Owsley Stanley is widely noted in pop culture as being the premier LSD chemist of the hippie era and ‘financial backer and sound engineer’ of the Grateful Dead. It was Owsley who flooded the streets of San Francisco and Laurel Canyon with consistently premium quality yet inexpensive and readily available acid. Most accounts say he gave away more product than he sold in a purely altruistic desire to ‘turn on’ the world. His provocative background and family history suggest those intentions may not have been so altruistic Son of a US Navy officer and later government attorney, he was raised in Arlington, Virginia, home of the Pentagon, and attended a prestigious military academy in Maryland. His grandfather was a State Senator and his, in turn, a judge advocate in the Confederate Army. Owsley joined the USAF in 1956, working in radio intelligence and radar but upon leaving the Airforce moved to LA and began working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (former home of Jack Parsons, genius rocket scientist and initiate of Aleister Crowleys OTO occult religion) In 1963 he moved to Berkeley, which coincidentally was ground zero of the budding anti war movement at the time. Owsley soon began cooking up Meth and LSD in a bathroom lab near the university campus. Soon Berkley was awash was speed and acid. State narcotics agents raided the lab in 1965, yet Owsley walked away from the raid uncharged and surprisingly was allowed to retain his equipment It's estimated he produced some 4 million tabs of nearly pure LSD during the mid 60s. Immediately after the raid Owsley and the Grateful Dead moved to the Watts area of LA to ostensibly conduct what was described as 'acid tests’. Owsley rented a house next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the MO of the CIA MK Ultra project. Just a few months after they left Watts would explode in violence In 1967 Owsley unleashed STP on the San Fran Haight scene. A particular nasty hallucinogen, STP was developed at DOW Chemical, but had originally been tested as a possible biowarfare agent at a base near Frank Zappa’s former home, the Edgewood Arsenal #tsptr #gratefuldead #lsd #counterculture #owsleystanley https://www.instagram.com/p/CleBkRaMeFkuvxY3wcnAk5e18tGg5UmMlBW2T40/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
