Tim Scully Names Erowid Center as Literary Executor: The Underground LSD Manufacturing History Project
Former LSD chemist and historian of underground LSD manufacturing, Tim Scully — best known for his involvement in the legendary Orange Sunshine-branded LSD tablets in the 1960s — has named Erowid Center as his literary executor. We’re moving his history project ahead in exciting ways.
The Underground LSD Manufacturing History Project (ULSDMHP — needs a better acronym!) is a collection of documents and info gathered, cross-linked, and annotated by Tim with extensive references. It includes audio interviews conducted over the decades after his arrest and incarceration for LSD production. The custom database Tim designed has recently been transitioned to run on up-to-date software while Tim continues to edit and build out the data. Erowid Center is building out a new server setup to launch unembargoed data as a wiki, mirroring Tim’s database.
The following text by Tim Scully describes a little about why he’s put so much time into the Underground LSD Manufacturing History Project and his decision to formally make Erowid Center his literary executor, assigning us responsibility for the project upon his death. It ends with a PDF example of one of the thousands of documents collected by Scully for this project. Every blue, underlined word or phrase would be a link to another document or source material in the collection; we’ve removed the links because they don’t work outside of Tim’s unpublished collection. It gives a sense of how deep a dive he’s doing into the topics and people.
Project Background
by Tim Scully, Sep 25, 2025
Over 25 years ago when Bear Stanley, Melissa Cargill, Don Douglas, and I were exchanging stories about our time in the LSD underground, during an attempt at organizing a film project that never came to fruition, I had an idea. It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to find out what had happened to all of the people I had been involved with back in the 1960s when I was making LSD, and that it would be a nice idea to try to collect and preserve their stories.
I set out to interview some of my friends and associates from the old days. I decided that I was not interested in learning anything about possible recent activities: recent as defined by anything taking place within the statute of limitations, to put it gently. With five felony convictions already on the books, I have had absolutely no desire whatsoever to become involved in any way in further illegal activity of any kind.
But I was interested in uncovering “ancient history”, and the project expanded into the general history of underground LSD manufacturing.
I soon found out that people’s memories often conflicted, that they frequently recalled vivid mental images and stories but often were not able to anchor them in time to a specific date or even a year in many cases. I decided to collect the disparate stories. In an effort to anchor them in space and time, I also began assembling correspondence, press clippings, court records, reports of investigation and any other contemporary documents that would help me in connecting the puzzle pieces I was collecting into a more coherent image.
I eventually worked out a process for data mining the documents I collected and the interviews that I recorded and transcribed. I mined them for what I call factoids: paragraph-long snippets of information describing an event, ideally beginning with a date and ending with a citation to the source for the particular factoid.
As I gathered the voluminous records of various LSD manufacturing cases (many thousands of pages), I encountered a tremendous number of unfamiliar names of people, places, etc. Because of this, I decided to compile chronological collections of factoids associated with each person, place, lab, front company, etc. I wrote a bit of VBA code [Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications such as Word or Excel] to automatically apply hyperlinks to each occurrence of those names, to make it easier to sort out the relationships between them.
Because almost everyone that I interviewed was very concerned about privacy and most people wanted their information embargoed for at least a few years and some for their lifetimes, I did not hyperlink to online information. At this time, the whole collection of hyperlinked documents remains private, strictly local files on my own computer.
Thus, the sample Roseman and Copley chronology below has links, indicated as blue underlined words and phrases, that will not work for anyone else unless they have the complete history project file set.
Stories in the History
Besides the hyperlinked factoid database style of the Underground LSD Manufacturing History Project, another project of mine is to write my own version of what my friends and I did in a more narrative format.
Over ten years ago, Cosmo Feilding Mellen joined forces with Connie Littlefield, the director of Hofmann’s Potion, to make a long-hoped-for follow-on film. After telling the story of LSD’s discovery, Littlefield had originally planned a second film exploring the story of underground LSD manufacturing, featuring Bear Stanley, Nick Sand and me as examples of LSD manufacturers. Sadly, Bear Stanley died before Littlefield was able to secure funding for the film, so “The Sunshine Makers”, Feilding Mellen’s 2015 documentary about Nick Sand and me, only tangentially touched on Bear Stanley.
Starting in 2013, they filmed over a hundred hours of interviews with us and related folks, including some of the federal agents who pursued us, and then spent many months in editing. I wasn’t able to exert any influence on the final cut. While I found a lot to like in The Sunshine Makers, the limitations of the 90-minute documentary film format, despite capturing the feeling of what we were trying to do, condensed and changed the story so much that I felt a strong urge to explain further. In several areas, Cosmo stretched his editorial license to the max :-).
I decided that the only way to get the story told the way I want is to do it myself. Thus, around the time of the release of The Sunshine Makers (2015), I chose to temporarily put the larger History Project on the back burner. I began focusing on the parts involving my friends and me, and working on a “memoir” detailing the same events covered by The Sunshine Makers. The Sunshine Makers is available on DVD and on most streaming video services; if you haven’t seen it, check it out.
Planning for the Future
As I targeted my efforts on gathering interviews and documents relating to Bear Stanley, Nick Sand, David Mantell, Ron Stark, myself, and some others involved with us, I was both building my memoir and filling out areas of the History Project that I had been personally involved in. Years after I started the memoir project, which has proceeded slowly, I realized that I had become old and that death was not that far off.
I started searching for a literary executor who would take on responsibility for the Underground LSD Manufacturing History Project, and for my memoir if it hasn’t been published before my death. The literary executor would ideally get my memoir published, put the unembargoed portions of the History Project on the Internet while respecting all of the embargoes, and secure a home for my work at one or more university libraries. I eventually decided on Erowid Center, and in early 2025 executed a contract appointing them my literary executors. Earth is now about to embark on the process of writing code to translate the History Project so that it can eventually be posted on the web. Erowid has a lot of work to do on this project and financial support for it would be appreciated!
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