Owsley Stanley Is Dead: Here's a Brief Story About the Days When My Dad Dealt
His Acid
by Nina Shapiro, blogs.seattleweekly.com
March 15th 2011
Sorry to interrupt our normally scheduled programming, but I have to tell you
a story. It's about my dad, and how, for six months, he sold the best acid in
the world.
On Sunday, a man by the name of Owsley Stanley (pictured at right, in 1967)
drove his car into a tree near his home in Queensland, Australia. Stanley, who
died as a result of the accident, was many things to many people during his 76
years on Earth--the grandson of a former U.S. Senator, a ballet dancer, a
devoted carnivore (he once blamed a heart attack on some broccoli he'd eaten),
sound man and principal benefactor for the Grateful Dead, and one of the first
non-scientists to take seriously the threat of global warming.
But what Stanley was to most people was summed up best in the first sentence of
this New York Times obituary: a "prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the
stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi
Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic '60s."
Stanley was a modern-day alchemist. A self-taught genius who, with help from a
girlfriend studying chemistry at UC Berkeley, developed a strain of LSD that
was almost entirely pure. As a result, he (or more specifically, his product,
which came to be known as "Owsley" and was distinguished by the lavender owl on
each tablet) became famous.
Stanley's first "freak out" happened in a seaside lodge south of San Francisco
during a Jerry Garcia solo. It was witnessed by none other than Tom Wolfe, who
later recorded the event in his second book, the era-defining The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Around the time that Stanley was freaking out (that would be 1965), my father
was coming of age in Washington, D.C. After a brief stint as an anthropology
major at George Washington University, he dropped out and joined a group of
medics assisting Vietnam demonstrators, an organization that would become one
of the precursors to Doctors Without Borders.
Burned out by the war protests and his next job as the co-director of a
methadone clinic, my dad soon fled D.C. for the following places, in order: a
cabin in the woods in Nova Scotia, Guatemala, Mexico, and then San Francisco,
where he and a girlfriend lived in a junkie friend's house while she anguished
over whether or not to reconnect with a child she'd given up for adoption.
(It's at this point that I feel I should tell you that my formative years were
nothing like my dad's. In fact, compared to him my upbringing is like looking
in a funhouse mirror: sheltered home life, college with friends, predictable
post-grad jobs. God, I was a boring young 20-something. But back to our story .
. . )
It was in a coffee shop in Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of the counterculture,
where my dad literally ran into the man who would become his connection. He
can't remember much about him. Just that he was young, like him, and ran his
operation out of a trailer in the country.
After driving back to D.C., my dad started getting boxes in the mail with a
return address from a California gun dealer. Inside the boxes were
softball-sized bundles of tablets, each emblazoned with the little owl.
My dad says he bought 1,000 hits at a time. Each hit cost him 78 cents, which
he then marked-up and resold to American and GW students for a dollar a hit, a
22-cent profit that was his exclusive source of income.
"This is really confessional, isn't it?" he said in a phone conversation this
afternoon.
My dad says he had a hard time getting his business started. In early '70s
D.C., acid was no longer the it-drug. Students were more interested in
Quaaludes, which were still legal at the time. But eventually he found enough
clients to unload his entire package, notwithstanding the hits he kept for
himself.
"Oh gosh, I must've tripped three times a week," he says. "I believed in the
product. It was a clean product. Within the limits of experimenting with a
psychotropic drug, it was the safest experience that I'd ever had."
(It's important to note that all of these details come from the brain of a man
who's already confessed to extensive drug use. My dad's disclaimer: "You should
put brackets around all of this that read 'FROM WHAT I CAN REMEMBER.'")
My dad was certainly not the only Stanley believer. From Rolling Stone's
authoritative 2007 profile, written 40 years after the Summer of Love:
During this period, the Dead wrote "Alice D. Millionaire," a play on words from
a headline about Owsley in The San Francisco Chronicle that read, "LSD
Millionaire Arrested." In concert, the band regularly dedicated "The Other One"
to him from the stage. At the end of Hendrix's live version of the Beatles'
"Day Tripper," recorded at the BBC studios in 1967, he can be heard calling
out, "Oh, Owsley, can you hear me now?" In 1976, Steely Dan burnished Owsley's
myth by recording "Kid Charlemagne": "While the music played/You worked by
candlelight/ Those San Francisco nights/You were the best in town. . . ."
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zmX6_ujBN0
Despite my dad's enjoyment of Stanley's hits, and the money they were making
him, he stopped selling them after only six months. One day he says he went to
meet one of his connections and totally forgot the package, which he took as a
sign. "I wasn't stoned or anything," he says. The next time he got burned,
sending his $780 check but never receiving the hits in return. It was then that
he decided he'd had enough of drug dealing.
When I heard about Stanley's death, it triggered in me a memory of fishing with
my father years ago, the first time he told me this story. Asked why he'd let
me repeat it again today, on a blog, for everyone in the Internet-connected
world to see, he gave me a simple reason: He's just been called to jury duty.
And, well . . .
"I can't afford it," he says. "Last time I was called I was foreman and it took
two months. Maybe if they read this I'll get out of it this time. So put it out
there!"
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Original Page:
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/owsley_stanely_acid.php
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