Orange Sunshine

Prohibition did not end supply, it privatised it. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Laguna Beach surfers who considered distribution a religious duty, moved tens of millions of doses of Orange Sunshine, made by Nick Sand and Tim Scully. Blotter art appeared as packaging and became the only folk-art form invented to carry a drug. In 2000 the DEA arrested William Leonard Pickard in a converted Kansas missile silo and called it the largest LSD seizure in history.

Part of LSD

15 moments in this segment.

1. 1975 - LSD blotter art (1975). The illustrated paper tabs that carried doses of acid, and became an underground art form (1975). This photograph dates from 1982.
2. 2000 - Getting high: the whole arc. A long-form history of the drug from laboratory to street.
3. 2009 - Inside a lab. What clandestine LSD production actually looks like, a chemistry that requires real skill and almost no space.
4. 2014 - A pictorial history of blotter. Blotter art is the only folk-art form invented purely as drug packaging: perforated sheets printed with images so a dose became a collectable.
5. 2016 - Orange Sunshine. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Laguna Beach surfers who became the largest LSD distribution network in the world, believing they were performing a religious duty.
6. 2016 - When Laguna Beach was the LSD capital. How a small California beach town became the centre of a global supply chain, and what the federal response did to it.
7. 2016 - The blotter museum the DEA has not raided. Mark McCloud's San Francisco collection of thousands of sheets of blotter art, legally fraught, since much of it is or was active.
8. 2017 - Nick Sand. Sand in his own words. He was the first person to synthesise DMT in quantity and spent decades underground and in prison.
9. 2017 - Tim Scully. Scully, who built the equipment as much as the chemistry, and who was later given clemency.
10. 2017-07-25 - The Sunshine Makers. Nick Sand and Tim Scully, the chemists behind Orange Sunshine, who between them made tens of millions of doses and went to prison for it.
11. 2020 - The silo, according to Pickard. His own account of the bust, and of what the DEA's numbers did and did not mean.
12. 2022 - Two hundred and fifty million doses. The scale the underground reached, a production run larger than most pharmaceutical products, run out of houses.
13. 2024 - Tracking the supply. The modern chain, which is smaller, more distributed and much harder to police than the Brotherhood ever was.
14. 2024 - Psychedelics and Empathy | Rob Malenka | Wu Tsai Neurosciences. Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? Recently, there's been growing excitement in the scientific community about revisiting the potential medical benefits of psychedelic drugs that have been off limits for decades. Scientists are discovering or rediscovering applications of psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and other compounds for treating people with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
15. 2025 - Pickard. William Leonard Pickard, whose 2000 arrest in a converted Kansas missile silo was described by the DEA as the largest LSD seizure in history. He served twenty years.