Augustus Owsley Stanley III, AKA the “Bear,” died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia today. He was 76. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley homebrewed more than one million doses of LSD in the San Francisco Bay Area fueling a revolution in consciousness, music, art, and the counterculture. The recipe came from a copy of the Journal of Organic Chemistry he found in the UC Berkeley library. The Grateful Dead’s first sound engineer, Stanley also pioneered several technologies for live sound. From the National Post:
The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.
“I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for,” he (said in a rare 2007 interview). “What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”
“Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia”