I suggest you read these two publications and get your mind blown. Of course my above statement was a bit hyperbole, but there is good reason to believe that the exact same DOM which materialised on Haight-Ashbury streets first materialised in a flask held in Shulgin's hands...
Thanks a lot for posting those articles. By coincidence I read the 2nd article a couple days ago. Hadn't known about the 1st one until I saw your link just a little while ago. It answers questions the first article raised, and creates more questions. The entire history of DOM is murky and odd, the stories illogical and contradictory in places. I've noticed it before but these two stories crystalizes it in my mind.
The biggest contradiction is why, right? It doesn't make sense for Shulgin to leak the info, and despite the articles and the media today portraying him as a revolutionary and a cowboy, that's not what he was. He was a very cautious man and spent most of his life unknown until he wrote the books. A bit of Devil's Advocacy because our popular view of the man was only one facet of his life.
He wasn't a snitch but he worked with the cops identifying samples they collected in the process of sending underground chemists to prison. Identifying those samples, especially back then, was an important work that saves lives but despite the Birkenstocks and the fantastic sense of humor technically he was part of the establishment. He was working to have the drugs accepted and used by the establishment.
He wasn't going to Love-ins or Greateful Dead shows, he was working with therapists creating medicine to repair damaged minds and damaged souls. That was his greatest life's work and it seems strange he would do anything to risk that or add to the growing terror over psychedelics by aiding people who were making his work more difficult not easier. Especially someone like Stanley. Might he have identified samples of Sand's and Scully's work in the process of sending him to prison?
I think it was Ann who changed him and his image. Added pizzaz and color to a hardworking obsessed chemist, they weren't married until the early '80s. After his most creative greatest period. He said that once he had tested a drug and was satisfied he never used it again. At that point he was very old, maybe a little senile, but he sounded sincere. Famous and important people always become more and more distorted over time. The image created by their admirers and books and opponents and media is never who a human being really was.
This 'sample' story reeled me end and I ended up fact checking and writing a lot on this subject, much more than the simple reply I was going to write. If anyone finds any factual errors or better sources please correct me if I'm wrong. I keep editing and adding more, reading some more, and having to edit more. It's becoming an article in it's own right when originally I was looking for answers to a couple questions I had about the effects of DOM.
Shulgin and Stanley have left the temporal plane, these events happened 60 years ago, there's only so much that's verifiable. The rest is speculation which is a bit frutrating. I can't say I'm emotionally or intellectually invested into what happened and what the truth really was. It is a fascinating event because it impacted the lives of a huge number of people, added to the growing moral panic over drugs that was gripping Americans.
It had an impact on how the US and The World percieve and use psychedelic substances. However it isn't that important to a larger number of people and none of us were there and The Drug Wars were already starting. When will the public acknowledge the Drug War is Civil War 2 fought between Americans? Why haven't I gotten my medals and my Purple Heart?
@xdrc , Scully claims in 2020 when he was writing his tell-all life of a mysterious genius chemist-book that all the DOM distributed at the Summer Solstice party in 1967 was given to him by Shulgin. He claims he was personally given 50 grams of DOM and a few notecards containing clues to the synthesis of DOM. Scully, being the genius he was, was told by Stanley to figure out how to make the stuff.
He had it puzzled out by April and managed to crank out 2 lbs by June but he wasn't sure he did it correctly. So he distributed Shulgin's instead. Sands, Stanley, and Shulgin did not confirm this story and Scully stuck to a different version of events until after they were dead. Unfortunately or conviniently.
If Scully had been given 50 grams by Shulgin quite a bit would have been used on re-creating, testing, and distributing samples DOM. If they were making 20 mg doses that's 50000 mg divided into 2500 doses. Yet Scully, in a 2005 interview, claims he handed out 5000 20 mg doses at the Golden Gate solstice party for free. Out of the 2 lbs he made.
When they observed that was too strong a dose they switched to 10 mg tablets. However if they'd had 50 grams of DOM prior how would they not expect the Freak Out? They would have tested the 20 mg tablets first. Another sources quotes Scully as saying hardly any 20 mg tablets were made and that most were 10 mg. If they made them 10 mg that's 5000 doses. A Shulgin dose of 4 mg would make for 12,400 doses. Now Scully claims there were never any 20 mg tablets, they were all 10 mg.
I may be picking on ole' scully but the timeline is also contradictory. With that much DOM I'd expect some testers would have experienced amphetamine psychosis between February and June. The original story was that they were in such a rush to get the batch done in time they didn't bother to do enough testing. The stories place the most likely time of the leak at or around the only public presentation Shulgin gave on DOM. This was January 25th, 1967.
Seems strange they'd need to go to the elaborate trouble of attending a public event when Shulgin could have met them in a deserted parking garage like Deep Throat. There were plenty of other people who knew of DOMs existance it had been discovered and tested by at least 1964. Stanley commenced testing in early April 1967. The FDA had enountered DOM on the east and west coasts by April 1967. All from that original 50 gram sample!
A friend of his dosed May 4th, 20 mg. He spent 3 days living in a world made of butterscotch. When he gave his trip report Stanley was satisfied. He liked people tripping their balls off. It was likely his idea to make the dose 20 mg. An underground newpaper in their April 28th to May 4th printing mentioned that STP lasts four times longer than LSD. On June 7th there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
This got way too long, I invested way too much in something no one will read anyway. My take is that Scully is misremembering things, getting dates and facts confused because he's really old. Or he wants his book to sell and Shulgin is hot right now. We all owe him a debt of gratitude, I hope his book sells well but I doubt the ghost writer and editors will try to stick to facts. I'm certain if Shulgin gave them 50 grams of DOM Stanley would have mentioned it. He enjoyed his drink and coke and liked to tell stories.
I'm surprised the writers of the articles, who are people I respect and like, weren't more critical. I'm getting a headache from looking at dates and contradictions. The story that Shulgin gifted the recipe of DOM to Stanley has been around for so long nobody doubts it. I've always thought it didn't sound right so I'm biased, but I distrust everything. I'd trust Shulgin's word over the others but he said it leaked because of 'shady people at his public presentation on it.' To me that's a shady answer.
There is evidence of Shulgin being showy and spreading his knowledge around, in his books. A different time though. I think it's just as likely someone else leaked it or Shulgin may have asked someone to tip them off. Or maybe multiple chemists were tipped off, that's why there was so much of it on the streets on the east and west coast by May 1967. Or maybe that 50 grams went a long way. I imagine if someone followed the threads, sources, Shulgin's notes, and Dow's records they could find the truth but I've decided I don't care enough..
If you somehow read all this bullshit (or you had the sense to skip down to the music) your reward is a great song about the Summer of Love and STP. This version is called 'The STP song'. By the hippy band that hated the Summer of Love. The Holy Modal Rounders!
This song sounds old timey and contains some old timey terms. The ones I can think of. Figure the rest out yourself.
douchie=heroin
bang the gong=smoking opium
take a whiff=insuffulate up the nose
takeoff king=ripping people off with bunk substances
Novacop=A concept from the Nova Trilogy created by William S Burroughs "The police are focused on "first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival." The Nova Police depend upon the Nova Criminals for existence; if the criminals cease to exist, so do the police.
This makes the addictive substance, the user, the police, the courts, viruses that must continue replicating and spreading to new hosts to survive. The nova cops travel the galaxy, finding new substances they can outlaw in order to create new nova criminals to arrest. Just don't blame it on the bossanova.
They are the first band to use the term psychedelic in a lyric, in 1964.
They were the first jam band.
The 1st band that openly played high, albeit sometimes poorly
Their only 2 songs you might know are 'Do You Want to be a Bird' from the Easy Rounder soundtrack and 'I like boobs a lot' that was a novelty hit on Dr Demento's radio program in the 70s.
There are people that run, not walk, away when you put one of their records on. They're used to clear out bars at closing time. They were ahead of their time.
This is the 'psychedelic verson' of the song. The producer was too high on speed so he cut the song in half and changed it's name. It sounds crazy because they were all high on meth. Except possibly Sam Shepard. This is the complete song, from another album that's a bit more normal and listenable but not nearly as fun because you should hear all the lyrics.
What a great word I'll have to try to remember and use it. Might be a good tagline for future social threads?