Chemist fuelled rise of LSD

Nicholas Sand, chemist: b New York City, May 10, 1941; m Maxine Lee Solomon (diss), Judy Shaughnessy; d California, April 24, 2017, aged 75.

Nicholas Sand was a chemist whose ‘‘Orange Sunshine’’ brand of LSD, prepared in an underground lab and distributed by a group of hippies calling themselves ‘‘The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’’, fuelled America’s 1960s psychedelic counterculture.

Fresh-faced and handsome, Sand was among the more charismatic members of a group who saw themselves as revolutionaries first and businessmen second. ‘‘We thought LSD was going to change the world,’’ Sand recalled. ‘‘By opening people’s minds, everyone would experience such a sense of love as to bring about world peace.’’

His partner-in-crime was Tim Scully, a computer expert who led a strictly ordered life, eating spaghetti and cheese every night and organising his book collection in his spare time. While Scully got high at his home in San Francisco, Sand preferred to strip naked and go wandering in the woods. Though they were not the first people to manufacture LSD on a large scale, the drug’s booming popularity towards the end of the decade owed much to their efforts.

With funding from Billy Hitchcock, the heir to a banking and oil fortune, in 1968 Sand and Scully started their own laboratory in the Sonoma County town of Windsor, California. By 1969, the pair had made around 10 million doses of the drug. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love stepped in to aid distribution. When the original supply began to run out, an entrepreneur called Ronald Stark turned up at the Brotherhood’s headquarters with a large quantity of pure LSD and began financing the cartel.

The Windsor operation was short-lived. The police arrested Scully in 1969, and though he avoided prison, he took the incident as his cue to step back from drug-dealing. When the law finally caught up with Sand in 1973, however, there was enough evidence in his laboratories – including a flowchart that Scully had made outlining the LSD manufacturing process – to incriminate both men.

Ronald Stark promptly disappeared, raising suspicions that he had been an FBI ‘‘mole’’, while the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was dismantled following a series of arrests. Facing a hefty prison sentence, Sand changed his identity and fled to Canada.

In the mid-1990s he was discovered living under the name of David Roy Shepard, in a house stocked with 43 grams of crystalline LSD. He was released in 2000 after serving six years of a 15-year sentence.

Moving to Ecuador, he spent his time writing letters to the Entheogen Review, a publication dedicated to ‘‘visionary plants and drugs’’. The unrepentant letters laid out Sand’s proposal for a ‘‘University of Psychedelic Studies’’ that would teach yoga, music and love. ‘‘There will be a beautiful park and temple with lawns and ponds,’’ Sand explained, ‘‘peacocks, swans and wildlife walking fearlessly.’’ Scully had a more successful retirement. He landed a job in Silicon Valley, finding many colleagues in the computer industry would cheerfully admit to an acquaintance with mindaltering substances.

Sand originally embarked on what the Brotherhood of Eternal Love called his ‘‘chemical career’’ soon after taking mescaline aged 20, as a student in Brooklyn.

After graduating in 1966 with a degree in Anthropology and Sociology, he started making the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in his bathtub. But it was his first experience with LSD which set him on his chosen career path. ‘‘I was floating in this immense, vast space,’’ he recalled, ‘‘and a voice shot through me. It said, ‘Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world’.’’

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‘‘A voice shot through me. It said, ‘Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics’.’’ Nicholas Sand