Remember acid? There was serious marketing behind lysergic acid diethylamide, synthesized from ergot by Albert Hofmann at Swiss firm Sandoz (He later described, in
LSD: My Problem Child," his
hallucinogenic bicycle ride home from his lab), which then patented it.
If Hofmann created it, Augustus Owsley Stanley III was the combined Steve Jobs and Henry Ford of acid's
manufacturing and marketing. Michael Walker, author of Laurel Canyon: Inside Rock n' Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, writes that Stanley, who died last week in Australia at age 76, was a
professionally protean eccentric who took the drug in Berkeley in 1964, then learned how to make it en mass, creating "Owsley acid" which "became the gold standard of psychedelics," Walker writes.
By 1967, Stanley had topped a million doses of the drug, which wasn't illegal yet. "Mr. Stanley single-handedly created a market where none had existed, and with it a large part of
what would become the 'counterculture,'" writes Walker, who says Stanley shared qualities with Steve Jobs, who also devised a "hand-sewn '60s ethic that persists today ... like Mr. Jobs, Mr. Stanley
was fanatical about quality control. He refused to put his LSD on pieces of paper -- so-called blotter acid -- because, Mr. Stanley maintained, it degraded the potency."
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