The Sunshine boys, however, stood to lose their freedom. Regardless, they remained unrepentant. Sand declined to testify. When Scully took the stand, he bluntly told federal Judge Samuel Conti that the only thing he was guilty of was wanting to “turn on the world.”
He also maintained he and Sand hadn’t even been making LSD. The Orange Sunshine confiscated by the DEA, he said, was actually an analog called ALD-52. Although ALD-52 induced hallucinations similar to acid, it had not yet been classified illegal under federal law. He and Sand always tried to stay “one step ahead of the government,” he proudly told the jury.
Pickard had to know more.
“There was a break,” Scully recalled, “and I walked out into the hall, and Leonard introduced himself as a fellow chemist.”
The tall, clean-shaven golden boy with the winning grin and haystack head of hair bore no resemblance at all to Scully’s typical Haight Asbury hippie fan. Scully shook Pickard’s hand, then gave him his full attention. Within moments, it was clear that they spoke the same language. Scully introduced Pickard to Sand and another friendship was born. Speaking in the oblique manner he’d developed since he first stormed the psychonaut fraternity, Pickard offered his services.
“From my notes of the era,” he said, “people were going under-cover, so to speak, to tease out the government’s intent on Nicky and Tim, playing whatever game would yield useful data, including identifying the friendly opposition, their cars, surveillance methods, the questions they asked. A kind of reverse investigation.”
Eternally fond of psychonaut subterfuge, Pickard made up code to throw off eavesdroppers. Counterintelligence was known as pulling an “Ivy Mike.” The Sunshine boys shared his paranoia: the DEA lurked everywhere.
“I recall Tim got into a jam once because he popped out of a car, knowing the opposition would be following him,” said Pickard. “He snapped their photo down a one-way street, then circulated the images.”
Under the headline “Hunting the Nark Can Be Quite a Lark,” the Berkeley Barb published Scully’s embarrassing photos of fumbling narcs.
“Judge Conti was not amused,” said Scully.
Aiming for irony, Pickard handed Scully a lapel pin worn by soldiers of the US Army Chemical Warfare Group.6 To the uninitiated, the emblem seemed to be a crossed set of Florence flasks that resembled bronzed testicles.
“The golden insignia was not a flask and test tube design, but crossed retorts: an ancient alchemical distillation glassware,” explained Pickard. “I owned several in my early teens.”
Scully understood the subtext immediately.
“He was trying to express some brotherhood of underground chemists,” he said.
For psychonauts, the irony went even deeper.
“In the insignia, the retorts cross over a hexagon representing the basic organic chemical structure of benzene, from which most organics are built,” Pickard explained. “That includes LSD, mescaline, phenethylamines, and thousands of other medicines.”
Months later, Pickard similarly cemented his kinship with Sand.
“Nick and I spent quite a few days together after his trial,” he said. “Nicky saw a ring I was wearing and asked to have it. It was heavy gold and bore an inscription of the Egyptian god of medicine. I gave it to him as a talisman.”
A talisman, as it happens, that didn’t work very well. The trial ended in February with guilty verdicts. Judge Conti sentenced the pair on March 8, 1974.
“Call it what you will: the psychedelic movement, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which sold some of this LSD, or the Hells Angels,” raged Judge Conti. “It all ends in the degradation of mankind and society. I think deterrence should be given preference in determining sentences, or else you are going to see anarchy in this country.”
The judge made examples of the Sunshine boys. Despite, or perhaps because of his righteous indignity in the courtroom, Scully got twenty years.
“I can say with 20/20 hindsight that if you’re guilty you should never get on the witness stand,” he said.
Nick Sand’s apparent reward for keeping silent was a lesser sentence of fifteen years. For cooperating with the government, Hitchcock was fined a mere $20,000 and his five-year sentence was suspended.
Sand and Scully spent much of 1974 behind bars at McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington. They eventually made bail while their attorneys pursued appeals.
Sand married Judy Shaughnessy in the meantime, moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, and began studying to become an operating-room assistant. Scully resumed his biofeedback/computer business at his new home near Mendocino. Neither risked a return to underground chemistry.
To demonstrate his continuing support, Pickard put $5,000 on his American Express card for a rare lithograph by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher. He gave it to Scully, who sold it to defray his legal expenses.
“American Express appeared later on and cut my card in half with a big pair of shears,” said Pickard.
Sand ran low on legal funds too. As partial payment to his attorney, Michael Kennedy, Nick asked Leonard to help him move an 800-pound red agate Nepalese Buddha to Kennedy’s San Francisco office.
Neither Buddha nor the Escher lithograph helped. They still lost. In rejecting the Sunshine boys’ 1976 appeal, the Ninth Circuit excused the fledgling DEA’s missteps:
The drug case involved laboratories in California, Missouri, and possibly in Europe. The tax case involved the transfer of cash from the United States through secret accounts in the Bahamas to other secret accounts in Switzerland. That government agents failed to grasp quickly the existence or scope of the enterprise is hardly surprising.
Tim Scully returned to McNeil Island on March 15, 1977, intent on making the best of a bad deal. While a public defender continued his appeals, Scully’s interests switched permanently to biofeedback. He earned a PhD in psychology behind prison walls and entered the Internet Age well-grounded in computer technology.
“One of the least productive things a person can do is assume the victim stance,” he said recently. “At the time, when my friend Don Douglas and I chose to make LSD, we were keenly aware
