by Andy Roberts
Even if the scare stories were all true and directly related to LSD use, the numbers of such incidences, compared with the numbers of people taking the drug, were disproportionate to the press coverage. It would have been odd, for instance, to find in The Times, a report of someone running naked through the streets after a drinking session, yet that is exactly the story the paper ran in April 1971 when a youth on LSD did exactly that. The unspoken implication in all these reports was that LSD would always make you do things over which you have no control. None of the papers reported how many people had found spiritual salvation or changed their lives for the better by using LSD. For the media LSD always equalled misery.
More serious allegations were made in 1970 when the government’s Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence published “The Amphetamines and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide”. The paper suggested that the urge to kill is one of the mental states brought on by use of LSD. This suggestion was a very small part of the report and was not backed by any quantifiable evidence, but made good newspaper copy, even The Times reporting “LSD induces urge to kill”.34
London’s Drug Squad was, until 1968, quite disorganised. The majority of the fieldwork was done by two teams of detectives, one of which was led by Norman Pilcher who had been involved in the Kapur LSD ring. Pilcher was notorious in London for targeting the drug habits of rock stars; after a raid on John Lennon’s flat he earned a mention as the “Semolina Pilchard” in The Beatles’ “I am the Walrus”.
LSD was a relatively new drug to the police and as such required a new way of policing. When Victor Kelaher became head of the Drug Squad in May 1968, his strategy was to target the LSD manufacturers rather than the street users. His first big case came in the spring of 1968 when a Hungarian student chemist by the name of Kalniczky was arrested at an LSD laboratory in the East End. Kalniczky’s partner in crime told the police where they had obtained their raw materials, and by using phone taps the police were able to arrest Malcolm Sinclair, an industrial chemist, and John Conway, a nightclub owner. Unfortunately, Kelaher had not checked the statute books. If he had, he would have discovered that possession of the constituent chemicals of LSD was not illegal and so the case against them failed. Sinclair was also exporting the same chemicals to the US through a friend called Ken Lee. This information, when supplied to the American authorities, led to successful convictions for crimes relating to LSD possession and manufacture in various States.35
As LSD use increased so did arrests for possession, supply and manufacturing. But the methods some police officers used to secure their convictions was coming in for criticism from many quarters. In their first annual report Release, the civil rights group founded in 1967 to help those arrested for alleged drug offences, claimed that the police sometimes planted drugs on suspects to guarantee convictions. Worse still, there were rumours that the drug squad were paying off informants with seized drugs.
Rumour became fact when, in 1970, Kevin Healy, a London heroin addict, agreed to become a police informer. Healy agreed to act as intermediary in an LSD deal between an undercover drug squad officer and a major LSD supplier called Lewis. The subterfuge paid off and Lewis was convicted of possession of 13,152 LSD tablets. He received three years probation, a light sentence and one of many inconsistent sentencing decisions made by the courts when they have dealt with LSD suppliers and manufacturers.
All Healy had officially received for his trouble was £20. Unofficially he claimed that he was given 162 of the seized LSD tablets, with the promise of more to come. This didn’t seem much to Healy who was now worried about the possible repercussions of being identified as an informer. Realizing he had evidence of corruption, he immediately went to see Rufus Harris at Release who took the story to Granada TV’s World in Action team.
World in Action was a respected investigative TV programme of the 1970s. Using Healy’s information, they began a covert investigation. In one secretly taped telephone conversation between undercover drug squad officer Nick Prichard and Healy, Prichard was caught on tape admitting that Healy could expect a cut of whatever was retrieved from a drug arrest, saying “... you know you get that from us.”36
In July 1970 Ken Lee, who had been involved in the supply of raw materials used to manufacture LSD in the 1968 Kalniczky arrest, returned to Britain. Police intelligence discovered he had brought a gram of LSD with him and was looking for a buyer. Undercover police officer Nick Prichard posed as a hippie and negotiated a sale between Lee and undercover American drug enforcement agent John Coleman. So far, so good. During the deal, in which the LSD changed hands for £450, Coleman persuaded Lee to reveal the names of his American colleagues who were running LSD labs, leading to their arrest. The American Drug Enforcement Agency was pleased, having secured several arrests for the outlay of £450.
In their book The Fall of Scotland Yard, authors Cox, Shirley and Short make the point, “LSD had been bought and sold in London with the full knowledge of the Drug Squad and without the arrest of either party: worse, a Scotland Yard officer had been present at the deal and had indeed conspired to bring it about. The Home Office, when they learned about the incident the following November, had a positive word for the operation: ‘illegal.’”37
Despite this sting being organised by the London police and although Nick Prichard was present during the transaction, Lee was not arrested.
Another hint of police corruption came in the summer of 1970 when a London LSD dealer known as Bartlett was arrested at the Isle of Wight festival in possession of 430 trips. Bartlett claimed he was a police informant working for Norman Pilcher and that Pilcher had personally given him the LSD to sell at the festival. Bartlett could not provide any substantive evidence Pilcher had provided him with the drug, and initially it seemed like a weak ruse in order to receive a lighter sentence. But when Hampshire police checked with their London colleagues they were phoned by Pilcher himself, confirming Bartlett was an important police informant. So important, in fact, that the head of the drug squad, Victor Kelaher, appeared as a character witness for Bartlett at the Isle of Wight quarter sessions.
The fact that the Drug Squad was corrupt came as no surprise to the counter culture. They had known about it for years and published several articles in the underground press about the matter. But the level to which the Drug Squad were corrupt made several high ranking police officers think carefully how they would structure any large anti-drug operations in the future. When Operation Julie was set up in the mid-Seventies to target LSD manufacturing and distribution in Britain, the lessons learnt in the Drug Squad corruption trials were applied to the Julie team and corruption was avoided.
In March 1970, the Home Office report of the Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence reported: “Probably the bulk of British LSD is smuggled in from the USA.” Those responsible for compiling the report would have done well to look at the LSD seizures for the preceding years. Much of the LSD found in police raids was being manufactured in Britain, some of it being manufactured specifically for export to the USA. For instance, detectives involved in the Kapur LSD manufacturing case found evidence some of Kapur’s product was made specifically for the American market.
Whatever the Home Office thought they knew about LSD in the early Seventies, they had no idea of a plot being hatched beneath their noses. A group of LSD idealists was coming together, motivated by their psychedelic experiences, certain that the drug could be a catalyst for radical change in society. Lief Fielding, one of the group’s peripheral members, wrote: “In the 60s I was an ‘acid freak’ – one of a group centred around Reading University whose lives had been transformed by the powerful psychedelic. Acid had, we thought, given us a collective vision of a saner, safer future, one where human interactions would not be based on greed, fear and coercion.”38
This sort of thinking was endemic throughout the LSD counter culture at the time, but Fielding notes: “Unlike many similar groups throughout the country we did not confine ourselves to talking. In 1970, together wit
h a bunch of similarly-minded people from Cambridge, we began to manufacture and distribute small quantities of LSD. Our conspiracy was on its way.”39
American author David Solomon was now resident in Cambridge and headed the conspiracy. He surrounded himself with like-minded LSD intellectuals and with a promising young chemist called Richard Kemp; Solomon initiated the production of LSD that would lead inexorably to the 1977 Operation Julie arrests.
The early Seventies saw acid guru Michael Hollingshead back on the British scene. Following his release from prison, Hollingshead had spent some time in Sweden before returning to London. He then sojourned in Nepal, living in Kathmandu with the hippies and editing Flow, a poetry magazine. On his return he noted many acidheads were also, “... looking for a way in which to re-enter the West. They found coming back to the West after years in the Himalayas just a very bad trip because there you’ve opened yourself out and then you have to come back to all this.”40
Hollingshead resolved to found a psychedelic ashram for those who found western civilisation too overpowering. In late 1970, he struck a deal with the Cathedral of the Isles on Greater Cumbrae, an island off the west coast of Scotland, and founded a commune within its grounds. The Pure Land Ashram, as it was known, attracted a number of young people, mainly drug takers. It has been alleged that full moon LSD ceremonies were held there on a monthly basis. According to an ex-resident of the commune, who wishes to remain anonymous, this is rubbish. “From time to time, and more on an individual basis, people would take LSD, but it was never that available from what I remember.”41
When the Cumbrae commune closed due to pressure from the church authorities, they left the island together in a van, intending to continue their communal existence in London. They broke their journey at a large manor house where Hollingshead knew the occupants well. He introduced the group to two “male psychologists” who claimed they were experimenting with LSD for clinical use. Most of the Cumbrae group decided to try this new LSD, and the “psychologists” observed as the trip unfolded.
The former communard wrote of the experience: “We ended up in London via a big house in Oxfordshire where most of the group overdosed on some extremely strong LSD and really flipped out. I at this stage was off it so I was watching the whole thing. This was given to us at this house as some kind of psychological experiment by the people who lived there. Michael knew them. It all went terribly wrong and they thought we were going to wreck their house and their reputation locally.”42 Hollingshead knew Solomon very well and this event might well have been a test run for the early Operation Julie LSD that was to dominate LSD use in Britain for most of the Seventies. When back in London, Hollingshead took the Cumbrae group to meet the noted painter, Felix Topolski who he had turned on to LSD some years previously. Topolski painted a large picture of the group.
By 1970, the heady days of flower power were over. LSD use was still on the increase but the LSD inspired Manson slayings in America had cast a dark shadow over the counter culture. The Altamont festival, at which one man had died, was the antithesis of the Woodstock generation and the film Easy Rider had shown both touching naïvety and the violent death of the hippie dream through the eyes of two young bikers. Harder drugs such as heroin and morphine were becoming more prevalent and LSD culture was slowly being subsumed in the wider arena of general drug abuse. In Britain, this darkness was made visible in the disturbing 1970 film Performance starring Mick Jagger. Warner Brothers expected a benign look into upper class hippiedom but instead were presented with a hippie gangster film that baffled them, causing some executives to walk out of the first screening. The film starred James Fox as Chas, a gangster on the run from Kray-like mobsters. Looking for a place to lie low he holes up in the basement of the rich and decadent rock star Turner, played by Jagger. The film plays with ideas of identity and power, shot through with drug taking both on and off set. The psychedelics used in the film were hallucinogenic mushrooms, presumably because they were more visible than LSD. Rolling Stones’ groupie Anita Pallenberg, who took a leading role, recalls she “... used to tease James Fox by saying that I had spiked his coffee with LSD.”43
Performance was a dark and edgy look at the drug subculture. Whilst the film industry could mirror the zeitgeist with such films, television shied away from using LSD in anything other than serious documentaries and news items. This situation changed in 1972 with The Alf Garnett Saga, the second feature film based on the successful TV sit-com Till Death Us Do Part. The star, jingoistic Alf Garnett, finds a tablet of LSD in his fridge, hidden there by son-in-law Mike. Mistaking the drug for sugar, Garnett takes it and embarks on a fictional LSD trip that rivalled the real thing for strangeness. Garnett harangues TV personalities Max Bygraves and Eric Sykes as well as celebrity footballer George Best at a football match when at the height of his trip. The portrayal of the old, racist Garnett on acid must have left anyone in the audience who wasn’t already aware of LSD’s effects even more perplexed about the drug.
In January 1971, the pages of International Times featured a letter from one Bill Dwyer “Dear Brothers and Sisters, I have been busted with what eventually may prove to be 1400 tabs of LSD”. Dwyer, who lived in a commune and was soon to become a driving force in the free festival movement, planned to base his defence on his belief that, “... acid is a holy sacrament which greatly assists the individual in cleansing himself of selfishness and the various million inhibitions bestowed on us by an authoritarian, moralistic society.”44 Dwyer’s letter was evidence the LSD counter culture was a powerful force and had individuals at its core who were committed to LSD as an agent of individual and political change.
All over Britain small communes, squats and shared houses were home to groups of people for whom LSD was a way of life. A letter published in IT, a year after Dwyer’s, exemplified this. It was from “Roger & the Gang” in a Hackney commune who were trying to recruit female members: “Dear I.T., we are a psychedelic based commune ... We believe in group marriage and the expanding of consciousness and also live on a vegetarian/health food basis.”45 Individuals such as Roger and Bill Dwyer were representative of those people who were committed to a full psychedelic lifestyle; one in which LSD permeated and drove every aspect of their existence. They believed a psychedelic life was possible and, if enough people adopted it, could lead to a psychedelic revolution among young people. There were thousands of such people, living in flats, squats and communes, an acid constituency with big aspirations but few people capable or willing to lead them.
Increased use of LSD and other drugs panicked the government to update the 1964 Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act, to which LSD was added in 1966. The new act, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, created three classes of drug, A, B and C and all illegal substances, derivatives and known analogues were encompassed within it. LSD was now a Class A drug. Possession of the drug became punishable with seven years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine, and trafficking punishable with life imprisonment and an unlimited fine. This did nothing to stem the use of LSD, which increased rather than decreased in the Seventies. Prohibition was very definitely not working, but new laws and new penalties provided the media and politicians with useful rhetoric with which to worry their constituents and readers.46
For the government, Timothy Leary’s name had become synonymous with all that was bad about LSD. He had been refused entry to Britain on several previous occasions and it was clear the British political administration saw him as a serious threat to the nation’s youth. In 1973 Leary once again attempted to gain entry to Britain. On this occasion, Federal Agents were escorting Leary back to the USA from Afghanistan after a period on the run following his 1970 escape from a federal prison. When the plane from Afghanistan stopped over at Frankfurt, Joanna, Leary’s wife, phoned her godfather Max Aitken, owner of London’s Evening Standard, and told him “Timothy says as soon as we get to Heathrow, he’s demanding political, philosophical, and spiritual asylum.”47
Leary was met from his pla
ne at Heathrow by Mr Greenyer, who had dealt with him on two previous occasions. Greenyer later commented dryly, “During the years since I last met him, Mr. Leary has developed much stronger belief in himself as the ‘Messiah’, though he backs this with highly intelligent, even logical speech. His words, possibly said jokingly, before departure were ‘In this world’s march I am one of the very few in step.’” Despite his voluble requests to immigration officials, yet again, he was refused entry to Britain. Leary, whose US identity card gave his profession as “philosopher”, took the refusal calmly before being flown to Los Angeles in a specially cordoned off area of a Pan Am 747. On this occasion however, Leary did manage to court some publicity; a large photograph of him appeared in The Times. Leary and his wife Joanna Harcourt-Smith were pictured on the moving walkway as they left the flight from Kabul, Leary sporting his trademark grin.48
Even though only a small percentage of Britain’s population had actually taken LSD, the drug, or more correctly the idea of the drug, was now firmly embedded in popular culture. It was so accepted by the majority of young people that in 1973 the future contender for the 2007 Liberal Democrat Party leadership, Chris Huhne, wrote an article on drugs while at Oxford University. His position on LSD, which he intimated was actually being made clandestinely at Oxford, summed up the attitude held by most young people of the time, “Acid [LSD] is manufactured in the labs and is the only drug which is getting cheaper ... The considerable number of students at this university who drop acid are well-balanced highly intelligent people ... if one is able to live with oneself ... then acid holds no surprises.”49
As the idea of LSD permeated society, manufacturers and their advertisers employed psychedelic imagery whenever they could. Book covers, LP sleeves, clothes, even food and drink began to be advertised with a psychedelic gloss, the implication being that by buying that particular product you were familiar with or at the very least aligning yourself with the LSD experience. Hippie clothes styles, such as the Indian kaftan, were being sold in high street chain stores. The LSD counter culture was becoming commodified and sold back to young people by cynical capitalists. By adopting the right clothes and music anyone could easily lay claim to being an acidhead. These so called “plastic hippies” were loathed by the genuine LSD counter culture, becoming just another in a long line of youth fashion fads stretching back through mods, rockers, beatniks and teddy boys.