Happy 80th Birthday Richard Hilary Kemp, LSD Underground Chemist

“I think my motivation was to change the course of human history. You can’t have a much higher motivation than that."

Richard Kemp was born in Northumberland on 17 June 1943. In 1968 he was doing a PHD at Liverpool Unversity on ‘the nuclear magnetic resonance of fluorinated molecules’ when he was recruited by American Beat writer, David Solomon, to make THC, then LSD. The ‘Acid Aventure’ led to underground laboratories in London and north Wales producing millions of high-quality LSD trips which supplied the festivals of the 1970s through well-organised secret distribution networks. The ‘caper’ (as Kemp’s partner, Christine Bott, called it) lasted nine years, until March 1977, when the first national police operation in history, codenamed Operation Julie, carried out what the media hailed as the “biggest drugs raid in British history”. In March 1978, at Bristol Crown Court, 29 defendants were handed down prison sentences totalling 170 years.

The remarkable story of how the LSD conspirators manage to distribute tens of millions of high-quality LSD tabs without the police managing to stop them is told in my book LSD Underground: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (BPC 2022- available from Amazon).

At the ‘Julie Trial’ in 1978, Kemp was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment. and Christine Bott to 9 years. Her account was published posthumously in 2021 as The Untold Story of Christine Bott by her friend,Catherine Hayes (publisher: ktazze ISBN: 9781838338855). Hayes’s book formed part of the story told in the six-part BBC Radio podcast, Acid Dream, (October/November 2022). Hayes also managed to get Kemp to break his silence of 45 years'; his recollections feature in the documentary.

Kemp was something of a green prophet. Whilst on remand in prison he wrote an 8,000-word statement which he intended to present at the trial in 1978, but he was dissuaded from doing so by his lawyers, who thought that as it was so political and unrepentant, it would get him a stiffer sentence A week after the Julie trial ended, parts of the document were published in the Cambrian News. Journalist Patrick O’Brien introduced it as ‘Microdoctrine – the beliefs behind Kemp’s LSD,’ and summarised Kemp’s views on ecology:

“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 are necessary. People will have accept a lower stand of living by being content with having things which are necessary for survival, and luxuries will have to kept to minimum. Secondly these 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… In common with 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 attitude. And he  believed LSD could spark changes in outlook and put the world on the road to survival.”

Kemp wrote in his own words:

“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.”

And,

“Insofar as LSD can catalyze such a change in members of the public, it can contribute to thisend… I have never believed that LSD is the substitute for the hard work required to change oneself. One might say it is a signpost pointing a way to self-discovery.”

We learn from the final episode of Acid Dream that is no longer the idealist he was. Sadly, he has lost hope of a rational ecological solution to impending doom. In the taped interview, Kemp admits making money was a serious motivation for making acid, but adds,

“I think my motivation was to change the course of human history. You can’t have a much higher motivation than that. The Earth’s resources are finite. And they are being used up, and when they’re used up they’re gone. We’re changing the ecology of the planet in a way we’ll  be able to feed fewer and fewer people at the same time that population is continuing to grow. So for me it was like I was never quite sure what my purpose in life was to be, and then it was as if suddenly ‘now I know why I’ve been born and now I know what I’ve got to do’. I didn’t ask myself whether I was completely sure about this for very long. I just thought I’m the right man, the right person at the right time, with the right skills and right temperament. Everything about it said ‘do it man, do it, go for it’”

Time Out report, March 1978

Whilst on remand in Her Majesty’s Prison Bristol, in1977, Leaf Fielding, LSD distribution manager, met LSD chemist, Richard Kemp:

“Richard was a man after my own heart. We talked long and excitedly in one-hour bursts. He too had wanted to turn the world on and he’d gone a long way towards achieving his aim by producing kilos of acid, enough for tens of millions of trips... ‘And look where our idealism got us.’ His despondently waving arm took in the prison walls, D wing and the punishment block. ‘Well we’re not the first people to be persecuted for we believe in,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t suppose for a moment we’ll be the last.We’ll be exonerated in the future, don’t you think?’‘ Maybe. But that doesn’t help us now.’ The bell brought another exercise period to an end.”

(Leaf Fielding, To Live Outside the Law, Serpent's Tail: 2012) 

Kemp was released from prison in 1984.

So what happened to Kemp’s original 8,000 word document, known as ‘Microdoctrine’? Patrick O’Brien, the journalist on the Cambrian News in 1978, has written to me In response to an article I wrote for the Barbarism of Pure Culture blog, entitled ‘How Green was the Psychedelic Revolution? He reveals - among other things - that after he published the extracts in the Cambrian News he was approached by Elwyn Jones, (1923-82), TV producer, screen-writer for BBC’s cop dramas (Z-Cars, Softly Softly) and former Head of the BBC’s Drama Department. Jones persuaded O’Brien to lend him the document (of which there were no copies) and Jones basically stole it. This was, it seems, another historic example of the BBC’s notorious loyalty to the ‘Establishment’: not so much a case ‘catch-and-kill’ as ‘snatch-and-kill’, intended to suppress the ideas of a dissident.

Here is the letter O’Brien sent me.

JUNE 1 2023. From Patrick O’Brien.
Credit, insofar as it matters, for that cleverly descriptive word ‘Microdoctrine’ belongs solely to the late Ken Hankey, a sub-editor at The Cambrian News, who dreamt it up as the single-word headline for my story about Richard Kemp published in 1978.
The second fact is that Richard sent me his hand-written statement from prison and, in the interest of balance, I got extracts printed in The Observer and in The Cambrian News (post-publication, the then managing director of The Cambrian News, Henry Read, expressed quite disapproval about the story, muttering about not wanting to give publicity to ‘criminals’).
Subsequently, I was approached by Elwyn Jones, at the time a fairly well known television writer and producer, who persuaded me to lend him the document, short-term, in connection with a piece he said he was working on for the BBC. He promised faithfully to return it quickly. I trusted him to do just that, having judged him to be someone of integrity. I was wrong. He wasn’t. Despite strenuous efforts, I failed to get the document back. Basically, he stole it, and forever afterwards I kicked myself for trusting him. I was conned. Jones died in 1982 having never, as far as I know, come up with anything at all on the LSD saga.
I knew Richard and Christine personally, while not having the faintest clue about their secret life. Overall, I think the purity of purpose of Richard’s mission (I absolutely agree with what he says about the way the world was, and is, going) was greatly diminished by the money-making motive, though I’m sure others in the enterprise were far more interested than he in the lucre. I also think it is dangerous and highly irresponsible to make LSD available, cheap, to all and sundry, given that it’s common knowledge that anyone taking it needs advice on potential problems and support while they’re taking it. Christine, for example, acknowledges this in her memoir. I do actually think that everyone making, distributing and selling this LSD were potentially dicing with people’s lives, which is why the glamorisation of the story, which persists, and especially perhaps its having been made into a rock opera, I find pretty crass.

See also ‘How Green was the Psychedelic Revolution? Acid King Richard Kemp Breaks his 45-year Silence’