Re-Creational Uses 8
According to science fiction writer Chester Anderson, by 1957 a substantial leak of Sandoz acid led from its Hanover, New Jersey plant to Greenwich Village. Beresford described how by 1961 Chuck Bick had become one of Manhattan's chief suppliers:
"Chuck's customers included bankers, lawyers, doctors, teaching staff from New York and Columbia Universities, writers, musicians, painters, playboys, clergymen, prostitutes -- as he related it the list seemed endless, though the number of purchasers was small. His method of obtaining LSD was simple. When stock ran low, Chuck phoned Sandoz in New Jersey and told the doctor there who handled LSD that this was Bick with a request for an additional vial of 10 milligrams, and could his assistant stop by in the afternoon to pick it up? Sheila, Chuck's wife, drove over to the plant and collected it. Chuck had no problem getting LSD, and, as far as I could tell, his people had no trouble taking it."
Augustus Owsley Stanley III, however, was having difficulty getting LSD. This led him to manufacturing the substance, and over the next five years he established the first massive underground production of millions of Owsley tabs and double-domes: powerful and high-quality LSD. In LSD: The Age of Mind, Bernard Roseman described how he and a partner came to engage in such manufacturing as well -- although in this case the quality was questionable, due to their inexperience as chemists, and also how before long they were busted and charged with smuggling some 62,000 LSD tablets. Manufacture at this time was not illegal and soon more and more were getting into the game.
In 1964 a class was given at the Free University of New York in which one of the questions of special interest was whether or not this drug should be given to very young children. If, as Freudians claim, the adult personality is largely formed by about the age of five, then why should children not be given it early if it removed imprints of social conditioning, as Leary and others were then claiming. How was this notion to be reconciled with the notion of free will, because, for example, even Catholics wait until the age of seven before considering an individual capable of independent judgment? Was there an unresolved dilemma here? These questions, tossed back and forth at some length, brought out that several parents there had already given LSD to their children, which perhaps indicates something of the flavor of interest at the time.
But in 1966, a different corner was turned. In the spring of that year, a five-year-old in Brooklyn swallowed an LSD sugar cube that had been left in the refrigerator by her uncle. She was taken to the hospital where her stomach was pumped. Then, almost immediately after, a Brooklyn medical student -- after having been released from the mental ward at Bellevue Hospital -- stabbed his mother-in-law to death and later claimed that he could not remember anything about the incident as a result of having taken LSD.
In the latter incident, it was later establihed that this individual had drunk a considerable amount of lab alcohol in addition to having taken various tranquilizers before the killing, and that his LSD usage had actually occurred years earlier and involved miniscule amounts. But the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde image feared by some about LSD seemed to have been confirmed. The media had a field day with all this, and within days district attorneys and legislators -- presented to the public as LSD experts --were denouncing this drug and calling for its extinction.
Up until now, the study and discussion of LSD's effects had been perceived as being fairly respectable. That summer the University of California at San Francisco sponsored a week-long conference about the drug's implications, and those attending were still terribly enthusiastic. But while this was going on, word came that a California legislative subcommittee had recommended outlawing LSD. Sandoz, alarmed by the media uproar that had been created, panicked and turned over a small quantity of LSD to the Food and Drug Administration, which announced that it would sharply curtail ongoing studies. Huston Smith, speaking at the California conference, sadly concluded that the confusion about LSD had become so great and our knowledge was yet so small that "there is no hope of telling the truth about it at this point."
