by Andy Roberts
If the counter culture believed that the Julie conspirators could fund their costs from their reputedly vast profits they were mistaken. All money belonging to those arrested was immediately confiscated or frozen. The police removed even small amounts of cash found at the defendants’ homes; in some cases leaving wives and partners with no source of income. On one visit to David Solomon’s flat after his arrest, the police took £135 from his wife Pat without even issuing a receipt. This was money loaned by friends for her financial assistance and was not connected to the acid conspiracy.25
The Daily Express, among other media sources, managed to obtain copies of letters sent, prior to the trial, by Bott and Kemp to friends. Bott’s letter reveals a woman driven by ideology rather than profit, prepared to speak her mind about her beliefs. She wrote, “I am sustained by the conviction of the righteousness of what we are into ... all those we reached with our acid, lovingly produced, will feel united in support of truth and that vision we share of mankind living in harmony. The insanity of the world is becoming increasingly apparent even to the straight people ... I’m certain a lot of people will re-examine their values before this trip is over.”26
It must then, have come as a devastating blow to Kemp, Bott and Solomon when they realised that the millions of people who had taken their “lovingly produced” acid did not seem to care what happened to them.
Kemp’s reply to Bott included: “We hope through our efforts our children will inherit a better world than we did. The forces of repression are firmly in control but I really believe we have started something no one can stop. It is so frustrating knowing they will call us evil men, destroyers of personality, purveyors of poison etc, and yet there is no scientific evidence to support their arguments.”27 Kemp was correct, there was no scientific evidence to support those arguments but scientific evidence was not under discussion at the trial where the prosecution was only interested in whether or not Kemp and his co-defendants had been involved in the manufacture and distribution of LSD.
For the main defendants the Operation Julie trial started on 12 January 1978 at Bristol Crown Court. The presiding judge was Mr Justice Park (Sir Hugh Park), an elderly judge with little knowledge of drugs or drug culture. Somewhat bizarrely, and in total contradiction of legal process, Park’s twenty-year-old granddaughter sat on the bench with him for some of the trial. By the time of the trial, all the defendants, with the exception of Christine Bott, Brian Cuthbertson and Russell Spenceley, had pleaded guilty. For them the show was over and they could only await the judge’s sentence.
All the national daily papers covered the trial, each trying to outdo their rival with theory and speculation. Was some of the acid destined for the IRA, the Angry Brigade or other international terrorists? There was no proof but it made for a good story. How much money had been made by the defendents? No one really knew but that didn’t stop the press feverishly extrapolating millions of pounds from much smaller amounts. That the Julie gang made money seemed to horrify the press almost as much as their highly organised manufacturing and distribution system. The media was also obsessed with the fact that the majority of the Julie conspirators were university educated professionals.
And of course the media couldn’t resist pulling some hoary old myths out of retirement. “We’ll Blow A Million Minds” screamed the Daily Mirror on 9 March, going on to breathlessly report how the Julie plotters had planned to put vast quantities of LSD in the reservoirs serving Birmingham. There was no evidence to support this accusation either but the “acid in the water supply” made good, public frightening, headlines.
Christine Bott stepped into the witness box, her defence pivoting on her belief that LSD was a useful drug, both to individuals and for the world. She told the prosecution that she was not interested in money, a claim borne out by the simple rural existence chosen by her and Kemp. Bott admitted she knew Kemp had been involved in the drug’s manufacture and though she claimed her personal experience of LSD was very positive, her “... philosophy as to its marketing and manufacture was a mixture of positive and negative”. Her view of the legalities of the manufacturing and distribution of LSD was simple: “If I thought there was a crime, I thought it had more to do with making money than LSD.”28
In response to further questioning, Bott told the court that LSD had been successfully used as a therapeutic treatment in psychiatry as well as to treat alcoholics. Though Bott agreed with the prosecution that LSD could be harmful to those who didn’t understand how to use it properly this did not diminish her faith in the drug: “I thought it was an agent which if used in the right controlled conditions could have a beneficial effect on the lives of the individuals who took it.”
It is probably this forthright attitude and ability to articulate her beliefs that cost Bott the sentence she was to receive. Gender politics in the 1970s were still very much confrontational. Park was a male judge from an alcohol driven culture. He must have been horrified to see the highly educated Bott defending the right to take psychedelic drugs while at the same time claiming disinterest in money. Bott was not arrested in possession of any LSD. Nor was there proof she had been directly involved in the manufacturing process, other than to support Kemp keeping him fed and comfortable. For her knowledge and support, she received a nine-year custodial sentence, only a year less than the other acid chemist, Andy Munro. As Munro commented, “Bott got nine years for making sandwiches. I got ten years for making acid.”
Contrast this disposal with that of Russell Spenceley’s wife Janine, who admitted to supplying large quantities of microdots, but at her husband’s request. She received a two year suspended sentence and effectively walked from court a free woman. Had Bott put spin on her testimony, played the vulnerable female and claimed that Kemp had coerced her into a life of illicit LSD manufacture, the chances are she would have walked free from the court with a suspended sentence at most.
Though the principals in the Julie conspiracy knew they were not going to get away with anything less than a prison sentence they clung to the hope that a plea of mitigation might sway Justice Park’s decision. In support of their plea Dr. Martin Mitcheson, head of the Drug Dependency Clinic at University College Hospital, London took the stand. Mitcheson argued that although LSD was a Class A drug he ranked it below the opiates, amphetamines and barbiturates in terms of its effects and only slightly more dangerous than cannabis. He also cited a BBC study from 1973 that indicated a minimum 600,000 Britons had taken the drug at least once, demonstrating how popular LSD was among the young. Furthermore, Mitcheson said, not one death certificate had ever recorded LSD as the cause of death. In response to questions from the judge Mitcheson agreed that he believed LSD should be moved to a lower classification.29
It was to no avail. Mr. Justice Park refused to accept the doctor’s expert testimony. It was, he said, irrelevant. In law LSD was a Class A drug and to the judge it was immaterial whether it was less or more harmful than any other drug, legal or otherwise. Nor did he take note of Mitcheson’s claims about the destructive effects of the legal drug, alcohol, and the number of hospital admissions it caused. Park interrupted Mitcheson with: “Alcohol is not a Class A drug.”30
Though he was factually correct it seemed that the die had been cast and no argument however strong, however well supported by fact, was going to prevent LSD being officially denounced, its acolytes vilified and imprisoned. Justice Park, it seems, was interested only in the blind and unfeeling application of the law rather than interpreting the law based on the available scientific evidence.
During his time on remand, awaiting trial, Richard Kemp hand-wrote a long statement which he intended to read out in court as the basis of his defence. He eventually decided against this but only after sending the screed to Patrick O’Brien, a journalist on the Cambrian Times, Kemp’s local Welsh newspaper. The Cambrian Times published an article based on Kemp’s thoughts entitled, somewhat wittily, “Microdoctrine”. In it, Kemp makes clear his own and the growing LSD cultu
re’s link between LSD, mindfullness and ecology. Although he kept the bulk of his beliefs out of court, Microdoctrine makes it clear that Kemp made LSD to change consciousness and to save the world from ecological disaster.
MICRODOCTRINE
Richard Kemp, the chemist of genius from Tregaron who was jailed for 13 years last week for his involvement in a conspiracy to manufacture and distribute the drug LSD, believed society would have to change rapidly if ecological disaster and social chaos were to be avoided.
In common with some expert scientific opinion he was convinced that, if Earth’s raw materials were to be conserved and pollution reduced to a tolerable level, there would have to be a revolution in people’s attitudes.
And he believed LSD could spark changes in outlook which would put the world on the road to survival. In an 8,000 word-statement which he had planned to deliver from the dock before being sentenced, Kemp declares: “I do have deeply held convictions as to the positive aspects of the use of LSD. It was these that provided the motivation for engaging in the activities for which I am before your Lordship and NOT the desire to make money by means of a criminal activity.”
He prepared the handwritten document in order that his views would emerge clearly and because the “crazy media exaggerations” of much media reporting “really got me down no end”. But his lawyers persuaded him not to deliver the statement in case it led the judge to pass a heavier sentence. Kemp says, “I am particularly anxious to counter the impression that I am an evil man so bound up in greed that I was uncaring or unmindful of the possible harmful effects resulting from what I did. I am not trying to ignore or excuse the fact I have broken the law. I wish only to put the crime in the perspective in which I see it.”
On ecology and conservation Kemp believes it is obvious we are living on the world’s capital rather than its income. He says that to achieve a level of consumption that is reasonable, taking into account the Earth’s limited and dwindling resources, two things will be necessary.
“People will have to accept a lower standard of living by becoming content with having things which are necessary for survival, and luxuries will have to be kept to a minimum. Secondly, those goods which are supplied will have to be built to have the longest possible lifespan, at the end of which they must be capable of being recycled.”
Kemp adds in the document he describes as “My LSD Philosophy”: “Changes in policy by manufacturers will come about only if sufficient pressure for change is generated by the public. In as far as LSD can catalyse such a change in members of the public, it can contribute to this end.” But he says that only if people find greater contentment within themselves and become free of trivial and outdated social pressures – he uses as an example advertising pressures to buy luxuries because these, it is implied, will bring social status – will they be able to accept the necessity of a life which revolves less around material things.
Kemp writes that he has taken LSD “over 200 times other than in the course of manufacture”. He says “It has been my experience, and that of many of those I know, that LSD helps to make one realise that happiness is a state of mind and not a state of ownership.” But he makes it plain that he has not yet freed himself from “the dependence on material things which we have been encouraged to develop throughout our lives”. And he does not claim that this freedom is, “an inevitable result of LSD experiences. But I feel that I, and many of those I know, have started down the road to a greater reliance on our inner resources. Because the realisation that contentment is a state of mind, one compensates less for unhappiness by buying things. This is why I felt that, if a large number of people were to experience this truth, whether by means of LSD or by means of an appropriate discipline, such as yoga or meditation, the problems resulting from consumerism would be to a large extent solved.”
Kemp practised what he preached in simple living. The £7,000 Blaencaron cottage he shared with Dr Christine Bott had few luxuries. There was no television or central heating, the sparse furnishings tended to be threadbare and the walls of the rooms were treated merely to an annual coating of white cement paint. A deep freeze stood in the lean-to but the ty bach (toilet) retained its original role. The only ostentatious touch in the two bedroomed home is a Victorian cast-iron spiral staircase, which Kemp bought in London and installed himself. They ate simply – an assortment of vegetables from the immaculately laid out garden, milk, cheese and yoghurt from their pedigree goats, eggs from half a dozen hens. He was committed to organic (non-chemical) gardening and belonged to West Wales Soil Association. During the 1976 drought, before sinking his own well with the help of a water diviner, he spent hours daily lugging water by truck to his vegetable beds from a river half a mile away.
Kemp claims that a sharp awareness of the importance of conservation is just one example of how clear sightedness through LSD can manifest itself. He believes the drug raises the barrier separating people from the unconscious part of their minds, and another benefit this can bring he says, is to alleviate or eliminate everyday neurotic problems. LSD, he adds, is often used as an end in itself because it enhances all the sense and “everything appears more beautiful. When people first use LSD they tend to concentrate on this aspect of the experience, but later they begin to use LSD as a means to learn about themselves, rather than as an end.”
He adds, “If it were just a question of satisfying people’s pleasure seeking desires, I would not have become involved. However, I believe that the end towards which LSD is a means is personally and socially beneficial. That is the way I and most of the people I know use it. I have never believed that LSD is a substitute for the hard work required to change oneself. One might say it is a signpost pointing a way to self-discovery.”
Kemp’s statement does not ignore the dangers of the drug. Anyone involved in the illegal supply of LSD, he says, is obviously running the risk of exposing certain people to negative experiences with which they cannot cope, and to which they may develop a panic reaction. He adds: “I must emphasise that in my experience of LSD use and in my observation of other LSD users, I have NEVER SEEN a person develop a reaction which has led to uncontrollable behaviour, aggressiveness or attempts to harm themselves or others. However, I do accept that this may have occurred but I am quite certain that it only happens where LSD is used in a circumstances far removed from those recommended by all concerned with the drug, and that such events are extremely rare.” He adds: “I would like to contrast myself with the heroin dealer who sells to others something which he knows is addictive and does no good and which therefore he does not take himself. Chronic dependence on LSD is almost unknown and no-one believes that it is addictive.”
But children, he says, should be protected. “It may be said that some of those under the age of majority have been exposed to something whose nature and proper use they did not fully understand. I would certainly support a system of social control, including a education about the nature and use of LSD, backed by laws where appropriate to protect those who are not fully able to take decisions for themselves, and to cover situations in which the use of LSD becomes a matter for public rather than private concern. One obvious example is driving a car on a public road.”
He continues: “The present climate and opinion of law effectively forced me to make a choice between making LSD available without social controls, with the small risks inherent in this approach, or not making it available at all. Believing as I did that the benefits are so urgently necessary if we are to have any chance of solving the pressing problems of the modern world, I felt I had no choice but to adopt the course which has led me to the dock and your Lordship’s judgement.”
He maintains that other drugs, particularly alcohol, amphetamines, opiates and tobacco, are far more dangerous than LSD. And in a letter from prison: “We have been hunted down, not because of a few bad trips or LSD-associated deaths, but because of the dramatic political effects we have been having.31
The sentences, when they came, were harsh
, and seemed to reflect Kemp’s fervent belief that the social and political establishment feared the changes LSD wrought in people. The two LSD chemists, Kemp and Munro, received 13 and 10 years, respectively. Solomon, presumably because of his own admission compounded with the fact he was a public advocate of LSD through his books, was sentenced to ten years. Todd was identified as the “marketing manager” of the operation and jailed for 13 years. The other principle defendents received varying custodial sentences and those in the outer circle of the plot were given various suspended sentences, fines and probation orders.
When sentencing Kemp, Justice Park told him: “All this was done, it is said, in the pursuit of the ideal that LSD liberated people’s minds and therefore your work would be beneficial to mankind. That was, I think, a false ideal.” Acknowledging the intellectual calibre of those he had sentenced, Park commented: “I regret very much ... that severe sentences are to be passed on people with excellent characters, excellent professional qualifications, and others in possession of very considerable scientific skill.” That so many highly educated people could be involved with LSD manufacture and distribution clearly rattled the fourth estate, as it was a theme noticed repeatedly in the media reports about the trial.32