Chemist sought to bring LSD to the mainstream

Published 12:02 am Saturday, May 13, 2017

One day in 1964, Nicholas Sand, a Brooklyn, New York-born son of a spy for the Soviet Union, took his first acid trip.

He had been fascinated by psychedelic drugs since reading about them as a student at Brooklyn College and had experimented with mescaline and peyote. At a retreat run by friends in Putnam County, New York, he took his first dose of LSD, 
legal at the time.

“I was floating in this immense black space,” he recalled in the documentary “The Sunshine Makers,” released in 2015. “I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ And suddenly, a voice came through my body, and it said, ‘Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.’ ”

After being trained by the lab partner of Owsley Stanley, America’s premier LSD chemist, he set about producing vast quantities of the purest LSD on the market. His most celebrated product, known as Orange Sunshine for the color of the tablets it came in, became a signature drug of the 1960s.

Touted by Timothy Leary as the finest acid available, “the tiny orange pills quickly acquired near-mythic status,” Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain wrote in “Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD” (1992). Distributed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a drug cult based in Laguna Beach, California, it showed up wherever hippies gathered — at Grateful Dead concerts, in California communes, in Indian ashrams, in the hashish havens of Afghanistan. Sand made sure that Orange Sunshine was available to U.S. soldiers in Vietnam; he hoped to bend their minds in the direction of nonviolence and brotherly love.

The goal was simple. “If we could turn on everyone in the world,” he said, “then maybe we’d have a new world of peace and love.”

It did not work out that way. Orange Sunshine was Sand’s ticket to a life on the run. For years he raced to stay a step ahead of federal agents, and after being convicted on drug and tax-evasion charges, he hid in Canada for two decades under an assumed name. After being arrested and unmasked, he was returned to the United States, where he served six years in prison.

Sand died April 24 at his home in Lagunitas, California. He was 75. The cause was a heart attack.

Sand estimated that he had manufactured about 30 pounds of it over the course of his career, enough for 140 million doses.

“I have a vision,” he wrote in 2001, outlining a future in which police would be replaced by “guides, friends, helpers and lovers” and the human race would ascend to “a new level of consciousness” through psychedelic drugs.

“That is what I have seen in my visions, and that is what I have been working for all of my life,” he added. “That is what I will continue to do until my last breath.”