Augustus Owsley Stanley III

Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph from San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press. - Augustus Owsley Stanley III, better known as Owsley, in 1967. He died Sunday in a car accident in Australia.

Self-taught chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley, a legend of the 1960s psychedelic underground who produced the LSD that fueled Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” and the Grateful Dead’s acid rock, died March 13 after a car accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had lived since the 1980s. He was 76. Mr. Stanley, the grandson of a Kentucky governor, grew up in the Washington area before he found his calling in Berkeley,­Calif., as an early patron of the Dead and one of the first people to produce mass quantities of acid. “I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007. “Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus. I was not responsible for his wings, but they did carry me to all kinds of places.”

In 1964, an NYT critic writes, a brilliant renegade named Augustus Owsley Stanley III spent three weeks in the university library’s organic chemistry stacks learning the secrets of synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD. Before long, Owsley was creating mass quantities of the purest acid the world had ever known, just in time for the seismic cultural and generational transformation of the era.

Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon.


The Washington Post obit has it that, As finicky about audio as he was about acid, he worked for years to develop the Dead’s “wall of sound,” a 40-foot-tall bank of more than 600 speakers whose output could be controlled by the musicians on stage. He plugged in a tape recorder at nearly every one of the Dead’s early sound checks, rehearsals and performances, creating a historical record of the live shows that helped turn the band into a cultural phenomenon. He also helped design the Dead’s widely reproduced skull-and-lightning logo.

His obit in the Australian, Unrepentant chemist of the 60s acid culture, has

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Found Drug Treatment in an African Plant

February 17, 2010
Howard Lotsof Dies at 66; Found Drug Treatment in an African Plant
By DENNIS HEVESI

Howard Lotsof was 19, addicted to heroin and searching for a new high in 1962 when he swallowed a bitter-tasting white powder taken from an exotic West African shrub.

“The next thing I knew,” he told The New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.”

The substance was ibogaine, an extract of Tabernanthe iboga, a perennial rain-forest plant found primarily in Gabon. In the Bwiti religion it is used in puberty initiation rites, inducing a powerful altered state for at least 48 hours during which young people are said to come into contact with a universal ancestor.

By Mr. Lotsof’s account, when he and six friends who were also addicted tried ibogaine, five of them immediately quit, saying their desire for heroin had been extinguished.

It was the start of a lifelong campaign for Mr. Lotsof. And now thousands of former addicts around the world and some scientists contend that ibogaine should be scientifically tested for its ability to halt heroin and cocaine cravings and even end addiction. Ibogaine is used in drug treatment clinics in many countries, but is banned in the United States.

Mr. Lotsof, who was 66, died on Jan. 31 at a hospital near his home on Staten Island. The cause was liver cancer, his wife, Norma said.

Virtually from that day 48 years ago when he first tried ibogaine, Mr. Lotsof became perhaps its leading advocate, lobbying public officials, pharmaceutical companies and independent researchers to investigate its efficacy. In the mid-1980s, he persuaded a Belgian company to manufacture ibogaine in capsule form and begin offering it to addicts in the Netherlands.

By then he had started the Dora Weiner Foundation, named for his grandmother, to develop ibogaine as a medication, to disseminate information about chemical dependence and to refer people to treatment. Mr. Lotsof ran the foundation.

In 1986 he received a patent for the use of ibogaine as a remedy for heroin and cocaine addiction. Five years later, he began working with Jan Bastiaans, a Dutch psychiatrist who had gained renown by using LSD therapy for Holocaust survivors. They treated 30 addicts from around the world, two-thirds of whom stopped using drugs for periods ranging from four months to four years. With 75 percent of addicts typically relapsing within six months of conventional care, the results spurred scientific interest.

“His great achievement,” said Kenneth Alper, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, “was in inducing the National Institute on Drug Abuse to undertake a research project on ibogaine that produced scores of peer-reviewed publications and paved the way for F.D.A. approval of a clinical trial.” The Food and Drug Administration did approve the trial, Dr. Alper said, but it was never completed because of contractual disputes and lack of financing. Ibogaine remains banned by the federal government.

“In the uncontrolled environments in which ibogaine is typically used, clinics or nonmedical settings,” Dr. Alper said, “the observations indicate that there is a resolution of withdrawal, meaning the addict is detoxified and no longer has withdrawal symptoms and is no longer physically dependent.” Scientifically controlled testing is needed, he said.

Herbert D. Kleber, director of the division on substance abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University, said he was skeptical about the efficacy of ibogaine in treating substance abusers, including those addicted to opium-based drugs like heroin. “At various times ibogaine has been proposed to treat opioid withdrawal as a cure for opioid dependence and as a cure for cocaine dependence,” Dr. Kleber said. “But there is a lack of controlled scientific studies to back those beliefs.

“A number of deaths have been associated with its use, especially to treat opioid withdrawal and dependence,” Dr. Kleber continued. “I therefore do not feel it is something that should be used in the absence of such evidence.”

Howard Stephen Lotsof (pronounced LOTS-uv) was born in the Bronx on March 1, 1943, the only child of Abner and Lillian Weiner Lotsof. Besides his wife, the former Norma Alexander, he is survived by two daughters, Rosalie Falato and Holly Weiland.

Mr. Lotsof, who dropped out of Farleigh Dickinson University in the 1960s, graduated from N.Y.U. in 1976. Over the years he wrote or co-wrote scientific papers on ibogaine that were published in respected academic journals, including The Journal of Ethnopharmacology and The American Journal on Addictions.

“These accomplishments are all the more extraordinary,” Dr. Alper said, “in view of the fact that Mr. Lotsof, a graduate of New York University who majored in film, was without a doctoral-level degree.”

138-119

Dock Ellis, a leading pitcher for pennant-winning teams with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Yankees despite a long addiction to drugs and alcohol, died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 63. The cause was liver disease, his wife, Hjordis, told The Associated Press.

Ellis won 138 games in his career and was the National League’s starting pitcher in the 1971 All-Star Game. After 12 years in the major leagues, he spent many years as a substance-abuse counselor. But he was remembered mostly for bizarre episodes on and off the field.

In his 1976 biography, “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball,” Donald Hall, later the poet laureate of the United States, wrote that Ellis had been drinking before he pitched a no-hitter against the Padres in San Diego in May 1970. But in his epilogue to the paperback edition, published in 1989, Hall wrote that Ellis had told him he was actually using LSD before the game, not realizing that he would be pitching the opener of a doubleheader, and had washed away the effects with amphetamines. “Doc was high not on vodka, but on acid,” Hall wrote in that epilogue. “He told me the story while he was still working for the Pirates.” When the book was about to be published in 1976, Ellis was with the Yankees and, fearing the reaction of their owner, George Steinbrenner, did not want that LSD admission to be made public, Hall wrote.

Associated Press

Pitcher Dock Ellis in a 1974 photo, when he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Just before the 1971 All-Star Game, Ellis said that the Cincinnati Reds’ Sparky Anderson, the N.L. manager, would not name him as the league’s starting pitcher because the Oakland A’s Vida Blue would be the starter for the American League and “they wouldn’t pitch two brothers against each other.” Anderson did start Ellis, who gave up a mammoth home run to Oakland’s Reggie Jackson.

In the Ellis biography, Hall wrote that reporters had criticized Ellis for inflaming racial issues, but that it was only a ploy.

“The only way I could start was to say they wouldn’t start me because I was black,” Hall quoted Ellis as telling him. “I call it child psychology. I said they wouldn’t do it, so they had to.”

In May 1972, a Reds security guard sprayed Ellis with Mace after refusing him admission to the ballpark, unsure that he was actually a ballplayer. The Reds later apologized. In a May 1974 game, Ellis hit the first three Cincinnati batters to face him and said later that he did so because the Reds had made disrespectful remarks about the Pirates after defeating them in the postseason two years earlier.

During the 1973 season, Ellis wore hair curlers for a time during pregame drills, supposedly to keep the back of his hairdo straight, allowing sweat to drip down, enabling him to use the moisture for spitballs.

Dock Phillip Ellis Jr. was born in Los Angeles, where his father owned small businesses. His father had been named Dock because his own father wanted him to become a physician. (Somehow a “k” was added to Doc.)

Ellis, a right-hander, had a 19-9 record for the 1971 Pirates, who defeated the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, and he was 17-8 for the 1976 Yankees team that was beaten by the Reds in the Series. He also pitched for Oakland, the Mets and the Texas Rangers, and retired after the 1979 season with a record of 138-119.

Ellis told The Los Angeles Times in 1985 that he began using drugs as a teenager, started to have alcohol problems while in the minor leagues, and “never pitched a game in the major leagues I wasn’t high.”

He entered a substance-abuse treatment center in Arizona after leaving baseball and worked after that as a drug and alcohol counselor in California. The Yankees hired him in the 1980s to speak about substance abuse to their minor leaguers.

In addition to his wife, Ellis had a stepdaughter, Jasmine Ellis, according to The Victorville Daily Press of California.

In recounting his career as a counselor, Ellis told The St. Petersburg Times in 1989 that “education is the only way.” As he put it, “If you can teach kids A-B-C, you can teach them about drugs and alcohol.”

December 21, 2008
Obituaries
Dock Ellis, All-Star Pitcher Who Overcame Longtime Addictions, Dies at 63
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN