Albion Dreaming (39 page)

Kemp writes that he has taken LSD “over 200 times other than in the course of manufacture”. He says “It has been my experience, and that of many of those I know, that LSD helps to make one realise that happiness is a state of mind and not a state of ownership.” But he makes it plain that he has not yet freed himself from “the dependence on material things which we have been encouraged to develop throughout our lives”. And he does not claim that this freedom is, “an inevitable result of LSD experiences. But I feel that I, and many of those I know, have started down the road to a greater reliance on our inner resources. Because the realisation that contentment is a state of mind, one compensates less for unhappiness by buying things. This is why I felt that, if a large
number of people were to experience this truth, whether by means of LSD or by means of an appropriate discipline, such as yoga or meditation, the problems resulting from consumerism would be to a large extent solved
.”

Kemp practised what he preached in simple living. The £7,000 Blaencaron cottage he shared with Dr Christine Bott had few luxuries. There was no television or central heating, the sparse furnishings tended to be threadbare and the walls of the rooms were treated merely to an annual coating of white cement paint. A deep freeze stood in the lean-to but the ty bach (toilet) retained its original role. The only ostentatious touch in the two bedroomed home is a Victorian cast-iron spiral staircase, which Kemp bought in London and installed himself. They ate simply – an assortment of vegetables from the immaculately laid out garden, milk, cheese and yoghurt from their pedigree goats, eggs from half a dozen hens. He was committed to organic (non-chemical) gardening and belonged to West Wales Soil Association. During the 1976 drought, before sinking his own well with the help of a water diviner, he spent hours daily lugging water by truck to his vegetable beds from a river half a mile away
.

Kemp claims that a sharp awareness of the importance of conservation is just one example of how clear sightedness through LSD can manifest itself. He believes the drug raises the barrier separating people from the unconscious part of their minds, and another benefit this can bring he says, is to alleviate or eliminate everyday neurotic problems. LSD, he adds, is often used as an end in itself because it enhances all the sense and “everything appears more beautiful. When people first use LSD they tend to concentrate on this aspect of the experience, but later they begin to use LSD as a means to learn about themselves, rather than as an end
.”

He adds, “If it were just a question of satisfying people’s pleasure seeking desires, I would not have become involved. However, I believe that the end towards which LSD is a means is personally and socially beneficial. That is the way I and most of the people I know use it. I have never believed that LSD is a substitute for the hard work required to change oneself. One might say it is a signpost pointing a way to self-discovery
.”

Kemp’s statement does not ignore the dangers of the drug. Anyone involved in the illegal supply of LSD, he says, is obviously running the risk of exposing certain people to negative experiences with which they cannot cope, and to which they may develop a panic reaction. He adds: “I must emphasise that in my experience of LSD use and in my observation of other LSD users, I have NEVER SEEN a person develop a reaction which has led to uncontrollable behaviour, aggressiveness or attempts to harm themselves or others. However, I do accept that this may have occurred but I am quite certain that it only happens where LSD is used in a circumstances far removed from those recommended by all concerned with the drug, and that such events are extremely rare.” He adds: “I would like to contrast myself with the heroin dealer who sells to others something which he knows is addictive and does no good and which therefore he does not take himself. Chronic dependence on LSD is almost unknown and no-one believes that it is addictive
.”

But children, he says, should be protected. “It may be said that some of those under the age of majority have been exposed to something whose nature and proper use they did not fully understand. I would certainly support a system of social control, including a education about the nature and use of LSD, backed by laws where appropriate to protect those who are not fully able to take decisions for themselves, and to cover situations in which the use of LSD becomes a matter for public rather than private concern. One obvious example is driving a car on a public road
.”

He continues: “The present climate and opinion of law effectively forced me to make a choice between making LSD available without social controls, with the small risks inherent in this approach, or not making it available at all. Believing as I did that the benefits are so urgently necessary if we are to have any chance of solving the pressing problems of the modern world, I felt I had no choice but to adopt the course which has led me to the dock and your Lordship’s judgement
.”

He maintains that other drugs, particularly alcohol, amphetamines, opiates and tobacco, are far more dangerous than LSD. And in a letter from prison: “We have been hunted down, not
because of a few bad trips or LSD-associated deaths, but because of the dramatic political effects we have been having
.
³¹

The sentences, when they came, were harsh, and seemed to reflect Kemp’s fervent belief that the social and political establishment feared the changes LSD wrought in people. The two LSD chemists, Kemp and Munro, received 13 and 10 years, respectively. Solomon, presumably because of his own admission compounded with the fact he was a public advocate of LSD through his books, was sentenced to ten years. Todd was identified as the “marketing manager” of the operation and jailed for 13 years. The other principle defendents received varying custodial sentences and those in the outer circle of the plot were given various suspended sentences, fines and probation orders.

When sentencing Kemp, Justice Park told him: “All this was done, it is said, in the pursuit of the ideal that LSD liberated people’s minds and therefore your work would be beneficial to mankind. That was, I think, a false ideal.” Acknowledging the intellectual calibre of those he had sentenced, Park commented: “I regret very much ... that severe sentences are to be passed on people with excellent characters, excellent professional qualifications, and others in possession of very considerable scientific skill.” That so many highly educated people could be involved with LSD manufacture and distribution clearly rattled the fourth estate, as it was a theme noticed repeatedly in the media reports about the trial.
³²

The editorial in
The Times
on the day after sentences had been passed announced they were “severe, but rightly so”. Several column inches were taken up in justifying the sentences by using the same weak and unproven arguments about the alleged deleterious effects of LSD on the personality.
³³

After sentencing had taken place, on 11 March, twenty-one members of the Julie team attended Bristol Crown Court where Mr. Justice Park publicly commended them. Several of the officers were wearing their Operation Julie tie designed by Detective Constable Alun Morgan. The tie featured a silver circle of 11 clasped hands,
representing the 11 forces from which the team was drawn. In the centre of the circle was an ear of rye, the cereal from which ergotamine tartrate, the basis of LSD, is obtained.

As the prison doors slammed shut on those convicted and sentenced for their part in the Operation Julie conspiracy the cries of protest from their customers were notable by their absence. Not only had the acidheads allowed the Julie trial to proceed without any form of organised defence or outcry, they also failed to express their anger at the sentences. Only hippie newspaper
International Times
attempted to put the dénouement of the trial in context.

The article “Lysergic Love Criminals” railed against the ignorance of the prosecution and judges and was dismayed by the selective mechanism of justice: “And the world said: consciousness expanding is anathema. Just as anatomists were considered anathema in Savonarola’s time. They were delving illicitly into God’s world. Cutting people open was regarded as similar to eating them ... And by the same token the tools for the examination of consciousness are regarded by the powers that be as a threat to the desultory scraps of consciousness over which they preside ... No comparison can be made between the violence of smack dealing and the pacific nature of acid exchanges. No comparison can be made between the crimes, or lack of them, induced by acid and the crimes which are impresarioed, with society’s less than tacit consent, by alcohol and a plethora of other noxious Class A substances, both psychic and chemical that few bother or dare to impugn ... Imagination is to wear grey again this season. The unexhilerated brains of Parliamentary draughtsman have decided that acid is ‘evil’ and the higher echelons of the Judiciary have seen fit to describe it as ‘the evil.’”
³⁴

With the principal conspirators now serving prison sentences the police finally had the time to examine the success and failures of Operation Julie in detail. Even though the operation had been a resounding success, it had its critics in the police who didn’t like the idea of cross-force policing and the creation of special units. This underlying current of ill will made itself felt at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers on 18 December 1978
when one officer referred sarcastically to Operation Julie as “the longest running show after
The Mousetrap
” and said he thought it should now be brought to a close and officers reunited with their home forces.
³⁵

It must have been incredibly difficult for officers who had spent months living undercover as hippies or in the cramped conditions of a surveillance post to go back to the humdrum, workaday routine of general policing. The feeling of belonging to a special elite for over a year and then being unceremoniously returned to the backbiting canteen culture of regional policing was too much for some. Others were resented by the forces they returned to; a resentment driven by jealousy that their colleagues had been involved in such an historic investigation.

Detective Constable Allan Buxton commented: “Operation Julie was so successful I thought the squad would be kept together. Instead, everyone was sent back to their own forces and treated like lepers. When I got back I was told, ‘you’ve had your holiday and earned some money and now you can come back and do some police work.’”
³⁶
Other officers were given menial police duties almost as though their part in Operation Julie had to be punished in some way.

The result of this dissatisfaction was that within a year of the arrests, six of the Operation Julie squad planned to resign from the police force. The first to go was Detective Chief Inspector Dick Lee. Prior to handing in his resignation Lee paid a visit to psychiatrist Ronnie Laing and Steve Abrams. He revealed to them that they had both been under suspicion in the early stages of the Julie investigation because of Laing’s friendship with Solomon and Abrams’ public espousal of drug use. A bizarre night of heavy drinking ensued, Lee arguing the police version of events that Laing and Abrams countered with the psychoanalytical and counter culture position on acid. Lee left the flat and allegedly handed in his resignation that same day.
³⁷

Prison gives people time for reflection and some of the Julie conspirators began to think about the assets that had been confiscated from them. Having had their initial appeal to the Court of Appeal rejected, Henry Todd and Brian Cuthbertson submitted
a further appeal to the House of Lords, claiming that their assets, comprising cash, stocks, gold, krugerrands and stamps, amounting to over £500,000 was unlawfully forfeited. Seizures of cash and other assets is allowed under the Misuse of Drugs Act, but the appellants argued that as they had only been convicted of conspiracy the law did not apply in their case. The Law Lords determined that Justice Park acted illegally and the assets should not have been seized, but refused to order them to be returned.

The appellants threatened to sue the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Thomas Harrington, QC, but he stated he would not return any assets unless there was a legal challenge. Giving assets back to convicted criminals was something the legal and political establishment wished to avoid at all costs, not least for the message it would send through the criminal underworld. Discussions took place between the DPP and the Attorney General and Inland Revenue staff as they tried to find a way not to have to return assets to Todd and Cuthbertson. A decision was finally reached which maintained the status quo. The Inland Revenue issued large tax claims against the Julie conspirators, effectively ending any claim for their assets to be handed back to them.
³⁸

A body of folklore sprang up in the wake of the Operation Julie trial. Some elements of this are too far-fetched for serious consideration while parts occupy the plausible middle ground between fact and fiction, becoming accepted fact purely by repetition. These rumours do two things; they hint at the unexplored areas of the Operation Julie conspiracy and demonstrate how the microdot gang has influenced popular culture. The acid in the water supply was patently nonsense but the following rumours appear to have at least some truth in them.

In the welter of theory and speculation following the 1977 arrests, one national Sunday newspaper printed: “Seventy-one people were arrested. And a detective said last night that when the matter comes to court well-known names will be mentioned including a friend of the Royal Family.”
³⁹
Surprisingly this allegation was not followed up and nothing more was heard of the story in the papers. Nevertheless, after the trial rumour began to spread among Britain’s LSD users that a friend of Princess
Margaret’s was questioned about allegations he had bought 30,000 doses of LSD on behalf of the Queen’s sister.