Augustus Owsley Stanley II

This past weekend, Owsley Stanley died in a car wreck in Australia. If you've never heard of the man, you probably aren't a Dead-head; which is to say, you should count yourself lucky.

Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley II was born in Kentucky to a wealthy political family. His father was a government attorney and his grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, was the 38th Governor of Kentucky and a member of the United States Senate.

Like similar characters in these circles - notably, another LSD-obsessed Kentuckian, Alfred M. Hubbard - it's hard to make sense of the events that led up to their life's apex. In 1956, Owsley entered the Air Force. In 1958, he became intensely interested in the Russian Bolshoi Ballet, and made the unlikely career change from military pilot to ballet dancer. But by 1963, he was attending UC Berkeley taking classes in electronics, and it's here that he became fascinated with hallucinogenic drugs. He was producing thousands of hits of acid in his bathroom on campus, and from there they quickly spread all over the country to be consumed by the curious. Apparently even Lee Harvey Oswald tried some of Owsley's LSD just before the Kennedy Assassination, according to FBI memo #NO-89-69-80.

By the summer of '65 Owsley was cranking out 300,000 doses per batch, and was possessed with an almost religious zeal to get everyone on the stuff, by any means necessary. Soon he was best friends with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became their primary LSD supplier. The Grateful Dead practically adopted him as an auxilliary member, becoming a fixture in their entourage as roadie and drug dealer, and it's said their "dancing bear" logo is an homage to him.

One glowing obituary of the man speaks of him as "a colorful figure who would pour acid into a squirt bottle and spray musicians and fans alike at shows". Whether these people in the audience wanted to be sprayed with LSD, even at the height of the flower power craze, is something that apparently didn't concern Owsley. Jerry Garcia, who apparently didn't care either, is quoted as saying: "There’s nothing wrong with Bear that several billion fewer brain cells wouldn’t fix."

Owsley was the Beatles' LSD caterer during the filming of their disastrous Magical Mystery Tour TV special, which was so monumentally hated by BBC viewers that Paul McCartney issued a statement apologizing for the film's acid-addled self-indulgent nature. As Peter Brown in The Love You Make noted, "It was the first time in memory that an artist was obliged to make a public apology for his work."

In typically naive hippiethink, Owsley defended his LSD crusade this way:

"Psychedelics are a gift of nature that brings tribalism to people; they bring an understanding of the ecology of the planet and the interaction of all living things, because that’s one of the first things you become aware of when you take psychedelics—how everything is alive and how everything depends on everything else. You go take a look at every indigenous culture that has a respect for its environment — unlike the hierarchical approach of the feudalistic structures that the world is now run by — and you will find that these people use psychedelics of some sort, usually in a regular, ritualized manner."

This childish assessment is so blatantly false and ridiculous that I don't even think it needs dissecting here; its naivete speaks for itself. Unfortunately, this dangerous sort of thinking still has a foothold today and many young kids are lied to by bargain-basement "shamans" who really believe that harsh brain-damaging unnatural chemicals have some sort of divine connection to ancient tribal cultures, and that therefore, you should ingest them.

Some may feel I'm being too hard on the guy, especially so soon after his death; but I can't underscore enough the number of lives lost and minds ruined by his shenanigans. That "he meant well" is no consolation. As far as I'm concerned, this guy ruined everything that was great about the 1960s.

Lexington's Narcotics Farm

For most of the 20th century, Lexington was the drug addiction capital of the nation. Not because of its citizens, but because of the inmates at the U.S. Narcotics Farm - also known as the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, the NIH Clinical Research Center, and the Federal Medical Center.

Construction started in 1933, and was completed in 1935. From then on, some of the worst drug-addiction cases around the nation found their way to the good old Kentucky hills. As the popularity of Heroin grew in beatnik musician and literary circles, celebs and celebs-to-be like William S. Burroughs, Chet Baker, and boxer Barney Ross ended up here for "the Lexington Cure". But as time passed, the center's ideas for treatment of drug addiction remained laughably primitive. According to a 1962 survey, the hospital had a success rate of less than 7 percent.


Burroughs mentioned his time spent at Lexington often in the course of his writings, especially his first novel Junkie, written under the pen name William Lee. He become addicted to Heroin in 1942, but managed to live in a highly adaptive state with his burden. Fellow writer Alan Ansen met Burroughs at the height of his addiction, and described him as a "totally autonomous personality". Ansen was impressed with Burroughs' eloquence and intelligence, and his ability "to use drugs without losing consciousness or articulateness".

The "cures" at Lexington were useless and Burroughs remained an addict. It wasn't until 1957 that Burroughs was permanently cured of drug addiction in the U.K. by Dr. John Yer­bury Dent's ground-breaking apomorphine therapy. Upon returning to the states a healthy man, he tried to interest the docs at the Lexington farm about Dr. Dent's discoveries. None of them would listen. They preferred their own ineffective and barbaric methods.

By the late 1960s, however, the public and the media gradually became aware of the psychiatric atrocities taking place, and the Center's reputation grew more and more infamous. An article in the Lexington Herald in the early 1970s exposed cruel and bizarre "treatments": "Some of the patients were stripped of their clothing and their pubic hair burned off, that some of the male patients' genitals were placed in ice water for long periods of time."

The junk really hit the fan when it was learned that tax dollars were funding wild experiments, with hundreds of federal convicts volunteering as human guinea pigs and being rewarded with Heroin and cocaine! The institution was dealing smack and coke even as it was raking in the megabucks to try to fight these drugs. And partially declassified CIA documents relating to the controversial MK-ULTRA program not only mention the Lexington hospital as a place of interest, but as an actual CIA-cooperative asset:

Because of the unconventional use of the materials involved, CD has had added difficulty in obtaining expert services and facilities to conduct tests and experiments. Some of the activities are considered to be professionally unethical and in some instances border on the illegal. These difficulties have not been entirely surmounted but good progress is being made. Another problem is raised by the lack of professional knowledge of lysergic acid, the basic substance with which CD is concerned...

The National Institute of Mental Health conducts tests on its ape colony to study the effects of P1, and knockout material and has provided much information of operational value. Human experimentation is more difficult to accomplish. The best results have been obtained from mental institutions such as [one line redacted] Narcotics Addiction Hospital, Lexington, Ky., [one line redacted].

An arrangement is in process with the [one line redacted] which is expected to produce valuable results. Even with all the data gathered from these institutions there remains a considerable area of doubt. These tests and experiments are conducted under controlled conditions and the results may be quite different from those obtained in the operational use of the material. In this respect, [half-line redacted] must be experimental as well. Much more testing must be conducted before the behavior program can be considered to have accomplished its objective. [One-half page redacted]

In 1974 the center was turned into a federal prison but maintained a sideline as a run-of-the-mill psychiatric hospital until 1998, when two inmates allegedly killed each other and it was decided to move all psychiatric prisoners elsewhere. Currently the prison houses, last I checked, 1,530 men and 284 women.

Hallucinating Kentuckian Ruins Ohio Hotel Room

A Kentucky man has been arrested for destroying a Cincinnati hotel room by flooding it with hundreds of gallons of water. From FOX News:

Charles R. Weaver, 46, from Hindman, Kentucky, was arrested at the downtown Cincinnati Courtyard by Marriott.

A police report stated that water was coming out from under the door to Weaver's room and was leaking into rooms next door and into the lobby.

According the report Weaver was found laying in the water naked and he was screaming that someone was trying to set him on fire.

Weaver also allegedly set off a fire alarm while trying to run away from the police, according to the report. He also allegedly broke a window because according to him, he was trying to get his sister's attention outside.

Police also report that they found 24 grams of cocaine wrapped in money, several bottles of alcohol and 1.8 ounces of marijuana in Weaver's room. Weaver apparently admitted that he had been doing drugs over the past couple days.

According to WLEX 18, Weaver originally admitted to using the drugs, but then changed his story and accused the police of planting them in his hotel room.

The damage done to Weaver's room, adjoining rooms, the hallway and the lobby will cost many thousands to repair. Hope this clown still has some money left after buying all those drugs, because he's going to need it.

Tombstone Filled With Marijuana

Customs agents at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport were recently baffled by a tombstone that someone tried to ship via air from overseas. Apparently, it's just something that is never done - the costs to ship a giant heavy slab of stone via air are immense, and why would anyone do that when gravestones are almost always made to order in the vicinity of the cemetery in which it's to be used?

Upon further inspection, the agents started noticing other oddities - there was no last name on the headstone, assuming the senior in "Delroy Senior" is a suffix and not a surname. Being "late of England and Jamaica" was also puzzling to them, although I'll grant slack that someone could have genuinely considered themselves to have been of both places.

But once they inspected it closely, they found the stone was actually ordinary cheap poured concrete painted with a faux-finish to look like granite. The drug-sniffing dogs were called in and they immediately went off like a geiger counter at the BP disaster site. As it turns out, the fake tombstone was hollow inside and filled with 50 pounds of marijuana.

According to cincinnati.com:

Bell said efforts to find the stone’s sender – or the intended recipient – have failed because everyone involved used fake names and addresses.

“Everything came up as a dead end,” Bell said.

Fake Cops Robbed Drug Dealers

Something that's always bothered me about the nature of police is that we're all expected to drop whatever we're doing and go into submissive "sir, yes, sir" mode just because someone says they're a cop. Or just looks or acts like one.

The entire security guard industry takes advantage of this socialized Pavlovian response by deliberately dressing security guards in police-style uniforms. Campus "toy cops", Impotent "mall cops", and all-purpose paunchy dudes hired to stand around looking vaguely official - they all depend on the appearance of being cop-like, in the hope that the illusion will bluff the public into cooperating with them.

Sure, real police are supposed to identify themselves as such, but really, anyone can put on a cop suit and flash a badge and say they're a cop. And some enterprising louts in Pikeville recently did just that. According to Kentucky.com:

A welder and former coal-company employee pleaded guilty Monday to using a gun in a scheme to impersonate police and Operation UNITE investigators and rob people of pills and cash in Letcher and Knott counties.

Tony Ray Herald said he worked with Vernon Todd Griffie, a former Perry County volunteer sheriff's deputy, to go to the homes of people they suspected of being drug dealers. They would scope out the houses and arrange to buy drugs, he said.

Later, the two would return dressed as sheriff's deputies or police officers, claiming to be part of the Operation UNITE Eastern Kentucky drug task force. They would put the victims in handcuffs and take cash and pills.

A federal judge in Pikeville set Herald's sentencing date for Aug. 17. The charges carry a penalty of at least seven years in prison.

The hilarity of druggies pretending to be cops so they can steal from other druggies is so great, it almost begs to be made into a movie, a play, or an HBO series.

But I'd love to know what happened after the fake cops left their marks. Didn't the druggies wonder why they hadn't been taken to jail? Didn't they think it was weird that the cops would confiscate their drugs AND their money, but then set them free? Perhaps they also wondered why these cops were driving an old mud-covered pickup truck instead of a cop car.

But even if they figured it out, what were they gonna do - call the police and say "hey dude, somebody robbed our meth lab"? Because of this Catch-22 inherent in criminals being robbed by other criminals, there was really no reason to impersonate cops in the first place. I suppose they just liked playing dress-up.

Homicidal Doctor Pushes OxyContin to Kentuckians

Back in February a Tennessee doctor named Visuvalingam Vilvarajah was arrested in Harlan County, KY on charges of engaging in organized crime, assault and wanton endangerment. According to the indictment, Vilvarajah provided prescriptions for large quantities of drugs knowing they weren't for patients' personal use.

During the course of the narcotics and organized crime investigation, the Harlan County sheriff found that at least 350 people in the area carried prescriptions from Vilvarajah and his partner. These drugs included several types of painkillers, including OxyContin and methadone.

But that's not the weird part. Sadly, that sort of thing is rampant these days.

The weird part is, after being taken into custody, the Kentucky police realized that Vilvarajah had previously been convicted in 1986 on two charges of second-degree murder. According to news reports, he learned his wife was about to leave him and shot her and her mother in the head.

The even weirder part is that he only served five years for second-degree double murder, and that his medical license was fully reinstated. (If I ever kill someone, remind me to do it in Tennessee.)

Vilvarajah faces up to 75 years in prison if convicted.

Alfred M. Hubbard

The Alfred M. Hubbard story - what little we know of it - is one of the strangest, most mysterious tales of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, skullduggery and adventure I've heard. And of course, he's a good Kentucky boy.

As he himself told the story of his early youth, he was poor, barefoot; a self-described hillbilly from the mountains of Kentucky. Then a pair of angels appeared to him and instructed him to "build something". ("He had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences later said of him.)

In 1919, he did indeed build something: he invented the "Hubbard Energy Transformer", an alleged perpetual motion device which garnered nationwide media attention. Hubbard sold half the patent for $75,000 to the Radium Chemical Company of Pittsburgh, PA, after which it was never heard of again.

During Prohibition, Hubbard worked for a gang of bootleggers and smugglers in Seattle using a cab driving company as a front. He built a "ship-to-shore communication device" which he concealed in the trunk of his taxicab, to aid him in making liquor runs over the Canadian border. By some accounts, he was caught and went to prison for 18 months, but by other accounts, he had actually been a secret government agent for the Treasury Department all along, infiltrating the smugglers for Uncle Sam. Even if true, Hubbard was possibly playing both sides of the fence as a double agent: his next gig was running security for the Mafia-run Tropicana Hotel in Vegas.

Hubbard was approached by the OSS (now the CIA) and offered a job: sneaking war munitions into the U.K. before America had formally entered World War II. Eighteen months before Pearl Harbor, Hubbard became a Canadian citizen as part of his cover, and handled millions of dollars which were laundered through the Canadian consulate and financed OSS/CIA covert operations in Europe.

According to researcher Ben Metcalfe in Vancouver Magazine, Hubbard was also involved in the Manhattan Project in some way, probably moving Uranium through Site W.

After the war, Hubbard ran a charter boat company, and was now in the habit of referring to himself as "Captain". Captain Hubbard was now a sudden millionaire somehow, and owned an island off the coast of Vancouver called Dayman Island. President Harry Truman granted him a Presidential Pardon via his Proclamation 2676.

(As if all of this isn't a highly bizarre and improbable-sounding life story already, just wait, it gets weirder...)

In 1950, Hubbard experienced another angelic visitation. The angels told him to watch for something very important to the future of all mankind, which would soon make itself known to him. The next year, he heard about Albert Hoffman's experiments with LSD, and became convinced that this was the breakthrough the angels had spoken of.

Hubbard became obsessed with LSD, and began a major campaign to promote it as the spiritual cure to all humanity's problems. He introduced thousands of prominent people to it, including Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, and - so he claimed - the Pope. Reports conflict on whether he did this strictly on his own volition, or as part of the CIA's "MK-ULTRA" mind-control LSD experiments. I'm guessing the latter. (Most of the MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 by project chief Sidney Gottlieb and CIA Director Richard Helms.)

According to the book Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Hubbard spent much of the 1960s working for Teledyne, which was a major defense subcontractor, for a secret NASA project that involved testing "psychochemical agents" on astronauts and pilots.

Somewhere along the way, Hubbard had acquired a doctorate degree from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, without having actually attended classes. He listed this doctorate as part of his credentials when he went to work for the creepy Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s. The SRI, which also had MK-ULTRA connections, pioneered the early top-secret military research into paranormal abilities like Remote Viewing. These SRI experiments were headed by some very interesting people like Hal Puthoff, who was also working for that other fellow named Hubbard.

After a failed attempt to set up a new LSD-as-cancer-cure experimentation program in 1978, Hubbard became a hermit in a mobile home in the Arizona desert. He died August 31, 1982, at the age of 81.

What I haven't been able to determine is exactly where in Kentucky Mr. Hubbard was from. Anyone got a clue?


(Thanks to Todd Brendan Fahey, for his seminal research on 'Captain' Al Hubbard"!)