If you were fortunate enough to have taken some White Lightening or Monterey Purple LSD manufactured by Owsley, aka Bear, or some Orange Sunshine LSD manufactured by Tim Scully in the mid to late 60s, and you are wondering why the LSD of today does not produce the same magical, mystical experience you had back then, you need to read this. If you agree with me that the Eagles put a line in their hit song Hotel California that says “We haven’t had that Spirit here since 1969” is a reference to the fact that really pure LSD 25 has not been available since then, you are going to want to read this. If you’re someone who is devoted to the use of psychedelics for Spiritual exploration, there is some important information in this post for you.

Tim Scully learned how to manufacture really pure LSD from Owsley, aka Bear, by working in the Richmond lab with him. He went on to produce several million hits of Orange Sunshine LSD, some of the best ever made, in the late sixties. He and Bear were both close friends of my mother’s, Marge King. He is still to this day in my circle of friends. I asked him a question about why LSD is not the same anymore. He was kind enough to give a very, very complete and informative answer. By email. He give me permission to make it public here.

Me: LSD these days doesn’t seem to be the same as it was many years ago. Why? Is it because lysergic acid is no longer available as a starting material?

Tim Scully: It’s true that lysergic acid has been almost unobtainable in the black market since about 1968. But many ergot alkaloids contain lysergic acid within their more complex molecules and lysergic acid can be obtained from them through a process known as cleavage. So that shouldn’t be a barrier to making pure LSD.

By the way, in case you didn’t know it, LSD is a semi synthetic drug. Ergot alkaloids are natural products which are mostly obtained from the ergot fungus. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, it’s possible to split out lysergic acid from the ergot alkaloids produced by ergot naturally. That’s how the lysergic acid that Bear and I bought was manufactured by the companies we bought it from. A relatively small addition of a diethyl amide sidechain at the right place on the lysergic acid molecule produces LSD.

Now I’ll try to answer the original question but I should start by explaining that because I have five felony convictions, all from one trial, I have chosen to keep my distance from any illegal activity for many years because the consequences for me of a relatively small violation could be a much longer prison sentence than for most other people. As a result I have no firsthand knowledge of the LSD that’s circulating now. Everything that I say is based on what I’ve read and on historical knowledge.

The next introductory explanation has to do with the powerful influence of set and setting on psychedelic experiences. You probably are familiar with the notion that the immediate surroundings in which you take a psychedelic and your mental state at the time when you take it both have a very strong influence on the experience that you have. In addition to your immediate surroundings, I believe that your cultural surroundings have a very powerful influence on the experience you have. The cultural beliefs surrounding psychedelics have changed drastically (for the worse) since 1965 when I first took LSD.

On top of all of those factors there’s the question of the placebo effect or expectations. I believe that not only your own mental state but also the mental states of the people around you and from whom you get the psychedelic influence the experience that you have. In modern medicine double-blind experiments are the gold standard because the experimenter’s beliefs can have such a strong influence on the patient’s response to a drug that this needs to be controlled for in any well-designed research study.

We ran a very simple experiment in about September 1966 at the Point Richmond lab where I was working as Bear (Owsley) Stanley’s apprentice. We took five or 10 g of pure crystalline LSD and divided it up into five equal piles. Each of those piles was diluted identically first by dispersing it on a quantity of tribasic calcium phosphate sufficient to make up 10% of the total tablet weight and then by thoroughly mixing that with enough lactose to make up the remaining 90% of the total tablet weight. A small amount of food coloring and Gum Arabic were added. The Gum Arabic was a binder to hold the tablets together.

Each pile got a different color of food coloring but otherwise was identical. We made tablet triturates from these five different colored piles. The resulting tablets were distributed in the San Francisco scene.

Interestingly enough we found that people in the scene told different stories about how the five different colors of LSD tablets must be adulterated with different drugs mixed in. People said that the red tablets, for example, were more laid-back and tended to make people sleepy. People said that another color was jangly and speedy and they speculated that speed or strychnine had been added to them. And so on. In fact all of the tablets contained identical quantities of pure LSD and no other active ingredient.

The point to this shaggy dog story is that people’s expectations and superstitious beliefs have a powerful effect on the experience they report. I believe that it would be very difficult to carry out a well-designed experiment to distinguish the effects of pure LSD from LSD contaminated with various impurities.

I should add that Bear Stanley, Melissa Cargill, Don Douglas and I all believed that it was extremely important to make the purest possible LSD. We went to a great deal of extra effort to attain that high purity. But I don’t have solid scientific evidence to prove the difference in experience that people would have when they take pure versus impure LSD.

I also have a personal belief that the intentions of the person making LSD and of the people distributing it may have a significant influence on the experience that people have when they take it. Thus the distribution channel that LSD travels through influences the experience that people have because it helps to frame and set their expectations. As the laws have become more harsh this has tended to push drugs more into professional criminal channels and that’s not good. It not only colors people’s expectations negatively but also exposes them to the ready availability of other drugs which can be very bad for them. Even back in the 1960s this was sometimes a problem and I believe it’s more of a problem now. All too many people fail to recognize that just because one illegal drug seems to be benign and helpful, that doesn’t mean that all illegal drugs are equally benign. I know a lot of people who’ve gotten into trouble through not understanding that.

I know with a high degree of confidence that down through the history of underground LSD manufacturing there have been some manufacturers who were very careful about making very pure LSD, eliminating iso-LSD as well as more obvious impurities. But there also have been manufacturers who didn’t believe that it mattered how pure LSD was and some of them made no effort at all at purification and others made only minimal efforts. So your mileage certainly will vary with respect to the purity of the LSD as it left the manufacturer. And, depending on how the LSD was packaged, it may deteriorate on its way to the end user.

It’s my understanding that these days most LSD, at least in the United States, is distributed on blotters. This has come about due to several factors. One of them is a change in the law that caused the weight of inert ingredients to be included with the weight of active ingredients in calculating prison sentences. This has resulted in most manufacturers of LSD choosing the lightest weight possible distribution vehicle. Another issue is that the sources of tablet machines have become so tightly controlled that they are much more difficult for underground labs to get so that even a chemist who isn’t concerned about the additional weight of tablets will have a lot of difficulty getting the equipment to make them. Well-made tablets have the advantage that the dose is controlled accurately and if the LSD is distributed on something like tribasic calcium phosphate, which strongly binds to the LSD; it will be evenly distributed throughout the volume of the tablet. This protects most of the LSD from UV light, abrasion, etc. This is in contrast to blotters where the LSD often is most concentrated on the surface of the blotter due to how the liquid that the blotter was dipped in evaporated.

In the presence of moisture, ultraviolet light converts LSD 25 into Lumi-LSD. This is an undesirable compound which is not psychedelic and which may have negative effects on psychedelic experiences. Blotters are much more subject to both un-even dosing and decomposition into Lumi LSD then well-made tablets were.

One more thing has changed since the 1960s. Back then Bear and I put up the acid that we made in doses of approximately 270 µg. Over the years the average size of a street dose of LSD dropped lower and lower and it’s my understanding that street dose is now or more on the order of 50 µg or less. Needless to say that makes a big difference in the kind of experience you will have. The lower doses have had the beneficial effect of reducing the rate of emergency room admissions of people freaking out from cataclysmic acid trips but on the other hand it has meant that fewer people experience what I used to call the oneness and other people often call the Clear Light.

Tim

Tim Scully is slowly working on a book that will be his memoir. He said it may be a year or more before it is published. If you want to know when that book is can be purchased, you can check his Wikipedia page from time to time, I am sure someone will update that when his book is published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Scully