When terence says "Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don't know, but there is very little of it left." I think of the courage that it takes for any clandestine psychedelic chemist to do their work, I also think of how since Nick has passed, there's one less inspiration for others to have that courage themselves...In the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night, and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners, in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don't know; but there is very little of it left. Now, people feed at the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually pursuing truth, or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.
Nick sand told by Tim scully, Who better to tell the tale?
(Below is an excerpt, and while it's rather long, the whole piece can be located in the link below the excerpt)
Nick Sand
May 10, 1941 -- April 24, 2017
BY TIM SCULLY
During his college studies Nick read about psychedelics and met intellectuals who took them. He immediately tracked down some mescaline sulfate and had his first psychedelic experience in December of 1962. Eventually he took peyote several times and began smoking cannabis while listening to Indian music. Nick soon became convinced that his life's work would be making psychedelic drugs widely available.
In the summer of 1963, Nick Sand taught himself chemistry and set up his first tiny lab in the attic of his mother's house. He initially learned how to make dimethyltryptamine (DMT) because it was the simplest psychedelic to manufacture. At the time, the only known method for taking the drug was by injection, as DMT is inactive orally.
In the summer of 1963, Nick Sand taught himself chemistry and set up his first tiny lab in the attic of his mother's house.
Nick taught himself to be a psychedelic session guide and over time became widely respected for this skill. He turned many of his friends on to DMT, which resulted in a strong demand for more DMT; this led Nick to move his lab down to the basement of his mother's house, where he could scale it up so that he could produce more. In the spring of 1964, after a chemical fire in the basement required a response from the fire department, Marcia told him he had to move his lab out of the house. Nick rented space for his lab in the loft of a two-story commercial Brooklyn building upstairs from a small garment factory. He used the business name Bell Perfume Labs to conceal the purpose of his business and continued to scale up his manufacturing of psychedelics. Around this time Nick stumbled across the idea of consuming DMT by smoking its free-base instead of injecting its salt. This made DMT available to people unwilling to inject drugs.
Nick Sand met Dr. Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), when he gave a lecture at Brooklyn College in 1964. Nick invited Dr. Alpert to see his lab and turned him on to DMT. Richard Alpert in return invited Nick to visit Millbrook, a farm in upstate New York, owned by Tommy and Billy Hitchcock, where Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, and others had established an experimental psychedelic community. Nick took his first LSD trip at Millbrook and was introduced to George Gurdjieff's writing; these became lifelong interests of his.
In 1965, a carboy of sulfuric acid in Nick's lab spilled, dripped downstairs, and ruined fabric in the garment factory's shop. Nick hastily relocated Bell Perfume Labs to a building filled with dental labs not far from the Brooklyn City Hall. At the new location he continued to scale up his manufacturing of psychedelics; by this time he was using 72-liter flasks. Nick experimented with making LSD but wasn't able to figure out how to purify it. His DMT wasn't very pure at that stage either.
Nick's marriage to Melly ended in 1965 because she was unable to convince Nick to give up his obsession with making psychedelics. Nick remained immersed in the psychedelic community, eventually meeting people from California including LSD manufacturer Owsley Stanley.
In May of 1966, Richard Alpert returned from testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington and told Nick Sand that LSD would be outlawed. Nick soon decided that he would have to go underground to continue his work.
In the fall of 1966, Nick made a trip to California and briefly visited Owsley Stanley's Point Richmond Lab. Owsley suggested to him that he should move to California.
While visiting New York City, David Mantell met Nick. David was a former UC-Berkeley organic chemistry student who dropped out to rent a ranch near Cloverdale, California, and establish a small commune. David joined Nick at his Bell Perfume Lab in Brooklyn, where Nick worked out improvements in purifying DMT and diethyltryptamine, a related psychedelic.
In September of 1966, Timothy Leary formed the League for Spiritual Discovery as a religion that incorporated psychedelics drugs as sacraments. Sometime after that he wrote a letter appointing Nick Sand as alchemist for the League for Spiritual Discovery and instructing law enforcement officials not to impede his work.
In February of 1967, Nick Sand and David Mantell dismantled Bell Perfume Labs and packed it into a used meat-hauling truck. In March, the two began driving across the country so that they could set up the lab in California. They failed to stop at a weighing station in Dinosaur, Colorado; and when Nick refused to pay a fine to the arresting officer, both men were jailed. The truck was eventually searched, drugs and laboratory equipment were found, and they were charged with federal controlled substance offenses in early April of 1967. After many months of legal maneuvering, the charges against them were dropped because the search of their truck was eventually found to have been illegal.
Free on bail, Nick and David made their way to California where Owsley asked his lab partner Tim Scully to tell Nick how to make DOM2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (DOM), a still-legal psychedelic known as "STP" on the street, so that Nick could get back on his feet after his Colorado bust. Nick traveled back to Millbrook, where he seduced Jill Henry—Billy Hitchcock's beautiful governess—and convinced her to come to California with him. Initially, they lived on David Mantell's ranch near Cloverdale, California. Later that year, Nick and David set up a new chemical company in San Francisco called D&H Custom Research, using the aliases Nicholas Dashman and David Hoffman. Starting with bench-top chemistry they made STP. Owsley introduced Nick to Terry the Tramp of the Oakland Hells Angels as a possible distributor.
Nick and David soon were able to sell enough STP to finance scaling up; by the end of 1967, they were using a surplus 200-gallon stainless steel soup kettle as a reaction vessel for making larger batches of STP. They also made smaller batches of DMT and methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA), a psychedelic/empathogen similar to MDMA (Ecstasy).
On December 21, 1967, Owsley's tableting facility in Orinda, California, was raided by federal agents, ending his involvement in LSD manufacturing. In January of 1968, Nick Sand and Tim Scully searched together for European sources of lysergic acid or ergot alkaloids as raw material for making LSD. Over the next six months they jointly acquired over a kilogram of lysergic acid and a smaller quantity of ergotamine tartrate. But Nick Sand still needed some technical know-how to begin manufacturing LSD.
When Tim Scully's second Denver lab was raided by police in June of 1968, he was out of town and wasn't arrested. But he lost all of his lab equipment. Nick Sand eventually agreed to finance setting up a new lab for making LSD in return for Tim Scully teaching him the process Tim had learned from Owsley Stanley. As part of their agreement, Tim insisted that any LSD they made would be distributed through The Brotherhood of Eternal Love rather than the Hells Angels. Nick Sand also agreed to handle the tableting of their product.
Sand and Scully's collaboration led in November to the establishment of a lab in Windsor, California. Ultimately, this lab produced well over a kilo (more than four million 300 μg doses) of very pure LSD. Nick Sand tableted this material as small orange pills that eventually became known as Orange Sunshine.
https://erowid.org/culture/characters/s ... phy2.shtml