A year later, Sand’s reputation as a drug chemist had spread to San Francisco, where another self-taught chemist, Owsley Stanley, was cranking out millions of doses of LSD. ’ And suddenly a voice came through my body, and it said, ‘Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.’ Nick eventually jumped bail, set up a lab, and made more acid in labs all over the world.
- So buckle up, throw on some dead, and take a trip back in time to the 1960’s with our throwback to the OG of cool of Orange Sunshine.
- "Great read and provides the background information to explain some of what was happening here in southern California in the late sixties, early…" Read more
- The drug had a similarly profound effect on the petty criminals who would become the Brotherhood, two-thirds of whom had already had run-ins with the law.
- I think that’s fun for some people, but not for me.
- "…written history that filled in a lot of background of my youth, a good story that most are not aware of, and in today's sad and tragic drug culture,…" Read more
- Scully was arrested in May 1969 on a warrant from Denver, Colorado, related to the bust of the second Denver lab in June 1968.
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Schou notes that the group regarded acid as “a sacrament, a window into God itself, a key to unlock ‘the doors of perception’”. “Instead of dropping out of society, they created their own version of it”, says Nicholas Schou, author of a book on the Brotherhood. Their founder, John Griggs, was high on heroin when he robbed a Hollywood producer at gunpoint – but after taking LSD for the first time, he renounced violence, apologised and returned the stolen goods.
“Evangelists have an epiphany at church; we’re the same, except we were LSD evangelists,” Randall says from his purple throne of the Brotherhood’s mission to spread the good word of LSD far and wide. With a little help from their rich-kid friend Billy Hitchcock’s deep pockets, Sand and Scully started their own lab in California and started cranking out their own “Orange Sunshine” LSD tabs – four million doses in a single month, to be exact. Money wasn’t the aim for the pair — at least not for Scully, Sand didn’t mind getting paid — their goal was to spread the lessons they had learned on those early trips. LSD, they thought, would save the world in a matter of years, provided they could get enough people to take it. He and Sand first tried acid, separately, in the mid-1960s, when it was still scarce.
Scully eventually worked out a deal with Nick Sand where he would teach him the process for making LSD if he financed a new lab. Stanley had instructed Scully in February 1967 to retool the first Denver lab to also manufacture STP. With this new source of Lysergic Acid, Scully set up the second Denver lab — which produced “Blue Levis” before it was busted in June 1968 while Scully was away sourcing more material.
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The Brotherhood of Eternal Love helped spread their Orange Sunshine around the United States, Europe, India, and even as far as American Soldiers in Vietnam. The LSD that was made in Windsor came from one pound of lysergic acid that had originally been made in Italy, but had been purchased in London by Scully. LSD is manufactured from lysergic acid, which is produced by the ergot fungus that grows on rye and other grains. Scully and Sand chose a secluded farmhouse obscured by trees in Windsor to set up their lab. The Brotherhood was a group of California surfers who evolved into a worldwide drug distribution network. After a series of unfortunate events led to the closing of the Denver Lab, Sand agreed to finance a new lab for Scully if he would teach him the LSD manufacturing process.

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In 2019, he founded PsyGen, supplying legal psychedelic material for clinical trials. They set up their own massive underground LSD operation, in a lab tucked away in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. As he recalls, word soon spread throughout the Vancouver underground. One day, in the mid-1980s, van der Heyden was tasked with the disposal of a number of the geology lab’s rare chemicals; working through an itemized manifest of compounds, he realized that some of the chemicals at hand could be combined to make 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA. But he wouldn’t get the opportunity until many years later, while working as lab tech in the University of British Columbia’s geology department, where he’d settled into a fairly quiet life studying molecular composition of old rocks. It saturated the psychedelic underground — in America, and across the world.
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Despite the newfound enthusiasm around drugs like psilocybin, MDMA, and even high-octane, super-psychedelic compounds like 5-MEO-DMT, LSD remains something of an outcast. Recent revolutions in the public understanding of drugs led van der Heyden back to psychedelic chemistry, albeit in a more official capacity. If Owsley is something of a psychedelic Zelig, who became a countercultural cult figure (inspiring books, articles, bumper stickers, collectable tie-dye couture) despite keeping a relatively low profile at the time, then Cargill is practically phantasmic.
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Leary claimed that laboratory tests had revealed the pills contained strychnine and that during this period there were many reports of psychedelics laced with poisons circulating in the counter-culture. ‘At that time it was very common for most of us in the Psychedelic scene to practice free love and it was relatively unusual that the people living on the Brotherhood Ranch practiced monogamy. The book was dedicated to Huxley and cites his 1954 essay The Doors of Perception, which explored the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline, a psychedelic substance found in plants indigenous to Mexico. He was arrested in the Nineties and released after six years, after which he moved to Ecuador, where he still extols the virtues of psychedelic drugs. His girlfriend at the time would visit him with a mouthful of drugs, hidden in a balloon and kiss the goods into his possession. The real men are using cocaine and heroin and those kind of drugs,” he says – yet he believed that acid was more harmful than these allegedly “harder” drugs.

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Phase I drug metabolism was investigated by incubating human liver microsomes and cryopreserved human hepatocytes with LSD. Previous studies have demonstrated that O-H-LSD is present in human urine at concentrations times greater than LSD, the parent compound. The metabolism of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to 2-oxo-3-hydroxy lysergic acid diethylamide (O-H-LSD) was investigated in liver microsomes and cyropreserved hepatocytes from humans. LSD and its main metabolites were quantified in brain tissue and femoral blood, and furthermore hematoma and urine when available. The duration and intensity of effects are dose-dependent.
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- This 2015 documentary chronicles the life and times of two men, Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, who together set in motion the psychedelic revolution of the late 1960's.
- On 4 August 1969 the Idyllwid community was shattered by the sudden death of John Griggs from a drug overdose.
- Like other psychedelics, tolerance to ALD-52 happens quickly.
- Everyone who has taken LSD remembers their first time.
Carol added, “I think people are starting to come out of the psychedelic closet. If it hadn’t been for acid, there wouldn’t have been hippies and the whole peace and love movement, and movement for world ecology. After John passed, Mike and Carol fell in love and carried on the message, spreading what they believe is a sacrament to be taken with intention. I met them a few times, and they were like, ‘You’re nice, but we’re not interested in telling you our story.’ They were fiercely protective,” Kirkley said. Another journalist researching the Brotherhood for a book shared notes with Kirkley for a few years, but while the publisher for the book had a deadline, Kirkley did not, and he held out to get to the heart of the story.

Scully immediately ingratiated himself to Stanley by volunteering to assist with his electronics work, rigging up PAs for early Dead concerts and Ken Kesey’s freaky “acid trip” parties. He has self-diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, but on acid, he loosened up. It consists, he says, of “thousands of massively hyperlinked PDF files,” which he hopes to donate to a university library someday. Scully, who now hunkers down in a remote cabin near Mendocino, is lanky and balding, with big round glasses and a trim gray beard that makes him look a bit like a wizard. Another key figure in that tribe was Tim Scully, a Berkeley math whiz and electronics designer who, in time, would stake out his own LSD empire. But, burned by busts and raids, she’d duck out of the drug game after her Orinda arrest.
“We formed an eight-man psychedelic cell,” he recalled. Federal agents found 313,000 doses of LSD and a lab on wheels. “If we could turn on everyone in the world, then maybe we’d have a new world of peace and love. Sand later claimed it got to US soldiers fighting in Vietnam and he hoped to bend their minds in the direction of brotherly love. Then they teamed up with a band of hippy drug smugglers known as The Brotherhood of Eternal Love to distribute Orange Sunshine across the US, Europe, India and Afghanistan. Sand’s reputation spread to San Francisco, where others were experimenting with LSD.

A year later Scully set up a third lab with the late Nick Sand, another celebrated clandestine chemist who is credited as the first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT—another amazing psychedelic material. In 1966 Scully and Owsley set up a lab in Point Richmond, California, and started making acid together. But in fact a handful of West Coast surfers and early flower children did take extraordinary risks bringing psychedelic substances to the people in mass quantities, their goal being not illicit wealth but a “revolution” of lysergic enlightenment. Though the height of the ’60s counterculture era, rumor had it that the primary importer of recreational drugs was something called “the Brotherhood” — an organization so shadowy that many assumed its existence was strictly mythological.
Some users report slightly more time for ALD-52 to kick in; others suggest no clear difference. Both compounds are primarily converted to LSD, with a few secondary metabolites — none of which have been found to have harmful effects. From the available research, this compound appears to share the same safety profile as LSD. There hasn’t been much research on ALD-52, despite how long it’s been around.
A lot of people experience visual disturbances or “trippy” visions. LSD is a hallucinogenic drug that causes alterations in thoughts and feelings as well as an intense awareness of the user’s surroundings. Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as acid or abbreviated to LSD, is formed from the lysergic acid which is found in certain funguses that grow on rye and other grains.
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ALD-52, like all lysergamides, is a lot more cerebral than magic mushrooms but generally produces the same sort of effects. Anecdotally, some users report ALD-52 as having a stronger body high and less visual effects than 1P-LSD — but there are a lot of contradicting views on this. Overall, the effects of ALD-52 are going to be virtually identical to the effects of LSD.