Lanny-yap: R.I.P. | Owlsley "Bear" Stanley

13 March 2011

R.I.P. | Owlsley "Bear" Stanley

Owlsley Stanley with Jerry Garcia

Owsley “Bear” Stanley, an iconic iconoclast and pioneering LSD chef who produced millions of doses in his Bay Area labs (after allegedly finding the recipe in a chemistry journal at UC Berkeley), passed away today in Australia following a car crash near his home in Queensland. He was 76.

From his involvement with the Grateful Dead (a former manager and sound man, Bear co-designed the band’s Lightning Bolt Skull logo), through his friendship with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (as detailed in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), to his product’s inspirational effects on contemporary legends (Jimi Hendrix named “Purple Haze” after a potent batch of so-called Owsley Acid), Bear undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the nascent psychedelic scene.

“I was punished for political reasons,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, referring to a 1970 drug bust that sent him to prison for two years. “Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”

He is survived by his wife Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

TDW

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Interests

Absurdity, ambiguity, anomalies, bacon, behavior, bonobos, brain science, consciousness, conversation, design, evolution, expressive arts, extremes, food, frontiers, gadgets, hermetics, humor, ingenuity, irony, maps, martinis, mental health, monkeys, mysteries, mysticism, nonsense, oddness, paradoxes, phenomenology, rocks, semantics, sf, social justice, spirituality, technology, tilt-shift and time-lapse, the visual presentation of data, anthropo-, bio-, eco-, etho-, ethno-, psycho- and sociology

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13 March 2011

R.I.P. | Owlsley "Bear" Stanley

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