In heyday of LSD, secret Windsor lab produced millions of Orange Sunshine pills
Inside the Windsor Historical Society museum there are collections of fine art, archaeological artifacts, tools and household gadgets, thousands of items on shelves, in hutches and behind glass, some dating back nearly four centuries.
Two recently added items at the Hembree House - discretely placed posters in the two bathrooms - provide a hint, however, to a time in Windsor's past that is neither well known locally nor widely publicized.
In the late 1960s, a small group of hippie zealots worked feverishly in an old Windsor farmhouse to produce an especially pure form of LSD, on a mission to turn on the world.
Little was known about the clandestine lab because it was never busted. Authorities only found out about it several years after it was dismantled.
That hidden chapter of history had its start in late 1968 when the lab was set up in Windsor. Within a few months it produced roughly 3 pounds of LSD, or enough to make 4.5 million hits of “Orange Sunshine,” a nickname for the orange-colored, barrel-shaped pill that produced an especially powerful psychedelic trip.
It would become one of the iconic drugs of the late 1960s, proclaimed the finest acid in the land by Timothy Leary, the former Harvard instructor who famously advised people to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
It was the year after the “Summer of Love” when thousands of flower children flocked to San Francisco to get high and groove in The Haight, espousing peace, love and Utopian ways. Some would come north to Sonoma County for back-to-the land communal living.
Among those who discovered Sonoma County was Tim Scully, a wonky East Bay kid and a physics major who'd dropped out of UC Berkeley. He and his associates chose Windsor to make LSD, which they saw as God's gift to humanity because of the ecstatic, consciousness-raising experience they had with the drug.
They chose a secluded Windsor farmhouse screened by trees, on 2 acres off Wilson Lane, now Mitchell Lane, to the west of Baldocchi Way. It was demolished more than 30 years ago to make way for Vintage Green subdivision homes.
“They invented Orange Sunshine, right here in Windsor,” said Windsor Historical Society President Steve Lehmann. “To me it's history. I'm surprised we don't have people doing some kind of pilgrimage here.”
“Sunshine Makers” come to Windsor
When Scully took LSD for the first time in April 1965 he felt at one with God and all living things.
Later that year he began hanging out with the San Francisco-based Grateful Dead, helping as sound engineer for the rock band along with Owsley “Bear” Stanley, already dubbed “The King of LSD” for the purity of his product.
The late Stanley, then 30, took the 21-year-old Scully as his apprentice beginning in mid-1966 at a lab in the basement of a rented house in Point Richmond. Stanley, his girlfriend and Scully cranked out 300,000 doses of “White Lightning” LSD. With the approaching 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the mayor of Richmond is trying to pinpoint the location and put up a commemorative plaque.
But in October 1966, LSD became illegal in California, and Stanley and Scully moved to Denver to set up a new lab.
The following year, Scully was introduced to Nick Sand, another underground chemist, and they collaborated in San Francisco to produce STP, a new psychedelic which was not yet illegal. Sand, another LSD proselytizer, had been introduced to LSD at Millbrook, an upstate New York farm and experimental community frequented by Leary.
By late 1967, Stanley was busted in connection with a tableting LSD lab in Orinda and Scully moved the Denver lab to another house.
But that was discovered in mid-1968 by authorities, when a water pump broke and police were called to the house while Scully was in Europe looking for precursor chemicals to make LSD.
Sand agreed to finance a new lab if Scully would teach him the Owsley Stanley manufacturing process.
Scully did on the condition that any LSD made be distributed through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, rather than the Hells Angels. The former was described by some as a hippie mafia, a group of California surfers who evolved into a worldwide drug distribution network. The latter were notorious for gratuitous violence.
By late December, Sand through an intermediary, purchased the farmhouse in Windsor where he and Scully set up the large-scale LSD lab.
The real estate agent was told the buyer was a physics professor who wanted to set up a photography darkroom in the old farmhouse. The money came from proceeds of sales of psychedelics from Sand's STP lab.
Scully and his partner were in a hurry to make as much LSD as they could, because they believed the raw material would become unavailable. The drug is manufactured from lysergic acid, which is produced by the ergot fungus that grows on rye and other grains but can also be synthesized in a lab. The LSD made in Windsor came from one pound of lysergic acid that was made in Italy, but purchased in London.
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