The Bear Research Group was all about high yield and purity. Owsley was equal parts perfectionist, huckster, and sorcerer. When standard flasks and beakers weren’t sufficient, he hired a scientific glassblower to customize. He applied new coolant processes to pinpoint temperatures. He anguished over each batch like an expectant father.
Simultaneously, he consulted fortunetellers for guidance on where and when to harvest the goods. Some believed Stanley dispatched Scully and Douglas to Colorado in the winter of 1966 because newly-elected Governor Ronald Reagan swore he’d rid California of LSD. Not so, according to Bear’s widow Rhoney Gissen Stanley. In her 2012 memoir, she said Bear Research secretly moved to Denver because the purest acid in the highest yields could only be produced on the east side of the Rockies during Aquarius ( Jan. 20—Feb. 18).
“It is true that we often used the I Ching as an Oracle and that we sometimes had horoscopes drawn up,” conceded Scully, though he held that the Denver move was precipitated by Reagan, not Aquarius.
Scully and Douglas started scouting a new location in Seattle, then Idaho and Wyoming, before finally leasing a house a few blocks from the Denver Zoo. They set up a sterile, dim-lit lab in the basement, per Owsley and Cargill’s specifications: vacuum pumps, goosenecked flasks, yellow “bug lights” to minimize ultraviolet rays, dry-ice deep freeze, glass encased precision scales, chromatography column. . . .
The result of their painstaking efforts was 14,000 tabs of Monterey Purple, an Owsley commemorative readied just in time for the Monterey Pop Festival, officially kicking off the Summer of Love.
When Owsley and his growing entourage returned in lysergic triumph to California, Scully and Douglas stayed behind. During their time alone in Denver, Scully worked up a batch of STP, a psychoactive first created in 1963 by Dow Chemical alumnus Alexander Shulgin. Combined with further shipments of acid, the Denver deliveries kept San Francisco loaded through the Summer of Love and well into the fall.
But by December, Bear’s remarkable run hit a wall. Undercover state and federal narcs descended upon Owsley’s East Bay pill factory. It was there that Bear’s troops converted the Scully/Douglas concoctions into tablets: 350,000 hits of acid and 1,500 doses of STP. Melissa Cargill and Rhoney Gissen were among the Bear Research associates caught in the dragnet. Buck naked except for his walrus mustache, Owsley himself was hauled away in handcuffs on Christmas Eve.
Though the Colorado contingent remained at large, Bear’s bust spooked Douglas. He left Scully to break down and store the Denver lab. Soldiering on, Scully looked for a new backer. He found his angel in Billy Hitchcock. Leary’s ex-landlord put up $12,000 and Scully was back in business. No longer Bear’s apprentice or Douglas’s partner, he needed a new sidekick. He would find him in Nick Sand.
The Brooklyn-born son of a Soviet spy, Nicholas Sand4 took his first lysergic journey in August of 1964 at an ashram in upstate New York. Staring at heaven, he sat in a nude lotus position, perspiring before an open bonfire.
“I was floating in this immense black space,” he recalled. “I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ And suddenly a voice came through my body, and it said, ‘Your job on the planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.’”
Obeying the bonfire, Sand returned to Brooklyn, divorced his wife, set up a pharmacy in the attic of his mother’s brownstone, and named his brave new enterprise Bell Perfume Labs.
Like Scully, Sand was self-taught. Besides mescaline, he isolated DMT in his bathtub and found it jolted into a richer euphoria if smoked, not injected—his first major contribution to psychonaut lore.
Three years older than Scully, Sand graduated from Brooklyn College in 1966 with a degree in sociology and anthropology. Several pilgrimages to Millbrook ended that career path. After consulting Alpert and Leary, Sand adopted a new goal: commando in the psychedelic army.
Before his own reincarnation as Ram Dass, Alpert named Nick official alchemist of the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, whose priests—known as Boo Hoos—celebrated psychedelic mass.5 Not to be outdone, Leary created his own church and called it the League for Spiritual Discovery. Again, Sand was official alchemist.
Meanwhile back in Brooklyn, complaints rolled in from the neighbors about the smell emanating from Marcia Sand’s attic. At his mother’s urging, Nick moved to a dental supply building across the street from the Brooklyn Hall of Justice.
Throughout acid’s peak year of 1967, Owsley remained the bodhisattva of LSD. Inevitably, Nick set out to pay his respects. He put Bell Perfume on wheels. Disguised as a meat-delivery van, his tricked-out camper featured a pot-bellied stove, a rooftop exhaust, and a half-million dollars’ worth of glass tubing, chemicals, gizmos, and flasks.
On April Fool’s Day, Sand and David Mantell, another budding psychonaut, blew past a border check point as they entered Colorado on their way to the West Coast. Sheriff J. J. Johnson chased them down and fined them $50 each. On principle, Sand objected. He and Mantell were rewarded with ten days in the Moffat County Jail. While they cooled their heels, the sheriff searched their van. He later claimed he’d found enough psychedelics to dose every man, woman, and child in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.
By the time the feds got wind, Sand and Mantell had vanished with no forwarding address. They continued on to California, where Sand turned Bell Perfume into D&H Custom Research and opened for business in an industrial zone south of San Francisco.
Mantell rented a ranch in Cloverdale, two hours north. Over the next several months, Nick honed his skills, creating STP, MDA and further batches of his eminently smokable DMT, which he sold through D&H. He still had neither the expertise, glassware, nor the ingredients to tackle LSD.
But Tim Scully did. He’d heard plenty about Nick. Though younger, Scully was far more experienced. Nick understood and accepted his junior role. Master and student. Mentor and tenderfoot. Abbott and Costello. Over time, their roles reversed, but Scully and
