Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

Ken Kesey called LSD a “gift of the gods.” Psychedelics were as much a part of the Boulder scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s as head shops and eight track tape players. A Separate Reality written by Carlos Castenada was one of the most widely read books by students and young people during that time period – a book that purported to tell the tale of a young anthropologist taking peyote as an apprentice to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer.

Jimi Hendrix described the LSD experience in his song, Purple Haze. Bob Dylan was turning on the Beatles to pot and in 1967 it seemed like nearly everyone under the age of 30 was listening to Hendrix and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles. Eric Clapton and Cream released their Crossroads album and the Doors released their hit, Light My Fire.

Music and mind-altering drugs and literature all seemed to be melded together in some kind of synchronicity. Race riots, assassinations, and the war in Vietnam added a sense of chaos to the overall fabric of society in the years immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For some, drugs offered an escape from the chaos and for others it merely amplified it. Drugs offered a path to a new, higher level of consciousness for some and, for others, hedonistic pleasure.

The deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, and Bing Crosby’s son from a bad acid trip, and the Stone’s concert at Altamont Speedway in California marred the psychedelic scene and sent chills through the hippy community. Still, Timothy Leary was being treated as a spiritual leader by the Moody Blues and rock bands and people experimented with the drug anyway. The Beatle’s movie, Yellow Submarine, seemed designed to be viewed on LSD. If you wanted to try LSD, all you had to do was go up to University Hill in Boulder and buy some from one of the ubiquitous street dealers. So many things ranging from black light posters to the covers of rock albums seemed to be influenced by the drug culture. It seemed inevitable that young people would end up experimenting with drugs.

A Drug Wholesaler Remembers

I moved to Boulder in 1968 in search of the mythical land of California. I didn’t quite get there. I had been a medium level dealer in New York, and then I moved out here . . . that is, me and my partner. We were entrepreneurs, selling good acid and good marijuana . . . the kind of people who nowadays go out and start computer shops. At that time, the main source of money was the dope business. The cops had not really discovered it yet, so it was fairly un-dangerous. It was one of the few places where, with a small outlay of capitol, you could hope to make your fortune – something that’s really not possible anymore.

Did you cook your own acid?

No. We had a source in California, a friend of ours who made it and shipped it throughout the country. We were wholesalers.

Did it have a brand name?

Yes. It was sold under the trade name “Barrels.” It was Green Special Barrels and Orange Barrels. Every manufacturer was known by the pill press that he used. That was the first acid that was in Boulder. We also sold in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. We also sold at the airport space.

We made it a point to never sell anything we hadn’t tested or that we couldn’t really firmly stand behind. I think most of us were in that business then and now continue running good small businesses because we stand behind our products, whatever they happen to be now, and whatever they were then.

Everyone had a way in their lives that they were first introduced to drugs. How did you get turned on to dope?

Well, I had been involved in the arts and the arts group that I was part of, a community theater organization, happened to also smoke, so I guess it was a nice social thing to do. It was certainly better than cigarettes. I was a real purist. I mean, I started doing psychedelics when I was 14 or 15, and got out of them about seven years later. I didn’t smoke tobacco. I didn’t drink alcohol. I didn’t do heroin. I tried speed and didn’t like it.

I guess the piece of the puzzle that I want to speak about was the years and the formation and the demise of the Boulder Dealer’s Association, which was a loose union of reputable dealers of psychedelics in Boulder – pretty much exclusively wholesalers.

Street dealers were not welcome in the BDA. Wholesalers who kept really tight quality control and made sure that everyone knew what was good and what was bad and what was overpriced, (tried to keep the prices fair) and made sure that the Mafia didn’t move into Boulder. Boulder was a nice college town and I think that everyone that moved here from somewhere else appreciated it.

How did one keep the Mafia out of town?

It was self-policing. If we heard that a new dealer in town might be associated with the Mafia, we would send somebody out to ask questions. And (if we determined that they were), they would suddenly find that nobody wanted to do business with them. We’d say, “Oh dear, the market has really gone down lately.” It was also partly keeping a low profile, trying to keep Boulder from being discovered (and) trying desperately to keep Boulder from being recognized as the center fo a really good market, which we had noticed it was. Partly we were trying to keep it a closed shop union. The only difference being that we were the good guys.

It wasn’t until, I forget the D.A., it must have been ’68 or ’69 . . . The election of a new D.A. A new D.A. was elected with the avowed purpose of cleaning up Boulder from the “filth” like marijuana. He busted, I’d say, at least half of the BDA over the next few years. Of those of us who were left, there just wasn’t enough manpower to keep the Mafia out.

I remember when the Mafia came in . . . they began going around selling heroin to the students and we were just appalled because we had really wanted to keep this market clean. It was stupid because it was like the D.A. couldn’t see (what was happening). He was just totally blind. He had this purpose of mind and he didn’t realize that we were fulfilling his purpose infinitely better than what he did. So by 1970, the Mafia was pretty thoroughly into Boulder as a market. I’ve always felt bad about that.

Was Sandy Jones (a heroin dealer) a part of that?

Yes. I can remember Sandy. I don’t know. I really don’t know. He wasn’t part of our group. I just read what was in the papers. He wasn’t part of our group. I just read what was in the papers, but he was a person I really don’t remember. He was a person in a completely different crowd. There was a kind of a tough crowd, and then there were all of us softies who were much more interested in having religious experiences than mainlining. In a lot of ways, so many of the problems that Boulder has faced in the years since, I trace to that D.A. and to that move that enabled the Mafia to get a hold here.

Ken Kesey said that nothing changed America more profoundly than LSD. He called it “a gift from the gods.” How profoundly did LSD change Boulder and America, in your opinion?

Well, it was a whole movement, and as with any other movement, you have a drug of choice. The artistic movement, the kind of music people listen to, the politics or lack of them that the group epitomizes – it all makes a coherent whole when you look at it. It’s a socio-ecological manifestation. The drug of choice of the ‘60s, and also the thing that we believed in, made it very interesting. Now the drug of choice is cocaine, but people know better now than to believe in it, and that’s a real difference.

But then, there was this overwhelming and deep-seated belief that if we could just release enough Acid into the major water supplies, then our social problems would clean up and the world would be a good place to live in again. We really believed that! I know that I did with all my heart and soul.

Ken Kesey asked, “Did you ever drink a can of Tab while you were tripping and feel like it was “a good thing?” (Tab was one of the first diet drinks with a terrible, chemical taste that was supposed to be sweet like sugar. The commercial slogan for the drink was that it was “a good thing.”) He said it made you want to puke. Your whole body would sort of revolt against that ersatz junk that they marketed as Tab, using cyclamate as an artificial sweetener.

It made you sensitive to what was going on, instead of what people had told you all along was going on. And that was very important. Now, that same energy has been translated into the health movement. Everybody runs and everybody does all these healthy things. It’s still an attempt to make you conscious of what you’re ingesting and what you’re doing to your body, trying to keep your body healthy. Now, everybody is much more into becoming conscious through other means.