Aspie who played a role in 60's LSD scene
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ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 68
Gender: Male
Posts: 39,637
Location: Long Island, New York
21 May 2017, 2:03 am
In heyday of LSD, secret Windsor lab produced millions of Orange Sunshine pills
Quote:
In the late 1960s, a small group of hippie zealots worked feverishly in an old Windsor farmhouse to produce an especially pure form of LSD, on a mission to turn on the world.
Little was known about the clandestine lab because it was never busted. Authorities only found out about it several years after it was dismantled.
That hidden chapter of history had its start in late 1968 when the lab was set up in Windsor. Within a few months it produced roughly 3 pounds of LSD, or enough to make 4.5 million hits of “Orange Sunshine,” a nickname for the orange-colored, barrel-shaped pill that produces an especially powerful psychedelic trip.
It would become one of the iconic drugs of the late 1960s, proclaimed the finest acid in the land by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard instructor who famously advised people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Among those who discovered Sonoma County was Tim Scully, a wonky East Bay kid with a degree in physics from UC Berkeley. He and his associates chose Windsor to make LSD, which they saw as God’s gift to humanity because of the ecstatic, consciousness-raising experience they had with the drug.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Stanley “Bear” Owsley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Owsley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Owsley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD. With the approaching 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the mayor of Richmond is trying to pinpoint the location and put up a commemorative plaque.
A recently minted pilot, Scully was arrested at the Napa Airport in May 1969 on charges stemming from the previous lab in Denver.
Sand, he said, immediately shut down the Windsor lab and remodeled and sanitized the room where it had been.
“Sand and Scully were apparently running this lab in Windsor and they did a good job of keeping it from us. We didn’t find the lab,” retired narcotics officer Patrick Clark said in the 2015 documentary “The Sunshine Makers.”
But federal grand jury indictments and the testimony of Billy Hitchcock, the wealthy owner of Millbrook and a friend of theirs who had visited the Windsor lab, helped convict Scully, Sand and others.
In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years in prison for LSD manufacturing and distribution, and Sand got 15 years. Both went to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington state and were even cellmates.
Scully was released on an appeal bond partway through his prison term, and had his sentence cut in half, enabling him to be paroled after 3 ½ years.
Scully, 72, now lives in Mendocino County in the backwoods community of Albion on a ridge near the Pacific Ocean. He said he long ago gave up any criminal activity.
Before his conviction and prison time, he founded his own electronics company and still repairs old instruments and computers in his one-bedroom house, cluttered with thousands of books, file cabinets, computer monitors and buckets of firewood for his wood stove.
His longtime partner, Alice Einhorn, lives on the 4-acre property, in a nearby house.
During a recent interview at his home, the gray-bearded Scully, wearing a slight smile, Panama hat, corduroy jeans and a blue hoodie sweatshirt, answered questions with the meticulous detail that hints at his slight Asperger’s syndrome, a compulsive condition manifesting itself in inflexible routines, or pursuit of specific, narrow areas of interest.
In Scully’s case, it was the way he ate the same type of spaghetti and butter dinner every night for decades, until health problems forced him to change.
For the past 20 years he’s been gathering the history of underground LSD manufacturing and has a large database linking chronologies, court records and PDFs of people, labs and locations. He says it will be useful for historians and university libraries. He is also working on a memoir.
Little was known about the clandestine lab because it was never busted. Authorities only found out about it several years after it was dismantled.
That hidden chapter of history had its start in late 1968 when the lab was set up in Windsor. Within a few months it produced roughly 3 pounds of LSD, or enough to make 4.5 million hits of “Orange Sunshine,” a nickname for the orange-colored, barrel-shaped pill that produces an especially powerful psychedelic trip.
It would become one of the iconic drugs of the late 1960s, proclaimed the finest acid in the land by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard instructor who famously advised people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Among those who discovered Sonoma County was Tim Scully, a wonky East Bay kid with a degree in physics from UC Berkeley. He and his associates chose Windsor to make LSD, which they saw as God’s gift to humanity because of the ecstatic, consciousness-raising experience they had with the drug.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Stanley “Bear” Owsley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Owsley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Owsley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD. With the approaching 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the mayor of Richmond is trying to pinpoint the location and put up a commemorative plaque.
A recently minted pilot, Scully was arrested at the Napa Airport in May 1969 on charges stemming from the previous lab in Denver.
Sand, he said, immediately shut down the Windsor lab and remodeled and sanitized the room where it had been.
“Sand and Scully were apparently running this lab in Windsor and they did a good job of keeping it from us. We didn’t find the lab,” retired narcotics officer Patrick Clark said in the 2015 documentary “The Sunshine Makers.”
But federal grand jury indictments and the testimony of Billy Hitchcock, the wealthy owner of Millbrook and a friend of theirs who had visited the Windsor lab, helped convict Scully, Sand and others.
In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years in prison for LSD manufacturing and distribution, and Sand got 15 years. Both went to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington state and were even cellmates.
Scully was released on an appeal bond partway through his prison term, and had his sentence cut in half, enabling him to be paroled after 3 ½ years.
Scully, 72, now lives in Mendocino County in the backwoods community of Albion on a ridge near the Pacific Ocean. He said he long ago gave up any criminal activity.
Before his conviction and prison time, he founded his own electronics company and still repairs old instruments and computers in his one-bedroom house, cluttered with thousands of books, file cabinets, computer monitors and buckets of firewood for his wood stove.
His longtime partner, Alice Einhorn, lives on the 4-acre property, in a nearby house.
During a recent interview at his home, the gray-bearded Scully, wearing a slight smile, Panama hat, corduroy jeans and a blue hoodie sweatshirt, answered questions with the meticulous detail that hints at his slight Asperger’s syndrome, a compulsive condition manifesting itself in inflexible routines, or pursuit of specific, narrow areas of interest.
In Scully’s case, it was the way he ate the same type of spaghetti and butter dinner every night for decades, until health problems forced him to change.
For the past 20 years he’s been gathering the history of underground LSD manufacturing and has a large database linking chronologies, court records and PDFs of people, labs and locations. He says it will be useful for historians and university libraries. He is also working on a memoir.
_________________
“Self Acceptance is a process not a performance”
“You are autistic enough. And you always have been”
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity.
21 May 2017, 3:51 am
ASPartOfMe wrote:
In heyday of LSD, secret Windsor lab produced millions of Orange Sunshine pills
Quote:
In the late 1960s, a small group of hippie zealots worked feverishly in an old Windsor farmhouse to produce an especially pure form of LSD, on a mission to turn on the world.
Little was known about the clandestine lab because it was never busted. Authorities only found out about it several years after it was dismantled.
That hidden chapter of history had its start in late 1968 when the lab was set up in Windsor. Within a few months it produced roughly 3 pounds of LSD, or enough to make 4.5 million hits of “Orange Sunshine,” a nickname for the orange-colored, barrel-shaped pill that produces an especially powerful psychedelic trip.
It would become one of the iconic drugs of the late 1960s, proclaimed the finest acid in the land by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard instructor who famously advised people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Among those who discovered Sonoma County was Tim Scully, a wonky East Bay kid with a degree in physics from UC Berkeley. He and his associates chose Windsor to make LSD, which they saw as God’s gift to humanity because of the ecstatic, consciousness-raising experience they had with the drug.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Stanley “Bear” Owsley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Owsley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Owsley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD. With the approaching 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the mayor of Richmond is trying to pinpoint the location and put up a commemorative plaque.
A recently minted pilot, Scully was arrested at the Napa Airport in May 1969 on charges stemming from the previous lab in Denver.
Sand, he said, immediately shut down the Windsor lab and remodeled and sanitized the room where it had been.
“Sand and Scully were apparently running this lab in Windsor and they did a good job of keeping it from us. We didn’t find the lab,” retired narcotics officer Patrick Clark said in the 2015 documentary “The Sunshine Makers.”
But federal grand jury indictments and the testimony of Billy Hitchcock, the wealthy owner of Millbrook and a friend of theirs who had visited the Windsor lab, helped convict Scully, Sand and others.
In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years in prison for LSD manufacturing and distribution, and Sand got 15 years. Both went to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington state and were even cellmates.
Scully was released on an appeal bond partway through his prison term, and had his sentence cut in half, enabling him to be paroled after 3 ½ years.
Scully, 72, now lives in Mendocino County in the backwoods community of Albion on a ridge near the Pacific Ocean. He said he long ago gave up any criminal activity.
Before his conviction and prison time, he founded his own electronics company and still repairs old instruments and computers in his one-bedroom house, cluttered with thousands of books, file cabinets, computer monitors and buckets of firewood for his wood stove.
His longtime partner, Alice Einhorn, lives on the 4-acre property, in a nearby house.
During a recent interview at his home, the gray-bearded Scully, wearing a slight smile, Panama hat, corduroy jeans and a blue hoodie sweatshirt, answered questions with the meticulous detail that hints at his slight Asperger’s syndrome, a compulsive condition manifesting itself in inflexible routines, or pursuit of specific, narrow areas of interest.
In Scully’s case, it was the way he ate the same type of spaghetti and butter dinner every night for decades, until health problems forced him to change.
For the past 20 years he’s been gathering the history of underground LSD manufacturing and has a large database linking chronologies, court records and PDFs of people, labs and locations. He says it will be useful for historians and university libraries. He is also working on a memoir.
Little was known about the clandestine lab because it was never busted. Authorities only found out about it several years after it was dismantled.
That hidden chapter of history had its start in late 1968 when the lab was set up in Windsor. Within a few months it produced roughly 3 pounds of LSD, or enough to make 4.5 million hits of “Orange Sunshine,” a nickname for the orange-colored, barrel-shaped pill that produces an especially powerful psychedelic trip.
It would become one of the iconic drugs of the late 1960s, proclaimed the finest acid in the land by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard instructor who famously advised people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Among those who discovered Sonoma County was Tim Scully, a wonky East Bay kid with a degree in physics from UC Berkeley. He and his associates chose Windsor to make LSD, which they saw as God’s gift to humanity because of the ecstatic, consciousness-raising experience they had with the drug.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Stanley “Bear” Owsley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Owsley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Owsley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD. With the approaching 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the mayor of Richmond is trying to pinpoint the location and put up a commemorative plaque.
A recently minted pilot, Scully was arrested at the Napa Airport in May 1969 on charges stemming from the previous lab in Denver.
Sand, he said, immediately shut down the Windsor lab and remodeled and sanitized the room where it had been.
“Sand and Scully were apparently running this lab in Windsor and they did a good job of keeping it from us. We didn’t find the lab,” retired narcotics officer Patrick Clark said in the 2015 documentary “The Sunshine Makers.”
But federal grand jury indictments and the testimony of Billy Hitchcock, the wealthy owner of Millbrook and a friend of theirs who had visited the Windsor lab, helped convict Scully, Sand and others.
In 1974, Scully was sentenced to 20 years in prison for LSD manufacturing and distribution, and Sand got 15 years. Both went to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington state and were even cellmates.
Scully was released on an appeal bond partway through his prison term, and had his sentence cut in half, enabling him to be paroled after 3 ½ years.
Scully, 72, now lives in Mendocino County in the backwoods community of Albion on a ridge near the Pacific Ocean. He said he long ago gave up any criminal activity.
Before his conviction and prison time, he founded his own electronics company and still repairs old instruments and computers in his one-bedroom house, cluttered with thousands of books, file cabinets, computer monitors and buckets of firewood for his wood stove.
His longtime partner, Alice Einhorn, lives on the 4-acre property, in a nearby house.
During a recent interview at his home, the gray-bearded Scully, wearing a slight smile, Panama hat, corduroy jeans and a blue hoodie sweatshirt, answered questions with the meticulous detail that hints at his slight Asperger’s syndrome, a compulsive condition manifesting itself in inflexible routines, or pursuit of specific, narrow areas of interest.
In Scully’s case, it was the way he ate the same type of spaghetti and butter dinner every night for decades, until health problems forced him to change.
For the past 20 years he’s been gathering the history of underground LSD manufacturing and has a large database linking chronologies, court records and PDFs of people, labs and locations. He says it will be useful for historians and university libraries. He is also working on a memoir.
I can find no evidence that Tim Scully has actually been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, or that he himself claims to be on the spectrum. It seems that a former girlfriend of his speculated that he has AS, and this was convoluted into a fact.
There is a habit of people who are uneducated or misinformed about AS/ASDs to think that any type of nerdiness, shyness, social awkwardness, eccentricities, or otherwise unusual behavior is synonymous with AS/ASD, when it is not.
