Premier LSD chemist aimed to ‘turn on’ world
His most celebrated product, Orange Sunshine, became signature drug of late 1960s
One day in 1964, Nicholas Sand, a Brooklyn-born son of a spy for the Soviet Union, took his first acid trip.
He had been fascinated by psychedelic drugs since reading about them as a student at Brooklyn College and had experimented with mescaline and peyote. Now, at a retreat run by friends in Putnam County, N.Y., he took his first dose of LSD, still legal at the time.
Sitting naked in the lotus position, before a crackling fire, he surrendered to the experience. A sensation of peace and joy washed over him. Then he felt himself transported to the far reaches of the cosmos.
“I was floating in this immense black space,” he recalled in the documentary The Sunshine Makers, released in 2015.
“I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ 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.’ ”
Like Moses receiving the tablets, Sand took this commandment to heart. After being trained by the lab partner of Owsley Stanley, America’s premier LSD chemist, he set about producing vast quantities of the purest LSD on the market. His most celebrated product, known as Orange Sunshine for the colour of the tablets it came in, became a signature drug of the late 1960s.
Touted by Timothy Leary as the finest acid available, “the tiny orange pills quickly acquired near-mythic status,” Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain wrote in Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD. Distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a drug cult based in Laguna Beach, Calif., it showed up wherever hippies gathered: at Grateful Dead concerts, in California communes, in Indian ashrams, in the hashish havens of Afghanistan. Sand made sure that Orange Sunshine was available to U.S. soldiers in Vietnam; he hoped to bend their minds in the direction of non-violence and brotherly love. The goal was simple. “If we could turn on everyone in the world,” he said in the documentary, “then maybe we’d have a new world of peace and love.”
It did not work out that way. Orange Sunshine was Sand’s ticket to a life on the run. For years he raced to stay a step ahead of federal agents, and after being convicted on drug and taxevasion charges, he hid in Canada for two decades under an assumed name. Eventually, after being arrest- ed and unmasked, he was returned to the United States, where he served six years in prison.
Sand died April 24 at his home in Lagunitas, Calif. He was 75.
The cause was a heart attack, said Gina Raetze, his longtime companion, who uses the name Usha.
After taking his first psychedelic drug, mescaline, in 1962, Sand taught himself chemistry and set up a lab in his mother’s attic to make dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. Although it produced only a brief high, it was much easier to formulate than LSD. Brisk demand prompted a move to larger premises in a Brooklyn loft.
An invitation from Richard Alpert, Leary’s former Harvard colleague, brought him to Millbrook, a farm in Dutchess County, N.Y., where Alpert, Leary and others had started a psychedelic community.
After 1966, when LSD became illegal, Millbrook created the Original Kleptonian Neo-American Church, whose clergy members administered sacraments in the form of psychedelic drugs. Sand was designated the “alchemist” of the new religion, as well as of Leary’s church, the League for Spiritual Discovery, whose initials spelled LSD.
The glory days lay just ahead. In 1967, Stanley encouraged Sand to shift his operations to California. To help him get started, he offered him the services of his lab partner, Tim Scully, who proved to be a brilliant teacher.
From a lab in Windsor, Calif., north of San Francisco, the two partners turned out four million doses of Orange Sunshine, the first step in a planned production of 750 million doses — the right amount, they decided, to precipitate a psychedelic revolution.
Federal and state law enforcement officials had other ideas. By late 1971 Sand was being investigated by a joint force of federal narcotics and tax agents, who pressured Billy Hitchcock, the owner of Millbrook and Sand’s liaison with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, to testify against Sand and Scully.
Both men were convicted on multiple charges by Judge Samuel Conti, known as Hanging Sam, who complained during the trial that the death penalty was not available to him.
Conti, telling Sand that he had “contributed to the degradation of mankind and society,” handed down a sentence of 15 years. In his cell at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington state, which he shared with Scully, an unrepentant Sand conducted LSD sessions for his fellow prisoners until he won release pending an appeal of his case.
When it became clear that the appeal would not succeed, Sand, dressed as a tourist on a fishing holiday, entered Canada under the assumed name Ted Parody — officially Theodore Edward Parody III.
He settled in the town of Lumby, in British Columbia, and began growing psilocybin mushrooms as a cash crop. After becoming enchanted by the teachings of Shree Rajneesh, the Indian guru, he spent time at the Rajneesh ashram. He learned to grow hydroponic vegetables and set up an LSD lab. With the guru, he helped create a Rajneeshee community, Rajneeshpuram, near Antelope, Ore.
Rajneeshpuram disbanded in 1985, and Sand returned to Canada, where he eventually created a large lab in Port Coquitlam, near Vancouver, to make LSD and other psychedelic drugs on a grand scale.
In 1996, RCMP officers raided the lab and in the course of their investigations discovered that their suspect, now using the name David Roy Shepard, was a fugitive from justice in the United States.
The drug haul was stupendous, the case big time. Staff Sgt. Kenneth Ross of the RCMP, speaking at a news conference, called Sand “an icon in the world of illicit drugs.”
In 1998, Sand pleaded guilty to manufacturing drugs in Canada — he had been found with enough acid, he said, “to dose the whole of Canada two times over” — and was sentenced to nine years in prison, to run concurrently with his U.S. sentence.
He was returned to San Francisco, where Conti was brought out of retirement to preside over the case. The judge added five years, the maximum, to Sand’s original sentence.
Sand was released to a halfway house in 2001 after winning an appeal to overturn the bail-jumping conviction on the grounds that he had not been told what date to return to court.
He completed his parole in 2005.
“I was floating in this immense black space.” NICHOLAS SAND