How an LSD producer tried to trip all of America
Ttook just one LSD trip, in 1965, to hook Tim Scully — not on the drug, but on the notion of a world where everyone experienced the trippy transcendence that acid gave him. “For me, taking acid was like getting struck by lightning,” Scully, now 72, tells The Post. “I felt an intense connection with everything in the universe. I believed that if we could turn everybody in the world on to acid, we could have a more thoughtful planet ... I thought we could save the world with heroic doses of acid.”
The documentary “The Sunshine Makers,” out Friday, shows how Scully and his partner, a street-smart New Yorker named Nick Sand, tried to do just that. By the late ’60s, the pair had set off millions of intense trips by manufacturing a pure and potent LSD strain called Orange Sunshine. Platoons of drug-enforcement agents were hot on their trail.
“Tim Scully was not part of the psychedelic scene,” a prosecuting attorney said. “He was the psychedelic scene.”
Luckily, Scully couldn’t raise the money he needed to put his master plan into action. “Tim wanted to buy an ad in Life magazine,” says “Sunshine Makers” director Cosmo Feilding-Mellen of a cardboard insert that would have been dosed with a hit of LSD. “They would have kept it a secret until the issue got out on the street.”
Scully says he fine-tuned his acid-making skills with LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley, joining him for a spell building electronic equipment for the Grateful Dead.
After years of mystical trips and wild chicks, the 1960s ended, and the ’70s were a bummer. Starting in 1977, Scully spent three years in prison after an epically bad trip —“I saw federal narcot- ics agents hiding in trees” — that put him off acid altogether.
Once free, he worked in technology in Northern California; now retired, he’s researching a book on LSD.
Sand, his partner in crime, took a different path. Following a 1970s drug bust, he spent 23 years on the lam and was arrested in 1996 in British Columbia. Police uncovered his lab there, which had enough LSD to dose the whole of Canada two times over. He served six years in prison and is now living in Ecuador with his fifth wife.
Lately, LSD has surfaced again, in the form of microdosing — using tiny amounts of the drug to treat depression and also heighten creativity. Feilding-Mellen sees that as a full-circle coda to it all.
“Silicon Valley is the establishment with companies founded by acid heads,” he says. “Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both [admitted] to having taken acid. And now [tech employees] there are taking small quantities of it to improve their productivity. It’s a long way from ‘turn on, tune in, drop out.’”