The Microdot Gang

The Rise and Fall of the LSD Network That Turned On the World

James Wyllie

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781803990934
• Print ISBN:
  9780750996006
• Subtopic: British History

The biggest drug bust in British history occurred in the early hours of 25 March 1977: 800 officers made 120 arrests and seized a staggering 6,000,000 tabs of LSD.

The raids focused on two acid manufacturing centres: one hidden in an isolated farmhouse in deepest Wales, the other in a suburban house on a leafy residential street in south-west London. Between them they supplied acid to most of the UK, Europe, America and beyond. Tabs bearing their logo were recovered as far away as Australia.

James Wyllie tells the extraordinary story of how a middle-aged American academic, two idealistic British students, a public school cad and an American hustler formed the Microdot Gang and created an acid production line designed to turn on the world. It is the story of Operation Julie – a police operation unprecedented in scale, sophistication and complexity, the brainchild of an old-school detective who led an investigation that would eventually involve the security services, the FBI, the DEA, the Canadian authorities and the Swiss police.

Ranging over a decade and across several continents, The Microdot Gang is also a tale of how a cultural movement became a criminal enterprise, inspiring the war on drugs and launching a revolution that left an enduring and complex legacy.

Prologue

Grass

Gerald Thomas had every reason to be nervous as he strolled through the terminal at Montreal airport on 3 June 1973. He was carrying 15 pounds of hashish in his luggage. He was a self-employed dope entrepreneur, a travelling salesman with a reputation for taking risks, or being sloppy, depending on your point of view. No major drug dealer or international player of any consequence would be caught dead in an airport transporting anything more suspicious than a change of clothes, toothbrush and shaving kit.

For the big-time smuggler, air travel was a necessary evil and airports a potential hazard. You were vulnerable entering and leaving countries, assuming you were always of interest to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), the FBI, Interpol and every other law-enforcement agency engaged in the global war on drugs, and they were waiting for you every time you got off a plane. You never knew when your passport was going to be flagged or when you’d be invited into a little room for a thorough examination. If you had to move product by air you did it by cargo, not in your hand luggage; if you could do it by boat, even better.

But Gerald Thomas was not a major trafficker. And he wasn’t nervous. Sure, there was a certain amount of inevitable anxiety, but more satisfying was the feeling of sticking it to the Man, each time striking a blow against the system as he passed by undetected with his beloved marijuana. Risking a long prison sentence so he could get paid and the people get high. He was the rebel bandit, hero of the oppressed, defying tyranny wherever he went. He was Zorro. On one occasion he shipped a consignment of weed across the Atlantic concealed in a dead elephant.

When he first arrived at Montreal airport, Thomas stashed the dope in a locker and took a short flight to Boston to check out its customs and security arrangements in preparation for returning there with the marijuana. Satisfied with what he saw he hopped back to Montreal and retrieved the stuff, confident that he’d complete the transfer successfully. That morning his luck ran out. As it happens they weren’t waiting for him; it was just some canny customs official with a hunch. Though Thomas’ appearance was smart and conventional – not John Lennon glasses, faded flares and a flower in his hair – something wasn’t right. Why the quick trip to Boston and back? If that was his destination, why transit through Montreal? The answer was in his suitcase.

Thomas was not a hardened criminal. He’d not grown up on any mean streets or graduated from juvenile detention centres or committed any crime other than the import and export of controlled substances, which he did more out of faith than necessity. For over a decade he’d been fully committed to an alternative lifestyle that involved the consumption of large quantities of cannabis and LSD. Given his hostility to work – the soul destroyer – to wage labour and the 9–5 hell, to paying taxes to support the hated system or being part of that system in any shape or form, it was a logical step to become a dealer. You got an income while remaining unemployed. You guaranteed your own supply. Your colleagues were usually friends or fellow believers, every customer a potential recruit to the cause. It was an open market and demand was consistently growing. It was the perfect ‘job’. Even though penalties were harsh and the law brutal in its application, this added to the attraction; not only did it bring drama, it meant you remained an outlaw and a revolutionary. For Thomas, and many like him, part of this image was wish-fulfilment, glamorising the inconvenient reality that they really were out to get you. But part of it was also a lingering conviction that they were on the right side of history.

Unfortunately for Thomas – when faced with the full might of the forces of law and order – he was nothing more than an amateur enthusiast who’d hit on the happy circumstance of making money out of his hobby. He’d been caught with a substantial amount of hashish. There were no mitigating circumstances. He was facing anything between seven and twenty-five years locked up with real criminals in a real prison, with murderers, rapists, child molesters and organised gangs. He was a college-educated hippy with three science degrees approaching middle age. What did he know about hard time?

One possible way out was to go underground. Become a fugitive. There were established routes and contacts. False IDs and passports could be provided. However, Thomas didn’t think that way. Released on bail, he stayed put and asked his friends in the UK to send him some money and clothes; he was unprepared for a Canadian winter. Nothing happened. Then he tried to get them to clear valuable drug-making equipment out of his London-based warehouse. Instead of preserving it, like he asked, they destroyed it. Infuriated, Thomas demanded compensation, but was bluntly refused. Disappointed and feeling betrayed, Thomas contemplated another option. Turn informer. He had a wealth of knowledge, in particular the inside track on the Microdot Gang, a massive LSD network based in the UK that produced millions of tabs a year – each acid trip potentially powerful enough to change a person overnight and make them question the very nature of reality. Thomas knew the key figures well and the intimate details of their operation. Surely this would be of interest to the authorities?

April 1974, with the tape machine rolling and two Scotland Yard officers present, Thomas began at the beginning. Late summer 1969: David Solomon, Ronald Stark and Richard Kemp met for the first time at Solomon’s cottage nestled in bucolic Grantchester Meadows to discuss how their LSD was going to change the world …

1

Jazz Head

Aged 43, David Solomon was the oldest member of the Microdot Gang and represented the vanguard of LSD culture, pioneers whose youth was played out against the backdrop of world war, nuclear bombs, anti-communist witch-hunts and rapacious consumerism. People like Solomon were part of a slow-burning protest against the mainstream, an informal underground. When their experiments went spectacularly over-ground during the 1960s, they faced a clear choice. Embrace the new generation or step back. Some did, appalled by the flower children’s apparent naivety and reckless hedonism. Others claimed the mantle of leadership – Solomon included. Ironically, a movement associated primarily with youth followed gurus and prophets who were often middle-aged or older.

David Solomon was born in California in 1925. During the war he was called up but spared combat duties after his two brothers were killed on a bombing run over Germany. Instead he did clerical work for the OSS – the forerunner of the CIA – before being discharged in 1946. Solomon headed for New York, enrolled at NYU to study English literature, and dived into the city’s pulsing jazz scene where he discovered a new form of music: be-bop. A dazzlingly fast, rhythmically complex, harmonically adventurous and blues orientated style that sent convulsions through the jazz world and eventually the wider one, be-bop’s main practitioners adopted a provocative anti-establishment stance with a distinctive style and their own hipster language.

Solomon was an instant convert and quickly befriended one of be-bop’s leading lights, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. At the same time, Solomon was introduced to cannabis, which had been circulating in the jazz community since the 1920s and spawned a sub-genre of tunes known as ‘reefer music’; Dizzy Gillespie observed that ‘jazz musicians, the old ones and the young ones, almost all smoked pot’. On graduation, Solomon settled with his wife Pat in Greenwich Village – ground zero of the post-war counter-culture – and began working as a critic for the jazz magazine Metronome, which championed be-bop. Working for Metronome gained Solomon kudos, but not much income. By the early 1950s, he had two daughters to support. Thankfully, his credentials were good enough to land him a job as an editor at Esquire magazine.

Founded in 1933, Esquire mixed high-brow fiction and topical discussion with life-style features, sports profiles, motor cars and drawings of naked ladies. Esquire also had a strong tradition of jazz coverage – running a Jazz Forum and a yearly Jazz Awards – and welcomed be-bop. Solomon slotted in nicely, working on articles like ‘Dizzy’s Jazz’ (June 1957), and ‘The Golden Age of Jazz’ (January 1959). As the decade progressed, Esquire picked up on messages from the underground transmitted by creatures known as the Beats who attempted to capture the intensity, freedom and spontaneity of be-bop; shared a fondness for drugs and Paris; and lived hand to mouth from city to city, rubbing shoulders with the marginalised and dispossessed. Head tribesmen were the poet Allan Ginsberg and fellow writers William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Though both Ginsberg and Burroughs transcended the Beat label, Kerouac was shackled to it due to his staggeringly successful set text On the Road (1955). Solomon’s home turf of Greenwich Village was one of the nexus points of the Beat scene, showcased in the November 1954 issue of Esquire in ‘The Lives and Loves of Greenwich Village’. Other Beat hotspots were given similar treatment; in the May 1958 edition it was ‘San Francisco: The Magnet City’.

As well as being deeply embedded in the same cultural milieu as the Beats, Solomon was prepared to take similar risks to achieve a heightened state of awareness. During his tenure at Esquire, Solomon embarked on his psychedelic initiation when he ingested 400 milligrams of mescaline, a by-product of two strains of cactus – the San Pedro, a mountain plant from Peru, and peyote, a desert variety found in Mexico – that had been central to sacred rites and rituals for thousands of years before Spanish conquerors arrived in the sixteenth century along with Christianity. Determined to crush any indigenous religions, the emissaries of the Church demonised mescaline. According to them, the ‘devilish root’ opened a gateway for Satan to enter and possess his victims. During the nineteenth century, peyote was adopted by Native American tribes after they were shunted onto reservations, in the hope that it would give them access to the spirit world. Their use of mescaline was studied by anthropologists, which led to it gaining the attention of scientists, psychologists, philosophers and artists and writers, whose experiments with mescaline in the first half of the twentieth century laid the groundwork and created the terms of reference for the first generation of LSD consumers. For Solomon, his encounter with mescaline was like nothing he’d ever experienced before: ‘I had never seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal unity and involvement with the material world.’

Solomon’s first psychedelic adventure occurred because of his involvement with the English writer and intellectual Aldous Huxley, best known for his sci-fi masterpiece Brave New World (1932). During 1953, Solomon contacted Huxley about a newspaper article he’d written about drugs: Solomon suggested he might like to do a longer version for Esquire. Huxley agreed in principle, but publication was delayed and then abandoned when the material appeared as The Doors of Perception (1954), perhaps the most significant single work on hallucinogens.

Marked by the horrors of the First World War, alienated by industrial society and materialism, fearful of the rise of Communism and Fascism, Aldous Huxley rejected modern society and dedicated himself to finding ways to overcome the human malaise and reconnect to spiritual values. Having settled in California, Huxley was contacted by a psychiatrist working in a state mental hospital in Canada who was researching the effect of mescaline on schizophrenics. He began a correspondence with Huxley. Spring 1953, Huxley offered himself as a test subject; ‘thus it came about that one bright May’ he ‘swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results’. After about half an hour some flowers caught Huxley’s eye and he saw not merely a set of well-arranged blooms but the essence of life itself: his trip had begun. Time and space became dislocated and displaced. Everything around him, including the folds in his trousers, revealed themselves in microscopic depth and detail.

LSD followed on 23 December 1955 and, a year later, Huxley coined the term ‘psychedelic’. Meanwhile, his writings on the subject, though mauled by the critics, quickly gained traction and hit a nerve with legions of potential followers, Solomon included: ‘my own excursions … were largely the result of a deep curiosity engendered by reading such books as The Doors of Perception’. Suitably inspired, Solomon moved onto psilocybin – a synthetic derivative of magic mushrooms that first emerged from a Swiss lab in 1958 – and LSD two years later. By then, Huxley was increasingly preoccupied with how best to harness LSD’s potential for the good of mankind. His solution was essentially elitist; LSD would benefit the more enlightened members of society, but the masses would be overwhelmed and disorientated by it. Solomon shared Huxley’s concerns, but came to less conservative conclusions. Solomon wanted to spread the word and help LSD gain wider acceptance. So he decided to compile an anthology of writing about acid.

LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964) was a varied collection that mixed scholarly articles on the subject that Solomon selected from a range of scientific journals with more mainstream offerings, including material he’d commissioned and edited for his new employers at Playboy – which Solomon joined in the early 1960s after leaving Esquire. Hugh Hefner had launched Playboy in 1953 with capital from his mom as a raunchier version of Esquire, with real nude ladies rather than drawn ones. Within a few years, it was outselling its rival and shifting millions of copies. Though Hefner essentially reproduced Esquire’s basic formula – and its extensive jazz coverage – Playboy was more explicitly attached to the counter-culture. As a result, Solomon was able to push his agenda and he recycled three articles from the magazine in his LSD book, each one a personal account of a psychedelic experience.

To guarantee the anthology’s success, however, Solomon needed to acquire some new material by ‘celebrity’ authors. Solomon contacted Alan Watts – a well-known expert on Buddhism who had married LSD to Zen philosophy. In his piece for Solomon, Watts asked whether ‘the risks involved in using these chemicals was worthwhile’: his answer was ‘yes’ on the basis that LSD could help us throw off our ‘insular identity’ and become ‘thoroughly at home in our own world … swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as dolphins’.

More significant was a contribution by William Burroughs, one of the few ’60s icons to be equally revered by the ’70s punks and ’80s ravers: Solomon called him a ‘reformed junky turned literary genius’. A pathologically secretive man who felt like an alien on an undercover mission to Earth, Burroughs had been thrust into the limelight because of his experimental novel The Naked Lunch (1959), which had inspired rave reviews and moral outrage. Burroughs welcomed Solomon’s request as he’d gone out on a limb to showcase the author’s work in Metronome. Solomon was now overall editor at the jazz magazine and was trying to steer it in a more avant-garde direction; one of his staff recalled that ‘under Solomon’s leadership we were publishing a magazine that featured something truly revolutionary … the young black jazz performers who were transforming music in America’. Keen to add literary fuel to the fire, Solomon got Burroughs’ permission to run extracts from the author’s latest novel, The Soft Machine – where characters, plotlines and locations were chopped up and spliced together in fractured sentences and repetitive patterns – alongside an essay about ninth-century hashish-eating Arabic assassins: not exactly what the average Metronome reader was expecting to find next to reviews of the latest Miles Davis album.

Burroughs was grateful for the commission – and the $50 that came with it – and wrote to Solomon thanking him for ‘the excellent job you did with the two pieces I sent you’. When he next passed through New York, Burroughs dropped by the Metronome offices to see Solomon, but was informed that he no longer worked there. After over fifteen years as a contributor and barely a year into his editorship, Solomon had been ‘let go’. His determination to push the boundaries (he encouraged his reporters to take acid and then write about it) had backfired. At least Solomon had the LSD book to fall back on, and Burroughs duly submitted Points of Distinction between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs for inclusion in the anthology. As a long-term heroin addict and authority on drugs of all kinds, Burroughs approached the subject with scientific rigour; his forensic analysis of the differences between stimulants – LSD, cannabis, amphetamines and cocaine – and depressants – alcohol and heroin – ended with the claim that ‘hallucinogens provide a key to the creative process’.

Another coup for Solomon was securing an appearance by Aldous Huxley. Hallucinogens: A Philosopher’s Visionary Prediction was the last thing Huxley wrote before his death and was trailed in the November 1963 issue of Playboy. Huxley warned that the world was suffering a life-or-death crisis caused by ‘explosive population increase’ and ‘head long technological advance and militant nationalism’. Action was needed to transform humanity through education, meditation and ‘the use of harmless psychedelics’.

To complete the line-up, Solomon roped in Dr Timothy Leary, the poster boy of acid who exhorted the youth to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’. Vain and narcissistic, Leary had the ability to relay sophisticated and complex ideas in readable and memorable prose, which he combined with an instinctive understanding of how to manipulate the media to propel himself into the limelight. When Solomon first entered Leary’s orbit in 1961, the self-appointed ‘high-priest’ of LSD hadn’t even tried acid yet, despite studying the effects of mescaline and psilocybin as part of a research programme that he’d started at Harvard after his introduction to magic mushrooms, during which he claimed to have learnt ‘more in the six or seven hours of that experience than in all my years as a psychologist’. When Leary finally took LSD – not long after he’d met Solomon – he called it ‘the most shattering experience of my life’.

Solomon and Leary shared a mutual acquaintance in the jazz world, the trumpeter and big band leader Maynard Ferguson, a precocious talent who had just finished a lucrative gig writing and performing the soundtrack for a primetime TV drama about racing drivers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Part One: Daydream Believers
• Part Two The Microdot Gang
• Part Three: Business As Unusual
• Part Four: Come-Down
• Epilogue: If You Go Down to the Woods Today …
• Sources
• Bibliography