The Sunshine Makers

Remain seated and come to order, court will begin in session.

In today's hearing, the government

is not dealing with the standard playground pusher.

These men represent a new form of organized crime,

totally different from our previous notions.

Tim Scully was not part of the psychedelic scene.

He was the psychedelic scene.

I wasn't interested in personally making money.

I thought that what we were doing

was really important, trying to change the consciousness

of the world in a positive way.

But we all know who is number one in this case.

It is Nicholas Sand.

I was considered some kind of mad man,

psychedelic commando.

Because I'd go anywhere, do anything for psychedelics.

We are talking now about people responsible for producing

millions of doses of hallucinogenic drugs.

And they are proud of it.

If we could turn on everyone in the world,

then maybe we'd have a new world of peace and love.

Call it whatever you want to call it.

They all ended up in one thing, the degradation of mankind.

The degradation of society.

We had the same desire to risk our freedom,

and be what we thought were American patriots.

Hey, partner.

Good to see you, man.

-Too long, eh? -Yeah.

I think we're supposed to go in.

I think so.

Nice Panama hat.

It's getting a little worn around the edges,

just like the rest of us.

-Great seeing you, man. -Yeah.

Hey, you look good.

You look great, man.

I didn't know Nick Sand when I first took acid.

Totally losing that hair.

It was early 1965,

and it wasn't that easy to find yet.

I found a fellow in San Francisco who had some.

We built a fire in the fire place,

and took it in the evening.

I was kind of a wild kid.

I grew up on the streets of New York.

My first experience with taking acid changed everything.

I had very good friends who were a couple.

We went up to their lake house retreat in Mahopac, New York.

As the sun went down, we took our capsules of LSD.

I was nervous when I first swallowed the acid.

I knew that the experience could be very terrifying.

Ordinary things could become very ominous and scary.

But I knew also that it could be transcendent.

And of course I was hoping for transcendence.

I sat in front of the fire,

with nude in the lotus position.

I just wanted to be naked.

I didn't want to be encumbered by clothing.

Everything that I looked at,

seemed to have a life of its own.

The mantle piece under the fireplace.

The fabric on my pants that I was wearing.

Yeah. This is it.

And then it went much further than that.

I disappeared.

I was floating in this immense black space.

I said, what am I doing here?

As you get very high on acid,

that's when you get to experience oneness.

You see the whole universe reflected

in all the other people that you look at.

If everybody took LSD,

the entire place would change overnight.

People would want to be more loving.

The flash that I had

was that if everybody could share this experience,

they'd be much less likely to be mean to each other.

To just trash the world by using up resources

and dumping pollutants everywhere.

We'd avoid destroying ourselves with the tools

we've been developing.

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."

Um. It was very interesting.

As we were coming down from the acid trip,

the world was completely new and fresh.

Smells of the flowers and lawns were really intense.

I thought, we could make this stuff.

We could make a lot of it and give it away.

We could turn on everyone, everyone who wanted to.

And maybe it would save the world.

With small groups of people, you felt connected.

And in fact you were connected.

Sometimes it was just by the intensity

of what you were experiencing.

And sometimes it felt spiritual.

It was just extraordinary, and made you think about the world

differently.

We were always friends and off and on we were lovers.

He was sure really wonderful to be with in many ways.

Hey!

Hey, Trooper.

Hola.

How are you?

-It's so good to see you. -Good to see you.

Today I feel great.

How are you doing?

I'm OK, especially after seeing you.

That's just because I remind you of your childhood.

He was full of excitement about whatever

his latest project was.

He was certainly like that about psychedelics.

He became a sort of--

he probably would say a psychedelic warrior.

I was on a crusade.

I wanted to turn on the world.

And that was how I first met Billy Hitchcock.

He was a chubby, not really smart guy.

He liked to take LSD.

And he said, you've got to come up to Millbrook.

Come on, I want you to meet Timothy Leary.

By teaching people how to use their head.

And in order to use your head,

you have to go out of your mind.

For the first time

I found a whole community of people interested

in psychedelic research.

Billy Hitchcock owned the whole property.

Dr. Leary leased one of the houses on the property.

We would have a population fluctuating between ten and 20 people,

working with hallucinogenic drugs,

doing research and experimentation.

All kinds of scientists, physicists,

ecologists from all over the world came.

And so it just became like psychedelic rat wiring.

And so I stayed there for a couple of years.

But I still wanted to know the secrets of how

to produce very fine, pure LSD.

I started making LSD back in late 1966.

Tim came over to my house

sometime in the fall of 1967.

He told me that he'd been manufacturing LSD.

Billy's a very charming guy.

He was a patron of the psychedelic movement,

and also a wealthy man.

That seemed like a pretty good recipe.

Sand expressed an interest in meeting.

I was introduced to Nick Sand.

He struck me as being ambitious, energetic.

I said, I would really love it

if you could teach me to make LSD.

Tim and I decided that the best way to discuss this

was to take an acid trip together.

He took a whacking dose of about 75 mics,

and I probably took more.

I told him that I wanted to turn on the world,

and that I thought making 200 kilos of acid would be about right.

And that ideally we should give it away.

You know, I thought, well that's fine.

You can give yours away for free.

I'm not giving mine away for free.

He's a very, very thrifty distended Scotsman.

His comfort level was a lot higher than mine.

He's way cheaper than I am.

And then finally I said, "OK, come to California."

We'll work together.

I was going to leave for California.

And I had a feeling I needed a woman to balance my energy out.

I used to up to Millbrook for a number of reasons.

I was kind of a horny guy, and psychedelic chicks,

that could function on my level were rare.

And there were a whole bunch of them up there.

And Jill was there.

I stayed up there working as Billie Hitchcock's

governess for his stepchildren.

I was, at that time had moved into one of the tower rooms.

Nick just appeared in the morning,

popped out of the closet.

And just came and got in bed.

And we turned onto LSD.

And she was very, very beautiful.

I like thin chicks.

I was in awe of his energy

and I really wanted to...

Yeah. I mean, Nicky likes to make love a lot, you know.

So that is important to him.

But it's almost utilitarian.

We're going to get in trouble here.

And I said,

you got to come to California with me because I'm going

to need someone to help me.

It wasn't so much that Nicky was charming.

It was that Nicky knew where he was going.

He had a strong sense of his mission.

Those were the things that made him attractive.

Nick thought that he could change...

consciousness of large numbers of people,

by making psychedelic drugs.