Albion Dreaming (38 page)

Furthermore, Solomon indicated, it was time for the LSD counter culture to “... help our wives and children. It seems morally unthinkable that famous pop artists and groups – who owe much to Alice – would not cough up. Everyone – from Bob Dylan to the Stones, Lennon, McCartney
et alia ad infinitum
should be asked for sizeable contributions to help pay for our immense legal bills and keep our families fed and housed.”

Solomon had hit the nail on the head. This was crunch time for the LSD counter culture. If the acidheads really believed their chosen drug was a sacrament, central to their culture of consciousness and lifestyle exploration, then now was the time to prove it. All the musicians Solomon cited had taken LSD and had written songs alluding to it. Some, like McCartney, had openly admitted to its use. LSD had been a major factor in their creative lives and their careers, to no small degree, were rooted in their and their audience’s love of the drug.

Solomon’s letter gives the sense that the Operation Julie defendants’ trial could be a show trial between the establishment and the counter culture. A psychedelic standoff the defendants would still lose but which would send shock waves round the world, drawing attention to the British government’s attempts to stifle an individual’s right to alter their consciousness at will. On the last page of the letter, Solomon drove his point home, listing a number of heavyweight cultural mavens that Harris might persuade to publicly support the Operation Julie defendants. These included Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, novelists Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, playwright Arthur Miller and Humphrey Osmond, the authority on psychedelics.

Home Grown
did run news pieces and well-written articles about the Operation Julie case. However, the magazine was
published too intermittently to be of meaningful value in supporting those charged and later convicted and sentenced.
International Times
also covered the unfolding events and kept people informed about what was happening. But other than LSD users being self righteous and indignant about the arrests, the counter culture kept quiet. There were no demonstrations at New Scotland Yard, no marches on the Home Office and no attempt to organise a defence fund. After all, there was still a large amount of Kemp and Munro’s acid on the streets, new manufacturers were coming on stream, the free festival season was starting and for the vast majority of the counter culture it was business as usual.

If the counter culture believed that the Julie conspirators could fund their costs from their reputedly vast profits they were mistaken. All money belonging to those arrested was immediately confiscated or frozen. The police removed even small amounts of cash found at the defendants’ homes; in some cases leaving wives and partners with no source of income. On one visit to David Solomon’s flat after his arrest, the police took £135 from his wife Pat without even issuing a receipt. This was money loaned by friends for her financial assistance and was not connected to the acid conspiracy.
²⁵

The
Daily Express
, among other media sources, managed to obtain copies of letters sent, prior to the trial, by Bott and Kemp to friends. Bott’s letter reveals a woman driven by ideology rather than profit, prepared to speak her mind about her beliefs. She wrote, “I am sustained by the conviction of the righteousness of what we are into ... all those we reached with our acid, lovingly produced, will feel united in support of truth and that vision we share of mankind living in harmony. The insanity of the world is becoming increasingly apparent even to the straight people ... I’m certain a lot of people will re-examine their values before this trip is over.”
²⁶

It must then, have come as a devastating blow to Kemp, Bott and Solomon when they realised that the millions of people who had taken their “lovingly produced” acid did not seem to care what happened to them.

Kemp’s reply to Bott included: “We hope through our efforts our children will inherit a better world than we did. The forces of repression are firmly in control but I really believe we have started something no one can stop. It is so frustrating knowing they will call us evil men, destroyers of personality, purveyors of poison etc, and yet there is no scientific evidence to support their arguments.”
²⁷
Kemp was correct, there was no scientific evidence to support those arguments but scientific evidence was not under discussion at the trial where the prosecution was only interested in whether or not Kemp and his co-defendants had been involved in the manufacture and distribution of LSD.

For the main defendants the Operation Julie trial started on 12 January 1978 at Bristol Crown Court. The presiding judge was Mr Justice Park (Sir Hugh Park), an elderly judge with little knowledge of drugs or drug culture. Somewhat bizarrely, and in total contradiction of legal process, Park’s twenty-year-old granddaughter sat on the bench with him for some of the trial. By the time of the trial, all the defendants, with the exception of Christine Bott, Brian Cuthbertson and Russell Spenceley, had pleaded guilty. For them the show was over and they could only await the judge’s sentence.

All the national daily papers covered the trial, each trying to outdo their rival with theory and speculation. Was some of the acid destined for the IRA, the Angry Brigade or other international terrorists? There was no proof but it made for a good story. How much money had been made by the defendents? No one really knew but that didn’t stop the press feverishly extrapolating millions of pounds from much smaller amounts. That the Julie gang made money seemed to horrify the press almost as much as their highly organised manufacturing and distribution system. The media was also obsessed with the fact that the majority of the Julie conspirators were university educated professionals.

And of course the media couldn’t resist pulling some hoary old myths out of retirement. “We’ll Blow A Million Minds” screamed the
Daily Mirror
on 9 March, going on to breathlessly report how the Julie plotters had planned to put vast quantities of LSD in the reservoirs serving Birmingham. There was no evidence to support
this accusation either but the “acid in the water supply” made good, public frightening, headlines.

Christine Bott stepped into the witness box, her defence pivoting on her belief that LSD was a useful drug, both to individuals and for the world. She told the prosecution that she was not interested in money, a claim borne out by the simple rural existence chosen by her and Kemp. Bott admitted she knew Kemp had been involved in the drug’s manufacture and though she claimed her personal experience of LSD was very positive, her “... philosophy as to its marketing and manufacture was a mixture of positive and negative”. Her view of the legalities of the manufacturing and distribution of LSD was simple: “If I thought there was a crime, I thought it had more to do with making money than LSD.”
²⁸

In response to further questioning, Bott told the court that LSD had been successfully used as a therapeutic treatment in psychiatry as well as to treat alcoholics. Though Bott agreed with the prosecution that LSD could be harmful to those who didn’t understand how to use it properly this did not diminish her faith in the drug: “I thought it was an agent which if used in the right controlled conditions could have a beneficial effect on the lives of the individuals who took it.”

It is probably this forthright attitude and ability to articulate her beliefs that cost Bott the sentence she was to receive. Gender politics in the 1970s were still very much confrontational. Park was a male judge from an alcohol driven culture. He must have been horrified to see the highly educated Bott defending the right to take psychedelic drugs while at the same time claiming disinterest in money. Bott was not arrested in possession of any LSD. Nor was there proof she had been directly involved in the manufacturing process, other than to support Kemp keeping him fed and comfortable. For her knowledge and support, she received a nine-year custodial sentence, only a year less than the other acid chemist, Andy Munro. As Munro commented, “Bott got nine years for making sandwiches. I got ten years for making acid.”

Contrast this disposal with that of Russell Spenceley’s wife Janine, who admitted to supplying large quantities of microdots, but at her husband’s request. She received a two year suspended
sentence and effectively walked from court a free woman. Had Bott put spin on her testimony, played the vulnerable female and claimed that Kemp had coerced her into a life of illicit LSD manufacture, the chances are she would have walked free from the court with a suspended sentence at most.

Though the principals in the Julie conspiracy knew they were not going to get away with anything less than a prison sentence they clung to the hope that a plea of mitigation might sway Justice Park’s decision. In support of their plea Dr. Martin Mitcheson, head of the Drug Dependency Clinic at University College Hospital, London took the stand. Mitcheson argued that although LSD was a Class A drug he ranked it below the opiates, amphetamines and barbiturates in terms of its effects and only slightly more dangerous than cannabis. He also cited a BBC study from 1973 that indicated a minimum 600,000 Britons had taken the drug at least once, demonstrating how popular LSD was among the young. Furthermore, Mitcheson said, not one death certificate had ever recorded LSD as the cause of death. In response to questions from the judge Mitcheson agreed that he believed LSD should be moved to a lower classification.
²⁹

It was to no avail. Mr. Justice Park refused to accept the doctor’s expert testimony. It was, he said, irrelevant. In law LSD was a Class A drug and to the judge it was immaterial whether it was less or more harmful than any other drug, legal or otherwise. Nor did he take note of Mitcheson’s claims about the destructive effects of the legal drug, alcohol, and the number of hospital admissions it caused. Park interrupted Mitcheson with: “Alcohol is not a Class A drug.”
³⁰

Though he was factually correct it seemed that the die had been cast and no argument however strong, however well supported by fact, was going to prevent LSD being officially denounced, its acolytes vilified and imprisoned. Justice Park, it seems, was interested only in the blind and unfeeling application of the law rather than interpreting the law based on the available scientific evidence.

During his time on remand, awaiting trial, Richard Kemp hand-wrote a long statement which he intended to read out in court
as the basis of his defence. He eventually decided against this but only after sending the screed to Patrick O’Brien, a journalist on the
Cambrian Times
, Kemp’s local Welsh newspaper. The
Cambrian Times
published an article based on Kemp’s thoughts entitled, somewhat wittily, “Microdoctrine”. In it, Kemp makes clear his own and the growing LSD culture’s link between LSD, mindfullness and ecology. Although he kept the bulk of his beliefs out of court, Microdoctrine makes it clear that Kemp made LSD to change consciousness and to save the world from ecological disaster.

Richard Kemp, the chemist of genius from Tregaron who was jailed for 13 years last week for his involvement in a conspiracy to manufacture and distribute the drug LSD, believed society would have to change rapidly if ecological disaster and social chaos were to be avoided
.

In common with some expert scientific opinion he was convinced that, if Earth’s raw materials were to be conserved and pollution reduced to a tolerable level, there would have to be a revolution in people’s attitudes
.

And he believed LSD could spark changes in outlook which would put the world on the road to survival. In an 8,000 word-statement which he had planned to deliver from the dock before being sentenced, Kemp declares: “I do have deeply held convictions as to the positive aspects of the use of LSD. It was these that provided the motivation for engaging in the activities for which I am before your Lordship and NOT the desire to make money by means of a criminal activity
.”

He prepared the handwritten document in order that his views would emerge clearly and because the “crazy media exaggerations” of much media reporting “really got me down no end”. But his lawyers persuaded him not to deliver the statement in case it led the judge to pass a heavier sentence. Kemp says, “I am particularly anxious to counter the impression that I am an evil man so bound
up in greed that I was uncaring or unmindful of the possible harmful effects resulting from what I did. I am not trying to ignore or excuse the fact I have broken the law. I wish only to put the crime in the perspective in which I see it
.”

On ecology and conservation Kemp believes it is obvious we are living on the world’s capital rather than its income. He says that to achieve a level of consumption that is reasonable, taking into account the Earth’s limited and dwindling resources, two things will be necessary
.

“
People will have to accept a lower standard of living by becoming content with having things which are necessary for survival, and luxuries will have to be kept to a minimum. Secondly, those goods which are supplied will have to be built to have the longest possible lifespan, at the end of which they must be capable of being recycled
.”

Kemp adds in the document he describes as “My LSD Philosophy”: “Changes in policy by manufacturers will come about only if sufficient pressure for change is generated by the public. In as far as LSD can catalyse such a change in members of the public, it can contribute to this end.” But he says that only if people find greater contentment within themselves and become free of trivial and outdated social pressures – he uses as an example advertising pressures to buy luxuries because these, it is implied, will bring social status – will they be able to accept the necessity of a life which revolves less around material things
.