Snippets of the Lives of the Incredibly Awesome: The Druggist to The Stars

Owsley Stanley, who died this past March, produced what was said to be the finest LSD of the psychedelic ’60s, and was among the first to mass-produce the drug. Mr. Stanley is believed to have doled out at least a million doses of LSD in his heyday, possibly five million, to clients that included the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Ken Kesey. Here are some of his other accomplishments:

• Mr. Stanely appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on LSD under the index term “Augustus Owsley Stanley III (American chemist).” The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.”

• The novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters used his wares during the Acid Tests, later recorded in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

• The Grateful Dead’s former financial backer, LCD supplier, and sound engineer, Mr. Stanley was immortalized in the song “Alice D. Millionaire.”

• Along with artist Bob Thomas, he designed The Grateful Dead’s skull-and-lightning-bolt logo.

For more on Mr. Stanley (at one point, he was a professional ballet dancer) and other amazing lives, buy The Obits: The New York Times Annual 2012, a new annual that collects the best of The New York Times obituaries from the previous year. And check back next week, for another installment of Snippets of the Lives of the Incredibly Awesome. Until then, enjoy The Dead song inspired by the “Artisan of Acid” himself “Alice D. Millionaire”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQybXHI2W-A[/youtube]