Interview with an Alchemist: Bear Owlsey Interview

Interview with an Alchemist:
Bear: Owsley, LSD Chemist Extraordinaire
In Conversation with Bruce Eisner

Owsley Stanley or “Bear” is a legendary figure with his roots going back to the 1960’s psychedelic movement. Timothy Leary, in his ‘Sixties anthology of essays, Politics of Ecstasy predicted, “The television folk heroes of today are the merry outlaws of the past. The Television Robinhoods of the future, the folk heroes of the twenty-first century, will be the psychedelic drug promoters, A.O.S. 3, acid king, LSD millionaire, test-tube Pancho Villa, is the best-known of a band of dedicated starry-eyed crusaders who outwitted the wicked, gun-totting federals and bravely turned on the land of the young and the free to the electronic harmony of the future.” A.O.S.3. was Leary’s acronymic code for the name that Bear was given at birth -- Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

No, the television program or movie hasn’t been made yet. But in Leary’s unique literary style, he was introducing us to the greatest LSD chemists who ever lived. Yet Oswley’s fame extends even further, because besides being the most venerable and celebrated of LSD chemists, Bear was also the soundman for the Grateful Dead during their early years and one of the key characters in Tom Wolfe’s best-selling Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test – which chronicles Bear’s history with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. There is also a lengthy description of his story in Storming Heaven --- Jay Stevens popular history of the psychedelic movement.

In 1997, I received an email from “out of the blue” by the one and only – “Bear” Owsley. He had read a 1977 article I had written called “LSD Purity: Cleanliness is Next to Godheadlines” (the High Times editor’s title, not mine) which I had first published in January 1977 and republished in the library section of Island Web (http:///www.island.org) - the website of my non-profit educational organization Island Foundation.

Bear had read the article and had a few historical bones to pick with it. After a rapid exchange of email, Bear and I realized we were, in a certain sense, kindred spirits.. I asked Owsley if he would do an interview with me for Psychedelic Island Views a publication of Island Foundation with a very limited circulation of about 4,000. Bear accepted.

The actual interview was conducted by telephone. Bear now lives with his second wife and children from that marriage on a homesteaded piece of land off the energy grid somewhere in Queensland, Australia. The interview carried on for over four and one-half hours and has been carefully edited and re-edited. The first portion of the interview was published in two installments in Psychedelic Island Views, with the last one appearing over a year ago. This is the first publication of the approved Owsley edit of the interview that was conducted on May 17, 1998.

Bruce Eisner:

Before we get into all of the psychedelic stuff, let’s do a little cybernetics. How do you see computing in the future as going, and what do you think the implications for it all is on the human race?

Owsley Stanley:

Well, the biggest impact computers are having is the rapid expansion of the Internet, mass communication. Computers themselves are just tools like anything else. They are pretty good tools and they’re getting better all the time. The interface is still clumsy, because they kind of grew out of typewriters. They still have those clumsy ways of operating. But they don’t seem to increase productivity very much. Almost every company that’s gotten into computers has actually increased the number of personnel it has for the same amount of work. It makes a different kind of work, and it involves a different kind of employee.

B: Let’s maybe look even further in long term. How do you see the Internet as radically different from all of the communication technologies that it’s displaced, and what kind of implications does that have for the alternative culture?

O: Well, I don’t know. That last part sounds almost like a separate question.

The interesting thing about the Internet is the protocol. The TCP/IP protocol packetizes the information and sends it off through the system without basically having one specific pipeline between the originating and terminating computer, so that it can flow through a network of interconnected computers freely. It seeks the quickest or most direct path. But because of this structure it’s impossible to interfere with it. So all the governments that are jumping up and down and passing laws are sort of like the King going down to the beach and commanding the sun to rise, or commanding the tides to go out! They are trying to interfere inappropriately with processes they really have no real way of interfering with. The protocols are in a state of flux or change, the new Asynchronous Transfer Mode worries me simply because it provides a continuous -stream type connection.

The concept of having a continuous flow like ATM is promoted by people who want streaming video and real-time cheap telephone communications over the net [and which] will provide a continuous stream which can, of course, easily be tapped into, modified, blocked, or whatever. It’s the packet style of information exchange that’s so difficult to deal with, and I think that attempts by the government to “censor” it will always fail. But if they abandon the protocol that makes the Internet what it is, then of course they’ll fall subject to censorship, and I think the freedom from censorship is the most important aspect of the Internet. For this reason I don’t feel attracted to ATM.

One of the things the net produces is a situation where you can no longer control what people have to say. The Internet is not a broadcast medium; it’s not a medium similar to anything else; it’s more like a complicated sort of telephone system. You call somebody up, and then you can access whatever he or she has in their computer. But nobody can actually force their content on you. If you get junk mail, there’s plenty of filters that’ll throw it out, you don’t even have to see it. Nobody can really broadcast, although they’re trying to fix that, its called “push technology,” and is another thing I think is an aberration. It’s not in the spirit of things. The point there is that people anywhere in the world can access anyone else’s opinion they wish, and read the postings freely, is a forum that will absolutely spell the end of tyranny.

B: So you’d rather have pull than push?

O: Absolutely. You just need convenient ways to search for and find the things you want, which is where search engines are very important. The ways in which the Internet is organized and catalogued are very important. These things are not that well developed so far. The net breaks down borders; it breaks down censorship; it breaks down propaganda. It allows you to freely exchange information with people everywhere. And once people start getting together and comparing notes, well . . . ever read Machiavelli? You’ve got to control the sources of information, you’ve got to control the sources of pleasure, you’ve got to control all those things in order to rule with absolute authority. Of course they’re always trying to do this.

B: Let’s talk a little about your views about government in general. You just sent me over the Internet what you call “The Modest Proposal.” Why don’t you talk a little bit about your modest proposal. Just summarize it. We were talking last time about tribal culture, and you were talking in that essay about professional politicians, and I’d like you to maybe talk about both those ideas.

O: Well, people evolved over millions of years from a very poorly defined animal— because archeological traces of people are not all that easily discovered—, and no one’s really quite sure what the proto-human mammal was like, or what precursor it evolved from. These are the so-called “missing link” things that anthropologists have so much trouble with. But I think we’ve been pretty much like we are today for a very, very long time. A lot longer than most people realize. And our social structures were basically tribal during most of this developmental period. It is the social interaction between people that is the thing which makes us unique. Our social structures, and our methods of learning virtually everything that we use in our behavior, is learned from adults while we are children. That’s all very important, and this is one of the things I’m discussing in the little diatribe against children’s TV. It’s all interrelated, we know we’ve got something wrong, things are not working right.

B: You talk about the professional politician. Could you talk a little bit about that first, and then talk about children’s TV.

O: OK. Well, in a tribal setting, people generally gather together to discuss and make decisions, and often there will be a person who is chosen as spokesman. Usually these people are highly dominant. And the development from this highly dominant individual as a spokesperson into the kings and princes was kind of a lineal thing, it just happened, that’s the way it went.

We now have a society that’s hierarchical. Most of the power is taken away from the people, and it’s put in the hands of the few individuals. These individuals form a government. We have over the centuries slowly tried to modify and develop a form of government that was more responsive to the people. Unfortunately, it’s always been diverted, it’s always been taken over by those who love the power; you know, it’s an elitist group. One time this elite group was called princes and dukes and kings. Now the elite group is basically the people with lots of money. The people who are elected into politics are elected according to a set of rules. In the United States this set of rules is called a constitution. There are some countries that don’t have written constitutions. They have a body of law that is considered as a whole, combined with traditions over generations, that actually functions as their constitution. But the rules that are described in the constitution are to define the way in which elections are run, the kind of people who can run for them, and so forth and so on. Unfortunately, most of the documents are too simple. They don’t really produce a description that will provide a real representative government, a government that really represents the people who go down and cast their votes. It represents other—monied—people’s interests.

B: And in the US it is probably worse than most of the other so-called democracies.

O: You see it everywhere. In order to get elected, you have to have a lot of money, because media costs are very high. In order to get this money, unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ve have it given to you by someone. And these “donors” never give things without strings attached. So conditions are always placed on the donations in various ways. Sometimes these conditions are quite explicit, and sometimes they’re implied, but they’re always there.

The individual who seeks government usually is in a system that allows people to be reelected and often, in fact, gives them generous retirement benefits at the end of a certain number of years of service. This induces people to become professionals, professional politicians. Their true profession, however, is getting elected, and then retain the office, so their most important skills are solely to be elected and to remain in office. Their skills involve manipulating public opinion, of looking nice and talking well, seeming intelligent, seeming responsive, seeming competent. None of this is necessarily true. In fact, that’s why you see the biggest absurdity of them all, movie actors becoming leaders of countries. It’s just absurd! Because a good actor with a good script can present himself as anything. A professional politician does not need to be a lawmaker. He’s used as one, but that’s not his profession. A politician need not know how to write a good law, how to run a country, how to generate foreign policy, how to generate an economic policy. He doesn’t have to have any of these skills; he can hire advisors. Actually, the advisors attach themselves to him like parasites, like fleas to a dog. He doesn’t actually have need of any skills at all that are of any other use except to become elected and reelected. Judging from the current crop, perhaps other skills are just an impediment to a successful career.

I think what we need is people who are part of the community, who are citizens who have other jobs and other interests, who go and serve in the same spirit a person would serve on a jury, not as a profession that’s going to lead to a fat retirement, but rather as a service to the community and to his fellow citizens.

B: Talk about your ideas about children’s TV and how that’s part of this system that you’re talking about.

O: Children’s TV is mostly used as baby-sitting to entertain the children. Its nature is passive. The children sit and watch it; they don’t really learn anything from it. All they do is waste time. They’re distracted, entertained, when a child, a human being, doesn’t have the time to spend just being entertained. Anything that’s entertaining also must be instructive. Children’s games for generations were instructive kind of things; they developed various skills in both communication and physical aptitude, and were one of the ways of teaching the qualities that a person needs to interact and communicate with others and form a tight community. Humans are cooperative animals. What’s distinctive about us is that we work together in groups. It has made us very effective hunters, it makes us effective builders and so forth, and all of the things we learn as a child are the skills which make us human. If you waste time during these critical years, where every small short period of time is a window of learning for a particular skill, you miss out on something important. If you don’t learn that particular skill and that window closes, then later you can’t go back and sort of “rewrite the disk,” to use a computer simile. It’s more like burning data into a CD. If all the data doesn’t go down right, you’ve got a Frisbee.

B: Yeah! That’s a good one!

O: I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of Frisbee Kids. And we’re going to have a lot of Frisbee Adults when they mature, and this will cause a general breakdown in the social structure, which you see increasing all the time. Some of the teenage behavior is completely baffling, like all the vandalism and civil disbehavior.

B: Have you ever had a chance to read Aldous Huxley’s Island?

O: Many years ago I did.

B: You know that Island Foundation is based on the idea of creating a psychedelic culture, and it looks at society as a whole system, and a lot of the things that you’re addressing were addressed in Island. Childhood education, tribal ways of relating with one another, more open, trusting societies, and so forth.

O: It was a blueprint for one form of Utopia.

B: What do you think about the idea of Island Foundation? How do you relate to it as an idea?

O: I don’t know, I really haven’t given it that much thought. I will say one thing: social structures, since they’re founded in early childhood learning which locks in, burns in, like a CD, doesn’t allow societies to change very fast or radically. They change slowly, they evolve. The evolution sometimes is so glacially slow that you’ll find ritual behavior in many groups of people that goes back 10,000 years even. No one really knows why certain things are done, but everybody feels uncomfortable unless they do them. So trying to create a society out of nothing is hard.

B: Do you want to talk about where you’re living these days?

O: Well, I live out in the country. I’m basically a country boy; I don’t like cities much. I like nature. I don’t like to rely upon the civil infrastructures; we generate our own electricity and so forth. It keeps me busy trying to maintain things, but I don’t have to worry about the power surges that blow out your TV and your computer and telephones. And believe me, it happens a lot, they have a very primitive power system here. I don’t know why it’s primitive, but no one here seems to know what to do about it. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it, so I just ignore it, I stay away from it.

B: Getting back to the idea of people picking up these old imprints and being stuck with them. I was listening to a tape that Tim Leary did back in 1981 or ‘82 at Esalen, called “The Power of Imprinting.” This was back when he was on his twenty-four circuit model, before he got into virtual reality and computers and so forth.

O: Well, not really, he never really got into the computer movement. He was always on the periphery of it, but he was always at least a couple of years behind the curve.

B: Oh, I know.

O: You do know that?

B: I know very very well, because I was very close with him.

O: Why didn’t you tell him that, because I tried to . . .

B: Oh, I tried to push it. I was the only one who ever actually surfed him around the net, this was four months before he died. He had a Mac set-up with an ISDN, and I sat down and surfed him around, and then he ordered everybody in the house to go up and get his web site up to speed!

O: I’ll tell you a little story here, about Tim. I went down to see him one time in LA, I’d tried for years to just get him to open up to me and hang out, so that I could figure out who he was. He was always kind of a mystery.

B: I know what you mean.

O: Talking to him was very much like dealing with a mask of some sort. I showed up in town one day and called him up, and said, ”Let’s get together and go somewhere, let’s go have dinner, talk, hang out a bit.” “No, no I’m really busy, I’m doing this thing.” “Well, what are you doing?” “I’ve got these guys here and we’re designing a game. This game is going to be fantastic, incredible, everybody’s going to love this thing, it’s going to, . . . ” etc. So I go over to his place, I walk in, and he has a program up on the screen of his computer that looks sort of like one of those very early interactive games— everything’s text. And I said, “Tim, people don’t play these kind of games anymore. A couple of years ago, people were playing these kind of games, but everything now is graphics. It’s all graphics, it’s action, it’s incredible, it’s like driving a simulator. You’re not going to get people to play a text-based game anymore.” I could not get through to him. And he was just too busy to go and be a friend and hang out with somebody and talk about real things.

B: Well, that changed a lot after Barbara left him, then he became much more available.

O: Did he? Well, you know, then he fell into decline, and got into that endgame there. I got an email letter from a fellow who wanted me to contribute a tribute to a collection he was assembling. I said (to him): “Look, there’s got to be plenty of people who will write nice things about Tim Leary, I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.” Well, it seems he did, and he kept after me. Each time I’d get a little more explicit, but he just kept coming back. I said, basically, what it boiled down to was that I didn’t think that Tim Leary was a hero. Not a hero to me, anyway. In fact, if I were going to be real precise about what I think, I think Tim Leary was probably the worst thing that ever happened to the psychedelic movement. He made everything difficult for all of us; he wouldn’t listen to any of us who tried to tell him to back off a bit. He was most probably primarily responsible for all the draconian laws we have today on the use of psychedelics and other mind-altering things. I said that as far as I was concerned, I never felt Tim Leary showed me who he was. He seemed to be always playing some role or game or something, or hiding behind some mask, and I just didn’t know who he was. So how can I tell you who he was? He never let me know who he was. Basically, I didn’t want to speak badly to the guy, because I always liked him. I always tried real hard to find some route so that I could actually have a heart-to-heart communication with him.

B: Well, that changed toward the end.

O: Well, yeah, but then he got surrounded by all these weirdoes. I called there about two days before he died. I had a premonition— I saw a tape on TV that had him in it, and Ram Dass, and some other folks, Rosemary and some others. I called and I said who I was, and this sort of stoned-out guy said, “Oh man, I think he’s deep in conversation with someone.” I said, “Well, go tell him I’m calling from Australia and I’d like to talk to him.” Of course this is a pretty expensive toll call. Ten minutes later, he comes back to the phone and picks it up: “Oh gee, man, I just don’t want to interrupt him, why don’t you call Zack and make an appointment.” I never spoke to him after that. He died first.

B: Well, he was in a coma for two days before he died.

O: He wasn’t in a coma at this point, this was before he entered the coma. It was several days before he died, and I just got this cosmic urge to call, but I just couldn’t get past the minders. The people around him didn’t have a clue as to who I was, they wouldn’t have had a clue who you are, who anybody was. I don’t know who THEY were. I felt a little bit upset about that, because even though I think the guy was not necessarily the savior of the psychedelic movement in the United States that many people do—in fact, quite the reverse—I still had a high personal regard for him as a person. I liked him, I’d go and try all the time to communicate with him, and was only disappointed that it didn’t seem to work out. But I never gave up, I’m the kind of the guy that never gives up on people that I decide are my friends. I never gave up on him.

B: And you always felt he was your friend, underneath.

O: Yeah, he was always very friendly. He just seemed to be afraid to get close, and from other people I’ve talked to, I’m not the only person that’s had that experience with him. So you couldn’t say he was discriminating against me or anything. I always felt that if I could just sort of break down that barrier and get a good glimpse of who’s inside, I’d like to do it. I tried for years, you know, I never walked away from him or anything. I always was waiting for him to call me up and say “Hey, let’s go do dinner” or something. He never did.

B: Well, there was always a little bit of a gulf between the West and the East Coasts as far back as the oh, mid-sixties. I think you were hanging out more with Kesey and the Dead scene.

O: I didn’t meet Kesey and the Dead scene until ‘65. I knew about all those people in the East from ‘62 or ‘63 on.

B: Let’s go back to the beginning and do the historical thing. How you first became acquainted with LSD? What were you doing before that? And how did that make a change on you personally?

O: I don’t know. I went along like everybody else, just trying to pick up skills to earn a living.

B: What were you doing before you discovered psychedelics and things like that?

O: I was taking classes at the University of California in art and languages and stuff like that. I’ve always had an interest in art. For some reason, until 1971, I had no idea that I could do good art. I always knew I wanted to make things. I knew that the work that I did with music was art, and I knew that it had something to do with sculpture, because it was a three-dimensional sculpturing of sound in space. It all made sense to me, all the pieces made sense. I’ve always been an artist, but I wasn’t always aware that I was an artist. As a child, I actually thought I wanted to be an engineer because I thought engineers made things. I even went off and enrolled in engineering college. It took me about a year to discover that engineers seemed to be sitting at desks with slide rules all the time. Slide rules were terrible, man!

B: I knew that, because my grandfather and my father were engineers, so I knew what they did exactly.

O: To me, engineers were like the heroes in my scenario, which included characters like Buck Rogers and Brick Bradford, Flash Gordon, etc.

B: So you were interested in the science fiction world . . .

O: Dr. Huer, remember, he was the engineering genius that helped with the rocket ships in Buck Rogers’ strips. I learned to read from comic books; I’ve always loved them. I taught myself to read when I was about two and a half years old, which is one of those little windows that Countess Montessori described in children. From about two to two and a half, then it opens up again around five or six to eight years old. Children can learn to read in any of these time slots, and I happened to spontaneously learn to read printed information at two and a half. I didn’t recognize letters; I read more or less like a Chinese would read. The word itself was like a picture. It had a shape, the shape was composed of the strokes; the strokes, of course, were the letters. I didn’t know a letter could be interpreted separately. It took me a long time to learn to use the dictionary successfully because I couldn’t make any sense out of a sequence for the alphabet. It was just a bunch of strokes to me.

B: So you’ve always had an interest in the future, and science. Now how did you first find out about psychedelics?

O: Well, I knew people in the ‘60s that were in the scene I fell into around 1958 or ‘59. I knew people who used pot and peyote, and I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t relate to it as anything that had anything to do with me. I was athletically inclined. I studied dance and music, acting and things like that. I worked summers as a broadcast engineer at a television station.

B: And this was in Berkeley?

O: No, I was down in LA for a long time. But I just wasn’t interested in the drugs. I didn’t care if people smoked pot or anything; I just wasn’t interested in it. And my friends were quite tolerant; they didn’t have any problems with me about that. If I didn’t want to do it, fine. If I didn’t want to drink, fine. If I didn’t want to smoke cigarettes, that’s fine. None of this was important, and nobody was on any kind of crusade about it. It was there, I just wasn’t interested.

B: That was during the Beat days, really.

O: I wasn’t aware of the Beats. Later, I bounced some checks, and got into trouble, and I realized that I couldn’t deal with the regular, commercial world of finance that allowed you to write checks, and to have credit cards and all the rest of it. I decided after that I didn’t want to deal with it, and I’ve never had a checking account after that, ever. Or any sort of credit card. I was on probation for awhile for having written some checks that the money wasn’t there for. I regretted it. I thought it was a terrible breach of honor and everything else on my part; I was just appalled at what I had done. The judge gave me probation, and when the probation ended I felt sort of like I had been released from something. I was living by this time in Berkeley, and wanted to see my old friends down in LA, and drove down at the semester break to visit. I found a buddy at a little funky coffee house near LA City College, and he came over to me and said, “I’ve got make a trip to Pasadena.” I said, “What for?” He said, “You don’t want to get involved, I need to score some pot, and you don’t want to have anything to do with drugs, you’re on probation.” I said, “No, I’m not on probation, I got off probation a couple of weeks ago. I’ll give you a lift.” I gave him a lift out there, and after he came out of the house, I said, “Well, look, maybe it’s time I should try some of this.”

So I had my first smoke sitting in my little MGTF on the side of the road in Pasadena after my friend had scored the weed, and I thought it was interesting.

B: So that had a strong impact on you, that first smoke?

O: Not really. I got kind of stoned and disoriented and whatnot, and thought well gee, this isn’t at all unpleasant. I didn’t drink. I don’t like alcohol much to this day. So over the next few weeks I got more into it. At first it was hard to figure out where to buy it, as my scene in Berkeley was not involved in smoke. I finally scored, smoked some, decided I liked it. Then someone told me about morning glory seeds.

B: Was your first trip on morning glory seeds?

O: No, I never actually got around to eating them. I didn’t want to get involved in dealing pot. I had no money or anything. But I asked my friend, “Is there anything legal that will get you high?” He said morning glory seeds. So I bought a pound bag of those. And through dealing the seeds around (I put up 3 by 5 cards with my post office box address on bulletin boards: “250 Heavenly Blue seeds for $1”), I met a lot of people with other things, and traded different things, and ultimately came across speed and LSD and all the rest of it. I think one of the aspects of illegality in drugs is that once you’ve made things illegal, all of a sudden you’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box of things, and anyone who goes for any of them winds up in contact with all of them. And if you’re going to break one law, which is a civil disobedience of a sort, well why not break another? These kinds of laws (prohibition) teach disrespect for the legal process.

B: Back in those days, there wasn’t that much information about what different drugs did. So since they are saying all drugs are bad, everybody was going to try everything, right?

O: Yeah, well, even speed, it seemed like it was a very nice pleasurable drug. Nobody knew at first, but after a little while on the street you found out it made a raving, babbling idiot out of you, very quickly!

B: So you tried that as well, then, and you didn’t like it?

O: Well, I wouldn’t say I didn’t like it. I didn’t like what it did to me.

B: And in those days people mainlined speed. Nowadays there’s been a resurgence of speed use in the youth culture.

O: They’re somehow smoking it even. I can’t imagine that. Like the freebase thing, and . . . the whole thing is just out of control, and the government really . . . if you examine the intention of the people who wrote the United States Constitution, their intention was that the government be a protector of the public welfare and promote good, health and so forth. They had a high ideal. The elite who wrote the US Constitution intended for the government to be weak, and to be easily ruled by the elite. The elite, of course, was the framers, and they were descendents of the aristocracy who had migrated here from England, and they had a very strong social, moral feeling that they were the only ones who knew how to take care of things, that most people didn’t, and therefore the society depended upon them to make sure things were done right. That didn’t last very long; the framers were replaced by the mercantile classes very quickly in the early nineteenth century. Money rules to this very day. So they were disenfranchised from their own system which they had set up for themselves; it was some sort of cosmic karma.

B: In the early days of psychedelics, it definitely was a higher level crowd. The people that Leary and so on were turning on were famous writers and artists —

O: That’s what you have the most documentation on. Because these people were out in front. I’m not proposing that people should use heroin or cocaine, or anything. I don’t even propose that people should necessarily use psychedelics, unless they prepare themselves ahead of time. It’s a decision that each person certainly has the right to make. No one else should have the right to tell them whether they can or cannot do things. The laws are kept in place because of the money they create. Marijuana has been so tightly bound with all of the other illegal substances, for instance, that you can’t separate it. The people who are benefiting financially from these illegal drugs do not benefit necessarily from pot. Pot is not their major item, you know. Coke and heroin are their major items. Pot and the psychedelics are simply harmless drugs, but because of the way in which these laws evolved, starting with marijuana in the late ‘30s, they cannot allow any reduction in the laws— you might say “holes in the dike.” They cannot allow a brick to be displaced from this wall of prohibition that prevents people from taking these things. The fact is that there is a group of men in the DEA that spend all of their time researching any possible new or overlooked substance, or even a precursor to a substance, that could possibly alter any aspect of your perception of reality, and place it immediately on the prohibited list. This is their thing. This is what they do every day.

When I was a kid we used to put aspirin in Coca-Cola, which would get you kind of woozy. That would be a Class I narcotic nowadays if it came up again and people started using it. So it’s nutty. Sasha Shulgin produced a book a few years back that listed all the things they had made illegal. It was a thing the size of a phone book. The bottom line of it is that one could go to jail if you were to say, “Gee, I was making aspirin.” And the prosecutor says, “Did you have a license from the government for making aspirin? . . . .I see. You were manufacturing a drug without a valid license.” You see, that’s an offense too.

B: Now in the early ‘60s, when the more intellectual crowd was using psychedelics, was it Sandoz that they were taking?

O: No, I think the vast majority of the material that was floating around in those days — that wasn’t made, you know, in somebody’s kitchen — was actually from Czechoslovakia. Lots of blue liquid in vials was around. The first acid that I took was made by a guy who was actually a civil engineer that got interested in it, read one of the syntheses, and performed it in his kitchen in one step.

B: Well, you could get lysergic acid monohydrate in those days.

O: True, you could if you had connections. It wasn’t all that easy to get. I was able to obtain some — sixty grams from a well-known chemical firm — and then I found a better connection, who was ordering it from Farmitalia. He was changing the bottle so I wouldn’t know where it came from. I bought 400 grams from him. He was actually pretending he made it! I guess he took me for a fool, or something, but he did sell me the material, and it was the genuine article.

B: So the earliest acid you got was mixed — some of it was good and some of it wasn’t good?

O: Most of it was terrible. It would make you high, but it was so full of impurities and other things that it was a totally rough trip.

B: Where do you think the impurities come from?

O: I’m not God. I can’t look into a brownish liquid and tell you what’s in there. There’re all kinds of derivatives of ergot containing various derivatives of lysergic acid that are active in some way in the body. St. Anthony’s fire, do you know about that? It was the result of ergotamine in the ergot growing on rye which was made into bread in the Middle Ages, made your fingers and toes drop off. They are very complex, many of the derivatives, and most of them are active — and when you are doing a synthesis you get all kinds of things that hook up to the lysergic acid molecule. Breakdown products, isomerization — who knows what’s in there?

I’ve had this conversation with Sasha many, many times. I’ve said: “Sasha, as you approach higher and higher purity, you get more and more magical.” He said, “Well, you’re ascribing a very high activity to very minute amounts of impurity.” I said, “I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but there’s something going on there.” Then later I got to thinking about this, and realized that perhaps the impurities are like a kind of catalyst. A catalyst can catalyze a reaction at extremely minute quantities, and often these catalysts are not affected by the reaction. Who knows that there isn’t some catalytic/synergistic effect that occurs? Where you have 100 mcg. of LSD and you have nanograms of some strange fellow-traveler impurity that actually catalyzes the effect of the LSD on the nervous system into something else. I’m not going to say that this is what’s happening, or that I necessarily believe this, but I do know that as you purify LSD you very quickly come to a point where it will not dissolve in the solvent from which you have crystallized it. It gets to a point where it’s insoluble in the methanol, and you have to heat this for such a long period of time in fresh methanol that some of it breaks down. And once it has broken down, only then will it dissolve. So there’s a lot of strange stuff going on with this “chemical” that doesn’t necessarily work according to the usual principles of chemistry. There’s no more chemistry to making LSD than there is to baking a bloody cake. You just have to know how to do it. What parts to use, what temperature to set the oven, etc. Most of it is published, and that which isn’t published is available to an investigative mind. The correct and accepted term for those who make the entheogens is “cook.” I like to think of it as a sort of Gourmet Chef, master of Fine Mental Cuisine.

Now, Sasha is a chemist. I’m not a chemist, I never pretended to be a chemist. I’m an artist. There’s no more chemistry to making LSD than there is to making a bloody cake. You just have to know how to do it. What bits to use, what temperature to set the “oven”, etc. Most of it is published, and that which isn’t published is available to an investigative mind. It helps to be smart, if you’re bright and you pick up on things and pay attention, you can pretty soon figure out what was left out of the published account. On the other hand, a chemist is a person who, wanting to make a compound, having an idea of the structure, evolves in his mind a synthetic process to produce it. To verify the structure of a known original compound is the usual reason for development of a synthesis for a naturally occurring or semi-naturally occurring compound. He is synthesizing this compound in order to prove its structure, or to provide a means of manufacturing it other than extracting it from a plant. A chemist is a highly skilled person. I don’t have any of those skills. What I did is like following a recipe.

B: But your acid had a reputation back in those days. Purple Haze, White Lightning, was always considered the most esteemed of all the acid that people could get back then.

O: I always tried to do it as well as my ability would allow.

B: In those days, the orientation was more toward that mystical experience. Today it’s probably different, a lot of the kids don’t even have that framework that people had back then, because there was an intellectual tradition, people were writing books, The Beatles were singing about Magical Mystery Tour. There was a spiritual context for taking acid, and people shared information with each other about what to expect from the higher dosages.

O: I don’t think so.

B: More so than now!

O: You think so? I don’t know. I’m not out on the street anymore. But I did come across a very interesting program on television recently,. I just tuned into the middle of it. It was about techno. Basically it was about the acid scene, the modern scene: the music, acid, ecstasy, etc. It was an in-depth. Some techno is very good, some of it’s uninteresting to me, but some of it is so good, it’s amazing. It’s modern, complex, electronic music, and it’s usually done in real time by musicians. So it’s sort of like performances that resemble in some ways John Cage, Berlioz and Sobotnik. Real cutting edge, heavy duty. I’ve been thinking of trying to contact Phil Lesh about this, I was really impressed. It started in Goa.

B: With Goa Gil.

O: Yeah, it started in Goa, this whole thing.

B: That’s what Goa Gil claims.

O: I don’t doubt it. Some of the strangest parties I’ve been to here, and we’re talking 13 years ago, I went to a party that people who had come from Goa were running, and it was full of the strangest, heaviest, most psychedelic music. I was stoned myself, so I tried to find out later what records they used. They showed me this box full of records. I said what did you play, he said man I don’t know, whatever I thought was good at the time! There was a lot of African stuff, techno stuff, an amazing mix, and all of it was good. I didn’t connect the thing at all in those days. Until I saw the show the other night, I wasn’t really that aware of the depth of the scene. It looked like early Grateful Dead, looked like the Acid Test. Images of parties and people dancing, and freaking to music. It’s the same kind of stuff. It’s Acid Test stuff. So if somebody tells me: “You were doing this then, but they’re not doing that now”, I’d just tell them, you might not be in contact with the scene, but that scene is very much alive.

B: A lot of these kids are taking ecstasy . . .

O: I think there’s two branches. There’s a branch that uses ecstasy and there’s a branch that uses acid.

B: It started out with acid in the earliest days. The earliest acid house was in Ibiza in Spain back in 1987.

O: It moved to Ibiza from Goa, apparently, and from there on up into Germany, which is now practically the home of techno, from what I can tell.

B: In the early days, Goa Gil was playing Kraftwerk, and those kinds of groups. He was spinning DAT tapes, that’s what he was doing.

O: I heard some incredible music on that TV show, I thought Jesus I’d like to get that, oh boy I’d like to get that, and then they didn’t really explain the names of the groups they were playing.

B: We’ll send you some tapes!

O: Thanks. The scene which runs on acid, I have no problems with that. I do have problems with the ecstasy scene, I have serious problems with that. I just don’t think it’s good stuff. I don’t think any of the synthetics based on those multi-ring exotic oils are good. I think they’re very bad and I think that you’re creating a substance that the body has no way of dealing with because they don’t occur in nature.

I actually read an articles recently by someone who claimed that the body could actually “aminate”, that is add the amine radical, to myristicin or saffrole and produce these compounds in your body . Now I know a bit about biochemistry, and as far as I know there is absolutely no way to aminate anything in the body. There are ways of de-aminating, in fact monoamine oxidase is used to de-aminate compounds. It doesn’t go the other way, that’s like against the laws of entropy. You don’t reduce compounds in your body to less oxidized forms, the body oxidizes things, it uses them as fuel, as building blocks (aminos), or it eliminates them.

B: Well, people could say the same thing about LSD, they could say there’s sassafras and there’s nutmeg in nature, and there is morning glories and ergot in nature, but you have to do the chemistry in order to make something that’s effective.

O: No, that’s not true. Ergot contains many natural, highly psychedelic alkaloids. Iso-ergine is one of them, hydroxy-methyl-lysergamide is another one, and in fact, is considered nearly identical to LSD in effect. Albert Hoffman told me so himself. They believe that it was this derivative contained in extracts of c.paspalum that was used in the Eleusian Mysteries.

B: It’s true, they did a water salt solution.

O: I believe that they will find a plant which contains the exact diethylamide of lysergic acid in natural form. In alkaline alcoholic medium the isomers of the amines of lysergic acid will reach an equilibrium. This equilibrium will be a certain per centage of the iso compound, and a certain per centage of the normal compound. Of all the compounds listed experimentally by Hoffman, LSD has the highest ratio of active to inactive isomers in the equilibrated mixture, it runs 88-12. Of all the compounds, and it lists about 20 of them, it has the highest ratio of active to inactive. This means that nature favours the active form of LSD over the inactive by a considerable margin.

B: So you’re saying that basically because there is not naturally occurring, I mean people supposedly get high . . .

O: Whether or not there is, you cannot say. With a planet that has literally hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants yet to be discovered, you cannot definitively say that this compound does not naturally occur. I mean, how long ago was it that they thought that ergot alkaloids only existed in various forms of fungus. When they discovered them in morning glory seeds, people thought there’s got to be contamination in the laboratory, there’s something wrong here. The fact of the matter is that there are probably hundreds of extremely powerful psychedelic plants that are just not yet known to modern science.

B: Most recently, Salvia divinorum, they finally found the active ingredient.

O: Oh, that’s interesting. What was it?

B: I forget the chemical name of it, but there is a new book about it.

O: There’s lots and lots of references, people use this ritually, but we couldn’t find anything in it to extract it. It is good that it finally was isolated. Who knows, maybe the extraction process destroyed it or something. But to categorically state that LSD is only a synthetic compound, I don’t agree. I believe that it’s so close to nature that if it doesn’t exist, it hardly requires much of a stretch of the chemical imagination to produce it. If you take a polycyclic ring compound with a unsaturated side chain, and combine that chemically with nitrogen to produce a compound that cannot be found anywhere in nature, and then introduce it into your body and it produces bizarre effects, you can’t be too surprised. If somebody was trying to compare styrene compounds with phenethylamines, you can’t really do that either, because styrene is a conjugated, unsaturated side chain attached to an aromatic ring. It’s a totally different kind of compound than what we’re talking about, which is a saturated side chain with a nitrogen on it. alpha-phenethylamine is a compound which occurs in nature. It’s quite common, in fact, it occurs in the human body . . .

B: So you think that MDMA and MDA are too close to amphetamine, which is not naturally occurring

O: Not really, there are several amphetamine-like hormones in the body, the troublesome part is the double ring. The side chain is amphetamine. There’s a phenethylamine version that’s inactive. The only active phenethylamine that has psychic properties is mescaline. Most of these double-ring analogs, amphetamine analogs, were produced along a reasoning series based on amphetamine.

B: There’s a lot of phenethylamine analogs, like for instance 2-CB or 2-CI, or DOET or DOI, which are phenethylamines which are psychologically active. Shulgin’s book is full of those things.

O: He started looking at mescaline and all these things which have like branches. Very few of them originated with him. Most of them were already synthesised by someone, he searched them out, made up samples and experimented with them. He’s a very experienced experimentalist with these unusual compounds and derivatives, always trying to see where it would take him. I don’t know if I agree with all this. Mescaline’s fine, I like mescaline fine.

B: He made escoline, and proscoline . . .

O: That’s getting into a lot of other things that are not . . . There are 23 major psychoactive alkaloids found in peyote and San Pedro cactus, and the actual effects of the plant are probably as dependent upon these other ingredients, sort of like my trace elements, as they are upon mescaline itself. So a peyote high is distinctively and perceptively different from one induced by mescaline sulfate. I don’t dispute that there are many different kinds of things which will affect your nervous system, I’m just not in agreement with synthetics. I’ve experimented with a lot of these different things over a period of years, and I sat down one day and said, you know I’m just buggering myself up with this shit, and it’s not taking me anywhere that I can’t get with psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and mescaline. These are naturally occurring. They work. Your body has a “history” of experience with them. People have used them for thousands and thousands of generations, and we’ve adapted to them because they exist in nature, they’re there for us to use, they’re the planetary hormones that allow us to bring our consciousness forward to the next level. They’ve always been used this way.

It always seemed I went into more cosmic shit with acid, with very little visuals. Usually blurring, a bit of a paisley outline. If I was very quiet in a dark room and closed my eyes, I would get little arrowheads and things. Often I would see things that implied the pattern, and had much more fantastic and complex shapes to them. But I never found that acid was great at creating images out of nothing. It always seemed to just modify what you saw.

DMT, on the other hand I found, could create the most fantastic shit completely on its own. You would have no idea where it came from. I find that DMT and its relatives like psilocybin are extremely body-heavy. Boy, they’re body-heavy! LSD is not very body-heavy. But mescaline is also body-heavy. LSD seems to be one of the most benign of all of the psychedelics in its body effects . . .

B: It’s interesting, I just interviewed Terence McKenna before you, and he claims he never got high on LSD, that he never hallucinated off of it.

O: Well, I don’t much any more either. After a long experience with highly psychedelic compounds, you don’t get visual shit much anymore.

B: Why do you think that is?

O: I have no idea. The mind just does other things with it. Because the visual stuff that you see when you take LSD is actually noise. It’s stuff that’s there all the time that you ignore, that you’ve filtered out. It’s the background noise of the organization of your visual system, both in the eye and in the brain. When you take acid, it opens up all the portals and deactivates the filters. The first thing that happens is you’re overwhelmed by all the sensory stuff. We’re very visual animals, so the visual stuff is very impressive to us. But after you become experienced with it, your mind says, oh yeah well that’s pretty noise, but still it’s noise.

B: It gets used to it and . . .

O: It goes to another level. After awhile you get to point where if you really want a highly visual trip, you’ve got really only one option: You have to use a solution, and you have to drop it directly into your eye. I guarantee, you will find all the visual stuff you ever saw on any trip you ever took, it will pop right back into your consciousness if you do it this way.

B: Why do you think it is, because it’s interacting with the retina?

O: The eye is an extension of the brain.

B: So it gets in there fast.

O: It goes directly onto the brain.

B: Couldn’t you do that with a much higher dose of LSD?

O: It didn’t seem to do it to me! I noticed only the eyedrops worked. I mean, after a long lay-off you’d get a little more of the visual, but it always seemed that I went into more cosmic shit with bigger amounts of acid and with very little visuals, usually only some blurring and a little bit of a paisley outline, if I was very quiet in a dark room and closed my eyes. Often I would see things that implied the patterns, and had much more interesting fantastic and complex shapes to them, but I’ve never found that acid was great at creating images out of nothing, it always seem to modify what you saw. DMT, on the other hand, I found often could create the most fantastic shit completely on its own, you had no idea where it came from. It would be like nothing in your past experience.

B: In the current psychedelic scene, which they’ve tried to rename the entheogen scene . . .

O: I’m a little uncomfortable with that . . .

B: Yeah, well their big emphasis is on DMT and ayahuasca, and ayahausca analogs which use MAO inhibitors to catalyze 5-methoxy. What do you think about all that?

O: The 5-methoxy things don’t seem to be the ones, it’s the 4-methoxy ones that do it. It’s not the bufotenine. I can’t find a single writer who claims psychedelic results from taking or ingesting bufotenine. There’s even a story going around that people were using bufo marinus, a common, giant toad native to Costa Rico, that was imported into both Hawaii and Australia as an attempted control on the sugar cane beetle. It’s one of the more stupid things people have done, because it’s very easy to see that a totally nocturnal animal that feeds on the ground could hardly have any affect on a day-active beetle that stays in the upper parts of the plants that it’s attacking. But nobody bothered to check it out, they just saw this big toad that liked to eat bugs. All that’s great, I mean actually it’s not all that harmful in either location because it still eats a lot of bugs, mostly night active harmful ones that are close to the ground, like cockroaches. Unfortunately there are some rarer kinds of beetles in Australia which have nearly disappeared. This is mostly of concern to entomologists. The “cane toad” is very common in a lot of places, and I know a lot of people who have extracted samples of their venom, and found that it’s inactive. It doesn’t do anything. Eating it’ll make you sicker than a dog, but smoking it does nothing. But the story persists. There is an American native toad, bufo alvarius, called the Colorado River Toad, which indeed has a strong DMT-like venom, which can be smoked.

B: The 5-methoxy DMT occurs in . . .

O: 5-methoxy DMT is another name for a methyl ester of bufotamine. 5-methoxy is slightly active, but 4-methoxy DMT is very active.

B: People have been experimenting with all kinds of subvariants, even using DMT and a straight MAO inhibitor.

O: I only know of the combination with harmaline or harmine. These are the active ingerients of ayahuasca.

B: Do you think any of this stuff has any advantages over LSD for people?

O: Not really. I find that the effects of the tryptamine, the DMT and its relatives like psilocybin are extremely body heavy, boy, are they body heavy. LSD is not so body heavy. Mescaline is body heavy because of it’s effects on the liver. LSD seems to have the least body effects of all the psychedelics, and it would be my choice for most people.

B: Because it’s such a small amount . . .

O: I may be right or I may be wrong, I don’t know, but it was always my opinion that LSD itself wasn’t the active material, that it was simply a catalyst/agent that caused your body to release something that actually did the job. That was the reason why you couldn’t take it several days in a row, because you had to recharge this “body-battery” or capacitor that you were discharging. The reason that the intensity was proportional to the amount, was that the larger amounts caused a rapid and more complete discharge of the stored material.

B: Why was there so much bad acid around in those days if there was so much lysergic acid monohydrate floating around?

O: Well, there pretty much wasn’t any, certainly none “floating around.” It was hard to get. You couldn’t just walk into a chemical store and buy it. Organic houses didn’t carry it much. It was expensive as chemicals went, and unstable, and they often wanted to know exactly who you were before they would sell you any organic chemicals — especially those that were pharmaceutically active. You had to present a really good front in order to get them to accept you. And the average individual in possession of lysergic acid monohydrate had not much hope in hell of producing any LSD from it, because the reagents are so reactive that the slightest mistake and you produce nothing but brown goo.

B: Yeah, that’s what in Bernard Roseman’s book he produced, right?

O: He produced brown goo. His description of what he did doesn’t match the synthesis that he claimed to have used. It was a total scam. He most likely imported that stuff from Czechoslovakia. After I read that thing I thought he was a big joke.

B: Now you got into making it mainly because you were an artist —

O: I didn’t like what I was getting. You know, the published synthesis worked with about seven and a half grams of material. Seven and a half grams of starting material carefully manipulated produces nearly seven and a half grams of final product. That’s about a 67% yield, which is a very, very good yield for a synthetic peptide process — especially as sensitive and unstable as the lysergic acid compounds are. So seven and a half grams of material is a supply for a big mob of people. — a massive amount, at the dosage we chose, nearly thirty thousand trips!

So what are you going to do with it? Give it away. All the equipment that I had to use to make it is costly, so I had to get some money back. But I never felt it was my money. None of the money that came from acid I felt was my money. I was like a custodian of it, and didn’t know what to do with it. It was a real problem for me.

I never bought a decent car even during this time. I certainly didn’t buy any houses or anything. I just didn’t believe it was mine. What I was doing was something for the community that had great cosmic significance — although I could live off of it. But I tried to plow as much of it back into the community that I could. I gave a lot of the material away, gave out handfuls of the stuff in the park all the time. I put about half of it out through the free distribution system, and the other half went through the money distribution system. I felt that giving so much of it away for free kept the markup in the sale loop to a low level. The quality stayed high and the markup stayed low, and people got it anyway. Putting it out through the sales trip allowed a wide distribution that wouldn’t have happened if there had been no money in it.

One of the reasons I did it as carefully as I did was the thought/fantasy that if the authorities were to have come to me and said, “We want to see how you are doing this” (the imaginary FDA Inspector), they wouldn’t have been able to find a single flaw with the way I was doing it. I was doing it absolutely by the book. The tablets were clean and pure and were of uniform dosage. The material itself to start with was, in fact, more highly purified than the commercial product from Sandoz, the patent holder. We were trying to do it right, because anything else is a rip-off. After all, people are taking this into their bodies, and shouldn’t have to take a risk with their health.

B: In those days, the dosages were like around 250 mcg. a hit?

O: Well, you know, the dosage was perhaps the biggest mistake we made. We read about Hofmann’s bicycle ride, and that sounded right. That was what he had taken, so it had a tradition. We assumed that was the optimal dose. In the entire intelligensia scene with which I had contact they were into doses that ran mostly from about 100 up, and the tablets that Sandoz made were 25, the vials 100. But When I met Kesey, his idea of the proper amount turned out to be 400!

The strength of the dosage was far too high really. And after we got out of doing it, and other people got involved, dosages dropped. They dropped to a point where they hung at 80-100 mcg. This does not cause a cosmic experience for the person taking it. The person can remain quite functional. If you wanted to take two or three of the current doses, then you would definitely would get into the same cosmic areas that we did.

But I was so upset when I got into the underground drug scene with the twenty gram ounce, you know, and the 500 mg. spoon, and things like that, that I thought, “Jesus, no one who gets one of these tabs is going to get shorted.” So we figured 250 mcg., with a possible plus or minus 5% tabbing error — so we put an extra 10% in there. And then we decided that we wanted to cover for any possible deterioration from exposure to light, so we put another 10% in there, and wound up with over 300 mcg. It was sort of like rocket fuel. It was a mistake. I’ll freely admit to that.

The first doses I took were probably about 100 mcg. It wasn’t until an old friend, a lawyer, an LA defense attorney, in fact, learned about my introduction to acid. When I told him I had taken LSD, he said, “My God, I’ve got something to give you.” A friend of his had given it to him down in Mexico. He said he didn’t want to take it again, he was around 60 at the time, but he said, “You should really try this, because this is the Kind, the real thing.” He gave me this cap, which was a #4 cap with powder in it. It was probably either Sandoz or Czech material. I took this cap home, and when my cousin came to visit me from the East Coast, I split it with him. He’d never taken it. And I found out that I had never really taken real acid. God, if one person had taken that cap! It must have had 500 mcg. in it, I swear to God. It was POTENT. Both my cousin and I went on quite a trip. And it was at the conclusion of that trip that I realized that that was what real LSD was all about. And after that I tried to get some more. I couldn’t get any, so I thought, “Well, shit, if I can’t get any, obviously there’s only one other way out. Go to the library.” All the organic synthetic chemistry that I know about is the stuff I picked up in a few weeks in the UC library.

B: Your acid had a reputation back in those days. Purple Haze, White Lightning, was always considered the most esteemed of all the acid that people could get back in those days.

O: Well, it was just done right. Most of it wasn’t!

B: In those days, the orientation was more toward that mystical experience. These days it’s probably different, a lot of the kids these days don’t even have that framework that people had back then, because there was this intellectual tradition, people were writing books, The Beatles were singing about Magical Mystery Tour, and all that. There was a spiritual context for taking it, and people shared information with each other about what to expect from these higher dosages.

O: I don’t think so.

B: More so than now!

O: You think so? I don’t know. I’m not out on the street anymore. But I did come across a very interesting program on television just a couple of nights ago, actually. I just tuned into the middle of it. It was about techno. Basically it was about the acid scene, the modern scene: the music, acid, ecstasy, etc. It was an in-depth. Some techno is very good, some of it’s uninteresting to me, but some of it is so good, it’s amazing. It’s modern, complex, electronic music, and it’s usually done in real time by musicians. So it’s sort of like performances that resemble in some ways John Cage, and (Zepwhatnick?). Real cutting edge, heavy duty. I’ve been thinking of trying to contact Phil Lesh about this, I was really impressed. It started in Goa.

B: With Goa Gill.

O: Yeah, it started in Goa, this whole thing.

B: That’s what Goa Gill claims.

O: Well, I don’t doubt it. Some of the strangest parties I’ve been to here, and we’re talking like ten years ago, here where I live, I went to a party that people who had come from Goa were running, and it was full of the strangest, heaviest, most psychedelic stuff. I was stoned myself, so I tried to find out later what records they used. They showed me this box full of records. I said what did you play, he said man I don’t know, what I thought was good at the time! There was a lot of African stuff, techno stuff, an amazing mix of stuff, and all of it was good. And I didn’t connect the thing at all in those days. Until I saw the show the other night, I wasn’t really that aware of the depth of the scene. It looked like early Grateful Dead, looks like Acid Test. Images of parties and people dancing, and listening to music. It’s the same kind of stuff. It’s Acid Test stuff. So if somebody tells me, oh well you were doing this then, and they’re not doing that now, and I’m just telling you, you might not be in contact with that scene, but that scene is very much alive.

B: A lot of these kids are taking ecstasy . . .

O: I think there’s two branches that have branched off, there’s a branch that used ecstasy and there’s a branch that uses acid.

B: It started out with acid in the earliest days. The earliest acid house was in Ibiza in Spain back in 1987.

O: It moved to Ibiza from Goa, apparently, and from there on up into Germany, which is now practically the home of techno, from what I can tell.

B: In the early days, Goa Gill was playing Kraftwerk, and those kind of groups. He was spinning DAT tapes, that’s what he was doing.

O: I heard some incredible music on this show, I thought Jesus I’d like to get that, oh boy I’d like to get that, and then they didn’t really explain which groups they were.

B: We’ll send you some tapes!

O: I have no problems with that. I do have problems with the methylene dioxy analogs. I have serious problems with that. I just don’t think it’s good stuff. I don’t think any of the synthetics based on those multi-ring exotic oils are good. I think they’re very bad and I think that you’re creating a substance that the body has no way of dealing with because they don’t occur in nature.

I actually read an articles recently by someone who claimed that the body could aminate myristicin or saffrole (?) and produce these compounds in your body. Now I know a bit about biochemistry, and as far as I know there is absolutely no way to aminate anything like that in the body. There are ways of de-aminating; in fact, monoamine oxidase is used to de-animate. It doesn’t go the other way, that’s like against the laws of entropy. You don’t reduce compounds in your body to less oxidized forms. The body oxidizes things, it uses them as fuel, or it eliminates them.

B: Well, people could say the same thing about LSD. They could say there’s sassafras and there’s nutmeg in nature, and there is morning glories and ergot in nature, but you have to do the chemistry in order to make something that’s effective.

O: No, that’s not true. Ergot compound contains many natural highly psychedelic forms. Isoergine (?) is one of them. Hydroxy-methyl- lysergic amide is another one, and in fact that is considered nearly identical to LSD, Albert Hoffman told me so himself. They believe that that was the derivative of the ?? that was used in the Eleusian Mysteries.

B: It’s true, they did a water salt solution.

O: I believe that they will find a plant which contains the exact diethylamide lysergic acid in natural form in that plant. If you take in an alkaline alcoholic medium and you place an isomerized mixture of the various amines of lysergic acid, they will undergo an equilibrium. This equilibrium will be a certain per centage of the iso compound, and a certain per centage of the normal compound. Of all the compounds listed experimentally by Hoffman, LSD has the highest ratio of active to inactive; it runs 88-12. All the compounds, and it lists about twenty of them, it has the highest ratio of active to inactive.

B: So you’re saying that basically because there is not naturally occurring, I mean people supposedly get high . . .

O: Whether or not there is, you cannot say. With a planet that has literally hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants yet to be discovered, you cannot definitively say that this does not occur. I mean, how long ago was it that they thought that ergot alkaloids only existed in various forms of clavisest (?) ? When they discovered them in morning glory seeds, people thought there’s got to be contamination in the laboratory, there’s something wrong here. The fact of the matter is that there are dozens and dozens and dozens of extremely powerful psychedelic plants that are just not known by modern science.

B: Most recently, Salvia divinorum. They finally found the active ingredient.

O: Oh, that’s interesting. What was it?

B: I forget the chemical name of it, but it is in a new book about it.

O: There’s lots and lots of references. People use this ritually, but we can’t find anything in it to extract it. Who knows, maybe the extraction process destroys it or something. But to categorically state that LSD is a synthetic compound, I don’t agree with it. I believe that it’s so close to nature that if it doesn’t exist, it hardly requires much of a stretch of the chemical imagination to produce it. It’s not like when you take a polycyclic ring compound with a unsaturated side chain, and combine that chemically with nitrogen to produce a compound that cannot be found anywhere in nature, and then introduce it into your body and you have bizarre effects, you can’t be too surprised. And if somebody was trying to compare styrene compounds with phenethylamines, you can’t really do that either, because styrene is a conjugated, unsaturated side chain attached to an aromatic ring. It’s a totally different kind of compound than what we’re talking about, which is a saturated side chain with a nitrogen on it. Alpha-phenethylamine is a compound which occurs in nature. It’s quite common, in fact. It occurs in the human body . . .

B: So you think that MDMA and MDA are too close to amphetamine, which is not naturally occurring.

O: The side chain is amphetamine. There’s a phenethylamine version that’s inactive. The only active phenethylamine that has psychic properties is mescaline. Most of these poly-cyclic analogs, amphetamine analogs, were produced along a reasoning series based on amphetamine.

B: There’s a lot of phenethylamine analogs, like for instance 2-CB or 2-CI, or DOET or DOI, which are phenethylamines which are psychologically active. Shulgin’s book is full of those things.

O: He started looking at mescaline and all these things which have like branches, and very few of them originated with him. Most of them were already originated by someone, but he searched them out, made up samples and experimented with them. So he’s a very experienced experimentalist with these unusual compounds and derivatives, always trying to see where it would take him. I don’t know. Mescaline’s fine, I like mescaline fine.

B: He made escoline, and proscoline . . .

O: That’s getting into all those other things that are not . . . well, the twenty-three major psychoactive alkaloids found in peyote and San Pedro cactus, and the actual effects of the plant. are probably as dependent upon these other ingredients, sort of like my trace elements, than they are upon mescaline itself. So a peyote high is distinctively and perceptively different from mescaline sulfate. I don’t dispute that there are many different kinds of things which will affect your nervous system, I’m just not in agreement with synthetics. I’ve experimented with a lot of these different things over a period of years, and I sat down one day and said, you know I’m just buggering myself up with this shit, and it’s not taking me anywhere that I can’t get with psilocybin, DMT, LSD, mescaline. These are natural, naturally occurring. They work. Your body has an experience of them. People have used them for thousands and thousands of generations, and we’ve adapted to them because they exist in nature, they’re there for us to use, they’re the planetary hormones that allow us to bring our consciousness forward to the next level, they’ve always been used as this. It always seemed I went into more cosmic shit with acid, with very little visuals. Usually blurring, a bit of a paisley outline. If I was very quiet in a dark room and closed my eyes, I would get little arrowheads and things. Often I would see things that implied the pattern, and had much more fantastic and complex shapes to them. But I never found that acid was great at creating images out of nothing. It always seemed to modify what you saw.

DMT, on the other hand, I found could create the most fantastic shit completely on its own. You would have no idea where it came from. I find that DMT and its relatives like psilocybin are extremely body-heavy. Boy, they’re body-heavy! LSD is not so body-heavy. Mescaline is very body-heavy. LSD seems to be one of the most benign of all of the psychedelics in its body effects . . .

B: It’s interesting, I just interviewed Terence McKenna before you, and he claims he never got high on LSD, that he never hallucinated off of it.

O: Well, I don’t any more. After a long experience with highly psychedelic compounds, you don’t get visual shit much anymore.

B: Why do you think that is?

O: I have no idea. The mind just does other things with it. Because the visual stuff that you see when you take LSD is actually noise. It’s stuff that’s there all the time that you ignore, that you’ve filtered out. It’s the background noise of the organization of your visual system, both in the eye and in the brain. So when you take the acid, it opens up all the portals and deactivates the filters. The first thing that happens is you’re overwhelmed by all this sensory stuff. We’re very visual animals, so the visual stuff is very impressive to us. But after you become experienced with it, your mind says, oh yeah, well, that’s pretty noise.

B: It gets used to it and . . .

O: It goes to another level. After awhile you get to point where if you really want a highly visual trip, you’ve got really only one option: You have to use a solution and you drop it directly in your eye. I guarantee, you will find all the visual stuff you ever saw on any trip you ever took, it will pop right back into your consciousness if you do it this way.

B: Why do you think it is, because it’s interacting with the retina?

O: The eye is an extension of the brain.

B: So it gets in there fast.

O: It goes directly into the brain.

B: In the current psychedelic scene, which they’ve tried to rename the entheogen scene . . .

O: I’m a little uncomfortable with that . . .

B: Yeah, well their big emphasis is on DMT and ayahuasca, and ayahausca analogs which use MAO inhibitors to catalyze 5-methoxy. What do you think about all that?

O: The 5-methoxy things don’t seem to be the ones, it’s the 4-methoxy ones that do. It’s not the bufotenine. I can’t find a single worker who claims psychedelic results from taking or ingesting bufotenine. There’s even this story that somehow people were using bufomarinus, the common toad of Costa Rica that was imported into both Hawaii and Australia as an attempted control of the sugar cane beetle. It’s one of those more stupid things people thought, because it’s very easily seen that an absolutely totally nocturnal animal that feeds on the ground could hardly have any affect on a day active beetle that’s in the upper parts of the plants that it’s parasitizing. But nobody bothered to check the status for the thing, they just saw this big toad that liked bugs. All that’s great, I mean actually it’s not harmful in either situation because it still eats a lot of bugs, mostly night active harmful ones that are close to the ground, like cockroaches. Irrespective of that, bufo is very common in a lot of places, and I know a lot of people who have extracted samples of their venom, and it’s inactive. It doesn’t do anything. It’ll make you sicker than a dog, but smoking it does nothing.

B: The 5-methoxy DMT occurs in . . .

O: 5-methoxy DMT is another name for a methyl ester of bufotamine. 5- methoxy is slightly active, but the 4-methoxy is very active.

B: People have been experimenting with all kinds of subvariants, even using DMT and a straight MAO inhibitor.

O: I only know of the combination with harmoline, or harmine.

B: Do you think any of this stuff has any advantages over LSD for people?

O: Not really. I find that the effects of the tryptamine, the DMT, and its relatives like psilocybin are extremely body heavy, boy they are body heavy. LSD is not so body heavy. Mescaline is very body heavy because of it’s effects on the liver. LSD seems to be the most benign of all the psychedelics in body effects.

B: Because it’s such a small amount . . .

O: I may be right or I may be wrong, I don’t know, but it was always my opinion that LSD itself wasn’t the active material, that it was simply a releasing agent that caused your body to cause something that actually did the job. That was the reason why you couldn’t take it days in a row, because you had to recharge this battery or capacitor that you were discharging. The reason that the intensity was proportional to the amount was that the larger amounts caused a rapid and complete discharge of the stored material. This is just a thought that I had about it, whether it’s true or not I don’t know. Now the toads that were psychedelic are the Colorado River toads, which is (Bufoelvirase?) So if people want to smoke toad venom, that’s the one they’ve got to get, not the cane toad, it won’t do it.

B: Now let’s go back to the Dead scene, and how you first hooked in with all of that.

O: I had a friend, a big black dude, who lived in Berkeley. He was quite a character, and he would tell me I had to come down with him to see Kesey. I had heard of Kesey, and read his books, and he says to me, enthusiastically, “Fantastic, he’s got these Hells Angels.” I said, “Shit, man, you’ve got to be out of your mind. And you, a black guy! Those Angels EAT ‘niggers.’ What are you doing?”

He says, “Ah, I don’t know. It’s pretty interesting. He’s been feeding them all acid. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on down here, man!” I said, “No, I don’t want anything to do with Hells Angels. Stay away from those guys, man.” Because everything I had heard about them was just horrible.

But finally, one day I said, “Okay, come on. If it’s important to you, I’ll go down.” So I went down with him and, Jesus, boy, that was sort of like getting strapped to a rocket sled. The stuff that those guys would do with your head, and the drugs and everything else, was nothing like anything else I had experienced before. It was absolutely dramatic. And it WAS true. The Angels turned out to be some of the farthest-out people I ever in my life had met. They were just cut free by this thing. It was like a key. Kesey was playing with stuff which I recognized as ancient magical shit. But they didn’t know it. They just kind of stumbled on it by playing around. They stumbled on a lot of the old stuff that was just buried. I said, “I’ve read some old esoteric documents in occult literature, and this stuff is not visible. You’ve got to be real careful with this shit.” I thought they were running kind of loose with it. And that it was dangerous. And in some ways it was. But it didn’t matter. It was working and they were doing it. This, of course, is evidence that the ancient doctrines are based on psychedelics.

B: So you’re talking about the Acid Tests.

O: Well, that was Kesey’s back house at the place in the woods in La Honda; the Acid Tests followed. I met the Grateful Dead — I first saw them at the Acid Tests. I met them later at the Fillmore, and almost immediately hooked up with them. And they almost immediately went to LA, to follow the Acid Tests. I decided that since I had gotten on the bandwagon to be their soundman, I would go along too. All that stuff that Rock Scully describes in that book he did with David Dalton, which Dalton actually wrote, Living with the Dead, hadn’t anything to do with reality. It’s just a hazy, weird recollection of a drug-damaged mind, with a few facts stuck in here and there. Everything else was created out of whole cloth. But the real thing was a very interesting scene. The Pranksters and —

B: Oh, I know the book you mean. What about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

O: I never talked to the guy who wrote that one, Tom Wolfe. It was interesting, because reading his descriptions I could name the people he talked to. It was very easy to do because these people he talked to he had very good descriptions of. He has an amazing ability to describe character. But then they would talk about other people, so that the people that he was constructing from the stories the other told him, those were not clear. Unfortunately, Wolfe has some kind of compulsion to put everything he writes about down.

Living with the Dead didn’t even sell out the first printing because Deadheads realized what bullshit it was, and wouldn’t buy it. And word got around. The publishers even put up a website; the stuff they got back from the website must have curled their hair.

B: Well, what was wrong with it?

O: Well, it was just bullshit. Rock got heavy into heroin and, in fact, he was excluded from the Dead scene because every time he would come around Garcia would get smacked out and could hardly play. They connected Scully with the heroin, and they said, “You can’t come around here anymore. We’re trying to get this thing done.” And he was also an alcoholic. And while he was trying to write this book with Dalton, he was drunk all the time. He wouldn’t show up, and when he did show up, he would talk in, like, Valley Girl lingo. A few words here and a few words there, and he refused to give any kind of in-depth description of the people and characters that populated his story, such as they were. He could sort of remember something vaguely about something that happened. He would describe what he remembered to David, and David would then construct something based on that. It was like a little hint, and he would expand it into a story. The stories are fictional. The book is fictional. It has buried in it tiny little bits — I can go through it page by page and say, “Oh yeah, I know where he got this idea because such-and-such a thing happened. He couldn’t remember that right, so this is what came out and this is what David wrote about.” So the whole thing is appalling, and it has some very poor pictures of a lot of people in it. It makes us do a lot of things we didn’t do. The other thing about it is that at the end — Garcia died before this sucker was finished. Dalton called up Rock, and said, “Your good old friend died. Give me something to put in there.” Rock would not do it. The little tribute at the end of the book is by David. Can you believe that? Is that hypocritical or what? It’s just absurd. The whole thing is just so . . . bad.

Rock’s not a terrible guy. He’s just an unfortunate fellow who can’t remember shit. He went out and sold the story, and then he couldn’t deliver. So the book that came out doesn’t do justice to anyone, and it gives a terrible picture of Garcia. And it’s just not true. I’m sorry. And the Deadheads really didn’t buy it. The last I heard the publishers were ripping the covers off all the hardbacks to make a soft cover to try to get something of their investment back.

B: Well, the Dead had a very long history compared to other rock bands. I mean, they started out with this Acid Test, and they were never a major big seller in the ‘60s.

O: The Dead’s records always sounded contrived. Because the standard technique of going into a studio and sitting around and laying down a track at a time and building up twelve songs over six months doesn’t produce much in the way of exciting music. The Dead’s best albums were ones that they made from songs that they had fully developed on the road and were done on a restricted budget so that they could only go into a studio for a couple of weeks to do them. All of those turned out really, really well.

B: It was a live genre. It was a combination, taking rock and turning it into —

O: They were a jazz band. They weren’t a rock ‘n’ roll band. And people who think of the Dead as a rock ‘n’ roll band have missed the bus. They used rock motifs. They used blues motifs. They used country motifs. But they were a jazz band. It was a totally improvisational thing. Like they would play Madison Square Garden. Play three nights. Take a night off. Play three nights and so forth. They would play nine shows, and in those nine shows they would never play any songs over again. On the tour, however, they would play some of the more current ones at different venues; but if you took tapes of each night’s version and played them, you would find them different. Not just subtle differences. You would find all kinds of differences. Because they basically were a jazz band. The songs themselves were structured like jazz compositions in which there was a lot of latitude for improvisation.

When I was short of work and money, I went out with the Beach Boys back in the late ‘70s, doing sound. And they had used the same set list for the preceding eight years. They were playing the same songs in the same order, every show for eight years! The exact same set. They printed it up! It was a printed set list! A standard show!

Or with the Starship, you could make a cassette at the beginning of the tour; you could make a cassette at the end of the tour. You could put the two cassettes on two cassette machines and start them up at the same time and they would end on the same note! That, to me, wasn’t fun. There was no other band ever, I don’t think — outside of the jazz world — that was like the Grateful Dead. You could hear every concert they ever played and never get bored.

B: Was there a Dead culture in those days as well? It wasn’t as large, I know, but was there one?

O: Yes, they had a fanatic following as early as1965. One of the problems was that the fee that the promoters and clubs would offer the band only averaged around $100 to $125.

Well, if you’ve got five musicians working for 125 bucks, you’ve got twenty-five bucks per musician. That just about gets you to the gig and back, and pays for your dinner, doesn’t it? So there was no money for the soundman or anything else. There was really no money for the musicians. They couldn’t live on it — they all had day jobs. That was one of the points of staying in LA. The Acid Test sort of did its thing and finished, and the Dead stayed down there as long as the money lasted because we were waiting until an offer came. And the fans soon started bombarding the promoters with “Where are the Grateful Dead? We want to hear the Grateful Dead. How come you don’t book the Grateful Dead anymore? Where are the Grateful Dead? We want the Grateful Dead.” And the price offered started to rise. About the time we had run out of money, the price had gotten up to about, I think, $375. Three times what they were getting two months earlier or three months earlier, and so we said “Let’s do it!” And that was the beginning. So they were out of that doldrums at the bottom, and started climbing the ladder. That’s the way those things work, you know. They had a very strong following right from the beginning.

B: And you were following them around, doing their sound, and at the same time you were distributing acid ?

O: No, no, absolutely not! When I connected with the Dead, the understanding was that I would have nothing to do with any of the other stuff. That was the rule. I either did the Dead or I did the other thing. When I left to do the other thing because it had to be done — or I felt it had to be done, because there wasn’t any — I disconnected from them. It was a couple of years before I went back. After the Carousel closed, they came and asked me to do it again. I didn’t mix the two at all. That was one life, and there was the other life. Like I said, the acid-making was not a career for me. It was just something I did because I thought the community needed it. I started looking for a way out long before I got out, not nearly soon enough, as it turned out in the end.

I thought: “I’ve got to teach somebody how to do this. Who the hell?” I couldn’t really go out and ask somebody, because you’re putting them into something that has levels of ramification to it. They’ve got to come to you. The people who did come to me — I would worry about their motivations. It was a problem. I felt a responsibility to the community. I was trying to discharge my responsibility and get the fuck out because it was obvious I couldn’t keep doing it. I had gotten too hot. The first guy I gave some of the material to, in the very beginning, told everybody my name (strangely enough, he was a musician, a very good one). So my name got connected to it inadvertently. It was not of my doing. And the whole thing just sort of got crazier from there on out.

B: This is what time frame —‘66 or ’67?

O: Are you kidding? In early ‘65, I first succeeded in trying the synthesis in the fall of ‘64. There was a lot of stuff I had to figure out that didn’t work because I didn’t know all of the procedures because I had no training. It was, I think, February of ‘65 when I finally succeeded, and was able to get it to crystallize. I found out a lot of things that I needed to do to purify it, like developing a chromatographic setup. So I would say it was early ‘65, maybe March, the dosage was in #5 gelatin caps.

B: You said you felt the need to get out of it.

O: Yeah, I just felt it was something like a relay race. You couldn’t stay in it too long, because all this energy focussed on you. In fact, I always felt you couldn’t process very much material in one spot because it literally warped the fabric of the universe. Think about it. You’re taking something — a hundred grams of — say a hundred grams of lysergic acid monohydrate. It doesn’t do anything to you. You could eat it for breakfast, right? There’s no effect on anything mental.

You perform a process which within a matter of milli-seconds converts this totally inert material into some which will affect your consciousness at 25 millionths of a gram. So you have something that is hundred times 40,000. So that’s 4,000,000. Four million minds can be changed in a perceptible way by these hundred grams of material that came into existence in a very, very tiny space in a very, very tiny amount of time. And I believed in those days that holding your hands around the flask was important, and concentrating on the reaction was important. I also believed that at that moment that those chemicals came together that you had altered the universal mind in some significant fashion to suddenly produce something that was extremely powerful and you had produced a lot of it. I still believe that is true.

B: That’s kind of like a psychic black-wormhole or something —

O: Something like that. And therefore there was a permanent rip or tear or distortion in the fabric of space at the location where that conversion took place. So my thing was always to move from place to place. Do a little here, a little there. I’d do it, and we’d get it out there, and then it would run out. Because I didn’t want to do it again if I didn’t have to. I never felt it was anything to do with being something that I was doing. It was only a service, and I really wanted to get on with my experiences in the arts and especially the music I was discovering. I hadn’t discovered physical art, and it was a form of artistic endeavor, and the rest of it was that something had to be done. Someone had to do it. I felt I was doing a service, and I wasn’t in a profession. I was doing a service.

B: You eventually did get busted?

O: Well, yeah. I was trying to get out of it, and it was the last little bit. We just got the last little bit up, and we were trying to convert it into the tablet form. Because I didn’t believe in just letting the stuff go out there. God knows what hits the street, you know. It just wasn’t my way. I still tried to do it right.

B: You didn’t want to put it on blotter paper, like it’s done these days?

O: Well, three weeks later it would be gone. That was what I ran into when I first started taking it. Water and sugar cubes, blue liquid in vials, weird capsules and astringents, and all the rest of it. I just thought this is not right. You’ve got to do this right. If people take something, they deserve to be able to look at it and know they’re going to get the same thing every time. Like if you go out and buy a box of aspirin. You don’t want to look at each aspirin, and say, “God, how much is this? Is this going to work on my headache? Should I take ten? What do I take?” It didn’t make any kind of reasonable sense to me.

B: Did you use tartaric acid, or something like that as a binding agent?

O: No. Tartrate is the acid used to produce the salt. Lysergic acid diethylamide is a base. It will not crystallize from any solution. It undergoes conversion to iso-LSD, which will crystallize.

B: Or you could use maleic acid or something like that.

O: There were maleic acid derivatives, and some lysergic acid derivatives, but it was not published and the tartate was. It was not used as a binder, but as part of the compound. As for binding agents used in tabbing, I mixed it with tri-basic calcium phosphate, with bones as a carrier, as a buffer and an opaque substance to try to prevent light from getting to it. LSD, like most ergotamines I found, is quite unstable. It’s food for a lot of things. Bacteria get it, light gets it, moisture gets it, air gets it.

B: This bust — how bad a bust was it?

O: Bad enough. Crashing through the door, poking guns in your face. Not a pleasant experience, believe me! And then they take ninety grams of material, and sixty turns up in court. Sixty-seven grams of crystalline material, and forty-something showed up in court. They took something like one hundred grams of diluted material in powder, and about half of it showed up. The total that was missing was over thirty grams.

You know what happened to it — of course you do. In fact, as far as I was concerned, probably the powder that appeared in the jar in the courtroom wasn’t the stuff either. Probably all disappeared. I thought, well, that’s the universe’s way of making sure this stuff gets where it belongs! I thought the fact that the cops stole it and sold it — well, they’re corrupt and they get their money from selling it, but it gets to the street. Where it belongs, not in a lockup somewhere, evidence room somewhere.

B: So how much time did you do for that?

O: Well, they were all misdemeanor offenses. I was charged with possession, manufacture, and conspiracy. The only true offense was possession, because I wasn’t manufacturing any more. In fact, there were no tools to manufacture anything there. Conspiracy? It was hardly a conspiracy. It was a substantive act, and it didn’t consist of a conspiracy. They gave me a year on each conspiracy charge — I mean on each of the three charges — and they stacked them. Normally you drop a conspiracy, and if you don’t drop conspiracy at least you make them concurrent. We tried to fight it. In fact, it went to the Ninth Circuit, and they rejected our arguments. We went to the Supreme Court, and they sent it back to the Ninth Circuit saying, “Sounds like these arguments are valid.” And the Ninth Circuit said, “Nope, we’re not going to reexamine it.” It went back to the Supreme Court, which said, “You’ve already had your shot.” So I had to do what wound up being two years, one week and some hours. And that was enough to destroy my relationship with the underground. It never was the same after that.

What they did was they put me in a situation that had I been a weaker individual, less sure of myself, I would have certainly gone directly back into some sort of illegal activity. As it was, I struggled and struggled and struggled to get back into the art I felt I wanted to do. While I was locked up, I found that I could make physical structures with my hands that were amazing. I first did little pieces of wood that I got from the furniture shop and a couple of scratch-alls that were good steel that I ground and made some carving tools out of. What had happened was that I was in a medium-security place — Terminal Island — and one of the inmates there had given me some carving tools. He was leaving and said, “Well, here.”

I said, “Well, aren’t sharp things illegal?” He said, “Just stick it in your locker in the hobby shop.” So I did. Well, one day they decided to go through all the hobby shop lockers, and they found this thing and took it. I hadn’t had a chance to use it much. I noticed how it worked, and how it was made. I examined it quite closely. So when I later saw this guy carving something with a sharpened nail, I said, “Hey, man, I’ve seen a tool that’s much better than that.” He worked in the furniture factory in the prison camp, and I said, “Get me some kind of hard metal, like a file or a scratch-all or something, and I’ll make you a tool. Get two. I want to make one for myself.” He got me two. I made them, and he got me wood and I started carving. And the things I made were amazing. I mean, the first one looked something like what I was intending. The second one looked exactly like it. And the third one was a little face that I still have. And by the time I carved the seventh one, it was a sophisticated interpretation of the image of the moon — a derivative of which I still use today. The little wooden thing disappeared — I lost it out on the road a few years ago. I have a casting made from a mold of that little ebony carving which is the kiln goddess for my firing kiln. By the time I did that moon I realized it wasn’t a fluke. Something was really going on. My friend Bob Thomas, who was there, said, “Wow, you’re good. You’ve got it. Keep doing it!” I needed that encouragement, because if you look at something you’ve made, you don’t know how good it is at first.

By that time it had gotten to a point where I knew it was not only good, but it was weird because it didn’t seem to be hard. Things got better without me practicing. That scared me a little bit, you know. When you suddenly discover you can do things with your hands that are unbelievable, and you look at them yourself, and you can’t relate to the making of it, and you know for a fact that it is a good piece of art. It’s scary, especially if it comes easy and fast, and you don’t need to work at it. I don’t know that that talent didn’t always lie in me. Or it was brought about by psychedelics. I’m more inclined to believe the latter — that the psychedelics were the key to unlocking this ability, which obviously was there in potentiality in a sense.

B: Yeah, well a lot of people have had experiences where their creativity is enhanced by LSD — one of the reasons why a lot of people do it.

O: Just eating grass — if I smoke grass, then I won’t sit down and make something because I’ll be too involved with whatever is going on in my mind. But if I sit down on my workbench and begin a piece, and puff a few puffs while I’m working, the piece is improved. I’ve had images from acid — one particular idea which is a complex piece carved in gold and enamel, which consists basically of the skull of an animal created in gold, and then layer upon layer of enamel put on in such a way that it creates the musculature and the external part of the animal. At the same time, it looks like the most complex hallucinatory patterns and images you’ve ever seen. And I know it can be done. I haven’t a clue as to how to go about it. It’s just something that appears to me when I get stoned. And it appears to me when I’m not. Whatever approach is actually necessary to create it has also eluded me.

But there are a lot of things about each of the various media that I’ve worked with that elude me. I feel like I haven’t even gotten close to mastering enamel, and yet I don’t think I’ve seen any enamels anywhere that I’ve examined under a microscope that look anything like this stuff. So it’s nice to have something that you know is going to present this ongoing challenge to improve and exploit. I like doing physical art a lot.

B: So what year did you get out?

O: Oh, ‘72.

B: So things had really changed by then?

O: Oh, between July of ‘70 and ‘72, the Grateful Dead undergo a radical change. They hired a whole bunch of different people who were doing things in a totally different way. When I left, the crew was a loose organization. Usually you’d think of the four guys: Rex Jackson, and myself, and then another guy who from time to time would be with Sonny Heard or Johnny Hagen. Some nice kids would come and help us. It was just odds and ends of people. Sometimes Bob Matthews would show up and help out. Often Matthews would multi-track the shows. One of them was actually an eight-track that he made in LA at one of the Shrine Auditorium shows. He would put that out as if it were his tape. I said, “Hey, man, I was at that show. I was running the sound there. You used my tapes to make this?” He said, “No, the multi-track.” God, I was really pissed at that!

But we would just do whatever had to be done. You know, if it was the drums that had to get up right now, whoever was handy would pitch in and help. The guitars would get put in line, the P.A. get stacked up. The only thing was that when the show started, I went out and ran the board. That was the only thing that everybody else couldn’t do. I mean, I liked it that way. Every other aspect of any of the support work that had to be done by a crew for the Grateful Dead could be done by any of them.

When I came back, everybody had compartmentalized. Each one had their territory. Like a union guy, you know. I always thought that was a result of Matthews’ approach to organizing things, because he was a very organizing kind of guy. The only thing was that there no longer was a place for me because there was no territory, because it wasn’t held in common. And, of course, nobody wanted to give up an inch, and I was a threat because by that time there were a lot of people who only knew their job. They didn’t know everybody’s job, and so someone who could do anybody’s job — I was a pretty scary kind of guy. That is what happened.

I remained part of the family and part of the scene. And I could go away. I worked for a while up till ‘78 or so, but it wasn’t really happening. Nobody wanted to yield a fucking inch! I was upset by it, but then along comes this heroin thing for Jerry. And all of a sudden I thought, “God, you know the universe has actually done me a favor. I don’t have to live with this thing every day and deal with it as part of my job because I don’t feel that good.”

B: There was a TV documentary done back in the ‘60s — Harry Reasoner or something like that — where they had an interview with the Dead. Maybe it was ‘67 or ‘68, when they lived in the Haight-Ashbury. And they were just clearly psychedelic heads, you know — long hair — and that really changed later on. They all went in different directions.

O: Well, I always thought that the real reason that the Dead lost its coherence was that the members stopped taking acid on a regular basis. And they definitely stopped taking it together when they were going to go out and do a show. Professionalism was always a strong component of the Grateful Dead anyway. Like the Acid Test was fine because nobody really considered it a paying gig or anything. It was a place where you just went and got loose. But the paying gigs — they always had a concern that they would provide the people who paid money to get in there with a good performance. And eventually that became so strong in their psyche that they stopped getting high at all. On any occasion, except New Year’s or something like that. After awhile, even that stopped. And when it stopped, the changes started to set in. It’s like as long as you keep taking acid, your mind and your relationships to the world and the universe around you remain in kind of a plastic state. Like cement that’s been mixed, but you keep mixing it. Like as long as it stays in the truck, it’s okay — but once it runs out and has been laid down, it hardens. And your psyche or consciousness ages or hardens. That’s one of the characteristics of advancing age. You become inflexible. Things become real serious when you become an adult. In fact, in the late teens they start to become real serious.

B: There is certainly a place for people to get their act together and have an ego and so forth. But there’s a time when that becomes rigid and stultified. Don’t you think there was something about the psychedelic movement then? Wasn’t there the concept that if we could turn on a critical number of people, it would free their minds up and they would be open to these new possibilities that we’re discussing thirty years later, which haven’t emerged?

O: Yeah, we were sure there was a critical mass of people to turn on that would catalyze the change in society amongst those even who hadn’t. Just as in a concert after a certain number of people get high, everyone else is taken on this trip. They later come back and say, “Gee, somebody must have dosed me or something.” Nobody dosed them. It was just what they call “contact high.” We thought that could happen in the open part of society as well. We believed that when a certain per centage of people were exposed to the psychedelics, then that it would catalyze changes in the society as a whole. I don’t know whether that process can happen. Or whether it is happening and hasn’t surfaced yet. I don’t know. I do see that this same movement just isn’t the Grateful Dead anymore. All that stuff is happening, and it has been happening, but it’s just in a different mode. There are a lot of modes, and we may discover even more modes that are even more hidden.

B: You know, they have that old saying that “youth is wasted on the young.” Well, you could almost say that “acid is wasted on the young,” since it’s the people who are the older people who are the ones who really could use that jolt, right?

O: I think it is best to start not too young. I’ve never been of the opinion that a person under the age of 16 benefits more than they are positively inhibited by taking psychedelics. I’ve known people down to as young as seven or eight years old exposed to it. You know, hippies leave the stuff in the fridge, and the kid gets into it. I’ve seen that most of the ones who seem to adapt to psychedelics best are those who take it between the ages of about 16 and maybe 30. Past about 35, it starts to get strange. As below 16, it starts to get strange.

B: For a first time you mean?

O: Yeah. Once you’ve gotten into it, though, then it’s a maintenance thing. Keep contact with your youth by re-experiencing it. There are people who used to be psychedelic people who are very straight. Doing very straight jobs, and they are suffering the same bullshit everybody else suffers. They look you right in the eye, and say, “Yeah, I used to take acid, but I’ve already been there and done that.” You look at them and think: “What can you say?” They’re looking back on this thing like it was a bad dream, I gather. It’s a little like the kid who just managed to get his first tumble in the hay with a girl two weeks later telling his friend: “I’ve done that now. I don’t have to ever do that again.” Come on, man!

B: I went to meet up with Albert Hofmann back in ‘76 when I was into this LSD purity thing. I wrote an article on this in ‘77, and we thought the only place we could get the real pure stuff would be from the man himself. So me and a friend of mine went to visit with Hofmann, and we spent about three hours on this bridge on the Rhine River talking, and he told us about all the people who had come to see him before, all the people who had made pilgrimages there. Huxley, Michael Horowitz, and Leary and so forth. And he said, “Well, Leary’s a nice guy, but the biggest disagreement I have with him is that he thinks that young people should take LSD. I think that people need to be about 28 years old or something like that. He thinks that teenagers can take it.” When I challenged it, he said, “ Well, the kids in America are already like 28 year-olds in Europe, because they’ve been exposed to so much media.”

O: Well, that’s kind of odd. When I met him, he said, “Did you really make a million dollars from acid?” I said, “No way! I gave the stuff away!” He said, “Oh good! How strong did you make the doses?” I said, “Well, we made them the same as your bicycle dose — 250 mcg.” “Oh,” he said, “that’s a terrible overdose!” I said, “Yeah, in retrospect I have to agree with you.” I didn’t meet him until ‘89 or so.

B: We brought him here to Santa Cruz back in 1977. It was his first public appearance in the US. We did a conference here at the University; I was an undergraduate at the time, so I spent days with him. He’s quite an amazing guy. He’s a good tribute to LSD in the sense that he’s 92 years old and the guy’s mind is as alert —

O: Oh, he loves it! In fact, I gave him some stuff that I had, and he later thanked me for it and asked me for some more. And believe it or not, in 1990 he still had not at that point ever actually taken DMT.

B: He hasn’t been exposed to LSD a lot. He had only taken it, when I met him, about twelve or fourteen times.

O: He was definitely a psychedelic ranger, though. He was very responsive spreading it around. He thought it was important. So you said you went to talk to him about LSD purity?

B: Right, well we were interested in getting the pure stuff.

O: Did you get the pure stuff?

B: No, no. But he did reassure us that we were probably onto something with this purity thing, and the reason being that my friend and I had gotten pure LSD in the