At the Vancouver Museum there were rock posters on the wall. I looked for one with the Loading Zone. The poster with the Zone playing with the Who, in particular because I was in Canada. Peter Townsend was a follower of Meher Baba, as was I since 1967. My friend James Taylor was a leading follower of Baba, and found the Victorian in Oakland where we lived with the Zone. James and his childhood friends, were members of Brotherhood of Eternal Love who manufactured and distributed LSD all over the world. I was there when Tim loaded up a batch and headed to the airport to take a jet to London. Tim and Peter were chased thru the Berkeley Hills by rednecks. I was introduced to Tim Scully by my patron, Tim’s brother. Nancy dated Owsley and went on a double date with Christine and Nick Sands, another LSD manufacturer.

In 1966, Tim hooked me up to his bio-feedback machine while I was on LSD. I became good friends of Bob who has a I.Q. of 200. Bob and Scully met at the Livermore Lab when they were sixteen. They were CIA material.

We Hippies invented a new way of BEING with our fellow human beings that changed the world. I am on Pynchon’s case about being a Loner, and at the same time our literary spokesperson. We Hippies rejected the old ideas of success. We undermined the shame-based society that was trapped in the duality of good vs.evil.

Cold War Paranoia, is back, along with the call for a new Crusade. The evangelicals worship 911, it a sign unto them the End Time is coming, along with the ‘Killer Jesus’, who will murder millions of non-believers. Religious addicts are the most dangerous people on earth.

Jon Presco

“I got in touch with Tim Scully in 2003. Back then, I was making research on The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and my main reason for getting in touch with Scully was to learn more of his days with the organization. We corresponded by e-mail. The the text below is an edited version of these messages.

Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams tells us their story of The Brotherhood, and also frequently mention you. The book gives the impression that you once were a very devoted man, with a firm belief in the inherent spiritual qualities of acid.
— I can’t speak for everyone. Although when we took LSD we felt that we all understood each other and agreed on some deep level, I now think that feeling was sometimes an illusion.

— When I took LSD, the experience was so magical that I wanted to share it with everyone and make it available to everyone who wanted it. I believed that this would make the world a better place, at a time when it was very troubled, e.g. the war in Vietnam . I believed that others would have experiences similar to those I had, if they tried LSD, and I believed that such an experience would make people gentler, more caring, more conscious and at one with the universe. I thought of LSD as an entheogen , though that term was not in use at the time. I also believed that this is what the Brotherhood [of Eternal Love] members believed.

— Now, in hindsight, it appears that LSD doesn’t carry a specific message with it. I like the model presented in Acid Dreams, that LSD is an amplifier. Given the proper set and setting it can be a powerful entheogen. But with different set and setting it can be an interrogation aid for the CIA or a party drug or any number of other things. So I think a good cultural context is needed for entheogens to function, such as in Huxley’s Island or as in primitive cultures.

— I have also learned that although many idealists were drawn to make and distribute LSD, that this scene was and is also a magnet for con artists. I think Ron Stark probably was a world class example. I’m currently skeptical of the theory that he was a CIA agent, by the way.

— I only had close contacts with a few brothers during the time I was making acid, for security reasons. And the years I was making acid were from 1966-1970, with only the period from late 1968-mid 1970 overlapping with the Brotherhood. My main contacts were with John Griggs, Mike Randell and Ed May. I believe they were all sincere in sharing my beliefs. Of the three, only Mike Randell is still alive now. Since then, I have seen the testimony of several former brothers who became informers. I have read of the alleged involvement of some Brothers in dealing hard drugs. I don’t have any personal knowledge of the accuracy of this last allegation. I was always of the opinion that forcing entheogens into the same channels as other drugs would corrupt some people, and that certainly happened to some people. It is too bad we weren’t able to give them away.

— I have met many people who took LSD. The vast majority believe they benefited from the experience. A few obviously did not and I feel bad about them. I think a higher percentage of the people who made or sold LSD were harmed by doing so.

— With regard to the accuracy of Tendler and May’s book [The Brotherhood of Eternal Love], in many areas I am impressed with the research they did. I hope the Tendler and May book was inaccurate in saying that in later years the Brothers lost their idealism. Since I wasn’t in touch with them, I don’t know.

You say that you only were in close contact with three of the Brothers. I understand your position as a major acid chemist was unique and that the security you mentioned was of great importance, but did you see yourself as a “Brother” or just somebody helping them doing a righteous thing?
— Many people shared the goal of turning on the world in the ’60s. There wasn’t nearly as formal an organization as the government seemed to believe. Nick [Sand] and I cooperated in obtaining raw materials, for example, but were in many ways working completely independently. Nick, Bear and I all got some help from Billy Hitchcock, but again, this was a very loose arrangement and not at all the kind of organization that most folks imagine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a community of common interests or a network.

— I don’t have a clear sense of how formal the Brotherhood was, but I suspect that it also was pretty informal, with various “members” doing their own thing but sharing resources. They made me an honorary member, giving me a necklace with a symbol which the members would recognize. But it was an extremely loose association.

The psychedelic counterculture of today is now an underground phenomena and probably very different from what it was in the Sixties. It is more likely that people pick up a book by Terence McKenna rather than reading Timothy Leary’s manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. McKenna made a big impact in the 1990s, but instead of LSD opting for the use of Psilocybin mushrooms and also DMT, saying LSD simply isn’t very spiritual in nature. McKenna’s view on acid as less spiritual seems to have become somewhat established.

Could this shift in attitude possibly have anything to do with the degradation in the quality of acid? There are recent reports showing that the LSD of today is much weaker and also of inferior quality, while your Orange Sunshine was said to be even purer than that of the Sandoz laboratories.
— Yes, Bear and I both made every effort to make the purest possible LSD. We aimed to get 3600 doses per gram of pure crystalline LSD. We always dispersed it on tribasic calcium phosphate which was thereafter diluted with lactose. In the earliest period, Bear put the resulting mixture in #5 geletin capsules. Later we switched to tablets, either tablet triturates or compression molded, depending on the equipment we had available. The tribasic calcium phosphate had a strong affinity for the LSD and kept it evenly distributed throughout the tablet or capsule. This protected the labile LSD from decomposition due to exposure to UV light, extreme Ph, etc. Tablets were harder to counterfit or adulterate.

— There was one small batch of acid which Bear combined with 1mg of STP as an experiment. He concluded that STP was a bad idea and reverted to pure LSD.

— I gather from reading on the web that modern acid is usually distributed on blotters, a cheap but very bad distribution method since it leaves the acid vulnerable to rapid decomposition, and that a typical dose is not 50 micrograms. I don’t have much information yet on the purity of present-day street acid, though I’m looking for published reports.

— I’d expect several factors to influence the kind of trips people have. Certainly the size of dose makes a big difference. After that I would rank set and setting with impurities coming in last, assuming they are not unusually toxic. That doesn’t mean I think purity is unimportant. I just suspect that the other factors may be substantially more of an influence in this case. One blessing of the small doses popular now is that extreme bad trips are more rare.

Do you think acid will be around in the future and if so, will this drug be relevant in any spiritual or scientific way rather than just being the party drug it has become?
— I have met many people who are still using LSD for spiritual purposes. I doubt that will stop. If the current drug war ever abates, I think it is likely that scientific and medical research would resume. I also think that more frivolous uses of LSD will also continue.

You still claim that it would have been better to give the acid away rather than selling it. Was this way of thinking shared by others in the community? Viewing LSD as a religious sacrament, like the early Brothers from Anaheim did, also makes the idea of selling it absurd. In what way did people justify charging money for it?
— Without a wealthy patron to finance the production and distribution, selling it was the most straightforward way of financing the costs, which were very substantial. The raw materials were very hard to buy and involved bribes, smuggling, etc. There were ever increasing legal expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Setting up and operating a good clandestine lab is not cheap either. Tabletting is also expensive. The last tablet machine I was involved with, in 1970, cost $15,000. I read that one costing $100,000 was confiscated in one of Nick’s labs. A substantial fraction, perhaps 1/3, of the acid I made was given away.

— Nevertheless, it appears to me that some people were corrupted by the money that flowed through the pipeline. And certainly having LSD in the same milieu as cocaine and heroin, particularly when government propoganda made every effort to erase the distinctions between drugs, led all too many people into deep trouble with hard drugs.

— During the years when I was making LSD, I was very concerned with the likelihood that the authorities would make raw materials completely impossible to obtain at some point. I felt that we were in a race with time to garner enough raw material to make enough acid to turn on the world before it became impossible. I think others shared this view and labs scaled up as rapidly as raw materials and resources permitted.

— At the time, we fantasized about various free distribution methods. One unrealized fantasy was to buy one of those postcard advertising inserts for a mass-market magazine such as LIFE and, after publication, tell everyone that there was a dose of LSD hidden on each postcard. But we never had the wherewithall to make that happen.

Out of curiosity, I’d also like to know how long you stayed on The Merry Pranksters’ Bus ? According to Acid Dreams you helped them install the sound equipment, is this right?
— I designed and built sound equipment for the Dead, lived with them and worked as a roadie for about the first 6 or 7 months of 1966. Then when the Point Richmond lab started up, the Dead wanted Bear and I to move out, so we did.

Nicholas Sand is one of the most prolific and famous underground chemists in history. Along with Tim Scully, Nick Sand was responsible for producing over 3 million hits of Orange Sunshine, a brand of LSD that was renowned for its quality and purity in the Sixties. He was the first underground chemist to synthesize DMT rather than extracting it from natural sources, and the first person to discover that the DMT freebase could be smoked. His two essays on DMT are indispensable for DMT novices and veterans alike.
http://psychedelicfrontier.com/trippy-portraits-psychonauts-nicolas-rosenfeld/

Robert “Tim” Scully (born August 27, 1944) is best known in the psychedelic underground for his work in the production of LSD from 1966 to 1969, for which he was indicted in 1973 and convicted in 1974.[1] His best known product, dubbed “Orange Sunshine”, was considered the standard for quality LSD in 1969.[2]

Contents
 [hide] 
1 Early Life
2 LSD Production
3 Investigation, Arrest, and Trial
4 Later Life
5 References
6 External links
Early Life[edit]
Scully grew up in Pleasant Hill, which was across the Bay from San Francisco. In eighth grade he won honorable mention in the 1958 Bay Area Science Fair for designing and building a small computer. During high school he spent summers working at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on physics problems. In his junior year of high school, Scully completed a small linear accelerator in the school science lab (he was trying to make gold atoms from mercury) which was pictured in a 1961 edition of the Oakland Tribune. Scully skipped his senior year of high school and went directly to U.C. Berkeley majoring in mathematical physics. After two years at Berkeley, Scully took a leave of absence in 1964 because his services as an electronic design consultant were in high demand. Tim Scully first took LSD on April 15, 1965.
LSD Production[edit]
Scully knew the government would move quickly to suppress LSD distribution, and he wanted to obtain as much of the main precursor chemical, lysergic acid, as possible. Scully soon learned that Owsley Stanley possessed a large amount (440 grams) of lysergic acid monohydrate. Owsley and Scully finally met a few weeks before the Trips Festival in the fall of 1965. The 30-year-old Owsley took the 21 year old Scully as his apprentice[3] and they pursued their mutual interest in electronics and psychedelic synthesis.
Owsley took Scully to the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966, and they built electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead until late spring 1966. In July 1966 Owsley rented a house in Point Richmond, California and Owsley and Melissa Cargill (Owsley’s girlfriend who was a skilled chemist) set up a lab in the basement. Tim Scully worked there as Owsley’s apprentice. Owsley had developed a method of LSD synthesis which left the LSD 99.9% pure. The Point Richmond lab turned out over 300,000 tablets (270 micrograms each) of LSD they dubbed “White Lightning”. LSD became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and Scully wanted to set up a new lab in Denver, Colorado.
Scully set up the new lab in the basement of a house across the street from the Denver zoo in early 1967. Owsley and Scully made the LSD in the Denver lab. Later Owsley started to tablet the product in Orinda, California but was arrested before he completed that work. Owsley and Scully also produced a new psychedelic in Denver which they called STP. STP was initially distributed at the summer solstice festival in 1967: 5,000 tablets (20 milligrams each) which quickly acquired a bad reputation. Owsley and Scully made trial batches of 10 mg tablets and then STP mixed with LSD in a few hundred yellow tablets but soon ceased production of STP. Owsley and Scully produced about 196 grams of LSD in 1967, but 96 grams of this was confiscated by the authorities; Scully moved the lab to a different house in Denver after Owsley was arrested on Christmas Eve 1967.

Nick Sand (born May 10, 1941)[1] is a cult figure in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996 for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.[2][3] Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York and was credited as the “first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT”.[4]

Nick Sand (born May 10, 1941)[1] is a cult figure in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966-1996 for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.[2][3] Sand was also Chief Alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York and was credited as the “first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT”.[4]

Contents
 [hide] 
1 Background
2 Prosecution
2.1 Resurfacing
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Background[edit]
Sand grew up in Brooklyn, New York and by his late teens he was already aware of the LSD scene developing around Greenwich Village. While attending Brooklyn College, Sand became interested in the teachings of Gurdjieff, the study of different cultures, and various Eastern philosophers.[5]
In 1961, he had his first mescaline experience.[1]
Graduating in 1966 with a degree in Anthropology and Sociology, Sand followed Leary and Alpert to Millbrook and became a guide to the psychedelic realm for many of the people who came to Millbrook. During this time Sand also began extracting DMT in his bathtub.[5]
Sand later started a perfume company as a front for the production of Mescaline and DMT.[6] During this time Sand began to attract the attention of the police due to his lengthy visits to Milbrook and chose to move his lab to San Francisco after Owsley visited Milbrook in April 1967.[citation needed] Sand’s San Francisco Lab was operational by July 1967. Sand wanted to make LSD but was lacking the necessary precursors. Owsley had given him a formula for STP and would tablet Sand’s product from his own lab in Orinda.
In 1968 Sand was introduced to fellow chemist Tim Scully, who had been training under Owsley Stanley until Stanley’s legal troubles in 1967.[7]
In December 1968 Sand purchased a farmhouse in Windsor, California, at that time a small town in rural Sonoma County. There he and Scully set up a large LSD lab. Here they produced over 3.6 million tablets of LSD that was distributed under the name “orange sunshine”.[2]

When Nicholas Sand was about 16 his dad was working as a chemist for the government developing nuclear weapons and how he had this amazing lab in his basement where Sand could experiment. He and his friends would sit around and experiment  and eventually developed LSD that they began shooting up. At the time there were about 15-25 people in the US that were doing this. He told me that one day Aldous Huxley came to lecture at his college and that there were only about 10 kids that showed up to listen. After the lecture Sand asked Huxley to come to his house to see what him and his friends have been working on. While Huxley was reluctant at first he finally agreed to check it out and couldn’t believe was he was seeing when he got there . Only a handful of people in the world were experimenting with this at the time. Sand was onto something incredible and they all tested out his new LSD concoction. He also told me that while  Huxley was there Sands mom came downstairs with sandwiches for everyone while they were all “Turning On”

The next big news we are going to read, is Michael was shot on the back. The press and the people will have real hard questions for the chief who will point to the cigar theft. Then, the shit will hit the fan.

http://belhistory.weebly.com/nicholas-sand.html

Later in the novel we return to Dr. Hilarius, this time hysterically shooting off a vintage hunk o’ Nazi weaponry:
“He’s gone crazy. I tried to call the police, but he took a chair and smashed the switchboard with it.”
“Dr Hilarius?”
“He thinks someone’s after him.” Tear streaks had meandered down over the nurse’s cheekbones. “He’s locked himself in the office with that rifle.” A Gewehr 43, from the war, Oedipa recalled, that he kept as a souvenir.
“He shot at me. Do you think anybody will report it?”
“Well he’s shot at half a dozen people,” replied Nurse Blamm, leading Oedipa down a corridor to her office. “Somebody better report it.”
As Charles Hollander points out in Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon doesn’t always speak directly:
. . .Chapter by chapter, step by step, Pynchon leads us to the assassination of President Kennedy, without ever mentioning the then–recent event directly. . .
If my response to The Crying of Lot 49 differs from Mr. Hollander’s, it is in emphasis. My “Magic Eye” reading doesn’t locate JFK nearly as much as the CIA, and when it comes down to CIA related times, places and names, Thomas Pynchon can get downright coy. But Dr. Hilarius’ involvement in “die Brucke” points to both of CIA’s little projects Operation Paperclip and MK-ULTRA:
http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Pynchon’s_California_Trilogy_and_the_CIA
http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/magiceye.htm

Meanwhile back at Gordita Beach, Doc Sportell has some interesting interactions with The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group from Laguna Beach who manufactured and sold an amazing quantity of LSD before diversifying and ending up more like street hoods than the visionaries they started out as with their leader, Timothy Leary. A Crucial text is Nick Schou’s article “LORDS OF ACID: How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Became OCs Hippie Mafia” from the July 7 2005 issue of the OC Weekly.

https://rosamondpress.com/2013/08/11/on-the-road-to-the-brotherhood/

Originally a chemical weapons manufacturing facility for World War II, the arsenal became the focal point of the Army’s rocket and space projects, including development of the first U.S. ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles in the 1950s.