Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD

Owsley did not parachute in to the Human Be-In in January 1967, as was widely reported, but he did provide 300,000 hits of acid called “White Lightning” for the event. Five months later at Monterey Pop, Owsley passed out his “Monterey Purple” backstage to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and the Stones’ Brian Jones, not to mention much of the festival’s staff and crew. Owsley also sent a photographer back to England with a telephoto lens packed with tabs of purple acid on the condition that he share them with the Beatles. “The thing about Owsley,” Townshend said, “is that when he gave you something, he would take it too. Just to show you. He must have had the most extraordinary liver.” During this period, the Grateful Dead wrote “Alice D. Millionaire,” a play on words from a headline about Owsley in The San Francisco Chronicle that read, “LSD Millionaire Arrested.”