Psychedelic Tricksters 4: Orange Sunshine
The Death of John Griggs and the Advent of Ronald Stark
The fourth part of the serialisation from selected chapters of Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black
By May 1969, at their laboratory in Windsor, California, Nick Sand; his pregnant partner, Jill Henry; Tim Scully; and David Mantell had produced over a kilogram of LSD, enough for more than 4 million 300 μg doses. Sand took charge of the tableting, churning out tiny pills dyed in orange, which were to become known as Orange Sunshine.
Tim Scully, having just obtained his pilot’s license, was having a piece of navigation equipment fitted onto his plane at Napa County Airport, California. On May 26, 1969, he strolled into the hangar only to be greeted by the Feds: ‘Tim Scully? You’re under arrest!’ He was taken to the Federal Building in San Francisco where investigators quizzed him on incriminating evidence found in his second Denver laboratory, which had been raided in his absence the previous year. Scully refused to answer his interrogators questions without the presence of his lawyer and was released on bail.
Sand, on learning of Scully’s arrest, was worried that the Feds might have found a paper trail leading to his lab in Windsor. So not wanting to take any chances, Sand closed it and moved his equipment out. His next move, in the fall of 1969, was to set up the Tekton Development Company in San Francisco to obtain lab equipment.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, led by John Griggs at the ranch at Idyllwild, was now distributing the Orange Sunshine. When the Brotherhood first moved into Idyllwild, in spring 1968, it had toolsheds, tractors, a windmill for drawing water from the well, diesel generators and a corral full of cattle. Dion Wright, a frequent visitor, noticed that what had once been a fully functioning ranch had strangely become a primitive camp: most of the inhabitants were living in teepees and since they didn’t eat meat the cattle had been given away to local ranchers. Glenn Lynd, as quoted in Nicholas Schou’s book, Orange Sunshine, says he expressed concerns about group-marriage arrangements inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which he claimed Griggs appeared to be enforcing in the name of free love. Lynd’s account however, may have been coloured by his later status as a government informer, i.e. it may have been a bit of self-justification for snitching. Tim Scully is adamant that Lynd’s claim that the people living on the Brotherhood Ranch practiced free love is ‘utterly untrue’. He says:
‘At that time it was very common for most of us in the Psychedelic scene to practice free love and it was relatively unusual that the people living on the Brotherhood Ranch practiced monogamy. But they did so. Carol Griggs was a strong force in insisting for monogamy on the ranch’.
On 4 August 1969 the Idyllwid community was shattered by the sudden death of John Griggs from a drug overdose. According to Lee and Shlain’s account, in Acid Dreams, Griggs’ demise in a teepee at Idyllwild was due to an overdose of PCP (Phencyclidine: also known as ‘Angel Dust’). During the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco, large amounts of PCP had been touted as synthetic cannabis (tetra-hydro-cannibinol – THC) amongst the Haight Ashbury hippies. PCP, which had been tested on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, was stockpiled by the CIA as a ‘non-lethal incapacitant’ even though agents reported that high doses could ‘lead to convulsions and death’.
In Timothy Leary’s version, in Flashbacks, the fatal dose was a synthetic concoction of psilocybin Griggs had bought from an underground chemist in Los Angeles. Leary claimed that laboratory tests had revealed the pills contained strychnine and that during this period there were many reports of psychedelics laced with poisons circulating in the counter-culture. According to Leary, rumours spread ‘about federal drug enforcement agents circulating tainted drugs, but there was no proof’.* According to Dion Wright,
‘The role of the intelligence community is unclear, but they were undoubtedly some kind of factor. Certainly the density of agents from various levels of government was more than anyone perceived at that time. I have come down on the side of a government assassination that worked’.
The authors of Acid Dreams seem to imply that Griggs’ death was suspicious. They write:
‘In the aftermath of Grigg’s death there was shakeup in the Brotherhood hierarchy. A different breed took over, and their approach to dealing was more competitive and cutthroat than before’.
According to Tendler and May’s account in their book, The Brotherhood, Griggs died because he simply miscalculated a dose of psilocybin mushroom pills. Tim Scully, who obtained Griggs’ death certificate and talked with the people who were with him when he died, says that is precisely what happened:
‘He died after aspirating vomit on the way to the hospital lying down in the back of a pickup truck where his friends didn't know enough first aid to keep his airway open after he took a very large dose of synthetic psilocybin which came from Switzerland and which was pure. A contributing factor to John's death was his propensity to be macho about taking extremely large doses of drugs, something many of the Brotherhood guys did. You can get away with that with LSD since very large doses are still not physically toxic but that habit becomes very dangerous when applied to other drugs such as psilocybin.’
After John Griggs’ death Michael Randall took over the Brotherhood’s LSD distribution system and married Griggs' widow. The Brotherhood carried on.
The authors of Acid Dreams claim that by the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was ‘stymied by lack of raw materials’ for LSD production, and ‘It was at this point that a mysterious figure named Ronald Hadley Stark appeared on the scene’.
Ronald Stark was operating a secret laboratory in Paris, with the British scientist, Richard Kemp, as his chief chemist. Towards the the end of 1969, Stark decided to expand his operation to the US, through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. To this end he reached out to Billy Hitchcock via his envoy, Tord Svenson. By this time. however, Hitchcock’s luck playing the stock markets was running out and he was facing an IRS investigation of his tax affairs. He decided to drop out of involvement with the LSD underground and move back east. So when Svenson, in early 1970, contacted Billy Hitchcock to do some LSD business, Hitchcock deferred and directed him westwards to contact Nick Sand and Tim Scully.
In Lee and Shlain’s book Acid Dreams, the account of Ronald Stark’s first meeting with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love goes as follows.
In August 1969, Ronald Hadley Stark drove across San Jacinto Mountains of California and descended on the bungalow and teepees at the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Idyllwild ranch with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Stark was carrying a bottle containing a kilo of pure LSD made at a laboratory in Europe. Stark talked about his expertise in scams: smuggling drugs in consignments of Japanese equipment, utilising business fronts in West Africa, and moving money through a maze of shell companies set up by his lawyers in various continents. However, he explained, he also had a mission: to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark also hinted that he was well-connected in the world of covert politics.
This narrative would make a great scene in a psychedelic 20th century western directed by Quentin Tarantino. But it is largely a myth. The claim in Acid Dreams that by the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was ‘stymied by lack of raw materials’ for LSD production, and that at this point Stark appeared is dismissed by Tim Scully. He points out that in the summer of 1969 the Brotherhood was busy selling vast quantities of Orange Sunshine and was not short of anything.
According to Acid Dreams, ‘Stark spoke ten languages fluently, including French, German, Italian, Arabic and Chinese’. Scully disputes this:
‘Everybody I know who knew him says that's not true. He spoke English, French, German, Italian, and apparently some Arabic. He did not speak Spanish and tried to use his Italian unsuccessfully to substitute for it’.
Most importantly, Ron Stark didn't suddenly appear on the California scene ‘coincidently’ following the demise of John Griggs in summer 1969. Stark first appeared in California in spring 1970. At Billy Hitchcock’s suggestion, Stark reached out to Tim Scully and Nick Sand, first by sending as an envoy his colleague, Tord Svenson. Tim Scully initially met Ron Stark in March or April 1970 and shortly thereafter introduced him to Nick Sand at the Cloverdale ranch. Scully recalls:
Ron Stark did not deliver a kilo of LSD to the Brotherhood. When he came to California to meet me, after a preliminary visit by his chemist, Tord Svenson, he convinced me to introduce him to Nick Sand and he brought that LSD along as his calling card. By the way, it wasn't in a bottle, it was in a plastic bag. Nick remembered it as being a pound while I remembered it as being a kilo. He claimed to have European laboratories that could produce an unlimited amount of LSD and all he lacked was American distribution. I was thrilled to hear that because by then some of the gumption had leaked out of my enthusiasm for saving the world by making LSD. I still believed that it would be a positive force but I was becoming less and less convinced that simply spreading LSD to the four winds would save the world while at the same time I was free on appeal bond from the bust of my second Denver lab and facing a possible total of 56 years in Colorado state prison. Over a period of days Ron managed to convince us to introduce him to the Brotherhood and we took him down to the Brotherhood Ranch in Southern California.
(NEXT UP: Ronald Stark takes over the Brotherhood of Eternal Love)
Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black is available from Amazon. Also on Kindle: HERE