Profile of famed LSD chemist Owsley - From BoingBoing.net by Mark Frauenfelder:

The San Francisco Chronicle managed to get an interview with the elusive Augustus Owsley Stanley III, a DIY chemist who produced legendary tabs of high quality LSD in the 1960s.

Owlsey's acid was even purer than the LSD made by Sandoz in Switzerland, the company that invented LSD and supplied it to the US Government as a tool of psychological warfare. Owsley's LSD was so pure that you could shake a beaker of it and it would glow -- its crystals were piezoluminescent.

Sporting a buccaneer's earring he got when he was in jail and a hearing aid on the same ear, he keeps a salty goatee, and the sides of his face look boiled clean from seven weeks of maximum radiation treatment for throat cancer. Having lost one of his vocal cords, he speaks only in a whispered croak these days. At one point, he was reduced to injecting his puree of steak and espresso directly into his stomach.

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly." By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement. Link to the full the full article here...