The Bhagwan’s first order of business was to upgrade the ranch’s rolling stock. The first year alone, he acquired a fleet of twenty-one Rolls Royces for the use of his 540 closest disciples who, like the Pravasi family, lived rent-free on the ranch. From his brand-new Rajneesh Neo-Sanyas International Commune headquarters, the serene soothsayer spread good life gospel through more than four hundred meditation centers10 that he established in store fronts and shopping malls around the world.
The good life didn’t last. Rajneeshpuram imploded about the same time as Nick’s marriage. In 1985, both the media and IRS auditors questioned the religious exemption Rajneesh claimed in his failure to pay taxes. At the same time, Judy questioned Nick’s ongoing affair with a German sannyasin named Varuni. Neither the cult nor the marriage survived.
Judy and Sorrel remained in Oregon. Nick and Varuni high-tailed it once more across the Canadian border. Facing arson, attempted murder, tax evasion, and drug smuggling charges, the Bhagwan sought asylum in twenty-one countries, was refused, and reluctantly returned to finish out his days at his ashram in Pune.
Nick may have lost faith in Judy and Rajneesh, but not in neuro-pharmacology. He and his newest consort resumed farming magic mushrooms, branched out into hydroponic weed and eventually shucked it all for gold mining. A legal skirmish involving the latter nearly exposed Ted Parody to be Nick Sand, so he changed names once more and left Canada.
For two years in the late 1980s, Nick was a man without a country or a woman. After Varuni left him, he began an odyssey that took him through Mexico, Belize, and parts south. He returned to Canada as David Roy Shepard and resumed cannabis cultivation, working out a process to extract THC oil.
From there, he moved on to manufacture virtually every other known psychedelic as well as a few unknowns. He settled down with Gina “Usha” Raetze, his newest new old lady, and they set up a newer, bigger, better lab in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. It quickly became a factory, grinding out more and better LSD, DMT, MDA, and MDMA than Leary or the Brotherhood ever could have hallucinated.
When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police finally busted David Roy Shepard on September 26, 1996, they arrested him in possession of eleven pounds of DMT, eight pounds of MDMA, eleven pounds of MDA, five-and-a-half pounds of ergotamine tartrate, and about one-and-a-half ounces of LSD. It took authorities three months to unravel his true identity.
1. Members included US Customs, the State Department, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the California and US Departments of Justice, among others.
2. California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; DEA did not yet exist.
3. A gallery of twenty-six photos.
4. Shortly before his death in 1999, Nixon aide John Ehrlichman told author Dan Baum that the War on Drugs had been nothing more than a re-election political ploy:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hip-pies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.”
5. Dr. Lester Friedman, a forty-four-year-old chemistry professor at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, was also tried, but on a lesser charge of advising Sand and Scully on the making of LSD. He was acquitted, but subsequently convicted of perjury and did six months in prison.
6. From 1955 through 1975, the Army tested a wide range of psychedelics on soldiers at its Edgewood Arsenal Medical Laboratories in Maryland. Dosing hundreds of enlisted volunteers in top-secret studies, Chemical Corps physicians recorded the effects of LSD and its incapacitating cousin, benzilate (BZ), which induced hallucinations and was weaponized during Vietnam.
7. Sand’s confederate David Mantell was captured and convicted after the Scully-Sand trial. He served two years.
8. In his autobiography, Rajneesh Chandra Mohan maintained he was born in his first incarnation seven hundred years ago in the mountains of western India and lived to be 106 years old. In his most recent incarnation, he was born Dec. 11, 1932, to a family of cloth merchants in the town of Kuchwada. He was born again on March 21, 1953, when the University of Jabalpur undergrad became Bhagwan (the Blessed One) Shree Rajneesh. He grew a waist-length beard and kept his unruly hair in place with a knit stocking cap. His robes were white and his eyes either enchanting or Rasputin, depending upon who beheld them. Even through his thick Indian accent, his English bore a strong lisp. The “enlightened master” had asthma and a bad back most of his life. He died Jan. 19, 1990, of heart disease, having been reborn once again the previous year—this time as a Buddhist named Osho. He was fifty-eight.
9. Each follower carried a “mala” with them at all times: a wooden necklace of 108 beads and a portrait of Rajneesh.
10. Meditation and growth programs such as “Rajneesh Tai Chi Intensive” and “Rajneesh Dynamic Bodywork” ran from $90 to $130 per session. Books, tapes, posters, ashtrays, cigarette lighters, bottle openers, and other items were priced more economically. Nearly thirty years after his death, Rajneesh’s meditation centers have increased to over 750 in sixty countries.
V.
“THERE WERE SIX,” SAID LEONARD Pickard.
The half-dozen chemists to whom Leonard attached himself descended from a different tradition, parallel to that of Nick Sand and Tim Scully, Dr. Leary and the Bear, but with zero publicity. The Six learned from the mistakes of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, though none among the Brothers ever
