Augustus Owsley Stanley III (Jan 19, 1935 - Mar 13, 2011) died when his car swerved off a road and down an embankment near Mareeba, Queensland, Australia. Although credited in some encyclopedias as a "chemist" who specialized in LSD, Owsley (who dropped the "Augustus" after a brief prison stint in the 1970s) considered himself an artist, and was greatly influenced by modern chemistry's forerunner, alchemy. Some historians deem Owsley as one of the least-known 1960s countercultural figures who had perhaps the largest impact on that period.
Owsley: Brief Background To Age 29 and LSD and the Beatles
An heir to the southern gentry Stanleys from Kentucky, Owsley was the grandson of Augustus Stanley Owsley I, who was Governor, a member of the House of Representatives, and finally a U.S. Senator from Kentucky. His father was a prominent attorney. As a young teen he was the first among his friends to reach puberty, so his friends called him "Bear," which was what he preferred to be called the rest of his life. (It seemed his friends called him "Bear" and the press and wider counterculture called him Owsley, never "Stanley.") The young Owsley was known as a brilliant student - particularly in science - who was wild and difficult. He had an unpleasant childhood, being expelled from a military academy at age 15 and had himself committed to St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, DC for 15 months in 1950, at the same time the "mad" poet Ezra Pound was there. Once out, he studied ballet, Russian and other languages, and at age 18 he severed ties with his family.
He spent 18 months in the U.S. Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar, and discharged at age 23. Owsley spent a lot of time spinning his wheels, his ferocious intellect never finding a place where it could flourish. After getting arrested for writing bad checks, he received a three-year suspended sentence, and he decided to enroll at Berkeley to study art.
One Week in April, 1964: Owsley Hears the Beatles and Takes LSD
Almost immediately recognized as the most eccentric character in a community of eccentrics, Owsley wrote poetry, painted (including a portrait of Christ's crucifixion from Christ's point of view), and was an odd yet dapper dresser. A folk music enthusiast, one day a friend brought over a copy of Meet The Beatles! and Owsley was stunned. The same week he took LSD for the first time. "I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside," he said, "and the cars were kissing the parking meters." His girlfriend was a chemistry undergrad at Berkeley, and they resolved to make some LSD that was at least as good as any pharmaceutical firm's.
Owsley, with no real background in organic chemistry, spent three weeks in the Berkeley library, poring over chemistry journals, learning everything he needed to know about how to make the drug that catalyzed the counterculture's consciousness. Around the same time, Owsley began studying alchemy, which he understood was densely metaphorical but profound in its implications regarding mental transformation. Often, in modern science textbooks, alchemy is treated as a goofy sidelight about human error before the rise of "true" science. Owsley, particularly enchanted with an ancient wisdom book of alchemy called The Kybalion, incorporated it into his work making LSD:
"It put into total context all the things I experienced on acid. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time and space, and dreaming what we are. Everything is connected, because it's all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That's what alchemy says." He told his journalist friend Robert Greenfield that his own state of mind while making LSD was crucial, because the potential effects on others mattered so much.
Owsley Peaks: 1965-1974
He set up his first lab in a bathroom in a house near the Berkeley campus. The police eventually raided it, and arrested him and confiscated his lab equipment. The police were looking for methedrine, which was illegal. LSD did not become illegal in California until October 6, 1966. Owsley hired the deputy mayor of Berkeley as his attorney and successfully won his case, and forced the police to give him back his lab equipment.
By conservative estimate, Owsley and a small, select group of chemist-friends, made at least 1.25 million "hits" of LSD. Other claims run up to five million. In the clandestine world he lived in, it is very difficult to substantiate these claims. He disputed an allegation by the San Francisco Chronicle that he had made a million dollars selling acid. And there is good reason to believe him, because he famously gave away so much of the notorious drug for free. He claims he never set out to change history, saying he only wanted to know that he was taking the purest LSD. He thinks he eventually made LSD that was 99.9% pure.
One of the main reasons LSD is not seen on the streets these days is: it's exceedingly difficult to make. One must have a thorough knowledge of organic chemistry and sanitary lab procedures. One batch takes around a week to make, and every step - and there are many - must be perfect. How did Owsley do it?
He had friends, but he was also a genius of the "mad scientist" sort. He said that when he enrolled in college, he would buy his textbooks and read them all right away, then sell them back at full price, as if he had decided not to take the class. A friend at Berkeley remembered that Owsley "had a theory on everything, like what kind of underwear is healthy." His theories were brilliant, sometimes very weird, and he sometimes defended this theories to the point where he exhausted his friends.
When he met the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey and gave them enormous amounts of pure LSD, it was because he loved the tribal aspect of the scene, and he loved the Dead's music. One problem: when they played, the band simply plugged into their amps, which were connected to single-channel speakers. No band members could hear each other. Owsley, with his knowledge of acoustics and electronics, completely redesigned their sound system, creating live stereo sound for the band. This technology rapidly swept the rock and roll subculture and made concerts much more listenable, both live and in recordings.
His White Lightning, Monterey Purple, and Blue Cheer batches of LSD were taken by the Beatles (especially during the filming of Magical Mystery Tour), the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival, and countless others. One must wonder how much the culture of the 1960s would have been different in the US and Europe had this eccentric genius never existed.
What A Long Strange Trip
Owsley convinced himself in the early 1980s that the entire Northern Hemisphere would be overcome with a new Ice Age, so he moved to Australia and lived off the grid there for the rest of his life. From sometime around 1959, he ate nothing but butter, eggs and meat, convinced that carbohydrates were a health hazard: "Roughage is the worst thing you can put in your body. Letting vegetable matter go through a carnivorous intestine scratches it up and scars it and causes mucous that interferes with nutrition."
He loved to take his friends out for steak dinners and lecture them on The Big Picture, combining Einstein with the Buddha and arguing that LSD came on the world scene (accidentally discovered by chemist Albert Hofmann) at almost the same time in the early 1940s that physicist Enrico Fermi achieved a fission reaction that made the atom bomb possible: the Mind outside of space and time was leveling the playing field, or as his friend the intellectual Ralph Metzner said, "Owsley's theory was that the higher intelligences controlling and supervising the progress of the planet could not let the atomic fission experiments go too far: the danger to all forms of life from nuclear radiation was too great."
Let us hope there is no bizarre alchemical message coming to us from some level Beyond in that: Owsley died only two days after the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, and at almost the precise time the nuclear reactors at Fukushima began to melt down.
Sources:
- Lee, Martin A, and Shlain, Bruce. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond. New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1985.
- Stafford, Peter. Psychedelics Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA, Ronin, 1992.
- Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York, Harper and Row, 1987.
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