Purple Haze . . .

THE CREATOR OF "OWSLEY PURPLE", Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III), has died, age 76. According to David Pescovitz at boingboing,

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, AKA the "Bear," died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia today. He was 76. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley homebrewed more than one million doses of LSD in the San Francisco Bay Area fueling a revolution in consciousness, music, art, and the counterculture. The recipe came from a copy of the Journal of Organic Chemistry he found in the UC Berkeley library. The Grateful Dead's first sound engineer, Stanley also pioneered several technologies for live sound.

According to Wikipedia, Owsley traveled with funny people:

In September 1965, Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; by this point Sandoz LSD was hard to come by and "Owsley Acid" had become the new standard. He was featured (most prominently his freak-out at the Muir Beach Acid Test in November 1965) in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters by Tom Wolfe. Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12, 1966 with his new apprentice Tim Scully and provided the LSD.

Using LSD to catch fish

DOSE NATION has a report that an article from a 1964 edition of Sports Illustrated describes one scientist's exploration into the use of LSD to catch fish. Really. SI's page confirms this:

March 30, 1964
A Dreamy New Era For Fish
Experiments with LSD-25 and other hallucinogenic drugs indicate it may be possible to spook trash fish up—and out—of angling waters.
• • •
But if a chemical could cause all the fish to surface for several hours without killing them, then the undesirable fish could be picked out and the game fish left to prosper. Again, a surfacing chemical would enable biologists to take a highly accurate fish census of a body of water without harming a fin. A low-flying plane could photograph a treated body of water, and biologists, interpreting the pictures, could get a count of species and populations.

Staring at Goats Dep't.

WIRED'S DANGER ROOM covers all sorts of stuff that is of interest to those of us concerned about security. David Hambling has a very interesting report titled "Inside the Army’s Far-Out Acid Tests" that almost defies belief, if you aren't already acquainted with programs like MK Ultra. 

The CIA sure jumped in with both feet: apparently, they acquired some forty pounds of LSD — a couple of hundred million doses.

Who knows where the massive supply went? Certainly the CIA had something of an obsession with LSD, at one point believing it was an effective truth drug. In the infamous Operation Midnight Climax, unwitting clients at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted. They even killed an elephant with LSD. Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked.

Anyway, worth the read, with all sorts of entertaining links.  Wiki's LSD entry has interesting background, too.

LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide), commonly called "acid," is the most powerful known hallucinogen - a drug that radically changes a person's mental state by distorting the perception of reality to the point where, at high doses, hallucinations occur. Even in very minute doses 0.05g LSD can significantly alter one's perceptions to the point of hallucination. Although it is derived from a fungus that grows on rye and other grains, LSD is semi-synthetic and has to be chemically manufactured in illicit laboratories.

Pure LSD is a white, odorless crystalline powder that dissolves in water. Because an effective dose of the pure drug is almost invisible, it is mixed with other substances, such as sugar, and packaged in capsules, tablets, or solutions, or spotted on to gelatin sheets or most commonly on pieces of blotting paper.

LSD is ingested orally. A microdot tablet or square of the perforated LSD paper is placed in the user's mouth, chewed or swallowed. Paper squares are most common because their small size makes them easy to conceal and ingest. Also, because LSD is not injected or smoked, paraphernalia are not required.

Formal Chemical Name (IUPAC)
(6aR,9R)-N,N-diethyl-7-methyl-4,6,6a,7,8,9-hexahydroindolo[4,3-fg]quinoline-9-carboxamide