1. Dream Away

BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts The Cambrian Mountains near Tragaron are one of the most sparsely populated areas in the country. The remote mountain range stretches from the foothills of Snowdonia to the tip of the Brecon Beacons. This is a wild mountain range. You can go hours walking the landscape and not see another human. If you want to be at one with nature, what better way than to be the only one with nature? But buried underneath these hills, somewhere, is what some people believe to be a gateway to another dimension. A portal to another astral plane, a key to spiritual enlightenment. Every year people come to this place in the hope of finding it. What they're looking for is a suitcase, a suitcase of mythic status. A suitcase as famous in Wales as Arthur's sword, or Tom Jones's virility. What gives this suitcase its legendary status? It might have something to do with the 20 million microdots of the strongest acid ever made, supposedly stashed within it. This is the story of the Microdot Gang, a ragtag group of chemists, dealers, businessmen and hippie dreamers. This is the story of an attempt to start a revolution of the mind from a Welsh farmhouse. This is a true story, in telling it we'll talk to some of the real people involved. It's like entering a multi-dimensional world. This huge dragon's head or something came out of the bowl. I just basically lost contact with reality. Where necessary we'll use actors. I believe in the eternal love thing. But the words they speak are the words of the real people. This is Acid Dreams, the great LSD plot. This is Richard Kemp, the genius chemist at the heart of our story. Today nobody knows where Richard is. He hasn't been seen or heard for 45 years. But right now, in our story, he's making LSD in a university laboratory in Liverpool. Synthesizing LSD is an extremely dangerous process. The ingredients are unstable and the process is explosive. Avoiding contamination is impossible, so chemists making LSD often hallucinate continuously for up to 48 hours while trying to execute complicated chemistry with flammable ingredients. LSD needs to be handled very, very, very carefully. Richard has just dropped a flask of liquid LSD. Trying to clean up the acid, disaster strikes. He cuts his hand on the shattered glass. In this moment, huge amounts of liquid acid pour directly into Richard's bloodstream. In a few seconds, he will have one of the biggest trips ever experienced by a human being. A trip that will change the world. One time, two times, two times, two times, three times, two times, two times, four times, five times. [Screaming] Hold on, let's rewind a little. [Music] Because at its heart, this story is a love story. A love story between two outlaws. Like Bonnie and Clyde, but with fewer guns and more incense. Let's meet the girl. I went one Saturday evening during my fifth year at medical school to a party at one of those large Victorian houses on the edge of Sefton Park. This is Christine Bott. Well, it's the voice of an actor reading from the memoirs of Christine Bott. Christine passed away in 2007. A very crush of people, red lights, beer spilled on the bare wooden floor, a smell of sweet smoke and patchouli oil. People dancing and shrieking over the deafening assault of the band. I noticed a dark-haired man standing against the wall smoking a cigarette. I smiled and gestured for a light. He looked me over with bright brown eyes as he offered me his cigarette. I spoke but gave him to a renewed blast from the band. Instead, I grinned and shrugged and joined him. This was Richard Kemp, the man who had changed her life forever. Hold on, hold on, hold on, thank you. Not yet, thank you. We'll come to you later. Time in this story doesn't go straight as it seems. Now we're still skinning up. After a few more chance meetings, Richard finally asked Christine out. They had a drink in the Philharmonic pub on Hope Street. And then Christine invited him around for dinner. Richard brought a bottle of Chianti and by the time the meal was over we were both mellow. "Why don't you sit by the fire while I make some coffee?" I said. Richard moved to the armchair by the fire and as I left he asked me, "Do you mind if I smoke?" "Oh, go ahead," I said. When I returned with the coffee, Richard was breaking open a cigarette and spreading the tobacco across a strip made of three cigarette papers glued together. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm making a joint," he said. "I have some great hash somebody gave me." "You can't do that, I won't have you bringing drugs in here." Christine kicked him out. She was a medical student and couldn't be around drugs. But Richard was cool. This was the 60s. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't stay away from him too long. Two weeks later, the pair lie back on Richard's bed in his student flat and listen to Jimi Hendrix's rainy day dream away. Christine is so stoned, she floats up to the ceiling and looks down at herself and Richard, laughing in hysterics. She reaches down to touch them. Is this what love feels like? They hold hands for the first time after a football match at Anfield. They kiss in the street. And before long, Christine gives up her room and moves in with Richard. They become a hip, young, intellectual couple and now it's Christine rolling the joints after dinner. But there are dark clouds on the horizon. The Vietnam War raged on and the student riots in Paris were defeated. Environmental decline, poverty, urban blight. Although nobody knows for sure exactly when it will happen or exactly what risk is the greatest risk man faces, scientists are fairly unanimous in saying that man does face extremely important risks. The need for radical change was in the air. We are on a suicidal course. Richard and Christine talked long into the night about the role of the state, the atomic age, war, climate change and radical politics. They wanted to start a revolution. But they didn't know how. And then they found acid. LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Albert Hoffman while working as a research chemist for a pharmaceutical company called Sandos in Switzerland. He was trying to isolate, purify and synthesize properties in medicinal plants. He studied ergot, a rye fungus and created lacergic acid diathalamide, which had absolutely none of the functions the company was looking for. So Hoffman shelved his batch of LSD-25 until 1943. LSD-25 had been bugging Hoffman for years. He was sure there was something special about it. So he did what any responsible scientist would do. He swallowed some and went for a bike ride. And on that bike ride, he became the first human being to ever experience an acid trip. He described extraordinary shapes with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors. Yeah, yeah. Initially legal, when worrying reports about its misuse captured the popular imagination, it was outlawed in the UK in 1966, meaning production of LSD had to go underground. He was soon embraced as the drug of choice for the counter-culture. Timothy Leary, a sacked Harvard professor, became the poster boy for LSD, advocating a rejection of cultural norms. He suggested people turn on, tune in and drop out. Now, as meaning at the moment or at once, seldom has a nation been able to witness such an explosion, a new mass mine. For many, the life-changing experience of taking LSD becomes a point of no return. And in the 1960s, young people in their thousands began abandoning their conventional lives in favor of a world of psychedelic discovery. And this is where a guy called David Solomon enters the story. Solomon was the quintessential beat generation hipster intellectual. He'd compiled an anthology with Timothy Leary called LSD, The Consciousness Expanding Drug. He was a writer and editor and published William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and promoted jazz artists like Dizzy Gillespie. Basically, David Solomon was cool. And David Solomon liked drugs. Solomon moved to the UK with a plan to synthesize the active ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol, THC. He believed this would be perfectly legal under British law and he could create a multinational business selling the drug. All he needed was a brilliant chemist to figure out how to do it. Richard had met Solomon through a mutual friend a couple of years before he met Christine. And Richard was in awe of Solomon. He was like no one Richard had ever met. Solomon introduced him to new books, new ideas, new music, new writers, new artists and new drugs. But Christine was uncomfortable around Solomon. He was too flamboyant, lacked boundaries. The house was forever filled with people coming and going and the drugs were too strong. Christine was so stoned by Solomon's hash she couldn't speak even if she wanted to. I was rendered almost speechless during most of this day from the strong hash I'd smoked from David's constantly circulating pipe. Richard and Solomon would talk endlessly and it wasn't long before this counterculture salesman had convinced Richard to attempt to synthesize THC in his university lab. But to produce a large enough quantity they needed cash. Solomon suggested Richard make LSD which they could sell and then use the profit to invest in the equipment to make THC. Christine and Richard talked this over. LSD's been illegal for two years now and the media's full of stories about how dangerous it is. His perception of depth and dimensions is radically changed. A low curb appears as a precipice with a distortion of sight and sound. And Richard and Christine still hadn't even tried the stuff. Richard's life was facing two distinct pathways. Continue his PhD studies in Liverpool or follow down Solomon's path. A path of criminal, psychedelic, spirituality, radicalism and adventure. Well, what would you do? Solomon gave Richard the raw ingredients for LSD and Richard made his first batch of it at his university lab. He brought it home for him and Christine to sample. My first trip was slow and inconclusive. Nick, Richard's friend, put on Axis Boulder's love. As I danced I noticed the carpet was writhing gently and the music sounded deeply meaningful. Nick began to badger me. Women hold the key to the mystery. You have to tell me the answer. Richard's second batch was stronger. My body felt oddly fluid as I went out into the garden. It was warm and sunny. I took a deep breath. The air shimmered. I wandered to the back of the garden where the great trees grew. I stood close to the largest beach. My face close to the smooth grey bark. I could see individual cells fitting together into a patchwork of soft colour. I lent against the tree and felt a flood of joy. There was no separation between the lovely Copper Beach and myself. Tears of ecstasy ran down my face. All words. All sense of time. All boundaries were gone. Later I went back to the room and Richard peeled an orange. The sweet juicy fruit was entrancing. We drank lapsang tea and dissolved into the music. The whole course of my life had changed. My first trip had been a mystical experience of universal love. It was an indelible confirmation that the natural world and everything contained in it, including myself, was sacred. I'd perceived the planet to be a single organism with its own regulatory systems, just as are to be found in our bodies. I was convinced that this experience of unity and harmony held the key to writing imbalances in the world that were stressing the environment and creating ever wider inequalities between the materially rich and poor countries. I believed, along with many others at that time, that if enough people also experienced this sense of at-wanness, we would reach a critical mass of spiritual awakening. They would soon stop the injustice, the fighting and exploitation, and bring about positive change in the world. For Richard and Christine, this was an awakening, a call to action. They thought everybody should have this experience. They now had a purpose and a destiny to save the world with acid. Then news broke of the perfect moment to help them in their quest. They learned of an upcoming festival in upstate New York, Woodstock. The Woodstock Music and Art there. So Richard went back to the lab in Liverpool to make a batch of LSD to sell in the States. This would be his strongest, purest batch yet. His first batch made it successfully to the States, but his second batch? Well, this is where we met him. Richard has just dropped a flask of the purest liquid LSD he has ever made. Trying to clean up the acid, he cuts his hand. In this moment, huge amounts of liquid acid poured directly into Richard's bloodstream. Richard has just ingested enough acid to supply Woodstock. Suddenly, he's acutely aware of the fact that he's doing something highly illegal in a university lab in the centre of Liverpool. He needs to get out of there. He needs to get home. But as he makes for the door, there's a problem, a big problem. He can no longer walk. Slowly, he looks down and discovers the source of the problem. His body is becoming fluid. This is Acid Dream. Acid Dream was written by Tim Price. And narrated by Risa Fans. Christine was Hannah Murray. Original music was by Griff Wies and sound design by Peregrine Andrews. The researcher was Hailey Mills and the production coordinator was Caroline Barlow. The producer was James Robinson and it was a BBC Studios production. (upbeat music)