Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/86805371168

[American Dream]

The Second Psychedelic Revolution Part Two: Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, The Psychedelic Godfather

James Oroc

At a testimonial dinner for the Shulgins in 2010 at the MAPS [7] conference in San Jose, CA, the underground chemist Nick Sand (who had only recently been released from jail), and who (along with Tim Scully, who was Owsley’s chemist) is often credited with the ‘invention’ of Orange Sunshine LSD, revealed that in 1966, after LSD had been made illegal in California thanks to the newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan, the precursors required for creating LSD under the methods of the day dried up, and for a short time LSD actually disappeared and much like would happen some twenty four years later in 2000, it appeared as if there could be ‘an End to Acid’.

According to the historical record, Sand and Scully then started manufacturing DOM (street name STP), an extraordinarily powerful psychedelic phenethylamine invented by Shulgin in 1964. Five thousand ‘doses’ of this new compound were given away at the first Human Be-In in San Francisco (Jan 14th, 1967) in an effort to promote the new drug as a ‘replacement’ to LSD, but unfortunately they (Sand and Scully) had apparently developed a tolerance to DOM, and reputedly made the dosages too high. This combined with the fact that the onset of DOM was much slower than LSD, with many people reportedly making the mistake of taking a second hit after an hour or so with little effect, caused numerous users to overdose and sent scores of ‘tripping hippies’ to the city’s emergency rooms. The press then further demonized LSD by reporting that this was the compound responsible.

Perhaps due to the aftermath of the Human Be-In debacle, Nick Sand and Tim Scully were then given a formula for a new method of manufacturing LSD that got around the constraints of the old method; they were told that it was from a ‘friend’, an ally who believed in what they were doing, but couldn’t be revealed at that time. At the MAPS testimonial dinner for the Shulgins in 2010, in a startling revelation whose importance somewhat slipped by most of the gathered audience and as far as I know has never been reported, Nick Sand identified that mysterious ‘friend’ as Sasha.

Assuming this is true—and obviously Nick Sand would have no reason to make up a story like that—this means that along with popularizing MDMA, and inventing literally hundreds of psychedelic and empathogenic compounds that have surfaced with increasing regularity in the 21st century, Alexander Shulgin was also the inventor of Orange Sunshine LSD, which was by far the most commonly manufactured LSD from the late 1960’s onward (Orange Sunshine is estimated to have been over 75% of the worlds LSD). Or to put it another way, while Albert Hofmann invented LSD, it can now be said that it was thanks to Sasha (and the bravery of Nick Sand, Tim Scully, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love [8]) that it was available from 1967 on!

From what I can remember, Sasha just sat there with an obvious twinkle in his eye and a wicked grin throughout Nick Sand’s testimonial as if to say, ‘What can they do to me now!’ But that’s classic Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin for you, looking out over an adoring audience on what was hopefully one of the happiest nights of his incredible life, with the same singular mix of humor and intellect that made him our one and only Psychedelic Godfather, and the most irreplaceable architect of contemporary psychedelic culture.


James Oroc and Sasha enjoy a laugh


Author’s correction: A more careful examination of Nick Sand’s comments at the MAPS testimonial dinner for Anne and Sasha Shulgin reveals that I was mistaken in my understanding of Sasha’s exact involvement in the development of the Orange Sunshine synthesis of LSD by Owsley, Nick Sand, Tim Scully, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. While telling the audience how he (Nick Sand) had had "a synthesis for LSD" that was challenging and then talking about getting "a synthesis" from Sasha, which allowed his LSD project to go forward, Nick then says that the Brotherhood gave him "a synthesis" that they'd adapted from Sasha's research and that “with that [synthesis] I was able to make production amounts of DOM to raise the FUNDS to make the orange sunshine project happen."

http://www.maps.org/videos/source2/video13.html

Apparently the precursor restrictions that come as the result of LSD being made illegal had resulted in a steep increase in the price of precursors and well as a limited availability, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love simply didn’t have the funds to manufacture LSD like they wanted. But as Nick states the manufacture of DOM (sold on the streets as STP) generated the funds required for the Orange Sunshine LSD synthesis, making Sasha’s role in the whole affair much more peripheral and limited than I previously stated. Nor does it seem likely there was any direct connection between Owsley and the Brotherhood and Sasha himself, since when Owsley was arrested in late 1967 for 100 grams of LSD and a quantity of DOM in 20mg pressed pills — and apparently oblivious of the fact that this was amount two to six times too potent— Owsley placed the blame back on Shulgin. “He had this stuff, and we thought it might be good. It turned out it wasn’t.”

[American Dream]

http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/86979347003

[American Dream]

More at: http://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/john-w ... ry-mi.html

[American Dream]

http://thegiphoscopeaward.tumblr.com/po ... 21369/kapa

[American Dream]

Max Ernst. La Femme 100 Têtes (The Hundred Headless Women). 1929.
Lesser known Ernst book of collage with introduction by André Breton.


http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/87305 ... -100-tetes

[American Dream]

http://earthrites.tumblr.com/post/87470641183

[American Dream]

http://operationjulie.wordpress.com/201 ... les-druce/

94 York Street, London, W1 – Charles Druce



94 York Street – former premises of Charles Druce Ltd



The former hallowed portals…where Richard Kemp
visited to pick up a spectrometer.

English supplier of LSD to Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Charles Druce is an unlikely figure in the history of LSD. He started his career as a clerk in various chemical merchants’ offices in London, moving up to trading in mail-order LSD in the early to mid-1960s when it was still legal. LSD was being legitimately produced in Czechoslovakia for example, even after Sandoz in Switzerland got cold feet and stopped its own production.

Druce came to the attention of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Dass), former Harvard professors who set up a legendary psychedelic community in Millbrook, upper New York State. Druce supplied LSD to Leary and Alpert up to around 1966. Alpert would fly over and stay in luxury hotels and pick up the acid in person to take back to the States. The full account of Alpert’s involvement has never been told, and probably won’t ever be, but he had a dare-devil streak that involved for example on one occasion flying his own plane ( a Cessna 172) from Canada to the US high on acid as the last part of his journey. Building a close relationship with Druce, Alpert once presented Druce with a copy of the ‘Psychedelic Experience’, the book he co-authored with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner.

In late 1966, LSD was banned in America and shortly after in the UK. Tim Scully and Nick Sand, chemists associated with Millbrook and the legendary Owsley Stanley in the US, went underground to produce it. Druce - by now owner of Charles Druce Ltd – was approached by Scully and Sand to supply raw materials. Druce and a colleague, Ronald Craze, created a company – Alban Feeds – to supply Scully and Sand with Ergotamine Tartrate. The first shipment was 2.8 kilos – enough to make around 5.6 million doses of acid.

This arrangement worked well for over a year. Druce also provided specialised equipment, including a spectrometer for Richard Kemp who was by now working with Ronald Stark in France. In his statement to the police following the Operation Julie bust, Kemp recalled going to Druce’s offices near Baker Street to pick up the equipment (in Ronald Stark’s red ferrari).

But in 1970, living well on substantial advance payments from the US, Druce and Craze were failing to keep the shipments going. The US operation had been busted in Denver, and Alban Feed’s role in supplying raw materials had come to the attention of the police in both the US and the UK. Druce and Craze cooled their involvement with the US.

By this time, Ronald Stark had become involved in the US operation and brought his more direct approach into play. He knew that Druce and Craze had been stockpiling ergotamine tartrate and keeping it in Hamburg – the international trading centre for chemicals. He set a trap in place. In due course, tempted by an offer from a Swiss Company, Inland Alkaloids, Druce and Craze entered into a transaction to sell 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate. But Inland Alkaloids was a ‘front’ company, operated at arm’s length by Nick Sand and Ronald Stark, and Druce and Craze found themselves ripped off and in debt to the bank (the Nat West at Crystal Palace).

The 9 kilos of Ergotamine Tartrate went to France where Richard Kemp was by then working with Ron Stark to produce huge quantities of acid.

[American Dream]

Bill Brouard

[MayDay]

AD, you are a total creep, but I must admit I love this thread. The burning man horror stories are especially amusing. Sexual abandon in the guise of spirituality. Couldn't have said it better.

I love the letter to marry Jane. We used to take long breaks every few months, but we've been going steady for a year or so nOw. I'm happy with the arrangement, although I do miss morpheus.

[American Dream]

AD, you are a total creep, but I must admit I love this thread. The burning man horror stories are especially amusing. Sexual abandon in the guise of spirituality. Couldn't have said it better.

I love the letter to marry Jane. We used to take long breaks every few months, but we've been going steady for a year or so nOw. I'm happy with the arrangement, although I do miss morpheus.

Just wondering, why do you consider me "a total creep"?

[MayDay]

http://blackswansounds.bandcamp.com/alb ... ed-remixes
Listen to this while you read this thread. It changes the whole experience.

[American Dream]

Subterranean Psychonaut
The Strange and Dreadful Saga of Gordon Todd Skinner

http://thislandpress.com/gordon-todd-skinner/


Gordon Todd Skinner in Joseph Harp Correctional Center

Gordon Todd Skinner senior class photo,
Cascia Hall, 1982

Chemistry was a breeze. He tinkered with molecular structures. Chess was a longstanding passion, but by the age of 15, Skinner discovered another obsession: drugs, and everything related. At 16, he could extract psychedelic tryptamines from plant life. He offered them to friends.

“All of my high school friends just lined up to take anything that I had, and it was—they were volunteering, so it wasn’t a problem,” Skinner says, fanning his fingers over the cafeteria table in Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Oklahoma, a world and a life away from his Tulsa prep school. His hair is mostly gray now, the crown of his head smooth as a cremini’s cap.

Skinner’s mother, a Tulsa business woman named Katherine Magrini, married Gary Lee Magrini. Skinner’s stepfather was a special criminal agent with the U.S. Treasury Department, which, at the time, handled scores of drug investigations. Federal agents visited the Magrini home regularly. From an early age, Skinner learned that he could dabble in the world of drugs right under the government’s nose. Either nobody cared, or nobody noticed.

Skinner tried stronger drugs on his friends, studying them like insects. He was known to bring a tank of nitrous oxide to school so he and his pals could inhale in the bathroom between classes. One weekend, according to a classmate, Skinner experimented on another student, dosing him heavily with something he’d conjured. The teen was later found in front of a full-length mirror, naked and talking to his reflection. He tried to negotiate a cocaine deal with an oak tree.

“I was just a scientist saying, ‘Try this out.’ And unfortunately, they were all just guinea pigs in line,” Skinner recalls. “Some of them thought it was great, and some of them don’t talk to me to this day over it.”

While Skinner lab-ratted his pals at Cascia Hall, at home he was submerged in a federal alphabet soup. Skinner’s stepfather, Magrini, earned an appointment as criminal enforcement agent for the Internal Revenue Service[3], and the front door of the Magrini house, according to Skinner, revolved with the constant stream of G-men from the FBI, DEA, IRS, and CBP[4]. Many of them were soldiers in the War on Drugs, a governmental prohibition campaign that was coined by President Richard Nixon and escalated by President Ronald Reagan. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which poured an additional $1.7 billion into funding the War on Drugs.

“They all came to our house and ate at our parties—I grew up with these guys. They talked shop non-stop,” says Skinner, calling from prison now. “The FBI guys would ask me to look into stuff for them, and I did this on a regular basis.”

Skinner is serving life plus 90 years for kidnapping-related charges. His cellmates refer to him as Dr. Lecter. He distrusts the FBI more than any other agency, and warns that the line is being monitored and that it might be blocked, because “that’s how they do me here.”


Gordon Todd Skinner in high school.
Note the caption below the photo refers to nitrous oxide.

Skinner’s ties to a number of other government agencies deepened in step with his drug experimentation repertoire. He didn’t really enjoy marijuana or other common drugs, but gravitated toward entheogens, the sorts of drugs that shamans and other spiritualists use. He read most every book he could find on the matter. One of his favorite libraries was Peace of Mind bookstore in Tulsa. Barry Bilder, the owner, became a longtime friend to Skinner.

“When I met him, Todd was still in high school,” Bilder said. “He would come in and buy all these drug books, and he had a tremendous collection that he bought over a period of years.”

Skinner can wax poetic on PCP-A receptors and the differences between pharmahuascas and 5-fluoro-alpha-methyltryptamine, but when the judge finally asked Skinner why he wanted to use entheogens, Skinner went flush.

I seem to have an idiosyncratic response to entheogens, that they are—have—maybe that’s arrogant, so I’ve got to be careful. They are very spiritual and sacramental things. I do not use these—I think you put it ‘recreationally,’ and I take offense to that, unfortunately, because I do not take these things recreationally. These are sacraments to me.

To achieve such a communion, Skinner employed a concoction of pyschoactives he called “The Eucharist”: a communion wafer laced with a panoply of lysergamides ranging from ALD-52 to extract of morning glory seeds, with a sip of ergot wine. Skinner conducted the ceremonies with “the sacrament,” and regularly administered the rite before large congregations of friends.

Numerous accounts from Skinner’s associates describe seeing Skinner act in a priestly manner, conferring the hallucinogenic host upon eager tongues and offering a chalice to waiting lips. Within half an hour, his sheep met god. Or the devil.

“A lot of people, when they met Todd at his highest, they would say something to me like, ‘Barry, that guy is the Buddha,’ ” Bilder said. “But what I’m suggesting is that Todd had something in his being, this thing that wasn’t right. He had made a pact early on in his life, maybe it was even in previous existences, where he said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do: I’m going to be here to create havoc.’ ”

On the witness stand in 2003, Gordon Todd Skinner was 39 years old and speaking like a priest of Soma[6]. But earlier in his spiritual journey, Skinner was seduced into another underworld, one of unholy adventures, a world where drugs were both faith and works. As a young man, Skinner partook in the most secretive of all arts. He became a government informant.

Skinner’s first notable case came in 1983 by way of a money-laundering scheme; he initiated the case by calling Agent McLean with the FBI. In a later and more significant operation, Skinner helped HIDTA, High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, Group #2 out of Florida (primarily managed by CBP), set up a complex sting operation with a man named Boris Olarte who was in the federal witness protection program[7]. In 1989, Olarte was then used to extradite and arrest José Rafael Abello Silva, a Columbian cocaine smuggler. His arrest contributed to the downfall of the Medellín drug cartel. As he informed, Skinner gathered intelligence on how government agencies dealt with drugs. Work as an informant turned out to be great training for a person interested in the trade, but it wasn’t enough to help Skinner avoid prosecution.

Earlier that year, Skinner was arrested and jailed in New Jersey for distribution of marijuana. Skinner’s bail was set at one million dollars. While serving time, he met fellow inmate William Hauck, who was incarcerated for a sex offense[8]. Through the ‘90s, Hauck surfaced intermittently in Skinner’s life, usually as a truck driver for Katherine Magrini’s company, but sometimes as an accessory to Skinner’s drug-related transactions. Skinner and Hauck were never really friends, perhaps because Skinner suspected Hauck of having longstanding ties to government agencies. Skinner’s suspicions remained benign, until Hauck figured much larger in Skinner’s life.

The Silo Testimonies

Todd Skinner wasn’t just a psychedelic spiritualist, nor was he merely a government informant. He was business-minded, and he understood the high demand for entheogens. If he could just find the right chemist—someone who knew how to set up a sophisticated lab where LSD could be produced—the possibilities and the profits were boundless. Alfred Savinelli, a friend of Skinner’s and part of the entheogen community, recalls when Skinner asked him if he knew where he could meet an elusive, gifted chemist named Leonard Pickard. Rumor had it Pickard was advancing the field of LSD chemistry. Savinelli knew Pickard. He felt Skinner’s ambition and Pickard’s naïveté would make a disastrous combination. Salvinelli shrugged Skinner off.

Pickard was still around, just not very visible. After serving time in the ‘70s for possession and manufacturing, Pickard seemingly vanished from the scene, until he was jailed in the late ‘80s. He did five years for manufacturing. Later, word got around that Pickard was in the DEA’s pocket.

Throughout the 1990s, Pickard continued moving in hallucinogenic circles. While taking classes at UC Berkeley, Pickard attended a series of potlucks—dinner conversations that centered on consciousness studies. He lived in a Zen center, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, and studied the migration of LSD use. Late in the decade, his associates claimed to see the professorial Pickard dealing with large amounts of loot. Pickard explained away any secretive behavior as related to his work for the FBI, DEA, and other agencies.

The similarities between Pickard and Skinner were extensive: both were entheogen enthusiasts, capable clandestine chemists, lawbreakers, and informants for the government. When they met each other at the 1997 Entheobotany Shamanic Plant Science Conference[9] in San Francisco, it was as though their convergence were ordained by a fungal power. “

When I met him, [Skinner] was using exotic structures every week or every few days,” Pickard told Rolling Stone. “He loved to eat ayahuasca and its various analogues.”

Pickard says that Skinner was offering research grants at the conference, which piqued his pockets.

“Basically I just made up quite a story to [Pickard] and told him that we could possibly get some money from [billionaire Warren] Buffett,” Skinner later revealed on the witness stand. “And I had quite a bit of fun with that one, but it really, in the end, upset him quite a bit.”

Pickard and Skinner met several times at Skinner’s house in Stinson Beach, California (its former occupant was Jerry Garcia). It was a party pad frequented by insiders of the entheogen world and the perfect place for Pickard and Skinner to talk business.

“Can you tell me what this guy [Skinner] was up to?” asks Tulsa Assistant US Attorney [AUSA] Allen Litchfield, a former classmate of Skinner, in an email. “He has popped into DEA claiming all types of immunity etc. Frankly he sounds a little spooky.”

“Skinner was involved in an LSD deal,” Lead AUSA Gregory Hough of Kansas replies. “His attorney got DOJ to give him immunity for his testimony against the other two leaders (Pickard and Apperson). After his testimony in the LSD trial, Skinner flipped back into the arms of his co-conspirators. This precipitated a bunch of mini-trials during our trial wherein Skinner, sponsored by Pickard and Apperson, testified that the three DEA agents, a courtroom deputy, and I all conspired to affect his trial testimony. Skinner alleged that, in spite of our best efforts, he testified truthfully. However, it was a tremendous distraction, likely caused OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] investigations of all concerned and, at the least was a breach of his immunity agreement… I know three DEA agents, a courtroom deputy, and an AUSA that would love to see him imprisoned and the key thrown away.”

http://thislandpress.com/gordon-todd-skinner/

[American Dream]

we’ve all been there



http://class-struggle-anarchism.tumblr. ... been-there