Leary went the opposite direction, following fame, chemistry, and Kesey’s Pranksters back to California.
“I had become a nationally recognized symbol of change,” he announced with characteristic modesty.
Leary arrived in San Francisco just in time for the Summer of Love. He became the High Priest of Haight-Ashbury and his newly-minted mantra (“Turn on, tune in, and drop out”13) became a Boomer meme along with his bumper-sticker refrain, “Question Authority!”
On Aug. 24, 1967, Captain Al Hubbard tried to leave Bern, Switzerland, with a suitcase full of LSD. Swiss customs stopped him at the border and confiscated 4,500 ampules. They did not arrest him. European laws forbidding acid were brand new and untested at the time.
Besides, Captain Al—who insisted on being addressed as “Doctor Hubbard”—had the solemn air of a mental health professional. He told Swiss authorities he represented the International Foundation for Advanced Studies, a California medical non-profit that purported to research the effects of psychedelics on human behavior. Purely medicinal. Everything on the up and up.
No dice, said the Swiss. They sent Hubbard back home empty-handed. He’d made the trip many times before, but the halcyon days of Delysid were officially over. Under increasing international pressure, Sandoz quit making LSD in August of 1965. Hubbard’s intercepted cache was among the last of the pharmaceutical company’s dwindling supply.
The previous year, Dr. Hubbard testified before the California state Senate Judiciary Committee, praising the salutary effects of psychedelics. In a final desperate attempt to curb legislation that would outlaw LSD, he pointed to the work of Dr. Humphrey Osmond, Dr. Oscar Janiger, Dr. Sidney Cohen, and dozens of other legitimate physicians who’d shown how LSD could improve mental health.
Hubbard wasn’t alone. No less a national icon than CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt aired an hourlong CBS Reports seen by millions about an alcoholic accountant who took LSD twice at a Maryland mental hospital, then never drank again.14
But televised testimonials, as well as the voices of Hubbard and other acid proponents, drowned beneath the scare headlines of the day: “LSD Happiness Declared Hokum”;15 “Lack of LSD Laws Hinders Police”;16 “Expert Fears LSD Ban—May Prompt Deadly Drug Use.”17
In its March 11, 1966, edition, Time warned of “An Epidemic of ‘Acid Heads’”:
The disease is striking in beachside beatnik pads and in the dormitories of expensive prep schools; it has grown into an alarming problem at UCLA and on the UC campus at Berkeley. And everywhere the diagnosis is the same: psychotic illness resulting from unauthorized, nonmedical use of the drug LSD-25.
Patients with post-LSD symptoms are providing the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute with 10% to 15% of its cases; more are flocking to the university’s general medical center and the County General Hospital. By best estimates, 10,000 students in the University of California system have tried LSD (though not all have suffered detectable ill effects). No one can even guess how many more self-styled ‘acid heads’ there are among oddball cult groups.
Leary’s public antics didn’t help. He stoked growing alarm among the so-called Silent Majority with his “drop out” drumbeat. Pop culture joined the chorus. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” intoned a Beatlific endorsement. When Bob Dylan sang of sons and daughters beyond their parents’ command, those same mothers and fathers blamed Leary’s LSD for wrecking the American Dream.
On Oct. 3, 1966, California and Nevada became the first two states to outlaw LSD. The remaining forty-eight states followed in short order, as did the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Food and Drug Administration. Almost overnight, acid became a global pariah. As Al Hubbard learned when he returned from Switzerland with his empty briefcase, Delysid could no longer be had at any price.
Just as Leary, Ram Dass, and their psychonaut tsunami washed over America, the drug that launched it all seemed to have virtually disappeared. Thus began the rise of underground chemistry.
The closest any unauthorized civilian had come to duplicating the Sandoz elixir was the cookbook efforts of an oddball pair both named Bernard and both busted by the FDA on April 3, 1963. Amateur chemist Bernard Roseman met amateur hypnotist Bernard Copley six years earlier while they were hiking the desolate Joshua Tree barrens east of Palm Springs. They struck it off, tried peyote together under the stars, and became psychonaut evangelists. Like Huxley and Hubbard or Leary and Alpert before them, the Bernards sought the meaning of life from a test tube.
While Roseman struggled to master an American version of Dr. Hofmann’s original formula,18 Copley raised capital and consciousness through his Hypnosophic Institute. In 1962, he published “Hallucinogenic Drugs and Their Application to Extrasensory Perception.”
Meanwhile, Roseman played trial and error with the recipe, missing a step or two in the refining process, but still came up with a crude Delysid facsimile that was sufficiently potent to attract government attention.19 While possessing LSD was not yet a felony, it still fell under Food and Drug Administration regulation. When the Bernards began selling their wares, the FDA took notice.
Roseman and Copley were arrested and put on trial in San Francisco. In the first of a long series of such prosecutions, both were found guilty in what became known as the “LSD Home Brew Case.”20 They appealed, jumped bail and eluded capture for four more years.21
By then, their crimes were small potatoes. Their extradition, re-arrest, and jail time barely made a media ripple. The primitive efforts of the two Bernards had been superseded many times over by acid’s first master craftsman.
While Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a.k.a. Bear, is credited as America’s first great LSD entrepreneur, it was his lesser-known girlfriend Melissa Cargill who actually picked up Albert Hofmann’s torch. Cargill made the elixir; Bear took the credit.
“Melissa studied organic chemistry at Cal and taught Owsley a few rudiments,” recalled Leonard Pickard. “But he didn’t really know any chemistry. He just
