

00:59:34 ►

which happened

00:59:35 ►

shortly after I finished my work in the

00:59:38 ►

Windsor lab, which is the last lab I worked

00:59:40 ►

in,

00:59:41 ►

I had to commute to court

00:59:43 ►

in Colorado. I was facing a possible sentence of 56 years

00:59:48 ►

in prison there for four 14-year felonies. And in between doing that, I turned my attention

00:59:55 ►

back to doing electronics design work, which is what I’d been doing before I started making

01:00:00 ►

OSD. And I started a little electronics company initially to make equipment for rock and roll

01:00:07 ►

musicians. But a friend of mine had turned me on to brainwave biofeedback in Barbara Brown’s lab

01:00:17 ►

in 1967, the very early experiments in alpha brainwave biofeedback. And that same friend introduced me to an engineer up near where I was living in Mendocino

01:00:31 ►

who had been designing biofeedback instruments for the state of California.

01:00:36 ►

And we talked about making a little brainwave biofeedback instrument

01:00:41 ►

that individuals could buy and use instead of big, complicated

01:00:47 ►

laboratory equipment.

01:00:49 ►

The reason why that was of interest is, well, first, let me back up.

01:00:55 ►

In 1967, when I was in Barbara Brown’s lab, I was thinking, we had, at the Watts acid test bear had bought a new loudspeaker called a super bass

01:01:09 ►

that could reproduce sounds in the very very low frequency range so you could feel the bass in the

01:01:18 ►

sidewalk a couple of within a radius of about a block from the venue where the Watts Acid Test was taking place.

01:01:27 ►

And having just experienced this brainwave biopickback thing at Barbara Brown’s place,

01:01:33 ►

I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could pipe Jerry Garcia’s brainwaves into that loudspeaker?

01:01:40 ►

And would that somehow share more of his consciousness with the people at the acid test.

01:01:48 ►

Well, that was a passing fancy, but in 1970 when I took another look at this,

01:01:57 ►

I had an opportunity to read research papers written by Joe Camilla,

01:02:01 ►

who had been able to successfully train people to control the production

01:02:07 ►

of alpha waves, and other research papers that had looked at the brainwave patterns

01:02:11 ►

of Zen monks and yoga masters, which showed that they produced copious amounts of high

01:02:18 ►

amplitude alpha waves in a pattern that was significantly different from that of everyday people’s brainwaves.

01:02:28 ►

And so the idea was that training people to control their brainwaves

01:02:36 ►

and to be able to produce high-intensity alpha waves

01:02:40 ►

could be a path for teaching people to reach a meditative state of mind without having to a shortcut of sorts of being able to learn how to

01:02:50 ►

meditate more quickly than spending years of doing Zen and without the legal

01:02:57 ►

complications of taking illegal drugs so I set off on that path with the fantasy that, well, maybe we could turn the world on with brainwaves and biofeedback.

01:03:10 ►

What was the idea again now behind amplifying Jerry’s…

01:03:16 ►

You would turn it into an audio signal and send it out, or you would just send it out just…

01:03:22 ►

That was a fantasy that we had the the alpha brainwaves are

01:03:27 ►

at around 8 to 13 hertz so they’re below the level of audibility at a level where you would feel the

01:03:33 ►

vibration you know like in the sidewalk the way that super bass speaker did if you directly pumped

01:03:40 ►

out brainwaves without doing anything to make them more easily audible.

01:03:46 ►

The engineer, a fellow named John Sinclair that I had met who worked for the state of

01:03:51 ►

California had been building what he called encephalophones for them where he up-converted

01:04:00 ►

the frequency of the brain waves to an audible frequency by using them to amplitude and frequency

01:04:05 ►

modulate a tone that was in the middle of the normal human hearing range.

01:04:14 ►

So you’d hear a tone that would warble up and down in both pitch and amplitude as the

01:04:22 ►

brain wave voltage was going up and down.

01:04:25 ►

And that would make even very slow brainwaves easily audible.

01:04:29 ►

And that’s what the first inexpensive brainwave instrument that I manufactured did.

01:04:35 ►

It was an encephalophone that made brainwaves audible.

01:04:38 ►

And we delivered it with a little phonograph record that had samples of the different kinds

01:04:43 ►

of brainwaves.

01:04:43 ►

So you could say, okay, here’s what alpha sounds like, here’s what beta sounds like, and so on.

01:04:49 ►

So by hearing these sounds, would it help somebody enter that state of mind?

01:04:58 ►

Well, the idea behind biofeedback is that if you can measure a physiological process,

01:05:06 ►

if you can present the results of that measurement immediately to the person being measured,

01:05:11 ►

you can use the result of that measurement to tell you whether strategies that you’re trying for controlling that process are working.

01:05:21 ►

So, for example, if you want to learn how to wiggle your ears, it helps to be able to look in a mirror so you can see whether you’re wiggling your ears. And if you first start getting

01:05:29 ►

a hint of movement, then you can try to do more of whatever it is you were doing internally that

01:05:34 ►

made your ears twitch. The same thing would go with any other physiological process. So if you’re

01:05:41 ►

trying to learn to produce alpha waves, if you have an instrument that tells you

01:05:45 ►

how much alpha you’re producing, you can then try different internal strategies.

01:05:52 ►

You can experiment with visualization, with clearing your mind, with relaxing, with tensing,

01:05:59 ►

with focusing, with defocusing, and so on. And most people learn

01:06:02 ►

with defocusing, and so on.

01:06:08 ►

And most people learn relatively quickly that closing their eyes,

01:06:12 ►

letting their mind become as empty as possible,

01:06:15 ►

tends to lead to producing a lot of alpha waves.

01:06:21 ►

And then they can go further down that path and experiment with what it takes to produce more intense alpha waves.

01:06:26 ►

After making that first crude instrument, within a couple of years, I learned that

01:06:31 ►

there would be a lot of value in looking at more than one channel of brainwaves at once.

01:06:36 ►

The first instruments just were single-channel brainwave amplifiers. When I made a stereo system

01:06:42 ►

that could look at two channels of EEG, look at the right

01:06:45 ►

and left hemisphere, for example, we found that training for interhemispheric phase synchronized

01:06:52 ►

alpha much more reliably correlated with what people described as a meditative state, because

01:07:02 ►

we found that people had learned ways of producing single-channel

01:07:05 ►

alpha waves without meditating.

01:07:08 ►

It turns out there were multiple ways of producing that simple physiological state.

01:07:14 ►

But by measuring for a more complex physiological pattern, we could narrow down the range of

01:07:19 ►

correlations.

01:07:20 ►

That’s jumping ahead a few years.

01:07:22 ►

But that sort of gives you a brief idea of what got me interested in biofeedback, at least.

01:07:27 ►

Absolutely.

01:07:29 ►

So how much of this did you continue, and what’s the current state of the biofeedback?

01:07:39 ►

Well, at the point when I started getting into doing biofeedback and making biofeedback instruments,

01:07:45 ►

there was a group called the Biofeedback Research Society.

01:07:50 ►

It consisted of researchers who were looking at what could be done with biofeedback

01:07:55 ►

and different kinds of biofeedback.

01:07:57 ►

And I joined the society, and I used to display instruments and sell them there.

01:08:02 ►

What happened is that researchers relatively rapidly learned

01:08:08 ►

that they could use biofeedback training in psychosomatic medicine.

01:08:13 ►

The first and simplest thing you could do is you could teach people how to relax.

01:08:19 ►

That could be done by doing skin temperature feedback

01:08:23 ►

on the temperature of your fingertips.

01:08:27 ►

The blood flow in your fingertips depends on peripheral vasoconstriction or relaxation.

01:08:36 ►

If you’re relaxed, your hands get warm, and if you’re tense, your hands get cold.

01:08:41 ►

So a relatively inexpensive and simple instrument can measure skin temperature

01:08:46 ►

changes, ideally a very sensitive instrument, so you can see changes of even a hundredth of a degree,

01:08:52 ►

give you an idea of what direction you’re moving in, so you can experiment with different strategies,

01:08:58 ►

and you can fairly rapidly learn how to warm up your hands, which can be an effective relaxation strategy for a lot of people.

01:09:11 ►

Other researchers found that with a somewhat more sophisticated instrument, you can measure the electrical signals associated with muscle activity.

01:09:17 ►

And learning how to relax muscle tension is another fairly direct path toward relaxation

01:09:24 ►

for a lot of people.

01:09:27 ►

As progress was made in research,

01:09:30 ►

people learned that different people express stress in different ways.

01:09:34 ►

Some people may do it through muscle tension in a particular group of muscles,

01:09:38 ►

and they may get migraine headaches and have a lot of muscle tension in their scalp.

01:09:43 ►

Other people may get muscle tension in their shoulders or in their backs

01:09:47 ►

or in other different places where people get whole knots of muscle tension,

01:09:53 ►

and that doing biofeedback training to learn how to let go of that muscle tension

01:09:57 ►

can be an effective tool for treating people whose personal stress pattern lies in that direction.

01:10:05 ►

And other people may work better with peripheral skin temperature,

01:10:09 ►

other people with looking at the electrical activity of the skin,

01:10:14 ►

the conductivity of it, a measure that’s called GSR or BSR,

01:10:19 ►

and still other people do better working with brainwaves.

01:10:23 ►

So the brainwave training requires the most complex and sophisticated instruments.

01:10:28 ►

I see.

01:10:28 ►

So over the years, I found myself making increasingly complicated and sophisticated instruments,

01:10:34 ►

which as microcomputer chips became available, became computerized.

01:10:40 ►

My first computerized biofeedback instrument used an 8008 Intel CPU before the 8080 was available.

01:10:49 ►

And then when the 8080 came along, I could make better computerized instruments.

01:10:54 ►

And I was starting to make and sell physiological monitoring instruments for researchers as well as biofeedback instruments.

01:11:06 ►

well as biofeedback instruments. A physiological monitoring instrument could be used as a biofeedback instrument or it could also be used just to measure what somebody’s physiology was doing.

01:11:14 ►

And that’s done in medical diagnosis or it can be done in any number of kinds of research

01:11:22 ►

where people are looking for physiological correlates.

01:11:26 ►

And when I eventually got a PhD in prison,

01:11:29 ►

I got it for looking at the physiological correlates

01:11:33 ►

of events in consciousness,

01:11:35 ►

looking at physiological patterns

01:11:36 ►

in many physiological measures.

01:11:39 ►

Wow, that’s fascinating.

01:11:43 ►

Do you want to briefly describe how you spent your time in prison and how you dealt with that?

01:11:50 ►

Well, I was lucky in a way. The judge who sentenced me set my bail very, very high, $500,000 all cash. So there was no way I could get out on appeal bond at first.

01:12:05 ►

cash, so there was no way I could get out on appeal bond at first. So during the first few months of my appeals, I had a chance to go to McNeil Island. You know, I got sent

01:12:10 ►

there in leg chains and belly chains and so on on the bus, just like everybody else.

01:12:14 ►

But I got a chance to experience what the penitentiary was like, you know, what the

01:12:20 ►

place, that was the place I was going to spend my sentence and having a chance to be there,

01:12:26 ►

get to know the staff and the inmates and find out that, yeah, it was an unpleasant place, but

01:12:32 ►

the reality of it wasn’t quite as scary as my fantasies had been. I was lucky because

01:12:40 ►

the way that the prison system behaves is very, very strongly politically modulated.

01:12:47 ►

And at the time, in 1974, the pendulum had swung fairly far in the direction toward rehabilitation.

01:12:54 ►

So prisons, the federal prison system was fairly generous in providing educational programs,

01:13:02 ►

psychology services, and other rehabilitation programs for inmates who are in prison.

01:13:08 ►

There are other times when the pendulum swings much more strongly toward punishment

01:13:13 ►

when those programs tend to wither and go away,

01:13:16 ►

and the focus is entirely on punishment and making the experience just as unpleasant as possible

01:13:23 ►

and you don’t really care about trying to rehabilitate people.

01:13:27 ►

So then the appeal court lowered my appeal bail to a more reasonable level so I was able to get out

01:13:34 ►

on appeal bond for several years while the appeals were running. And during that time, the

01:13:40 ►

Association for Humanistic Psychology, some members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology,

01:13:49 ►

formed an external degree program called the Humanistic Psychology Institute

01:13:53 ►

for PhD candidates studying for a degree in psychology.

01:14:00 ►

And they were willing to work with me with the idea that I could be a student in prison once I lost my appeals,

01:14:06 ►

which I expected to do eventually.

01:14:08 ►

I was just taking advantage of having a few years to get ready to serve a longer sentence.

01:14:13 ►

And so I got to do a lot of the things that I had to do outside of prison while I was out on appeal bond,

01:14:21 ►

and then by the time I lost my last appeal to the Supreme Court

01:14:25 ►

and had to turn myself in to McNeil Island to serve the rest of the 20-year sentence,

01:14:32 ►

I was pretty far along in my research for my Ph.D.

01:14:36 ►

I’d done a lot of volunteer work while I was out.

01:14:41 ►

I had to have a bail reporting officer while I was out on appeal bond

01:14:44 ►

because I had such a long sentence.

01:14:46 ►

So it meant that I was seeing somebody who usually was a parole officer.

01:14:52 ►

And I was seeing him the way somebody on parole would at least every month.

01:14:55 ►

So he had to be able to know where I was all the time and be able to get in touch with me whenever he felt like it to make sure I wasn’t running away.

01:15:04 ►

me whenever he felt like it to make sure I wasn’t running away. He would come up and see what I was doing, and he had seen the kind of electronic work I was doing and things I was doing with computers.

01:15:12 ►

At the same time, he was dating a young woman who was teaching a handicapped student at the

01:15:17 ►

local community college, a woman who had cerebral palsy, and she had a really tough problem with communication.

01:15:26 ►

She couldn’t speak, and the only communication channel she had was an electric clock,

01:15:33 ►

the old-fashioned kind of electric clock that has a sweep secondhand that goes around once a minute

01:15:37 ►

that her parents had modified to put the letters of the alphabet and the numbers from zero through nine

01:15:43 ►

scattered around the face of the alphabet and the numbers from zero through nine scattered around the face of the clock.

01:15:46 ►

And Robin, this young woman, could control the side-to-side movements of one knee

01:15:52 ►

well enough to hit a switch and stop the clock when it was pointing toward the letter or number she wanted to communicate.

01:16:00 ►

So she could spell out messages at the rate of one letter per minute,

01:16:04 ►

which required a lot of cooperation from anyone who she was trying to talk to, because they’d have to write down the letters or numbers and then finally understand what she was asking for or trying to express.

01:16:18 ►

Sure.

01:16:24 ►

He challenged me with trying to come up with something better for her.

01:16:32 ►

While I was still out on a peel bond, I showed her family how to do EMG biofeedback training with her,

01:16:36 ►

which helped her get some control over the muscle spasms she had.

01:16:40 ►

Most of the time they had to keep her arms and legs strapped down because they tended to flail around uncontrollably at times.

01:16:44 ►

She was able to make some progress with that,

01:16:46 ►

but mostly I worked on trying to design a better communication system for her.

01:16:53 ►

And when I got sent back to prison,

01:16:56 ►

I was fairly far along with the idea of what to do to build a computerized system for her

01:17:02 ►

so that she could build up a message on a little television monitor,

01:17:07 ►

and so that the letters of the alphabet would be presented to her in the order in which they’re most likely to occur.

01:17:15 ►

In English, it’s the first letter of a word, or if one letter was up there,

01:17:20 ►

in which the most likely letter to appear

01:17:25 ►

is the second letter of an English word following the first letter.

01:17:29 ►

I got a table of bigrams from a cryptographer.

01:17:33 ►

That’s what they call those.

01:17:34 ►

So that you know what letter is most likely to occur after an A or a C or whatever.

01:17:43 ►

So I could present the letters in an order in which she’d have to wait through a relatively

01:17:48 ►

small number of letters to appear before the letter she wanted would be presented and she

01:17:53 ►

could add it to the message.

01:17:55 ►

And I also put in a vocabulary of words and phrases.

01:18:00 ►

So if she wanted to jump to phrases, she could just click on something that says, I need

01:18:04 ►

to go to the bathroom and not have to spell all that out.

01:18:07 ►

Sure.

01:18:08 ►

And I finally got permission to be able to have parts for a computer kit get sent in

01:18:15 ►

so I could build a computer for her and then write that software and then send it out for her use.

01:18:22 ►

In between, I got to use the computer to do the statistics for my dissertation.

01:18:29 ►

So it was a win-win situation.

01:18:31 ►

Wow. Wow.

01:18:33 ►

So I got a job working for one of the psychologists in the prison.

01:18:38 ►

When I was there at first, when I first was sent to McNeil Island

01:18:42 ►

before I got out on a fuel bond, I got a job in the prison library, which was the best thing I could find on short notice.

01:18:50 ►

But I was interested in it.

01:18:51 ►

But the library was pretty, I mean, it was a lot better than a poke in the eye,

01:18:55 ►

but it was mostly old books that had been donated.

01:18:58 ►

The card catalog was terrible.

01:19:00 ►

I told the librarian I offered to try to fix the card catalog, redo it.

01:19:06 ►

But even if the card catalog was the greatest catalog in the world,

01:19:10 ►

the selection of books wasn’t that great.

01:19:12 ►

So there were limits to what could be done with it.

01:19:15 ►

But I found out that there was a psychology department,

01:19:18 ►

because every inmate has to go through psychological testing.

01:19:21 ►

And I struck up a correspondence with the prison psychologist while I was out

01:19:25 ►

on appeal bond, talked about biofeedback, the idea of setting up a biofeedback program.

01:19:32 ►

It turned out I couldn’t donate instruments to the prison because I was going to be back

01:19:37 ►

there again and it was a conflict against the Bureau’s rules.

01:19:42 ►

But when I got back to the prison, I had a job waiting for me, working for the prison

01:19:46 ►

psychologist, which made sense since I was studying psychology and he could use me to

01:19:52 ►

do statistics for his research.

01:19:56 ►

And the psychologist I worked for was a second generation Japanese guy named Bill Nakashima,

01:20:02 ►

really sweet guy. And I had been turned on to the idea of turning prisons into ashrams by Ram Dass,

01:20:11 ►

who came to the prison to give a lecture, which was a really nice event, in the chapel.

01:20:15 ►

But he had set up a thing called the Prison Ashram Project with some friends of his,

01:20:23 ►

and they published a book, Inside Out, which is

01:20:26 ►

a manual for inmates on how to do yoga and meditation and so on.

01:20:32 ►

And Dr. Nakashima agreed to set up some of these programs in the prison.

01:20:37 ►

So we had a Zen meditation group.

01:20:40 ►

We had a yoga group.

01:20:42 ►

He got a Tai Chi master to come in, and we had a Tai Chi group.

01:20:48 ►

The Zen master came in once a year, and then Dr. Nakashima would sit with the Zen group in between, you know, the rest of the year.

01:20:56 ►

Sure.

01:20:58 ►

And a yoga master came in once or twice a year, and then, you know, Dr. Nakashima worked with him in between some.

01:21:04 ►

once or twice a year, and then Dr. Nakashima worked with him in between some.

01:21:11 ►

And he got a Tai Chi teacher to come in actually every week for a while.

01:21:15 ►

And then after a while that got to be hard,

01:21:19 ►

but by then I’d learned enough that I was able to teach beginning inmates.

01:21:24 ►

And I eventually was able to get parts sent in so I could build biofeedback instruments.

01:21:33 ►

And the head psychologist had set up a peer counselor program where he was training inmates to be peer counselors.

01:21:40 ►

And he liked the idea of having me train the peer counselors to do biofeedback with their clients.

01:21:42 ►

So we did that.

01:21:47 ►

So I did a bunch of stuff like that in prison. And I was just really lucky that I was in a place at a time where it was possible to do those things. So I was able to

01:21:54 ►

make good use of the time. And I got my sentence reduced from 20 years to 10. And the Bureau of

01:22:01 ►

Prisons decided they liked me and asked the judge to let me become eligible for early parole.

01:22:08 ►

The judge said, hell no.

01:22:09 ►

If I’d known that you were going to be so much in love with him, I never would have reduced his sentence from 20 to 10.

01:22:17 ►

But the parole board let me out as soon as they possibly could.

01:22:20 ►

And I got out after three and a third years.

01:22:25 ►

A third of ten years.

01:22:26 ►

Wow.

01:22:26 ►

So I was very fortunate.

01:22:29 ►

You were.

01:22:30 ►

You know, one thing that I noticed

01:22:33 ►

in one of the Nick Senn interviews

01:22:35 ►

is he, like you, had this notion

01:22:38 ►

that you wanted to save or change the world

01:22:40 ►

and he noticed that LSD had this ability

01:22:43 ►

to make people softer and kinder. And it seemed as if he noticed that LSD had this ability to make people softer and kinder.

01:22:47 ►

And it seemed as if he maintained that desire to continue to better the world.

01:22:54 ►

What about you? How do you feel about those lofty ideas back then? Do you maintain them now?

01:23:02 ►

ideas back then? Do you maintain them now?

01:23:10 ►

Well, I was very young then, and it was more or less the definition of sophomoric.

01:23:15 ►

So I was pretty convinced I knew what it would take to save the world.

01:23:28 ►

And I’m more interested in trying to make my little corner of it better at the moment. I don’t have quite as grandiose a notion of what’s possible.

01:23:34 ►

I mean, I think Nick made a choice very early on when psychedelics first started becoming illegal

01:23:38 ►

to make them his life work.

01:23:42 ►

And he basically never did much of anything else to earn a living. So

01:23:51 ►

he had some motive conflicts going on there. I mean, the profit motive was definitely important

01:23:58 ►

for him because he wasn’t going to get Social Security or have medical insurance or whatever

01:24:04 ►

generally.

01:24:05 ►

I mean, he was going to have to take care of his retirement himself.

01:24:08 ►

That meant he needed to put some money away.

01:24:11 ►

So he was never big on the idea of giving away psychedelics.

01:24:16 ►

He was much more into the idea of selling them.

01:24:19 ►

I think his motives were very complicated and mixed, like all of ours are.

01:24:22 ►

But his mixture contained more

01:24:26 ►

of a business element. And as with some of the Brotherhood guys, the Brotherhood guys

01:24:34 ►

that I dealt with stayed on what I think of as being the right-hand path, where they were

01:24:38 ►

trying to turn the world on in a good way and distribute drugs that are not harmful.

01:24:46 ►

Some of the Brotherhood guys ended up, when they couldn’t get LSD,

01:24:50 ►

turning to distributing cocaine,

01:24:54 ►

which I think is definitely an example of taking the left-hand path.

01:25:00 ►

And Nick at times was much more expedient than I think was a really good thing.

01:25:07 ►

So we disagreed about some of that stuff.

01:25:10 ►

It’s hard to say.

01:25:11 ►

If you’re going to be a lifelong outlaw, you’ll be a psychedelic ranger lifelong,

01:25:17 ►

then it’s very hard not to become more of an ordinary more of a ordinary criminal also right i see well tim i really

01:25:29 ►

appreciate your time it’s been about an hour and a half now it has i’ve got some other

01:25:34 ►

responsibilities i have to take care of yeah i definitely wanted to respect that um so we can

01:25:40 ►

end here i really appreciate getting the the opportunity to chat with you.

01:25:45 ►

Okay.

01:25:47 ►

Well, thanks for your questions.

01:25:50 ►

I hope it works out for you.

01:25:51 ►

Oh, I do too.

01:25:52 ►

Thank you so much.

01:25:55 ►

And hopefully I can stay in touch. This is Eric from StuffStonersLike.com again.

01:25:59 ►

I want to thank you for listening to my exclusive interview with Tim Scully,

01:26:02 ►

the famous chemist behind the legendary Orange Sunshine LSD.

01:26:06 ►

Please check out my blog, Stuff Stoners Like, for more interesting interviews, product and strain reviews, and the latest news affecting stoner culture worldwide.

01:26:14 ►

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this interview, please find me on Facebook or Twitter at stoner underscore stuff, or email me at stuff at stuffstonerslike.com.

01:26:25 ►

Again, thank you very much for listening.

01:26:27 ►

I really hope you enjoyed the interview as much as I did.

01:26:31 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:26:34 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:26:39 ►

There were quite a few times here where I wanted to jump in

01:26:42 ►

and add my own thoughts to the conversation that

01:26:45 ►

you and I just listened in on, and my guess is that you felt the same way. So in closing, here

01:26:52 ►

are two of Tim Scully’s thoughts that we just heard, and I’m suggesting that over the coming

01:26:57 ►

months during some of our live Monday Night Salons that we should discuss them. The first is, and I quote, The LSD experience doesn’t really carry a message with it.

01:27:08 ►

It’s an amplifier, and it’s much more dependent on set and setting than I believed at first.

01:27:13 ►

I should have paid more attention to what people like Tim Leary and Ralph Metzner had been saying.

01:27:18 ►

End quote.

01:27:20 ►

Well, while we all know about set and setting now,

01:27:32 ►

Well, while we all know about set and setting now, I’m wondering if I’m the only one who nonetheless has stepped outside of the safe boundaries for a set and setting and got themselves into trouble.

01:27:44 ►

My question is, even though we know the importance of a good setting, setting in particular, but even though we know that, we sometimes sabotage ourselves and launch into a bad trip. Have you ever asked

01:27:45 ►

yourself why you did that? I have. Another thing that Tim said in this conversation was, and again

01:27:53 ►

I quote, it is also slowly becoming clear from observing my friends who had taken a lot of acid,

01:28:00 ►

and some of whom were still behaving like assholes, that LSD was not a cure for being an asshole.

01:28:08 ►

End quote.

01:28:10 ►

Need I say more?

01:28:12 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:28:16 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:28:30 ►

Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

631 - Tim Scully and Orange Sunshine

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Program Notes

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