29 Facts About Owsley Stanley

Owsley Stanley was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the decade's counterculture.

Owsley Stanley helped Robert Thomas design the band's trademark skull logo.

Owsley Stanley died in a car accident in Australia on March 12,2011.

Owsley Stanley was the scion of a political family from Kentucky.

When he was fifteen, Owsley Stanley spent fifteen months as a voluntary psychiatric patient in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC Without having graduated high school, he was admitted to the University of Virginia, where he studied engineering for a year.

Owsley Stanley dropped out after a semester, took a technical job at KGO-TV, and began producing LSD in a small lab located in the bathroom of a house near campus; his makeshift laboratory was raided by police on February 21,1965.

Owsley Stanley beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment.

Owsley Stanley returned to Los Angeles to pursue the production of LSD.

In September 1965, Owsley Stanley became the primary LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Owsley Stanley was featured in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's book detailing the history of Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Owsley Stanley attended the Watts Acid Test on February 12,1966, with his new apprentice Tim Scully, and provided the LSD.

Owsley Stanley met the members of the Grateful Dead during 1965.

Owsley Stanley both financed them and worked with them as their first sound engineer.

At this point, Owsley Stanley rented a house in Point Richmond, Richmond, California.

In Denver, the trio was augmented by fellow Berkeley student Rhoney Gissen, who joined the manufacturing effort and began a relationship with Owsley Stanley that endured through the early 1970s; although they never married, Gissen would eventually take Owsley Stanley's surname.

Owsley Stanley's defense was that the illegal substances were for personal use, but he was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison.

Owsley Stanley was charged with illegal possession of narcotics, dangerous non-narcotics, LSD, and barbiturates.

Owsley Stanley was confined to federal prison from 1970 to 1972, after a federal judge intervened and revoked his release from the 1967 case.

Owsley Stanley took advantage of the opportunity there to learn the trade of metalwork and jewelry-making.

Immediately following his release, Owsley Stanley resumed working for the Grateful Dead as a roadie and sound engineer in the summer of 1972.

The tensions culminated in a logistical mishap at an October 1972 concert at Vanderbilt University when students recruited by Owsley Stanley to deputize for an absentee Matthews absconded with half of the band's PA system, resulting in a fellow employee throwing Owsley Stanley into a water cooler.

Owsley Stanley moved to Australia in 1982, and frequently returned to the United States to sell his jewelry on Grateful Dead tours.

Owsley Stanley retained backstage access during this period, and his clientele included such notable figures as Keith Richards.

Notwithstanding his tour activities, Owsley Stanley made his first public appearance in decades at the Australian ethnobotanical conference Entheogenesis Australis in 2009, giving three talks during his time in Melbourne.

Owsley Stanley believed a "thermal cataclysm" related to climate change would soon render the Northern Hemisphere largely uninhabitable, and moved to Australia in 1982.

Owsley Stanley lived with his wife Sheilah in the bush of Tropical North Queensland, where he worked to create sculpture and wearable art.

From at least the mid-1960s until his death, Owsley Stanley practiced and advocated an all-meat diet, believing that humans are naturally carnivorous.

Owsley Stanley died after a car accident in Australia on Saturday, March 12,2011, not Sunday, March 13, as reported in most publications.

The statement released on behalf of Owsley Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home, on a rural stretch of highway near Mareeba, Queensland.