The LSD water supply caper made us so excited that every time we tried to hold a meeting to plan it we became so frenzied that the meeting fell apart with us rolling on the floor screaming, drooling, and shooting dope. Only thru sedatives and by contemplating pictures of plane crashes were the Yippies able to calm themselves down enough to scheme out this great project. During the summer of 1968, Augustus Owsley consumed much of his personal dope fortune in the preparation of LSD for the Chicago water supply. Owsley has always thrilled the Council of Eye Forms by his dedicated chemistry. This great man, scheduled to head the Ministry of Karma in the forthcoming Aeon of Yippie, spent eight months cooking up acid until he had the four swimming pools at his Ozark estate in Cabool, Missouri, completely filled with 800 dodecatillion doses of LSD, bubbling in hostility, ready for the reservoirs. 8:00 A.M. Tuesday, August 27, the day before the nomination, was chosen as the proper moment for the dope dump so that a bit of our sacrament might be shared by all the deliberating Americans preparing to select the Democratic candidate for president. I must admit that the Chicago Seed people were extremely hesitant to get involved in the acid caper. They gave the usual argument they gave whenever the Yippies sneak-zapped a cub scout pack, upper-room class, or DeMolay chapter with the sacrament. That did not prevent Abe Peck, the editor of the Chicago Seed, his voice trembling with need, from begging that we dump the acid in a waterproof cellar under his apartment building. “We’ll get rid of it later, heh heh ehe ha haw! hawrl! howrawhl!! hlwrahsh!! he said, being led away by his bodyguards. We decided to give them one hundred gallons which they put to good use. It was thrilling to see the Seed staff charge the Hilton thru teargas, laughing uncontrollably, while glub glubbing from their canteens full of hallucination. We rented five milktank trucks from a Muncie, Indiana, dairyman (a product of dope and the Farmer-Labor party–chortle chortle–commies and Yippies are everywhere) to haul in the acid. We managed to get the trucks hidden in a Chicago warehouse owned by a babyfood manufacturer, but the National Guard was guarding all possible entrances to the water plants and reservoirs. Our plans were all over the newspapers and we became so panicky that we almost charged the convention building with our convoy of dope. Frankly, I was in favor of this. We would crash the dope-trucks into the Amphitheater, ax holes in the tanks and slosh the LSD on all the reporters, soldiers, cops, and conventioneers. There was an hysterical fifteen minute genital-fondle and hashish break after we considered this proposal. Praise Ra that we decided against it. After the break, Abbie laughingly (I hope) proposed that we get all the girls at the weekend rock shows at the Electric Theater to take a mouthful of acid and try to slip past the guards at the reservoirs and spit it into the water. To solve the matter, Jerry got on the phone and ran the data thru the computer. The reply was negative on the LSD caper. There was too great a danger that some of us would get snuffed. What actually happened is that we poured it into the tanks used to clean the meat coming out of the Chicago slaughter plants. Hope you had a happy trip at Tad’s steak house. As it was, the LSD water supply cost us four good men, one eager fucker of step-aunts who chugalugged two quarts directly from the spigot of the tank-truck, and three who were stomped off by the Mafia, who wanted the acid for their Norwegian market.
Ed Sanders, Shards of God: a novel of the Yippies: The National Defense Planning Council Documents in American Civilization: The LSD Water Supply Caper–an example of left wing terrorism in the United States of America (1970)
