Owsley Stanley

Owsley Stanley
Stanley in 1967 at his arraignment
Born	Augustus Owsley Stanley III (1935-01-19)January 19, 1935 Kentucky, U.S.
Died	March 12, 2011(2011-03-12) (aged 76) Queensland, Australia
Cause of death	Car accident
Nationality	American
Other names	Bear
Citizenship	Naturalised Australian
Occupation	Audio engineer
Known for	LSD, Wall of Sound
Spouse(s)	Sheilah Stanley
Children	4
Relatives	Augustus O. Stanley, grandfather
Website	www.thebear.org

Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, January 19, 1935 – March 12, 2011), also known as Bear, was an American audio engineer and chemist. He was a key figure in the San Francisco Bay Area hippie movement during the 1960s and played a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Under the professional name, "Bear", he was the soundman for the rock band the Grateful Dead, whom he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Acid Test party. As their sound engineer, Stanley frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board.

Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. By his own account, between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced no less than 500 grams of LSD, amounting to a little more than ten million doses at the time.

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

Stanley was the son of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, a member of the United States Senate after serving as Governor of Kentucky and in the U.S. House of Representatives, campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.

At an early age, he committed himself to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. He studied engineering at the University of Virginia before dropping out. In 1956 when Stanley was 21, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and served for 18 months before being discharged in 1958. Later, inspired by a 1958 performance of the Bolshoi Ballet, he studied ballet in Los Angeles, supporting himself for a time as a professional dancer. In 1963, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved in the psychoactive drug scene. He 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. He beat the charges and successfully sued for the return of his equipment. The police were looking for methamphetamine but found only LSD, which was not illegal at the time.