Originally all LSD was made by Sandoz Pharmaceutical company, which had developed the chemical and hoped to market it commercially. It came in glass ampules filled with blue liquid, or small tablets in bottles with pharmaceutical labels specifying strength.
By 1965, use had increased sharply. Most acid at this time came in sugar cubes dropped with liquid Sandoz or some type of underground LSD. What percentage of the material was Sandoz is left to future determination. Augustus Stanley Owsley III, unable to obtain any pharmaceutical LSD, began to manufacture his own - first in Los Angeles in '65, then in nearby Point Richmond in '66.
Owsley's fellow alchemist, Tim Scully, admitted to me that the 1965 batch was impure, but claims that Owsley and he perfected a purification process in 1966. Many who used both Sandoz and Owsley - the latter came in tablets of purple (
Purple Haze) and
White Lighting of 270 micrograms - say that Owsley acid was less mystical and had more stimulant side reactions than the Sandoz product.
Owsley acid was the first large-scale commercialization of LSD. There were other smaller LSD laboratories before Owsley, and there were scores of laboratories that put out LSD at the same time that Owsley did. Some were making LSD of a purer form; the majority made it much worse.
After Owsley was arrested in 1967 at his tabbing facility at Orinda, California, his protege Scully set up a laboratory with Nicholas Sand, another alchemist long involved in the psychedelic scene. They manufactured a quantity of ALD-52 - a cousin to LSD, which they called Sunshine - in large crumbly orange tablets of 270 micrograms or so. [Erowid Note: Though it was claimed at the time that they were producing ALD-52, we now believe that they were, in fact, producing LSD.]
In the spring of 1969, Ron Stark, then a chemist with a European LSD factory and now a fugitive, allegedly began supplying underground acid to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Since the Brotherhood was also, by this time, distributing
ALD-52, and since both drugs were tabbed into identical pills (except for a few early blue tablets of ALD-52), many people didn't realize that there was more than one kind of Sunshine. Many counterfeit versions soon appeared on the market, most of which were impure, according to Scully.
Sand and Scully ceased manufacturing, but Stark went on to produce over 10 kilograms (over 35 million doses in crystal form) of what became the famous
Orange Sunshine - the last of which actually appeared in large red and green tablets called "Christmas Acid."
With the Sunshine boom came increased reports of side effects. In addition to stimulant reactions and symptoms akin to those of strychnine poisoning being reported, there seemed to be something missing in the spiritual dimensions of this new underground acid. Michael Hollinshead, who gave Leary his first taste of acid in 1960, later wrote in The Man Who Turned on the World:
There was now (1968) little good acid around, and what there was - the so-called "street acid" - came mainly from California. There was something wrong with the synthesis; it was not pure. And you were never sure what it was exactly that you were taking, so I only dropped it on those rare occasions when someone gave me "Sandoz" or "crystal" acid.
In 1969, LSD began to appear in
microdots, and in 1971, on gelatin sheets of various shapes - dubbed "
windowpane." The strength of individual doses swiftly decreased, and so did the purity of the average street dose.
An LSD experience is a complex interaction of five influential factors: set, setting, guide (fellow tripper), purity, and dosage level.
Set refers to the psychological makeup of the LSD tripper, both long term (genetic inheritance and childhood conditioning) and short term (expectations about the LSD experience and how the person feels that morning).
Setting refers to the environment of the trip - indoors or outdoors, "informal suburban house," "formal hospital room," or "windy beach at sunrise."
Set, setting and guide form the fabric of the trip. But before these influences can come into play, alteration in consciousness must occur. Thus, the nature of the biochemical used, its purity and its dosage level are most central in determining the course the session will take.
The manufacturing of the necessary precursors is a long process, and a great many new occasions for impurities can arise. Which contaminants do appear depends on whether the starting material was ergot, ergotamine tartate or
morning glory seeds.
Full article see :
Erowid LSD Vault : Article #1