5. Dream's End

(upbeat music) - BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts. (eerie music) - This is Acid Dream. (eerie music) After years of evasion, paranoia, and fear, Christine Bott's worst nightmare has come true. It's 11 o'clock 5 a.m. Sunday, the 27th of March, 1977, at Swindon East Police Station. She sat opposite Detective Constable Edward McLean and Detective Constable Divinia Blackstaff. This is a transcript of that interview read by two actors. - You've been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the illicit manufacture and distribution of LSD. You've been making inquiries and watching your movements for some months. Why did you get involved with the manufacture of LSD? - I feel that cannabis and acid, if used properly, lift the veil and one sees the truth. - And now that you've been caught, how do you feel? - Well, I knew it would happen one day. It was always in the back of my mind. - Why did you go into making acid? - We weren't in it for the money. You could see that from the way we were living. - If you weren't doing it for the money, why were you doing it? - I felt it was my contribution to alter society. - You mean that by turning people onto the use of acid, you could alter society somehow? - Yeah, I believe in the eternal love thing. - Can you explain those theories a little bit more? - I believe if people were given the chance to use acid, the world would become a better place. People would be happier. - Have you ever turned onto acid? - No. - Well, you ought to. Now, perhaps you wouldn't feel so repressive about it. It's difficult to explain what happens to you when you turn on, but you feel as one with the world. You begin to appreciate everything around you. The trees, the stones, everything becomes beautiful. It really helps you to see the truth. - And if the right people use it? - Yes, of course. - Most of the micro.gang pleaded guilty in the face of insurmountable evidence. There was such a media circus around the sentencing that seats in the public gallery had to be ticketed. At Bristol Crown Court, Mr. Justice Park sentenced Richard and his former partner, Henry Todd, to 13 years each. Christine got nine years. Smiles were sentenced to eight. The total amount handed out to the group of 17 principal defendants was 124 years. Operation Julie was a big news story, but it since faded from public consciousness. Richard Kemp hasn't been heard from for 45 years. Until now. - I've got an analogue phone, so it felt like something out of the 1960s. I haven't had the analogue phone for very long, but I decided that because of all the power cuts we've been having recently, I don't want to be disconnected from the world, so I thought I'd get an analogue phone. - This is Kate Hayes. Kate met Christine Botts in 1995, eight years after Christine was released from prison. The two became good friends, and since Christine died in 2007, Kate has been dedicated to telling her story. But Kate has a story of her own. Let's rewind back to the 1970s. It's 1972, and we're in a pop-up lab in London. Back before Operation Julie, before the prize-winning goats before whales, Richard has just delivered his liquid LSD to his tabletting team. The tabletting team carefully spread the acid paste onto a board with 1,082-millimeter holes, scraping off any excess. Once the paste has dried, the microdots are formed. Let's focus on one of them. A small blue tablet, nestled in a hole in the corner of the board. Another board with 1,008 spikes is pressed against the first board, removing each tablet from its hole, and our microdots is dropped into a plastic bag with 1,007 others. The bag is stuffed into a box of baby formula with a number of other bags. Our tiny microdots is jostled about as it's transported to the countryside outside of Reading by a guy called Leaf Fielding. In a forest, Leaf digs a hole, and the box of baby formula is buried. A nearby tree is carved with symbols for the next person in the supply chain to find. A few days later, the microdot is dug up. Now it's transported to Wales, where it's separated into a smaller batch and boxed up. One box is left in a plastic bag under a chair, where it's picked up by a guy called Smiles. At Smiles' home, our microdot is packaged up into a smaller batch of just 500 and posted through the Royal Mail to a dealer back in London. From here, our microdot passes through many hands until finally it is sold. And here is where our microdot's story ends, lying in the palm of a young woman called Kate. I was an unreconstructed hippie chick, 'cause I actually thought that as a girl, I believe I was as important as boys. And it was only later that I found that wasn't true. Kate's brother was spending a lot of time at a commune in Norfolk, a big old country house that had been thrown open to the counter-cultural community. And Kate started to hitch a ride there. There was often cannabis being smoked, and then one evening a friend offered to guide her through her first LSD trip, one-on-one. Now she's placing our microdot on her tongue, and... We then walked out as the sun rose into the gardens and into the land, and it was incredible. Every single plant was just pulsing with life. And as the light touched them and as I was, you know, watching the dawn, it really was the kind of process of feeling like waking up into a very beautiful world that was precious, and I guess a word I might use is sacred, you know, that it was imbued with a spiritual vibration, and that I was also part of. By the time Kate's 17, she's grown apart from her Catholic family. She spends more and more time hanging out at her brother's commune. Then one day something happens that changes Kate's life forever. She's staying at her friend's house, and her friend has a blazing row with her parents. But the solution seems so clear to Kate. They should run away. This was it. We'd made the break. We were going. We weren't going back to what felt to both of us in our own home separately, like a very oppressive and unhappy experience. I had been very, very unhappy at home for three or four years by then. It was kind of unbearable. So they headed to her brother's commune. But when they get to the country house, her brother's not there, and the place seems to have lost some of its allure. So Kate and her friend go to another house where they think they've found sanctuary until one night. Police! We got raided by the police and arrested, and we got taken to cells. So for us, that was like never going back. You know, that's that. Blown it. After a night in the cells, we were released, and we hitched to Norwich. And then we heard that there was strawberry picking that we could go to. So we hitched to some strawberry picking fields. That's where Kate met someone we'll call Tom, who then really made my life a living hell. And this man had come, and he'd been very smiley and attentive. I was 17 by then. So Kate decides to stay with Tom, finally hoping to find a safe port in the storm, until... Police! Tom's busted, and the same policeman searches Kate and finds the same thing in her small purse. You know, they looked at my purse and said, "Same 2.5p, then, Kate." So then Tom's arrested on drugs charges, but soon he's back, released on bail. And he said, "I'm gonna jump bail." And I said, "Well, I'll come with you." And ended up going on this nightmarish journey to Spanish Africa. In 1974, a ferry makes its way across the Channel. And he treated me appallingly, and I just about escaped with my life. Kate had made the counterculture her home, but relationships were failing, and she had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get by. Her idealism and faith in the beauty and interconnectedness of life led to her putting herself into situations that were increasingly desperate. That was the point, I think, that I realised that the world wasn't quite what I thought it was. Tom was determined to get to Morocco, where he intended to buy heroin. And as the journey progressed, Kate featured less and less in his plans. Then we got picked up by two beautiful German men who were hippies, and they actually smiled at me and were kind, and for me, it was like oxygen. They were smugglers on their way to Morocco, so they agreed to take us over the water to Spanish Africa. But by now, Tom's decided that Kate isn't part of his plans anymore. He wants to get rid of her. So he strikes a deal with the German hippies. For a bag of microdots, Kate will stay with them while he crosses the border. Having once had her mind expanded by LSD, she was now being treated for it. I think he saw that as an opportunity to offload me and gave them the LSD to take me off his hands. Kate stayed with the German smugglers, and for a short while, life was good again. Until one day... It was just outside of Barcelona. Footie opened the door, pulled me out, pulled my rucksack out, and drove off. (ENGINES REVVING) She was left on the side of the road. Kate had run away from home, searching for peace and love, but now she was alone, abandoned on the side of the road in Spain with no money and no one to turn to. I think I remember saying earlier that I had felt equal as a girl, but I mattered. I didn't feel any sense of not being good enough. So the contrast between that and then just being discarded like a bit of rubbish on a roadside. Kate's dream of a new world of human connection was in tatters, and now she needed help more than she'd ever needed it before. This sports car drove up, and it was a man, an old man. It's a senorita, senorita, I'll help you, I'll help you. I said, "I've got to get to the airport." He said, "I'll help you, but first of all, have breakfast." I thought, "Oh, okay, my luck's changed." He drove me to a place where the road ran out, and it was a building site for the road when he raped me, and nearly strangled me. Something stopped him, and he drove to where there was a kind of bus stop, and he chucked me out, and he chucked, I think it was a 10% note or something, and there were some people there who were probably going to work or something, and I said, "I didn't have any Spanish or French or anything." I just said, "That man just raped me," and someone turned to me and said, "Well, he gave you money." So I got on the bus, and I said, "I need the embassy. I need an embassy," and he just took the bus. I just got off in the middle of the city, I didn't know where the hell I was, and the bus driver had written down an address for me, so I showed that to a taxi driver, and he looked at it and drove off with it in his hand, and it was rush hour, and I just threw my rucksack down, and I just fell on the floor, and I just wept. And this young bully just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. He was not that much older than me, and he had some anguish, and he said, "I'll help you," and he took me to a cafe and got me some water. I went to the toilets and was nearly sick and tried to wash myself, and the boy was able to talk to an embassy, and they made contact with my brother. Kate was reunited with her family, but her experience sent her spiraling into a post-traumatic cycle that ultimately ended with her being sectioned. Nobody asked me what had happened to me. At no point did anybody ask anything, and the next thing I knew, I had been physically restrained, injected with something that knocked me out, and when I woke up, my head was really painful, and they'd administered electric shock treatment, and they kept me in that asylum for a year, and they did that to me every week. After her release, as Kate slowly pieced her life together, she realised she had a purpose, to take what had happened to her and dedicate her life to helping others affected by similarly traumatic events. It was 1993, and Kate saw an article in The Observer about cancelling. And then when I started the course, that is when I met Christine. The woman at the heart of the British LSD trade, the woman who helped to create the commodity that Kate was ultimately traded for. She was very beautiful, she was very elegant, she was very articulate. And now nearly 25 years later, they were sat in a circle in a small room at the University of East Anglia, telling each other their stories. At the beginning of the course, everybody tells their story, so I heard Christine tell her story about having been imprisoned for conspiracy, the way she put it, conspiracy to flood the world with LSD, which actually was true. And my story was I was a runaway, and I was sold for LSD. So for me, she could have been my nemesis. The universe had brought these two women together, but it was down to them what happened next. I think she was mortified that she hadn't thought too deeply about the impact of what they were doing on the street. And this is actually written in her memoir, she talks about that. I had no contact with street level drug use where people tripped under less than ideal conditions, or someone might even have their drink spiked with acid at a party without their knowledge. And there she was having to be confronted by that very person that she didn't want to reflect on. And Christine did one thing that Kate had needed all her life. Christine listened to Kate. She had a kind of way of listening that I found very interesting that she would take people in. I think that's why we became close. I think because of the nature of my story, it was impossible for Christine to not hear it. Christine helped Kate put her life back together again through friendship, love and kindness. Chris was amazing. She really was an amazing individual. She had sustained this dedication to this belief that by manufacturing this stuff, they would wake the world up to this emergency that they could see unfolding before their eyes in the early seventies. My way of understanding it is that the diggers and the dreamers and the politicos and, you know, those people came together to try and challenge the Vietnam War and all of these things. I think that lasted for a couple of years. And then what happened after that was a gradual commodification of everything. And I got caught up in the memory of that dream. In 2005, Christine was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she chose Kate as the person she wanted with her at the end. She wrote an outline about what she wanted to happen around her as she was dying. And it was a statement that I carried with me and that I shared with anybody that went to visit her about, you know, even though she might appear that she's dying, she'll be aware of the energy that's around her and that her death was as important to her. The process of dying was as important to her as her life. Christine died peacefully in 2007. This whole thing of, you know, we come from Stardust and we go back to Stardust is very much at the core, I think, of a lot of ancient belief systems. I believe in the eternal love thing. It's now 15 years later and Kate has succeeded in self-publishing Christine's memoirs. That's how we've been able to hear Christine's voice from beyond the grave. But Richard's voice hasn't been heard since the day of his trial. Then a few months ago, Kate received a phone call. I've got an analogue phone, so it felt like something out of the 1960s. I haven't had the analogue phone for very long, but I decided that because of all the power cuts we've been having recently, I don't want to be disconnected from the world, so I thought I'd get an analogue phone. And this was one of the first calls that I had on it. And it rang and I picked it up and the person said, "Is that Kate Hayes?" And I said, "Yes, yes it is." And he said, "Are you sitting down?" And I said, "No, but I can. Well, I suggest you do." This is Richard Kemp. "Acid Dream" was written by Tim Price and narrated by Risa Fans. Christine was Hannah Murray, McLean was Jacob Hawley, and the contributor was Catherine Hayes. 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. [BLANK_AUDIO]