People really should read
LSD Purity: Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness by Bruce Eisner 1977 Originally published in High Times
Source : Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – MAPS
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In the late 1940s, psychologists began experimenting with LSD as a "psychotomimetic" drug - one that causes the taker temporarily to mime the condition of psychosis. Some experimental subjects, however, and eventually some modern mystics like Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts discovered in LSD a shortcut to the ecstasy and egolessness of nirvana. LSD was recognized as the switch that turned on the clear light of the void.
Today's acid trip, however, is far more likely to resemble a live TV broadcast in runny color from the from seat of a roller coaster or a scene from The Exorcist. The decline in psychedelic quality over the years, which resembles the degeneration of Christianity and Russian Communism, has been a consequence of greed and opportunism on the part of manufactures and distributors. They offer to substitute immediate sensory gratifications for the original spiritual ideals. But the history of underground chemistry is also one of ingenuity and courage though influenced by haste and amateurishness. Its is the story of how LSD-25, the most powerful and spiritual molecule known to humanity became a "street drug."
Originally all LSD was made by Sandoz Pharmaceutical company, which had developed the chemical and hoped to market it commercially. It came in glass ampules filled with blue liquid, or small tablets in bottles with pharmaceutical labels specifying strength.
With underground LSD use came underground manufacture. The first recorded underground laboratory was set up by Bernard Roseman in 1962. Roseman, who now lives in seclusion in Oregon, was later arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle 62,000 doses of LSD. In his LSD and the Age of the Mind, he has this account of the first manufacture of LSD of less than pharmaceutical quality:
"I have already invested a year - on and off - and all the money I could save on this project, and I was at the point of admitting defeat. At this time, I was naturally reading everything I could lay my hands upon about ergot alkaloids. I stumbled upon a few articles that at first seemed quite unrelated to LSD, but they were logical and worth a try; because by comparison the process was exceedingly simple, compared to Hofmann's monumental preparation.
I obtained new starting material and worked it up to the point I was sure was correct, where I had d-lysergic acid monohydrate, quite useless by itself but the prerequisite for making LSD-25 by any system. The rest of my ordered materials arrived and I was ready to proceed. After so many repeated failures, I couldn't accept the possibility that this few-day procedure would work.
I went ahead nevertheless, though pessimistically, so that my seemingly apparent failure would not bother me too much. I worked with extreme care, protecting anything from heat and light. At the last step, when I was recrystallizing the few grams I had obtained, I was filtering the crystals off by vacuum and using ether. When all the ether evaporated , the substance started to absorb moisture from the atmosphere and was turning black before my eyes. All my work was gone: I stood there shocked unable to move for a moment. My hands instinctively grabbed an alcohol bottle and I pored it over the black decomposed material hoping to salvage something. I separated it with water and disheartedly took the black mess home. All night I tossed and turned and dreamt horrible, unrelated dreams.
At the first crack of dawn, I jumped out of bed, grabbed the flask from the refrigerator, poured a teaspoonful and drank it down. I went back to bed and turned on Wagner's Parsifal. Minutes passed by and nothing seemed to happen. I had psychologically prepared myself for failure, so I just closed my eyes and lay back an listened to the wonderful sounds of Wagner. In my concentration, I failed to notice that the music was getting slowly louder and instead of just my ears hearing, all my senses seemed to encompass the sound., and instead of hearing the music - I was the music!
Beautiful, soft colors emerged and exploded as climates of tone were achieved. An immediate understanding of the composer's intentions was revealed to me; I was being taken on a heavenly excursion into the world of pure sound and emotion. All at once, I sprang up with joy. I was in the state of LSD - my own LSD which I had made. I was deliriously happy and proud of my success."
LSD is a translucent crystal; this was a black mess. Thus, the first underground LSD was also the first impure batch, and its distribution may, somewhere, have incurred the first unfavorable consumer reaction.
By 1965, use had increased sharply. Most acid at this time came in sugar cubes dropped with liquid Sandoz or some type of underground LSD. What percentage of the material was Sandoz is left to future determination. Augustus Stanley Owsley III, unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66.
Owsley's fellow alchemist, Tim Scully, admitted to me that the 1965 batch was impure, but claims that Owsley and he perfected a purification process in 1966. Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (Purple Haze) and white (White Lightning) of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product.
Timothy Leary, who realized that impurities were a threat to the spreading psychedelic revolution, uttered prophetic words of warning at a Senate committee hearing in 1966, in exchange with Teddy Kennedy:
Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts: "What is it in the quality that you are frightened about?"
Dr. Leary: "We do not want amateur or black-market sale or distribution of LSD."
Senator Kennedy: "Why not?"
Dr. Leary: "Or the barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor-"
Senator Kennedy: "This is not responsive. As to LSD, why do you not want it?"
Dr. Leary: "On possession?"
Senator Kennedy: "Why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and distribution? Is it because it is dangerous?"
Dr. Leary: "Because you do not know what you are getting..."
Despite Leary's warning, LSD was made illegal on October 16, 1966.
Owsley acid was the first large-scale commercialization of LSD. There were other smaller LSD laboratories before Owsley, and there were scores of laboratories that put out LSD at the same time that Owsley did. Some were making LSD of a purer form; the majority made it much worse.
After Owsley was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California, his protege Scully set up a laboratory with Nicholas Sand, another alchemist long involved in the psychedelic scene. They manufactured a quantity of ALD-52 - a cousin to LSD, which they called Sunshine - in large crumbly orange tablets of 270 micrograms or so. [Erowid Note: Though it was claimed at the time that they were producing ALD-52, we now believe that they were, in fact, producing LSD.]
In the spring of 1969, Ron Stark, then a chemist with a European LSD factory and now a fugitive, allegedly began supplying underground acid to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Since the Brotherhood was also, by this time, distributing ALD-52, and since both drugs were tabbed into identical pills (except for a few early blue tablets of ALD-52), many people didn't realize that there was more than one kind of Sunshine. Many counterfeit versions soon appeared on the market, most of which were impure, according to Scully.
Sand and Scully ceased manufacturing, but Stark went on to produce over 10 kilograms (over 35 million doses in crystal form) of what became the famous Orange Sunshine - the last of which actually appeared in large red and green tablets called "Christmas Acid."
With the Sunshine boom came increased reports of side effects. In addition to stimulant reactions and symptoms akin to those of strychnine poisoning being reported, there seemed to be something missing in the spiritual dimensions of this new underground acid. Michael Hollinshead, who gave Leary his first taste of acid in 1960, later wrote in The Man Who Turned on the World:
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid...
My evaluation had nothing to do with the notion that a wholly synthetic drug produced a wholly synthetic experience - the intellectual response - but was based on direct, first-hand experience (about 30 trips with street acid in all). And in each session I felt that there was something it lacked - it was too "electric," too "speedy" and too "mind-shattering." The earlier clarity of "insight" which I had obtained via the Sandoz acid was replaced by confusion, brokenness, words and worlds thrown into absolute dismemberment, or even absolute chaos, though, I must add, often coupled with a feeling that I can only describe as "sublime inflation," a super abundance of emotive energy, but it could not signify more a passionate flame and less the life-giving sun.
