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Glandeuse Pinéale
- Inscrit
- 7/7/10
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A new book casts fresh light on an undercover operation that smashed one of the most extraordinary drug rings the world has ever seen and changed British policing forever. What was Operation Julie?
It was hardly a typical drugs bust. When police from around the country swooped before dawn one morning in 1977, dozens of the 800 officers working the case looked like unshaven, long-haired hippies plucked from the audience of a Pink Floyd gig.
And the vast LSD co-operative they were targeting was, if anything, even more unconventional.
Its leading members included doctors, scientists and university graduates - motivated, they insisted, by an evangelical drive to transform human consciousness itself.
But for all their peace-and-love ideals, their conspiracy was, at the time, the biggest drug ring the UK had ever seen and one of the world's largest. After officers seized a haul large enough for six million trips, the price of an acid tab on Britain's streets reportedly leapt from £1 to £5 overnight.
The investigation, codenamed Operation Julie, didn't just destroy one cartel.
It arguably represented the final death throes of the 1960s counterculture, conclusively shattering the idealism with which many had once viewed the drugs scene and marking the start of a harsher, more brutal era for the narcotics underworld.
In addition, its unprecedented scale and co-operation between forces changed forever the way Britain was policed and set the tone for the so-called war on drugs of the 1980s.
The inquiry led to raids on 87 homes, resulting in more than 100 arrests and 15 ringleaders being sentenced to a combined 120 years in jail.
But it began in the unlikely setting of Cambridge University's radical academic fringe, inspired by LSD pioneer Timothy Leary's belief that the drug broadened the mind and could transform society for the better.
The catalyst was David Solomon, a Californian bohemian intellectual and associate of Leary's who came to Cambridge in 1967. Two years later he was introduced to Richard Kemp, a Liverpool University chemist. Soon Kemp was meeting others in Solomon's circle and their first LSD production runs began at the American's home, a former vicarage.
One of the radicals who came to assume a key role within the organisation was Leaf Fielding, an anarchist former public schoolboy who had dropped out of university following his introduction to acid at the age of 18. He began as the tabletter, turning the raw chemicals into individual doses, and later took over the distribution network.
As he recounts in his newly released memoir, To Live Outside the Law, the fullest account yet of the Operation Julie story by a conspiracy insider, it was the promise of building a new society and seeking a way out of the cold war's nuclear stand-off that drove the gang at first rather than money.
"We were all extremely idealistic," he recalls. "I was convinced that this was the answer to the world's problems.
"We saw it as a new awakening out of the terrible impasse that the world had got itself into."
In 1973, fearful of police attention, one wing of the co-operative led by Kemp and Solomon moved to west Wales while another branch remained in London.
The influx of these counter-cultural figures into villages and towns like Llanddewi Brefi - later the fictional home of Little Britain's Dafydd - and Tregaron was less conspicuous than might be imagined.
Ceredigion's natural beauty and low cost of living had already attracted a sizeable hippy population, according to Lyn Ebenezer, author of Operation Julie: The World's Greatest LSD Bust, who was working as a local freelance journalist at the time. The likes of the Rolling Stones, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix had all made pilgrimages to the area.
The LSD ringleaders all held down jobs, mixed with their neighbours and stood their rounds in local pubs. As a result, Ebenezer says, they quickly became popular figures.
"They were great characters," he says. "They added colour.
Continue reading: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14052153
It was hardly a typical drugs bust. When police from around the country swooped before dawn one morning in 1977, dozens of the 800 officers working the case looked like unshaven, long-haired hippies plucked from the audience of a Pink Floyd gig.
And the vast LSD co-operative they were targeting was, if anything, even more unconventional.
Its leading members included doctors, scientists and university graduates - motivated, they insisted, by an evangelical drive to transform human consciousness itself.
But for all their peace-and-love ideals, their conspiracy was, at the time, the biggest drug ring the UK had ever seen and one of the world's largest. After officers seized a haul large enough for six million trips, the price of an acid tab on Britain's streets reportedly leapt from £1 to £5 overnight.
The investigation, codenamed Operation Julie, didn't just destroy one cartel.
It arguably represented the final death throes of the 1960s counterculture, conclusively shattering the idealism with which many had once viewed the drugs scene and marking the start of a harsher, more brutal era for the narcotics underworld.
In addition, its unprecedented scale and co-operation between forces changed forever the way Britain was policed and set the tone for the so-called war on drugs of the 1980s.
The inquiry led to raids on 87 homes, resulting in more than 100 arrests and 15 ringleaders being sentenced to a combined 120 years in jail.
But it began in the unlikely setting of Cambridge University's radical academic fringe, inspired by LSD pioneer Timothy Leary's belief that the drug broadened the mind and could transform society for the better.
The catalyst was David Solomon, a Californian bohemian intellectual and associate of Leary's who came to Cambridge in 1967. Two years later he was introduced to Richard Kemp, a Liverpool University chemist. Soon Kemp was meeting others in Solomon's circle and their first LSD production runs began at the American's home, a former vicarage.
One of the radicals who came to assume a key role within the organisation was Leaf Fielding, an anarchist former public schoolboy who had dropped out of university following his introduction to acid at the age of 18. He began as the tabletter, turning the raw chemicals into individual doses, and later took over the distribution network.
As he recounts in his newly released memoir, To Live Outside the Law, the fullest account yet of the Operation Julie story by a conspiracy insider, it was the promise of building a new society and seeking a way out of the cold war's nuclear stand-off that drove the gang at first rather than money.
"We were all extremely idealistic," he recalls. "I was convinced that this was the answer to the world's problems.
"We saw it as a new awakening out of the terrible impasse that the world had got itself into."
In 1973, fearful of police attention, one wing of the co-operative led by Kemp and Solomon moved to west Wales while another branch remained in London.
The influx of these counter-cultural figures into villages and towns like Llanddewi Brefi - later the fictional home of Little Britain's Dafydd - and Tregaron was less conspicuous than might be imagined.
Ceredigion's natural beauty and low cost of living had already attracted a sizeable hippy population, according to Lyn Ebenezer, author of Operation Julie: The World's Greatest LSD Bust, who was working as a local freelance journalist at the time. The likes of the Rolling Stones, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix had all made pilgrimages to the area.
The LSD ringleaders all held down jobs, mixed with their neighbours and stood their rounds in local pubs. As a result, Ebenezer says, they quickly became popular figures.
"They were great characters," he says. "They added colour.
Continue reading: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14052153
