“I discontinued writing to him,” said Pickard.
Watching Bear degenerate from fearless hippie to carnivorous survivalist was a bitter pill to swallow. Leonard had picked up the psychonaut baton where Owsley left off. He’d expected more from the original Acid King, but Bear quit making LSD long before Tim Leary went to jail and Congress declared acid a Schedule One drug. It was 1970, when the “Me” decade began, and enlightened revolution regressed to narcissism.
1. From Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (Vintage, 1998), in which Mullis also extolled his belief in astrology and described an encounter with an extra-terrestrial fluorescent raccoon.
2. Ibid.
3. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory for Scully; Argonne National Laboratory for Pickard.
4. Née Nicholas Francis Hiskey on May 10, 1941, Nick’s parents Clarence and Marcia Hiskey divorced after Clarence, a chemist, was expelled from the Manhattan Project. Marcia gave her son her maiden name: Sand.
5. Psychonaut Arthur Kleps adopted the title Chief Boo Hoo in his 1966 testimony in support of psychedelics before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency: “It is our belief that the sacred biochemicals such as peyote, mescaline, LSD, and cannabis are the true host of God and not drugs at all as the term is commonly understood. We do not feel that the Government has the right to interfere in our religious practice, and that the present persecution of our coreligionists is not only constitutionally illegal but a crude and savage repression of our basic and inalienable rights as human beings.”
6. 2002 report on psychedelic use from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
7. From “Leary Seeks ‘Wise Man of Century’ Title,” Long Beach Independent, Feb. 15, 1968.
8. In 1966, the California Franchise Tax Board granted the Brotherhood exempt status.
9. Griggs, a.k.a. The Farmer, a.k.a. The Hippie Messiah, was a small-time motorcycle gangster until he dropped acid and evolved into the enlightened godfather and CEO of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. He died aspirating his own vomit following an overdose of Swiss psilocybin crystals on Aug. 3, 1969.
10. Gissen took Owsley’s last name after bearing his son, Starfinder.
11. At a June 18, 1971, press conference, Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.”
12. His campaign slogan “Come together, join the party,” inspired John Lennon’s “Come Together” which became Leary’s campaign song. His war with Reagan extended into his Presidency when Leary mocked Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” anti-drug slogan with a bumper sticker that advised, “Just say know.”
13. “Billy Hitchcock knew a friendly Bahamian banker who was willing to fly to Manhattan and pick up Bear’s cash, open an account for him under the name of Robin Goodfellow and fly back to the Bahamas to deposit the cash for him,” said Scully.
14. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Investors Overseas Services, a global money laundromat founded by con man Bernard Cornfeld to aid US expatriates in avoiding income tax.
15. Credited with being the first psychonaut to extract oil from hashish, Stark ran the Belgian lab with the same attention to the bottom line as Hitchcock. With a net worth of $1,400 in 1964, Stark’s income purportedly rose to $1.2 million four years later when he vanished permanently into the acid underground. For decades, Leonard Pickard operated on the false assumption that Stark was a CIA plant, working both sides of the LSD revolution. According to Scully, he was nothing more than a very clever con man. He wasn’t even a chemist. Psychonaut Tord Svenson made the Belgian acid. Stark just sold it.
In 2011, Pickard obtained Stark’s DEA file through a Freedom of Information request and debunked any romance surrounding the Brotherhood renegade. Italian police arrested him in 1975 for conspiring with fascists. According to Italian court records, he entered the Middle East drug world in order to infiltrate and inform upon European terrorist groups. Sentenced to fourteen years, he continued to associate with the Red Brigades in prison while maintaining his CIA contacts. Released on appeal in 1979, he fled Italy and died in San Francisco of heart disease on May 8, 1984.
16. Linkletter held a press conference the day after his daughter died, declaring she “wasn’t a suicide. She was not herself. She was murdered by the people who manufacture and distribute LSD.”
17. Patty Hearst and Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald also invoked acid as the underlying demon in their notorious crimes.
IV.
BY OCTOBER OF 1971, a federal task force secretly targeted Nick Sand and Tim Scully for tax evasion, drug sales, and acid manufacture. They became part of a larger probe aimed at taking down the entire Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
But Nick and Tim were no longer a team. Scully had given up chemistry for psychology, devoting his share of the Sunshine profits to researching the emerging field of biofeedback.
Sand remained devoted to the psychedelic cause. In April of 1972, he moved to St. Louis. Under the alias Leland H. Jordan, he bought a building in which he founded Signet Research and Development. In addition, Nick and his new partner, girlfriend/chemist Judy Shaughnessy, rented an aging manse in the nearby suburb of Fenton, where they set up a small lab in the basement to augment the larger one at Signet.
That summer, investigators drilled into Nick’s safety deposit box at his bank back in San Francisco. They found a stash of STP. They also subpoenaed his tax attorney to testify before a grand jury investigating the Brotherhood. The attorney, Peter Buchanan, tipped off Scully, Hitchcock and Sand, but only Tim and Billy fled the country.
“We left to avoid the possibility of being
