UnNews:Psychedelic icon takes final trip

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14 March 2011

LSD king: Owsley Stanley touts his wares in the late 1960s

BRISBANE, Queensland -- Infamous "Acid King", Owsley Stanley, the 1960s hippie leader who reinvented LSD and flooded the flower-power scene with his homemade "acid", reportedly died in a car crash at his Queensland home on Sunday.

Grateful Deadhead, Walking Bullshit, who lives in Brisbane, mumbled a statement on behalf of Stanley's family saying the crash occurred at Stanley's house when he pulled into the garage at high speed without slowing down. “He was going well over 110 kilometers per hour when he entered the garage,” Bullshit told the media. Apparently Owsley had been testing a new compound he was developing called "VOOM."

Stanley, whose real birth date is unknown, was believed to be 76 - but our guess is as good as any, and it doesn’t matter a fig anyway. The hippie grandson of a former Kentucky Derby rider, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a trillion doses of LSD at his bathtub in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury area.

"He made acid so pure and way-out that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their bands in its honor," Bullshit told the media.

Hendrix's song Love or Confusion was reputedly inspired by a really bad batch of Stanley's product, and the ear-splitting psychedelic groups, The Misunderstood and Capt. Beefheart, took their names from Owsley’s lucrative business.

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started making LSD after discovering the recipe written on a Swiss research paper he found inside a fortune cookie at a mysterious Chinese restaurant in Shangri La (Tibet). Within months he had developed the recipe to the point that the very name “Owsley” had become synonymous with “cool acid.”

The police raided his first lab in 1966 after LSD was outlawed, although Stanley successfully prosecuted the arresting officers for disturbing the peace, and gained the return of his bathtub. But the police eventually got even with him in 1970 when they planted marijuana in his pipe. This resulted in a conviction, which sent Owsley to prison for twenty years. During those years he was confined to a cell one meter by one meter by one meter square.

"I wound up doing time for something I didn't even do. I should have been knighted, or at least gotten the Nobel Prize," he told the Chronicle's Joel Selvino. "What I did was stop the Vietnam War, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Was I a criminal? Hell, yeah! But I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

He emigrated to Queensland in the early 1990s, apparently fearful of a new ice age caused by global cooling, and up until the fatal garage crash he sold copies of his autograph in fortune cookies online.

Stanley is survived by his wife, four children, eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and seven great great grandchildren.

Sources

• Staff "Psychedelic icon killed in Qld car crash" Reuters, March 14, 2011