Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, dies at 75

[mr peabody]

The undaunted spirit and psychedelic warrior of love and light, Nick Sand, the outlaw chemist, died in his sleep on Monday April 24th at the age of 75. Most famous for the Orange Sunshine brand of LSD distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Nick Sand was responsible for the manufacture of over 250 million doses of acid. He was also the first chemist on record to have synthesized DMT for widespread recreational use by psychedelic enthusiasts. Nick serendipitously discovered and promoted the fact that the chemical is effectively active when smoked or vaporized. For those that knew him, it was apparent that he was shameless in his alchemical pursuits. He had no regrets: through LSD, DMT, other psychedelics and spiritual practices, he had freed his mind.

Nick’s chemical career began shortly after his first mescaline experience in 1961. As lifelong enthusiast of the psychedelic path, he once remarked that he was, “doing this from my heart out of faith that this was the right thing to do. Everywhere I went I gave it away and I saw what it did to people and I said, ‘This is good.’” As a former incarcerated acid chemist, I understand where he’s coming from. I, too, share the ideals, the passion, and the shamelessness. Taught the secrets of high-purity LSD manufacture by “Bear” Owsley and Tim Scully, Nick believed:

“When LSD is made in high purity, a certain magic obtains for the person who journeys with preparation and intention. Purity of intention and purity of product go hand-in-hand to produce a transcendent trip. There are no guarantees which corridors will open for you, but the odds are better with intelligent choices. For chemists, also, the mere intention toward purity is transformative: a path unto itself. This is alchemy.”

Rhoney Stanley, the former wife and LSD lab-mate of Bear, said Tuesday that “[Nick] was always optimistic, always thought the best would happen and he had a huge passion, a sexual passion, a love passion, a spiritual passion, and a psychedelic passion. He’s the first one who started talking about us as if we were psychedelic commandos and warriors.”

Tim Scully explained that they were doing it because they thought that “acid could save the world. Almost everybody who got turned on became deeply skeptical of the authorities and the politicians.”

The mother of his godson Aidan remarked, “Nick didn’t care about the stupid politics shit, he’d just laugh at it.”

Jon Hanna said Nick “became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience.”

The reality of living life as an outlaw, however, came face-to-face with that principled stand. As a result, Nick and many of his lab mates would serve time in penitentiaries as penance for their services to humanity.

This led to quite possibly the funniest and yet most endearing aspect of the shameless proselytizing nature of Nick Sand: He found a way to smuggle in and dose many prisoners at McNeil Island Penitentiary with psychedelics during his stay there. “We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.

On appeal from that original sentence, in 1977, Nick went on the run for two decades, continuing to manifest as many doses of LSD and other psychedelics as humanly possible. As a businessman, a former associate and co-conspirator said, “Nick was aware, alert and considerate. He wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of, every mouth that mattered was fed. He cared about consciousness, purity, evolution of the spirit. He made sure that we made it to that same place together.”

Rearrested in British Columbia in 1996, Nick served time in prison through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the original 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded.

Days after his release from prison in late 2001 at the Mind States Conference in Berkeley, California, Nick explained:

“When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history.

Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration.

To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap. What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones.

It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole.”

That is about as neat and concise an encapsulation of the purposive use of LSD as I have ever come across.

This Easter at Shulgin Farm, Nick approached looking frail and a bit unsteady in his gait, but grinning ear to ear, he leaned on me and quipped, “Hi Casey, I’m not dead yet!”

I thought it funny at the time, but I had a weird premonition. I followed him into the house and was lucky to be part of this final conversation with Ann Shulgin, the underground psychotherapist pioneer and wife of famed and prolific, lawful psychedelic chemist, Sasha Shulgin. Over a bowl of organic blueberries yesterday, Ann said, “Nick was a dear friend and we are all going to miss him terribly.”

This last Saturday, at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference put on by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and The Beckley Foundation in Oakland, California, Nick showed up for the screening of the new movie by Cosmo Feilding Mellen, The Sunshine Makers, about him, Tim Scully, Bear Owsley, and their manufacture of LSD. Nick’s closing remarks to the audience, his last public words, posited that LSD helps to answer our questions:

“Who are you, who are we, what are we doing here, are we here to make war or are we here to make love?”

Nick received a standing ovation, many hugs and kind words. Mike Randall, a former LSD prisoner and leader of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love relayed that Nick said he’d never had a day like that.

I believe it was a kind of completion for him—he could see his work had produced spectacular results and psychedelics had become mainstream. High on the crowd’s love, our love, having lived a proud, free and shameless life, he had a good death. May the four winds blow him safely home.

- Casey Hardison

 

[Xorkoth]

Beautiful post. Farewell to a great man.

 

[Goodwalt]

He will be dearly missed.

 

[Volsam]

Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap.

Beautifully said!... He was indeed a great man.

 

[spacejunk]

RIP magnificent man

 

[mr peabody]

Nick Sand grew up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. His father taught chemistry at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, and contributed to the Manhattan Project and to SAM (substitute alloy materials), which focused on the separation of uranium isotopes in order to extract the only fissionable isotope, uranium-235. Watching the destruction brought about by such work, Sand felt that there had to be a better way. One of his father's PhD students, an Indian Raja, taught Sand yoga at the age of 15. This inspired a deep and abiding interest in spirituality, and over the last five decades Sand has been a student of the Kabballah, meditation, Krishna consciousness, Sufism, aikido, T'ai Chi, Zen, and Tantra, as well as having studied the teachings of Krishnamurti, Milarepa, Ramakrishna, Rajneesh, and other philosophers.

Sand married his first wife, Melly, while he was still in college, studying anthropology. In 1961 he first took mescaline, which sparked a life-long interest in psychedelic sacraments. During his undergraduate days, Sand put together a laboratory and successfully synthesized mescaline and several short-acting tryptamines. His attic became a new sort of temple, as Sand started turning everyone he knew on to these obscure entheogens. After meeting Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) at a lecture at Brooklyn College, Sand invited Alpert to see his lab. Sand was then summoned to Millbrook, the commune home to Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery. At Millbrook, Sand met John Griggs (founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) and Owsley Stanley (creator of the first underground lab producing pure LSD1). At this point Sand began dividing his time between finishing his BA, making psychedelics, and guiding initiates in his attic and at Millbrook. He graduated from college in 1966. During a vision quest on DMT, Sand came to believe that he should devote his life entirely to manufacturing entheogens. This decision—to give up a career in anthropology and go underground to produce LSD—ultimately resulted in the break-up of his marriage. Sand became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience, because he believed he was working for a higher good. He left New York in 1967, and headed to the San Francisco Bay Area to set up a lab, where he manufactured DOM (known at the time under the street name "STP") and MDA.

From 1968 through 1969 in Windsor, California, Sand worked in an illicit lab with Tim Scully, who taught Sand how to manufacture LSD. Their material was distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a legendary band of dealers on a mission to enlighten the world. Just like Owsley before them, Scully and Sand both felt that it was extremely important to create a product of the highest purity at a standardized dose; these goals resulted in one of the most beloved "brands" of acid in the late 1960s: tiny orange barrels containing 300 micrograms of LSD, called "Orange Sunshine ". In 2007, an ex-DEA agent who spent time analyzing Sand's acid in the 1960s remarked, "It was always high quality, and it was always a good dose."

Although infamous because of his black-market LSD production, Sand was also the first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT. Sand and a lab colleague were the first people to notice that DMT exhibits piezoluminescence: when hardened DMT that had collected in a tray was being chipped out with a hammer and screwdriver in a brightly lit room, the blows emitted massive amounts of colored light. Sand was also the first person to realize that synthetic DMT could be smoked for effect; prior to this, self-experimenters were injecting DMT. This discovery came about by serendipity, when some crumbs of DMT fell onto a hotplate and vaporized, inspiring Sand to try smoking it.

Eventually Sand and Scully were arrested. Sand was told by his lawyer, Michael Kennedy, that their bust influenced the government in their massive effort to combine numerous drug control agencies (the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) under one umbrella with greater power: the Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years (later reduced to 10 years; he was released after 3.5 years); that same year Sand was sentenced to 15 years, but he jumped bail and relocated to Canada, where he set up a new lab. Sand met his current partner, Usha, via an international blind date arranged by a mutual friend who knew that they shared a passionate interest in psychedelics.

Sand was arrested again in 1996 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. His lab there produced assorted psychedelics and, at the time of the bust, had 43 grams of LSD on site. The lab was so impressive that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used it to stage a training video. Samples of drugs seized at the lab tested at over 100% pure,3 which is clearly not possible. Alexander Shulgin has speculated that the government's reference standards must have degraded and been less pure than Sand's illicit product. Sand served time in prison from 1996 through late 2000, first in Canada, and then in the United States in fulfillment of the 22-year-old sentence that he had evaded. While in prison, Sand wrote a manuscript called Psychedelic Secrets, which lays out his thoughts on the best approaches for trippers to take when exploring their minds; he also wrote a guidebook containing his production syntheses techniques for popular psychedelics. (Both books are as yet unpublished.)

After his release, Sand gave a speech at the Mind States II conference in 2001 titled "Reflections on Imprisonment and Liberation as Aspects of Consciousness". He received a standing ovation, and has spoken at numerous events since that time. In his personal exploration of psychedelics, Sand has long been a proponent of psychopharmacological synergy. In 2006 he gave a talk at Burning Man titled "Synergistic Combinations in the Future", describing some of his favorite ways to combine two or more drugs to produce uniquely beneficial effects.

- Jon Hanna

 

[JackARoe]

God Bless Nick Sand. He did a lot of good. I know I ate a lot of his acid. Intent is so important in life. And spreading around a lot of acid with that good intent really is Angelic to me. A great man. And slipped away in his sleep too. Very peaceful is the vision I get.

 

[snagglepuss]

Rip Nick.. A toast to you ..for changing the collective consciousness of so many....the positive impact of such work...which is ...and ....will continue to be..felt for years to come.......:

In the psychedelic comminity.....ive never met you.......but have known you all for forever.....cheers ))))

 

[Crashing]

Is anyone here pregnant? Maybe you'll bore Nick Sand reincarnate.

 

[drseltsam]

I guess he wasn't the hero we deserved but the hero we needed.

Batman jokes aside I see his point to produce drugs for people who want it. Usually the only choice is to go to the mafia, cartels or gangs who kill, torture, and destroy the society by corruption. Just by providing an alternative to this, he was a hero.

 

[Haltia]

He was a true underground hero who devoted his entire life to psychedelics.

I really hope the book sees daylight soon.