When it came to acid chemists in the sixties, two important figures seemed to have murky connections : Owsley Stanley and Ronald Stark.
For the first, his grandfather was a member of the Senate and had been governor of Kentucky.
Owsley ("Bear") served in the Air Force before getting into acid manufacturing, he would have found the formula for LSD in Berkeley and a few weeks later launched the production of methedrine to finance his future LSD lab. The police raid and he hires the vice mayor of Berkeley as a lawyer and will be released (the cops will have to return all his equipment to him).
Much more info about him in this article :
Would the Summer of Love have ever happened without Stanley, the reclusive acid impresario who turned on the world?
www.rollingstone.com
Ronald Stark (apparently his real name is Ronald Shitsky) was connected with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the conclusion of an Italian magistrate investigating him is... that he was an agent of the CIA.
A disturbing passage from the chapter 25* of the book on the "BrotherHood of Eternal Love" :
"A fresh police investigation was opened and, in October 1978, Stark was charged with 'armed banditry'. Despite a charge bordering on terrorism, seven months later he was a free man, released on parole and living in Florence. The magistrate who gave him parole said: 'Many circumstances suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services.
Which of the Italian lawyers was right? Was Stark, during his years in the drug world, in reality an American agent? Was he feeding back intelligence on the counter culture which the federal agencies were desperate to infiltrate in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Or could he have been a banker investing and transporting money destined for 'black' operations beyond the drug world?
On more than one occasion Stark let slip hints of connections with the espionage world. There was the story about working for the Defense Department, and another that he closed down the French operation through a CIA tip. He began work with the Brothers at just the time when they were involved with the Weathermen in the United States. Equally timely, he was in Paris during the May 1968 riots and haunted the radical fringes of London in the early 1970s, when there was yet another curious example of his interest in radicalism/terrorism.
Two American journalists were working on a feature for Frendz magazine, an anarchistic offshoot of Rolling Stone, on Belfast violence. A rising Provisional IRA man, James McCann, obliged them with copy by trying to firebomb part of Queens University in the town. McCann and the journalists were arrested. The latter were eventually released -but not before a surprising intervention by Stark, who took their London lawyer to lunch at the Oxford and Cambridge Club to discuss their Plight, offering to pay their fees and bail.
In fact the meeting did not lead to anything, but Stark had taken a great interest in Frendz, which was deeply involved in revolutionary politics and was something of a clearing house at the junction between drugs and the other sides of the underground. Stark's interest in McCann certainly contributed to an interest in the American himself by MI5. When Lee began searching for Stark, he found the secret service had been there before him. For McCann, having escaped from jail, set up as a cannabis dealer in Holland to supply the IRA with money for guns. One of the men sent by the British to find out more about him was a former Oxford student called Howard Marks. Perhaps it is only coincidence, but Marks, who set up in his own right as a cannabis dealer, was eventually arrested after dealing with the remnants of the Brotherhood in California.
Stark is one of the figures in the story of the Brotherhood whose origins do not link directly or tenuously back to Millbrook. When the DEA were putting together a case against Stark in 1972, they had great difficulty in pinning down his personal details and were never able to get his FBI file from New York. Their reports in California and the details passed on to Europe only showed what Stark was not, not what he actually was.
The silence was finally ended late in 1982. Stark was arrested in Holland on a charge involving 16 kilos of hashish. In the summer of 1983, he was released from custody and thrown out of Holland where he had claimed to be a Lebanese bound for New York. He was arrested on arrival in the United States on a passport violation and DEA agents began to reconstruct the original San Francisco LSD case against him. They found it impossible to do so after such a long time and Stark was released."
*
https://www.druglibrary.net/schaffer/lsd/books/bel4.htm
What can I say? I love LSD.
