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Peggy sold LSD for Owsley Stanley. Owsley was an legendary audio engineer and the first large scale LSD producer (1965-1967). He made five grams that made 5 mil
by Hilift 2y ago
Peggy sold LSD for Owsley Stanley. Owsley was an legendary audio engineer and the first large scale LSD producer (1965-1967). He made five grams that made 5 million doses. Tom Wolfe wrote about him in the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968), although I don't recall him mentioning Peggy. Truly an oversight.
The "Acid Tests" were large parties where people drank fruit punch mixed with LSD.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-a-trip https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-a-trip
- soulofmischief 2y agoYou're looking at 25k to 50k doses, not 5 million. A typical dose is 100-200μg, and back then they were often even stronger than that.
- mistrial9 2y agothe Acid Test parties were real and had a lot of impact at the time! many say foolish, in hindsight.. there was a sense of urgency among certain people about it that was a combination of factors.
- morkalork 2y agoThere's a telling anecdote in the book about one of the first parties where there were two coolers of Kool-Aid, one plain and one with LSD in it. The organizers weren't malicious, they put them out and made an announcement like "this one is for lions and tigers, this other one is for kittens" hint hint right? No one could hear it over the music and the whole thing became a shit show. Definitely their hearts were in the right place but they were also a bunch of amateurs
- neilv 2y agoWouldn't a person of average intelligence, who wasn't a drug user, have seen the obvious risk?
- morkalork 2y agoNo. That's the entire point. As the other poster said, Owsley was the first large scale producer of LSD. Obvious risk of what? Up until then, the risks you're talking about didn't even exist, let alone being common knowledge.
- neilv 2y agoSo they thought it didn't matter that people wouldn't know what drug they're getting, so no need to handle the obvious fact that they won't?
- lamp_book 2y agoI read that book as well and it was pretty clear they wanted people to take it without exactly knowing what they were getting into; at least, it escalated to that point. They being Ken Kesey and his group more so than the Dead. One of the core bus riders eventually quit because he saw it as non consensual dosing. That was my takeaway anyway - there is a good amount of ambiguity in the way the book is written.
- morkalork 2y agoThere are some events in the book that are reported by other writers and the difference in interpretation is uh not small.
- neilv 2y agoSigh. I know one of the children of one of the people who was in the Ken Kesey group. I don't know what to hope about whether my friend's parent knew or didn't know that they were being dosed.
- morkalork 2y agoAre you talking about the party-goers or the organizers. The attendees did not have a good idea of what they were getting into. The organizers were comically amateur-ish.