Despite Billy Hitchcock’s cash infusion, Colorado got too hot at the beginning of 1968. Citing illegal search and seizure, the courts ordered the return of Sand’s truck, but the feds had taken notice and were closing in.
In February, Scully rented a house a few miles southeast of his first lab. While he scrounged for ingredients in Europe, Scully left his girlfriend in charge. On June 23, 1968, the landlord stopped by. The lawn was brown. No one answered the door. When he let himself in, the stench nearly flattened him. Assuming the worst, he reported a rotting corpse to the cops.
Scully’s girlfriend had been in California. Upon her return, police arrested her, confiscated $25,000 in lab equipment, and demanded to know where Scully was. Now officially a fugitive, Tim laid low after he returned from Europe.
In the fall, he and Sand joined forces in California wine country. There, they cooked themselves into the history books in the basement of a remote farmhouse near the Napa Valley town of Windsor.
“Nick had been distributing the STP he made at D&H Custom Research through the Hells Angels,” said Scully.
No more Angels, he told his new partner. Hard drugs and violence did not mix with acid. Sand agreed and the Damon and Pythias of LSD began baking their first batch in March of 1969: four million doses. Their eventual goal was 750 million—enough acid to foment an insurrection. They called their newest brew Orange Sunshine. All they needed was a peaceful method for getting it to the masses.
Between 1966 and 1970, the number of psychonauts in the US rose sixfold, from 168,000 to 956,000.6
“A great breakthrough in evolution is underway, a drastic change in the way men think,” Tim Leary preached on Valentine’s Day, 1968. “With psychedelic drugs, we are learning to use all of our brain, not just the cortical fraction in which our consciousness is centered.”
Furthermore, he boasted, “We have dedicated men who manufacture LSD and other psychedelics, and release them under controlled circumstances in given areas to see what will happen. One million doses were released recently in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco—the most ever released in one place at one time so far, but there are men now who can release up to ten million doses at a time.”7
These unidentified Samaritans were members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a cheeky title that evolved out of Leary’s smug love of irony. Like his League for Spiritual Discovery, the Brotherhood was a New Age religious order that laid claim to First Amendment protection. As such, not only did the loose-knit cabal of beach bums and bikers claim psychedelics as sacraments; their organization was also tax exempt.8
The Brotherhood operated out of a Laguna Beach bong shop under the leadership of a charismatic ex-con named John Griggs.9 Over time, the hemp denizens of Laguna’s Mystic Arts World emporium became an affluent cult that funded itself chiefly through acid sales. By 1968, the Brotherhood was rich enough to afford its own mountain retreat near the Southern California resort community of Idyllwild. Around the same time, despite Leary’s boasts of a limitless supply, its primary source of LSD dried up.
“(Leary)’s living in a different world than we do,” said Lt. Norman H. Currie, narcotics chief of the San Francisco Police Department. “There has been no indication of an upsurge in LSD. In fact, we’re not turning up much more than six months ago, and a lot less than a year ago.”
Following his Christmas Eve bust in 1967, Augustus Owsley Stanley III had been effectively neutralized. He continued fighting the good fight, but it was ultimately a losing battle. While legal fees drained his coffers, narcs followed him everywhere. Cooking acid became impossible.
“To Bear, the manufacture of LSD was the right of personal domain and a victimless crime,” said his newest old lady, Rhoney Gissen Stanley.10 “It was only after he was in prison that his viewpoint changed. It was sad to see him let it go. Prison made him a bona fide outlaw and an enemy of his country.”
Owsley was not suited for confinement. During his first week in jail, another prisoner broke his nose. He could disguise himself all he wanted, but with each court appearance he was fast becoming as notorious as Tim Leary. Owsley envied the anonymity of Scully and Sand. The slow defanging of the Bear left an acid vacuum that his two apprentices were more than happy to fill. The Brotherhood needed product; Tim and Nick gave them Sunshine.
At the end of the sixties, LSD resurged not only in Lt. Currie’s territory, but all across the globe. Before the feds figured it out, the Brotherhood created an international network that stretched from Maui to Marseilles, and the Sunshine twins—Tim and Nick—fed the pipeline with the finest acid ever made. The Brotherhood augmented its acid exports with a flourishing marijuana and hashish import business, inventing new and creative ways to dodge customs: packing hollowed-out surfboards; loading tire wells, mufflers and gas tanks with product; flying drugs in with Cessnas; swallowing loaded balloons to be harvested later from the toilet bowl.
But the tide slowly turned in the government’s favor. Richard Nixon followed Ronald Reagan’s law and order example when he entered the White House. Like California’s antidrug crusader (who’d been instrumental in bringing down Owsley), Nixon declared war on drugs11 in general, and Tim Leary in particular.
The day after Christmas, 1968, Laguna Beach police busted Leary, wife Rosemary, daughter Susan, and son Jack as they cruised past Brotherhood headquarters. By his own count, Leary had been previously arrested a dozen times: “My daughter has been arrested eight times, my son six, my wife twice. . . .”
Cops found two roaches that Leary swore were planted. They impounded his car and arrested the entire family.
Three years earlier, the Learys had been similarly rousted crossing the border at Laredo, Texas. Susan, then a minor, hid Rosemary’s cannabis in her underwear.
