O
n Dec. 21, 1967 — the winter solstice, when the sun’s annual perambulations through the zodiac had reached their most southerly point — light was dimming on the Summer of Love.
In an unassuming pad at 69 La Espiral St. in Orinda, California, just east of Berkeley, a half dozen hippies were finishing their breakfast. They polished off square portions of steak, eggs, and black coffee. No granola here. They required heartier sustenance to fuel the hard work at hand: mass-manufacturing LSD.
A peaceful winter morning was spoiled, as one person who was there recalls, by a bark just outside: POLICE! OPEN THE DOOR! Before anyone had time to comply, cops crashed in. The front door was broken down with a heavy sledge, while another flank busted through the back. One overzealous officer crashed through a window. The pill press ground to a halt, leaving microscopic granules of hallucinogenic dust gleaming in the light of a cool, clear winter morning.
Court documents described the little Orinda home as housing “a small factory for the manufacture of LSD.” It was actually a small tableting facility, where crystalline LSD, synthesized off-site, was pressed into tablets for distribution. The feds had been led there by a weak link in their crew, who had unwittingly sold a substantial wad of acid ($3,400 worth) to an undercover cop. And now, in sleepy Contra Costa County, the whole operation had come crashing down. The cops separated the close-knit crew, egging them into diming each other out. But their loyalties were strong. Nobody said a word.
Six people were arrested, four men and two women — one woman wearing a Guatemalan tribal dress and the other a bear-fur vest. Reports at the time estimated the street value of the bust at almost $10 million. Chalk it up to some creative math: 217 grams producing some 2,170,000 hits dosed in standard units of 100 micrograms (µg), peddled at $3 to $5 a pop. These weren’t “standard units,” though. They were heroic doses, measured out at 270µg to 300µg. This was Owsley acid — the strongest, purest LSD ever produced in the underground.
It was the namesake of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, as eccentric a figure as has ever proweled the American underground. Wiry, furry, and proudly carnivorous, he also answered to “Bear.” He was ostensibly known for his work as an audio engineer, having designed sound systems for the Grateful Dead. (He also designed the band’s iconic skull-bisected-by-a-lightning-bolt logo, and inspired the Dead’s just-as-ionic “dancing bear” mascots.) Equally crucial to the band’s creative output was Owsley’s work as a chemist, leading a piebald crew of flower children who cranked out some 5 million doses of LSD into the world, turning on everyone from Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon. Some speculate that Owsley acid, smuggled from the Bay Area to Britain in a telephoto lens case, suffused the Beatles’ cartoonishly psychedelic Magical Mystery Tour movie. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe hailed him as “the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world.” Newsweek compared him to Henry Ford. Even the reports of the Orinda bust doubled as both a coronation and premature abdication. “Stanley is known throughout the west,” one paper reported, making him sound like some neurochemistry cowboy, “as the King of Acid.” The bust was followed by months of prolonged legal rigmarole. By the fall of 1969, Stanley was convicted. Owsley acid was no more. Or so the story goes.
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In recent years, psychedelics have benefitted from some pretty positive PR, thanks to research carried out by respectable scholars at reputable schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and London’s Imperial College. The legal landscape for drugs like MDMA and psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms) has opened up, thanks to a mix of legal ballot measures and Big Pharma investment. This renewed interest has seen the old-school, tie-dye-and-headband stripe of psychedelic sidelined for a more conspicuously serious culture of lab coats and lanyards. There has been a concerted effort, as Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling history of modern psychedelics How to Change Your Mind, previously told me, to “rescue psychedelics from the ‘60s.” But the story of Owsley acid suggests that these histories are inextricable, and that many of the lessons (chemical and spiritual) of the freewheeling hippie-era counterculture still inform modern-day clinical trials and capital investment.
There exists, to this day, a direct line between the LSD manufactured in inconspicuous, illegal clandestine chemistry operations and ongoing clinical trials, authorized amid the ongoing renaissance in psychedelic science. With slight tweaks and modifications, Owsley acid has passed from chemist to chemist, from underground to the pharmaceutical mainstream, like a grape-bearing vine safeguarded by generations of vintners. It has been synthesized, transmuted, and safeguarded for decades, by a family tree of gifted outlaw chemists using tried-and-true methods developed in home labs across the Bay Area since the mid-1960s. It has been shepherded across generations, binding an expansive, wiggly community of artists, chemists, criminals, rock stars, researchers, and good ol’ fashioned heads.
IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT AN IDLE Saturday binging The Antiques Roadshow on PBS, you’re probably familiar with the idea of provenance. Basically, an item’s value can increase if there’s a recorded history of ownership and transfer, traceable back to its origin. Same goes with drugs. Vintners may pass specialized wine grapes or vines down through generations, preserving not merely a legacy, but a particularized body or complex. Cannabis cultivators talk about “strains”: marijuana hybrids engineered to accentuate (or discount) certain of the plant’s psychoactive characteristics. With LSD, however, things are a bit trickier.
Drug chemists on popular cable crime shows may talk about “cooking” (Owsley once called himself “a master of fine mental cuisine”). But drug synthesis is more like baking. It’s not about panache but the boring stuff like precision, punctuality, and fastidious cleanliness. LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide, a semi-synthetic derivative of ergoline, an alkaloid first isolated from a range of gnarly plant and grain fungi. Alter a molecule here, add a propionyl group there, condense too much valeric acid, and a chemical becomes a whole new chemical.
Whether in cannabis dispensaries, concert parking lots, caves à vin, or dark-web narcotics markets, a drug’s pedigree is a link, drawing together users through history and binding them through a common experience, or headspace. But with Owsley acid, purity connotes something more than the molecular immaculacy of the compound. It’s a philosophy, an ethos. And it’s one that endures today, as the drug — or a version of it — is deployed in licensed medical trials as a psychopharmacological intervention. Tracing this LSD’s trip from the counterculture to the clinic tells the story of psychedelic drugs themselves: how criminalized compounds have found a second life as part of a cultural and psychopharmacological renaissance, wielded against intractable maladies from addiction to end-of-life anxiety. It is the story of how attitudes and cultures shift — and of just how far people will go to preserve access to the absolute best LSD. Ever.
“OURS WAS 99.9 PERCENT pure!” Rhoney Gissen Stanley tells me. “There was nothing better.” When she was around 20, Rhoney was one of the young women arrested in the Orinda raid — the one in the bear-fur vest. She was booked, but never indicted by the grand jury. She was Owsley’s girlfriend, or one of them, anyway. She took Owsley’s last name, despite the two never legally marrying. She has a son by him, Starfinder, who works as a large-animal veterinarian. Now 76, Rhoney is fiery and exploding with personality. She is also quite tiny. When she opens a spiral-bound diner menu, only her small black cowboy hat peeks above the laminated edge. “I eat nutritiously,” she beams, sitting in a booth at the Boulevard Cafe and Grill in Petaluma, California. “I follow Bear’s diet: not meat-only, but not carbs. He was brilliant about so many things.” She orders a crab benedict.
Before Rhoney knew Owsley the guy, she knew “Owsley” the product. She was introduced to LSD in 1965, while an undergrad at UC Berkeley. As she remembers it in her 2012 memoir, an ex-boyfriend drove her out to the Mendocino coast, handed her a capsule from a pharmaceutical bottle, and told her it was “Owsley acid, the best.” They sat watching the waves lap against the sand, and listened to Bob Dylan on the radio. It wasn’t long before Owsley himself would swoop into her life, when he delivered a rare German microphone to that ex-boyfriend, an aspiring songwriter who was also moving a small amount of Bear’s LSD at the time. Owsley, she remembers, was highly charismatic, and quick to dole out drips of his psychoactive potion from an old Murine bottle he squirreled away in his pocket. In those underground labs, Rhoney worked chiefly as an assistant: She’d monitor the column chromatography process, wash glassware, and — crucially — cue records on the turntable. A lifetime later, Rhoney is proud of serving as the handmaiden to Owsley acid.
But, burned by busts and raids, she’d duck out of the drug game after her Orinda arrest. “We were on constant alert,” she says. “It was so difficult to have a life that was so underground, and so full of cops and robbers.” As much as their LSD juiced all kinds of massive cultural “happenings,” Rhoney’s own circle was tighter. It was a group bound by the necessary distinctions of criminal conspiracy, and a common cosmology of lysergic idealism. “LSD,” she says, “taught us how to be a tribe.”
Another key figure in that tribe was Tim Scully, a Berkeley math whiz and electronics designer who, in time, would stake out his own LSD empire. Beyond a shared criminal enterprise, Bear, Rhoney, Scully, and the rest of their merry gang were united by what Scully calls “purity of intentions.” A high idealist, in a few senses of the term, Scully believed that LSD could alter individual consciousness, and change the world for the better. The best way to express this high-minded idealism was by mass-producing extremely potent, extremely pure LSD, almost as if its non-dilution was an expression of their own virtue.
“Making a pure product,” Scully says, “was part of expressing purity of intentions.”
Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965, with his childhood friend and soon-to-be outlaw associate Don Douglas, when they were in their early twenties. The trip produced what modern-day psychedelic clinicians call a “quantum change”: a shift in emotion and cognition that can radically alter one’s outlook. As they came down, Scully turned to his friend and said, “You know, Don, we could make this.”
Scully, who now hunkers down in a remote cabin near Mendocino, is lanky and balding, with big round glasses and a trim gray beard that makes him look a bit like a wizard. He spends his days working on his memoir, and compiling a massive history project chronicling the history of underground drug chemistry. It consists, he says, of “thousands of massively hyperlinked PDF files,” which he hopes to donate to a university library someday. He has self-diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, but on acid, he loosened up. “For a while,” he recalls, “I knew what it feels like to be a poet, an artist. Whole new universes of perception, thought, and feeling were revealed to me.” This formative trip was catalyzed by — what else? — Owsley acid. Scully tasked himself with meeting its maker. He didn’t have to wait long. Serendipitously, Owsley would appear one day at the door, to chat up a female tenant who was renting a room from Scully. Scully immediately ingratiated himself to Stanley by volunteering to assist with his electronics work, rigging up PAs for early Dead concerts and Ken Kesey’s freaky “acid trip” parties. He calls it “an extended job interview.”
In the winter of 1966, Scully and Douglas trailed Owsley and the Dead to Los Angeles, where they set up shop in a stucco mansion dubbed “the Pink House.” Scully worked on electronics and assisted in some light LSD tableting. “I was paying dues so I could work in a real lab,” Scully says. Douglas mostly handled the driving; his greatest asset was his ability to competently pilot 16-foot box trucks on 600µgs of acid — a double dose of “Owsley.”
In L.A., Scully and Douglas studied under Bear, and another important figure in their merry company: Melissa Cargill. She was the other woman arrested in Orinda, cuffed and led out of the house in Mayan traje tipico. If Owsley is something of a psychedelic Zelig, who became a countercultural cult figure (inspiring books, articles, bumper stickers, collectable tie-dye couture) despite keeping a relatively low profile at the time, then Cargill is practically phantasmic. “Melissa is a quiet person,” Scully says. “She made a new life for herself and her new husband which involved teaching, and I’m pretty sure that she had no interest in jeopardizing her ability to teach in the school system by flaunting her past.” Indeed, our own repeated attempts to reach her were unreturned. Additionally, her daughter declined.
Cargill met Owsley Stanley in 1964, when she was a student at UC Berkeley. According to Robert Greenfield’s unauthorized 2016 biography Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, he chanced upon her while drifting through the chemistry labs at UC Berkeley’s Latimer Hall, in search of an electronic scale, to precisely measure out some methamphetamine. The only other person in the lab was Cargill, whose studies in bacteriology were funded by student loans and part-time jobs. They chatted and hit it off. It wasn’t long before the pair moved into a house on Virginia Street in Berkeley, dubbed “the Green Factory,” for the fact of it being both green and a factory, of sorts. There, they began producing LSD in the bathroom. Writer Charles Perry, who lived near the Green Factory, remembered Cargill as “a cute little honeybee with tender intellectual eyes.” UC Berkeley’s records show that she never completed her degree.
In the available biographies, histories, and news reports, Cargill is typically framed as something like a complement to Rhoney: a lab-assistant/girlfriend. Some other sources, however, afford her considerably more credit: not merely an accomplice to the best acid ever made, but, potentially, its prime creator. A newswire report detailing the Orinda bust claimed that “Miss Cargill, Stanley’s girlfriend and a chemistry major, reportedly provided the knowledge for the manufacture of LSD.” The extent of that knowledge is hotly debated. As is Cargill’s operational role.
It’s well-documented that Owsley had lots of ideas about everything from electronics to LSD to the health benefits of a meat-only diet. But even such an eclectic intellect can’t quite account for mastering the nuts and bolts of psychedelic chemistry. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938, proclaimed that “there are probably only a few natural substances that are characterized by such a broad spectrum of activity of ergot alkaloids,” like lysergic acid. These are extremely complex, variegated compounds. And transmuting them into LSD is similarly intricate. It seems unlikely that anyone — even a highly-motivated autodidact like Owsley Stanley — could teach themselves how to synthesize the drug, absent some sort of hands-on instruction. Author Robert Greenfield, who wrote the unauthorized biography of Bear, refers to Owsley and Cargill as “co-equal partners.” One other chemist is unequivocal about who actually catalyzed Owsley acid: “She was the brains behind it.”
“I wasn’t there when Owsley and Melissa worked out the process for making LSD to begin with,” Tim Scully says. “I’m sure that she contributed significantly in a quiet way.” Scully’s friend Don Douglas echoes this sentiment, stating that Cargill “had an awful lot to do” with those early syntheses. Certainly, by the time that pair had been folded into the crew, Cargill seemed like Owsley’s counterpart — an isomer, in chemical terms. She, too, would have a child by Bear: a daughter named Redbird. In a testament to their deep tribal bonds, Rhoney says, Cargill once stepped in to breastfeed Rhoney and Bear’s son. While Owsley stewed in a federal penitentiary, Cargill and Rhoney would take turns bringing the newborns to meet their dad. Rhoney remembers Cargill as primarily interested in the complicated chemistry, and less with the highfalutin mission to turn on the world. “She had this lovely, charming quality,” she says. “But she was not a revolutionary.”
TIM SCULLY WAS, IF NOTHING else, lashed to the revolutionary potential of LSD. The Orinda bust, and Stanley’s subsequent incarceration, left a gaping hole in the underground LSD market. Still possessed by his calling to “scatter LSD to the four winds,” Scully was more than happy to fill the void. In the words of his friend Douglas, Scully embraced a role as Bear’s “chosen successor.”
Scully teamed up with another clandestine chemist: Nick Sand, a gregarious Brooklyn transplant and alumnus of Timothy Leary’s psychedelic-research-group-cum-drug-church, the League of Spiritual Discovery (note the acronym). Where Bear’s LSD was primarily moved at the street level by biker gangs (“I did not approve of the Hells Angels,” Scully notes), Scully would team up with a criminal organization that possessed a mellower vibe. The “Brotherhood of Eternal Love” were a sophisticated cartel, sometimes called (pejoratively, and mostly by law enforcement) “the hippie mafia.” (“We were not the fucking mafia,” says former Brotherhood honcho Michael Randall, sitting on a patio bar in Fairfax, a cute little hippie town in Marin County, where he holds court like a local celebrity. “We didn’t endorse violence of any kind. I never wore a gun.”)
The Brotherhood’s sway over 1970s drug culture cannot be overstated. They imported massive amounts of hash into the U.S. (stacked into imported VW buses and, later, hollowed-out surfboards), cultivated one of the most popular, and potent, cannabis strains of the era (“Maui Wowie”), and conspired, in 1970, with the outlaw Marxist militants in the Weather Underground to successfully bust Timothy Leary out of prison. Two years earlier, in 1968, they set up Scully and his new partner, Sand, in a Sonoma County farmhouse, where they’d batch their own legendary LSD, “Orange Sunshine.” In Owsley’s absence, Randall claims that LSD prices spiked as high as $100 a hit. Scully, Sand, and the Brotherhood were determined to flood the market, bringing the price of revolution back down to earth. “Millions of dollars went through my hands,” says Randall, who is enormously tall, sporting a scruffy Pancho Villa mustache. “But we never considered anything other than a way to continue our idea.”
Beyond the acid-fueled warehouse happenings and tripping mobs shoring up audiences at massive outdoor concert festivals, LSD was long valued in the hippie underground in ways that were more measured and deliberate. This includes being deployed in the lay treatment of depression — or what would have been called, in those days, “having a bad time.” For as much Orange Sunshine as the Brotherhood sold, they also gave plenty away. During a 1970 Christmas Day “happening” in Laguna Beach, a plane piloted by Brotherhood associates dropped some 25,000 hits onto the crowd. In the 1960s, “Owsley” acid was moved under a variety of colorful names, like White Lightning, Monterey Purple (the inspiration for Jimi Hendrix’s wailing hit “Purple Haze”), and Blue Cheer (from which the San Francisco hard-rock band took its name). Scully and Sand’s Orange Sunshine, derived from Stanley’s (and Cargill’s) original formulation, carried that legacy into the next decade. The drug was, by Scully’s own admission, produced in line with the same best practices established in Owsley’s labs. “I just followed in Bear Stanley’s footsteps,” he says. “The same dose and the same purity.”
While Scully and Sand kept a relatively low profile, the drug’s infamy would also be their undoing. In 1973, the Feds managed to turn one of the Brotherhood’s big benefactors: Gulf Oil heir Billy Hitchcock. Hitchcock bankrolled the operation with money from a trust fund that a 1974 Village Voice article pegged at $160 million. Hitchcock had been derelict in his tax payments and was persuaded to rat on Scully, Sand, and other Brotherhood associates in order to save his own skin. News reports at the time stated that the chemists were “charged with organizing a worldwide conspiracy to manufacture and sell LSD in huge amounts.” Prosecutor John Molina, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury that the pair “produced millions of hits of LSD and were proud of it and laughed all the way to their safe deposit box.” They were convicted: Scully was sentenced to 20 years, and Sand to 15. The bookish Scully pursued years of appeals options, before resigning himself to serving prison time. Sand, the more skittish of the pair, absconded to Canada. The drug itself remained the stuff of legend. By Randall’s estimation, the Brotherhood produced and distributed in excess of 150 million doses of Orange Sunshine. It saturated the psychedelic underground — in America, and across the world.
THE AMERICAN COUNTERCULTURE CAME late to the Netherlands. By the early 1970s, as flower power withered across the U.S., Amsterdam became a micro-mecca for wayfaring hippies. It was here, in 1972, that a 20-year-old longhair named Peter van der Heyden first tripped on Orange Sunshine. The experience blew open a door in his mind. He wanted to really understand what produced such profound experience at such teeny-tiny, submicroscopic doses. “I got really interested in these molecules,” he explains. “It seemed like a miracle that somebody could make something that had that kind of effect.”
Now, van der Heyden is in his early seventies with a stern, serious countenance that belies a life lived with tremendous joy and adventure. Decamping for North America, van der Heyden dreamed of meeting the men who synthesized this miracle. But he wouldn’t get the opportunity until many years later, while working as lab tech in the University of British Columbia’s geology department, where he’d settled into a fairly quiet life studying molecular composition of old rocks. One day, in the mid-1980s, van der Heyden was tasked with the disposal of a number of the geology lab’s rare chemicals; working through an itemized manifest of compounds, he realized that some of the chemicals at hand could be combined to make 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. Gripped as much by curiosity as by boredom, he smuggled out some material and whipped up a homemade batch, and passed it among a few close friends.
As he recalls, word soon spread throughout the Vancouver underground. It wasn’t long before a stranger appeared on his doorstep: squat and a bit balding, with pouty lips and eyes ringed by deep laugh lines. It was Scully’s old partner, Nick Sand, who was living and working on the lam in Vancouver. Van der Heyden’s long-discarded dream of meeting Orange Sunshine’s creators had finally, fatefully, been satisfied. “My work up to that point was very small scale, making a few grams of this or that,” he recalls. “Nick laughed and literally said, ‘I’ll teach you how to make drugs with wheelbarrows and shovels.’”
They set up their own massive underground LSD operation, in a lab tucked away in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. Van der Heyden’s day job granted him access to large quantities of diethylamine, a colorless liquid that stinks of ammonia, used in seawater analysis. It is also, incidentally, a chemical precursor for diethylamide, which puts the “D” in “LSD.” In 1996, the duo was busted. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it was “the largest production capacity of any laboratory ever seized in Canada.” Authorities recovered 43 grams of synthesized LSD — enough to dose every person in Canada at least once — along with a stash of Ecstasy and other so-called designer drugs like 2C-B. Sand, still a wanted man in the U.S., was extradited and sentenced to 14 years. Van der Heyden faced a softer, five-year stint in Canadian prison. He’d end up serving just 10 months.
Recent revolutions in the public understanding of drugs led van der Heyden back to psychedelic chemistry, albeit in a more official capacity. Witnessing the changes in clinical — and cultural — attitudes toward psychedelics over the past decade, he knew he had the opportunity, and the knowledge, to get in on the action. In 2019, he founded PsyGen, supplying legal psychedelic material for clinical trials. The company is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, an improbable place to find a warehouse-sized laboratory mass-producing psychedelic drugs. Still, this has always been the MO of the great psychedelic chemists: hiding in plain sight, whether in roadside barns and silos, or nondescript commercial spaces in snoozy Canadian office parks. (The Canadian government can provide exemptions — called “dealer’s licenses” — to practitioners, researchers, or in PsyGen’s case, manufacturers working with substances otherwise banned by the nation’s Controlled Substances Act.) The difference between van der Heyden and his predecessors is that his work is all aboveboard. But the philosophy of purity remains. According to a report in the San Mateo Times, on the occasion of his Orinda bust, Owsley Stanley bragged to arresting officers that his LSD was made to the most exacting FDA standards. Van der Heyden actually has the certifications to prove it.
In the autumn of 2022, van der Heyden realized a dream he’d been nurturing for half a century: He made his first, legal, pure batch of LSD. In PsyGen’s labs, van der Heyden has determined that some street LSD may only approach 50 percent purity. His 2022 batch achieved 99.96 percent purity. “Very few people in the world have ever tried really pure LSD,” he says. “But for those who have, and that of course includes chemists, we know that there’s a qualitative difference in the experience.”
The heroic strength of Owsley’s LSD was seen by some as reflective of his own macho posturing — “devastatingly strong in a heavy-handed way that recalled Owsley’s own insistent manner,” as the writer Charles Perry put it. For Scully and the Brotherhood, purity mirrored the stated sincerity of their ambitions: their belief that they were not moving a drug, but something like a countercultural holy rite. And so it behooved them to distribute the best version of this sacrament, even if cutting corners and compromising purity would have been more profitable. For van der Heyden, purity provides a cleaner, profounder, “more transparent” trip. If the landscape of LSD research keeps advancing, he hopes to one day analyze what he calls “the fingerprint of pure LSD on the brain.” For the time being, however, his LSD is being wielded toward more modest — if altogether more practical — ends.
WHEN IT WAS STILL LEGAL, in the 1950s and early 1960s, LSD was investigated in the treatment of neurosis, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. (Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder “Bill W.” believed that LSD could stimulate a “spiritual awakening” that could spur recovery.) But the countercultural explosion of “acid” still makes the drug seem like a bit of a psychoactive “problem child,” in the words of the father of LSD Albert Hofmann. Despite the newfound enthusiasm around drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, and even high-octane, super-psychedelic compounds like 5-MEO-DMT, LSD remains something of an outcast. Despite these hang-ups, some researchers are delving back into LSD-tweaked clinical investigations — albeit with requisite caution and circumspection.
Dr. Suresh Muthukumaraswamy came to LSD by a fairly conventional route. After completing his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Muthukumaraswamy began a postdoc fellowship at the University of Cardiff in Wales. There, he met Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher who had pioneered recent brain neuroimaging work, exploring how, exactly, psychedelics affect brain chemistry. He conducted clinical research on how a range of treatments — the dissociative ketamine, the anti-nausea medication scopolamine, even magnetic fields — can help treat clinical depression. Now, Muthukumaraswamy works in the School of Pharmacy at his alma mater, the University of Auckland. It’s an important homecoming, in no small part because New Zealand’s regulatory landscape is somewhat friendlier to researchers wanting to work with “high-risk” class-A drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, and, yes, LSD.
Muthukumaraswamy has secured government funding for a batch of pilot programs investigating the effects of LSD on focus, mood, cognition, and even the treatment of severe PMS symptoms. It’s part of a broader, albeit rather cautious, reintroduction of acid back into clinical and medical settings, despite lingering cultural suspicions around the drug. “There is absolutely a stigma,” he admits. “With LSD, you take that to a regulatory board, and they’ll say, ‘Stay away from that.’”
Nevertheless, Muthukumaraswamy has cleared the regulatory hurdles and investigated LSD’s efficacy in treating major depressive disorder, with a recent study that supplies take-home “microdoses” — about 10µg, not nearly enough to catalyze a full-blown psychedelic experience — to a group of clinically depressed volunteers. Early phases of the trial showed a significant, 60 percent remission in depressive symptoms after eight weeks. This marks a substantial improvement over the current state-of-the-pharmaceutical-art: Current rates of remission among users of prescription antidepressants hover around 43 percent. And the LSD used in this trial was supplied by none other than reformed clandestine chemist Peter van der Hyden, via PsyGen. “The purity is high. And the stability is good,” Muthukumaraswamy says with a laugh. “They make excellent LSD at PsyGen!” The formula van der Hyden had learned from Sand, who’d had it passed down from Bear himself, was to be used in the lab.
After eight weeks, the top-line data revealed “rapid and statistically significant improvements” in depressive symptoms. More precisely, there was a 60 percent reduction in depressive symptoms, with more than half of the participants exhibiting total remission. These benefits lasted for six months after the initial microdose treatment. This marks a notable increase over more conventional antidepressant therapy treatments, whose remission rates hover around 45 percent. Muthukumaraswamy notes, modestly, that the trial went “pretty well.” He is now moving on to a study investigating the potential of microdosed LSD in mitigating severe premenstrual syndrome. Drugs dispensed in such trials tend to eschew the more colorful street names applied to the LSD over the decades. No Purple Haze, White Lightning, Blue Cheer, or Orange Sunshine here. Instead, patients are treated with “MB22001,” a proprietary formulation developed by PsyGen and licensed to a Vancouver-based psychedelic medicine company that trades publicly on the Canadian securities exchange. “It’s wonderful,” says Rhoney Stanley of the revived interest in LSD. “It makes me happy. We knew it was a useful tool. And now it’s become put to use.”
There are regrets, of course. Tim Scully laments his wild-eyed plans to megadose the world. Older, probably somewhat wiser, and almost certainly chastened by his own experiences scraping up against the drug war and the American carceral system, he seems a bit more moderate. “I know that whenever I took LSD,” he says, “I felt a very strong impulse to want to share this magical experience with everyone, immediately. If only we could have found a way to weave it into the social fabric so that society would provide a backdrop of appropriate expectations and rituals for the experience.”
The weaving of such a powerful — and in the view of some true believers, actually magical — drug within the broader social fabric may affront some true-believing psychonauts’ own purity tests. When a drug that once inspired a passionate, even fanatic, desire to turn the whole world on its head is being marshalled as a medicament to treat more down-to-earth maladies, it can seem like LSD’s latent potential is being hemmed in. But for a great many others, these medical and clinical interventions are just new forms of the same psychedelic rituals, in which LSD has always served as a sacrament.
Van der Heyden remembers sitting through a 2017 conference on psychedelic medicine — one of those glossy, businesslike contemporary confabs that occupy convention centers these days, where lanyard-wreathed pharma bros tune into researchers discussing drug development, and trial designs, and patent law, and the potential of LSD in treating everything from depression to cocaine addiction, chronic pain, Azlheimer’s disease, and traumatic brain injury. Beside him was Michael Randall, the reformed LSD bandito. “He turned to me,” van der Heyden recalls, “shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘We knew all of this in the Sixties.’”