Owsley Acid, The Dead and The CIA

Richard explores the life and times of counter-culture icon, Augustus Owsley Stanley.  Without Stanley it is debatable whether the Summer of Love would ever have happened, whether The Warlocks would have become The Grateful Dead, or whether Psychedelic Music would even exist.   Bear as he was known, began mass producing hits of LSD from his makeshift lab near UC Berkely beginning in the mid 1960s and would become the single largest individual acid distributor in the world.  His Owsley Acid was used by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters for use in their legendary Acid Test parties.  He also supplied LSD to The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and possibly The Beatles. 

GUESTS:
George Walker aka "Barely Visible," is one of the original Merry Pranksters, cohorts and followers of American author Ken Kesey begining in 1964. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Further, organizing parties and giving out LSD.

Peter Wendel based in the nation's capital, is a journalist by training doing stints with major D.C. media outlets, including Gannett News/USA Today and Congressional Quarterly. Peter founded SongMango.com in 2014 as an outlet for his passion for music, particularly live music. Peter has been to hundreds of concerts and festivals, like The Peach, The All Good, Mountain Jam and Lockn'. He's ridden legendary Grateful Dead runs from Ventura County Fairgrounds (CA) to Irvine Meadows (CA) from the Nassau Coliseum (NY) to the Boston Garden. Catch him out on tour!

Paul Jeffrey Davids is the co‐author of Blowing America's Mind: A True Story of Princeton, CIA Mind Control, LSD and Zen.  He's also the co-author of six “Star Wars” books for Lucasfilm. He was production coordinator and a writer of the original animated “Transformers” TV series; executive producer of Showtime’s “Roswell: The UFO Cover‐up,” starring Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen, and he has produced and directed ten feature films, including “The Sci‐Fi Boys” and “The Life After Death Project,” both of which aired on SyFy, and “Jesus in India” and the bio‐pic, “Timothy Leary’s Dead.” As an undergraduate at Princeton, he won three top writing awards, then studied under full scholarship at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies in Los Angeles. Davids is also the bestselling co‐author of An Atheist in Heaven: the Ultimate Evidence for Life After Death? (2016) as well as being an accomplished artist.

H.P. Albarelli Jr. is the author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, published by the small specialist US publisher TrineDay in January 2010. The book documents and details numerous CIA and military sponsored unwitting human experiments. He is a founding member of the North American Truth and Accountability Commission on Human Experimentation.