Albion Dreaming (40 page)

Princess Margaret is known to have liked the high life and there have been allegations that she smoked cannabis and took other drugs. She certainly enjoyed hanging out and having fun, whether at her retreat on the tropical island of Mustique, or closer to home, at Glen House in Scotland, where, on one New Year’s Eve, she danced and sang
Jumping Jack Flash
with the Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson.

In February 2007, a BBC Wales website published an article containing: “Rumour has it that Princess Margaret was involved with one of the main suspects and that the police hierarchy delayed the swoop until she was well out of the way.” The author of the article was Lyn Ebenezer, a journalist who covered the Operation Julie events as they happened in 1977. Ebenezer claims he was told about the rumour by one of the Operation Julie undercover police officers.
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Another well-known name that has become inextricably linked with Operation Julie lore is that of Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA. In 2004, the
Daily Mail
quoted a friend of Richard Kemp’s who claimed Crick knew Kemp and Solomon and had taken LSD to help untangle the mysteries of DNA. Supporters of LSD seized on this tall tale and the story spread uncritically throughout the media and on over 14,000 internet sites. The article, based on a thirdhand source, is highly dubious. LSD first arrived in Britain during September 1952 and for several years was available only to a few psychotherapists. It is highly unlikely Crick, who discovered DNA in 1953, would have had access to the drug at that time.
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However, Crick, a Cambridge resident until 1977, was known to have used LSD later in his life. Crick’s biographer, having spoken to his widow, ascertained that although Crick did not know Kemp and Solomon he did know Henry Todd, who introduced him to LSD in 1967. Crick was apparently: “... fascinated by its effects – by how he became confused about what familiar objects were for, and by the way it seemed to alter the passage of time.” He took LSD several times but no factual evidence has yet appeared
that indicates he was more closely connected with the drug’s manufacture or distribution.
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Operation Julie has gone down in counter culture folklore. Even today, acidheads know of the case and in Britain “Operation Julie acid” is mentioned with the same reverence American LSD acidheads use for Owsley’s psychedelic produce of the Sixties. Kemp’s LSD, tabletted from a large consignment of pure LSD which was taken out of the country just before the raids, was circulating well into the Nineties and it’s possible that some people still have their own stash of Julie acid, lovingly salted away for a special occasion.

Operation Julie has now become a legend and popular culture has frequently referred to the event. Punk band The Clash, veterans of the early free festival scene in their guise as the 101ers, recorded the track “Julie’s Working for the Drug Squad” on their 1978 album
Give ’Em Enough Rope
: “An’ then there came the night of the greatest ever raid, they arrested every drug that had ever been made.”
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Other bands such as the obscure Drug Squad have also alluded to the conspiracy on their 1980 single “Operation Julie”.

The cat and mouse, police versus the acid intellectuals, game that Operation Julie became resulted in the story being dramatised for ITV in 1985. The three part mini series wasn’t a hit with the public though. It was low on action and high on dialogue and character, intrigued the critics but failed to ignite the public’s imagination. The name and the myth live on; as recently as August 2007 some internet discussion groups were taking seriously the possibility that there may be LSD and money still buried deep in the Welsh hillsides.

Those imprisoned for their part in the Operation Julie events served their prison sentences without incident and were released on various dates during the Eighties. There were no fanfares in the mainstream or alternative media. After release some of the conspirators kept in touch with each other, the rest vanished. Kemp and Bott’s relationship survived their incarceration but they parted shortly after their release and both disappeared. Rumours abound as to their whereabouts; Kemp has been seen in Goa, Bott
is thought to have lived simply for many years as a smallholder in southwest Ireland. David Solomon died in April 2007, and of Andy Munro, nothing has been heard. None of the principal conspirators has ever expressed any interest in telling the story from their point of view, either to make money or to give their side of the story. Their lives have moved on but their names will be forever linked to Operation Julie.

Since their release from custody, only one of the Julie gang has been in the public eye. On his release from prison, Henry Todd had returned to one of his passions, mountaineering, opening a business supplying oxygen cylinders to climbers. In May 1999, Michael Matthews, at twenty-two the youngest Briton to have summited on Everest, died on the descent from problems with his oxygen supply. Todd’s company had supplied the oxygen and Matthews’ father pursued a private prosecution for manslaughter. Todd was suddenly thrust into the news and his connection with Operation Julie exhumed. He was exonerated of any blame but the adverse publicity he received because of his Operation Julie connections affected his business, which closed.
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The defendants in the Operation Julie trial did more to promote LSD in Britain than anyone before or since. Whether or not they caused a psychedelic evolution, as Kemp intended, is debatable. It certainly wasn’t a public revolution. But the changes in worldview their LSD brought to countless thousands of people have had a more subtle effect in society. There are now people in their fifties and sixties who occupy key roles in industry, science, the armed forces, the police, and numerous authors, who have taken their Operation Julie vision into the heart of the establishment and tried to change things from the inside.

Kemp and his associates were, whatever their motivations, activists. Unlike most who espouse the hippie dream they made it happen, facilitating consciousness change for anyone who wanted it, and paid the price for doing so. Their supporters contend that the purity of Kemp and Munro’s LSD radically changed the consciousness of thousands of people. They claim the Julie acid caused its users to examine and refine their lifestyles, relationships, personalities and spiritual goals. More abstractly,
it could be argued Kemp and Munro’s LSD helped fuel the free festival movement of the 1970s, providing the energy and lysergic shimmer for those surreal events.

Their detractors believe Kemp and Munro’s acid was the product of an organization driven by vicious, uncaring greed, responsible for the moral degradation and damage to the mental health of thousands of young people. Unlike the pro Julie view there was little, if any, evidence for the claims of the prosecution and, if Martin Mitcheson’s data were correct, evidence to the contrary. But the people who write history, make history. The mainstream media and the police have written the only histories of the Operation Julie microdot gang and so it is the establishment’s view that is put forward.

The tenacity with which the police pursued the Operation Julie LSD conspiracy has rarely been equalled. It could be asked why, if the police, on a tight budget, could smash the LSD ring, they could not do the same for the heroin trade. Heroin has killed more Britons every year than LSD has done since it was first synthesised. Heroin destroys lives and families, the acquisitive crime it breeds making areas unsafe to walk or park in and puts a shoplifting premium on the cost of retail goods. LSD does none of this. But heroin is not a tool for examining consciousness, nor does it, or those who manufacture and distribute it, seek to transform the user to be able to see through the drudgery of western materialism and redundant Judeo-Christian spirituality. Heroin dulls individuals and communities, giving police and politicians an easy enemy to blame social ills upon. LSD energised individuals and helped create communities, new modes of living and the temporary autonomous zones of the free festival.

The conclusion drawn by the counter culture about the Operation Julie saga is simple. The British establishment, that thousand-year-old interlocking web of legislated power, law, status and wealth seems unable to countenance anyone who wishes to expand their consciousness with LSD but is content to allow widespread abuse of heroin, barbiturates and alcohol.

Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Greenslade, head of Operation Julie, summed up the battle of ideology and lifestyle
choice represented by the Operation Julie events: “We were up against the intelligentsia – and we won.”
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Greenslade was correct. The battle might have been won, but the war was not over yet. Despite the prosecution’s claim that Operation Julie had wiped out LSD in Britain, and what was available could only be obtained at a premium, that was not the case. Shortly after the trial, Release told the
New Musical Express
the “bulk price was now £40 for 4,000 (10p a tab) with a street price at £1”. They also claimed that LSD, far from drying up, is now “almost as easily obtainable as cannabis”.
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How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn’t that be newsworthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy.

Bill Hicks
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F
or LSD users who became involved with the drug in the heady days of the Swinging Sixties or the Operation Julie acid-drenched Seventies, the prospect at the dawn of the Eighties looked bleak. Attempts at fermenting the psychedelic revolution through communal living, festivals and LSD philosophy and spirituality had been tenuous at best, risible at worst. The original acid generation now stood blinking in the cold light of Margaret Thatcher’s new Conservative government. Tolerance for any form of drug use was at its lowest and young people saw the counter culture lifestyle as anachronistic and outmoded. There was a new spirit of raw, entrepreneurial, dog-eat-dog capitalist culture in the air. The LSD generation was up against the me generation and suddenly everything looked very different.

The drug scene was changing fast too. In the Sixties and Seventies certain types of drugs were primarily taken by clearly defined subcultures; acid and cannabis by hippies, amphetamines by punks, cocaine by the wealthy, heroin and barbiturates by people who craved oblivion, and so on. Of course, this is a
generalization but it was largely the case. The advent of punk in the late Seventies was the beginning of the end for clearly defined drug user groups. They still existed, but all kinds of drugs were now so widespread and cheap by the Eighties, that the barriers between tribal groupings and their chemical predilections began to merge.

One of the first casualties of this fragmentation of LSD culture was the closure of Lee Harris’
Home Grown
magazine. Harris had done an excellent job in reporting on psychedelic culture and the magazine was one of the few publications to support the Operation Julie defendants. Now, minimal profits, a dwindling market and apathy made the magazine unviable and the enterprise folded. Harris retained Alchemy, his Portobello Road “head shop”, which remains a focus and gathering point for alternative Londoners to the present day.
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The successive musical genres of Punk, New Wave and the New Romantics drew on radically different aspirations to the early LSD counterculture and required different drugs to fuel their cultures. LSD was still widely available, despite the aftermath of Operation Julie, but was now viewed differently by the next generation of drug users, many of whom were now taking LSD more for the sheer weirdness of its effects rather than for its spiritual insights. As ever, musicians continued to use LSD and the drug continued to be the motivating factor in some musical scenes. In the early Eighties, pop star Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes was a fervent advocate of LSD and its use slowly permeated the late Seventies and early Eighties Liverpool musical scene.

During that period, the music scene in the Beatles’ hometown had centred round a club called Eric’s. The club was notorious, as much for the drugs which could be obtained there as it was for the new music emanating from its tiny stage. Journalist, Andrew Hussey remembered Eric’s and the role LSD played as: “The atmosphere was exciting, often drenched in LSD (then the most unfashionable drug in the UK).”
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Unfashionable or not LSD, as it had done with so many other musicians, provided Cope with a muse. As the single “Reward” inched its way up the pop charts Cope was rehearsing his band
for a tour of America’s East Coast. In the studios, “rehearsals came to a stop, as Gary and I would be overcome by the power of the acid that we constantly ingested.” During these sessions the Teardrop Explodes were summoned to appear on
Top of the Pops
, Britain’s most prestigious music showcase. On the way to the show Cope took LSD: “The acid made us happy and nice. We gushed around the place like inbreds at a New England dinner party.” Cope repeated the Pops-on-acid routine with his next single, “Passionate Friend”, once again managing to perform live magnificently whilst tripping heavily.
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