Described in an early Los Angeles Times profile as “a drifter, a dapper ladies’ man and a professional student,” Owsley found both his calling and partner at UC Berkeley in 1963. He was twenty-eight. Cargill was twenty-four.
By then, Owsley had married twice, fathered two children, spent time in a Washington DC psych ward, had been honorably discharged from the Air Force, and dropped in and out of engineering courses at the University of Virginia, Los Angeles City College, and Berkeley, where he lasted a single semester.
He wasn’t dumb. Like Pickard and Hubbard, Owsley had been identified early by teachers and his patrician parents as a scientific prodigy. His father, a District of Columbia apparatchik, described Owsley as “emotionally unbalanced, but has a brilliant mind.” His boy just couldn’t seem to get on with authority. When challenged, Bear would go silent, become elusive, and, if pushed, snarl, brood, and withdraw—hence his nickname. The tips of two fingers lost in a childhood accident added to the illusion. Bear had no sense of humor, a hairy chest, and a claw for a right hand.
Owsley followed closely the trial of the two Bernards and got his first taste of acid from a friend of a friend of Douglas George. The Aerojet physicist’s grody green goo might be impure, but it had enough Technicolor kick to turn Owsley on before Tim Leary ever uttered his infamous slogan. He and Cargill shared Leary’s calling: they tuned in and dropped out of Berkeley together. The couple quietly plotted to enlighten Boomers with their own version of Delysid.
They set up a lab in the bathroom of their Berkeley rental and tinkered with Dr. Hofmann’s original formula. Owsley scouted chemical supply houses for the raw ingredients while he networked with Ken Kesey, the Pranksters, and an emerging Berkeley blues band called the Warlocks.22 For her part, Cargill—misidentified ever after as Owsley’s “female lab assistant”—perfected their alchemy.
Berkeley cops first busted the couple’s bathroom lab in 1965.23 They were charged with making methamphetamine. Chemical analysis proved they weren’t speeding at all, and LSD was still a year away from being outlawed. The court forced police to return their labware, after which they decamped to Southern California.
There, Owsley set Cargill up in another bathroom in another rental near Cal State University, Los Angeles. They began stockpiling raw ingredients under the name “Bear Research Group” and sold the finished product by mail order. A blue Owsley tab the size of an aspirin was imprinted with a Batman caricature and cost $5 a hit.
“Owsley saw his role as a psychedelic Prometheus,” recalled Rhoney Gissen.
His standby “old lady” in a three-way with Cargill, Gissen joined the family business after Bear dosed her with a drop of liquid LSD. He carried a Murine squeeze bottle with him at all times, wielding it like a wand among the uninitiated. Like the two wives he’d divorced before LSD, both Gissen and Cargill would each bear him a child. They remained close long after Bear left the country and the planet.
Following the example of Leary’s hubris, Owsley advertised himself and his wonderful acid through word of mouth from his home base in LA, and made a fortune in the process. By the time Owsley moved back to Berkeley, the LAPD estimated Bear Research had sold or given away ten million tabs—an exaggeration very much in tune with the times.
Bear and Cargill didn’t explode onto the national stage until 1967, the same year Bonnie and Clyde was nominated for an Academy Award. By then, the Bonnie and Clyde of acid had been transubstantiating rye fungus for over three years. Though few outside their circle of Grateful Deadheads knew their names, many knew their brand. Owsley acid was of such purity that connoisseurs still enunciate the most famous batches in hushed tones: Purple Dragon, Blue Cheer, White Lightning. . . .
Once the substance was outlawed, however, Owsley fell silent and never posed for pictures again. One of his final photos, shot in late 1967 in the hallway outside an Oakland federal courtroom, depicts a muscular, mustachioed middleweight in buckskins and ponytail rushing away from photographers. Three months earlier, he gave his name as Robert Thompson to an inquisitive reporter from the San Francisco Examiner. Owsley “is as elusive as a seal,” reporter Mary Crawford wrote in a breathless account headlined “Exclusive Chat with Acid King”:
He has an unlisted phone number and he frequently moves to keep his address unknown. But the Examiner has found that he is living in “retirement” in a charming brick cottage in Berkeley, a pad he shares with his “old lady” Melissa Cargill, an attractive, plump brunette who wears thick lensed owlish glasses. . . .
The barefooted, bare chested man who answered the door at Owsley’s house (said), “Owsley is out of the country and he won’t be back. Owsley moved out of here last spring.”
Owsley’s switch from Acid King to acid phantom reflected a fearful era. LSD was only one symbol of an ever-widening generation gap, but the drug’s mind-blowing, myth-exploding properties made acid a most convenient scapegoat.
The times were indeed a-changing, but more so for psychonauts, it seemed, than for obedient heirs of the middle class—and not necessarily in a good way.
1. Published the previous year by the London Daily Telegraph, Hofmann shared the top spot with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Runners-up included philanthropist George Soros, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and South African statesman Nelson Mandela.
2. First developed from the peyote cactus in 1897 by German pharmacolo-gist Arthur Heffter, mescaline became a staple of early psychiatry, along with psilocybin mushrooms. After discovering LSD, Dr. Hofmann synthesized both mescaline and psilocybin in the laboratory.
3. Both theories were exploited early and often by Hollywood. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) brought hallucination to the big screen while The Manchurian Candidate (1962) exploited the truth serum fantasy. Delysid made its screen debut in Vincent Price’s medicine cabinet in a
