David Black
1 June 2022
The summer of 2022 is seeing an unexpected revival of interest in the so-called Microdot Gang (AKA the LSD Underground) of the 1970s who were busted in Operation Julie.
On 25 March 1977, the Operation Julie police squad carried out the ‘biggest drugs bust in British history’, in which 130 people were arrested at 87 houses in various part of the UK. At the resulting trial at Bristol Crown Court the following year, 29 of the principlal defendants were handed down prison sentences totalling 170 years.
To begin with a brief ‘history of the history’, immediately after the trial, several of the detectives resigned; and two of them landed lucrative book deals with Fleet Street ghost writers. Operational Commander, Inspector Dick Lee (with Colin Pratt of the Daily Mail), published Operation Julie, How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World’s Greatest Drugs Gang. This was adapted for a major ITV drama series in 1983. A paperback by Martyn Pritchard (and Ed Laxton of the Daily Mirror), entitled Busted! The sensational life-story of an undercover hippie cop, was avidly read by every dope-dealer in Britain as a precautionary tale. On the ‘other’ side, in 2012, Leaf Fielding, who served an 8 years prison sentence, published To Live Outside the Law: Caught by Operation Julie, Britain’s Biggest Drugs Bust.
In 2017, forty years after the Julie busts, various media outlets, including the Guardian and the BBC, reported that Dyfed-Powys police had increased patrols to watch out for ‘treasure seekers’ who might be looking for a large stash of LSD still buried in woodlands. The story originated in the just-published memoirs of Stephen Bentley, another former Julie undercover detective, who had emigrated to the Philippines and turned his talents to writing detective novels.The Acid Stash in the Woods story must have helped to sell Bentley’s book, Undercover: Operation Julie – The Inside Story. It also raised suspicions at the time (well, mine at least) that the Welsh tourist board, VisitWales. was promoting a legend of a Hippie Holy Grail for adventurous tourists.
2022 isn’t an anniversary year for Operation Julie (the fiftieth is five years away), but there seems to be a buzz in the air, as indicated by the following events:
- After Richard Kemp and his partner, Christine Bott, were released from prison in 1980s, nothing was heard from either of them. Christine Bott died in 2007. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, The Untold Story of Christine Bott, has appeared. This autobiographical memoir of Bott’s “acid adventure” has been self-published by her close friend, Catherine Hayes. Catherine, who contributed an introduction to the book, has received a glowing endorsement from Richard Kemp. Breaking his 40-year silence, Kemp writes: “Chris clearly put a huge effort at the end of her life to write this book, which is excellently written, I have to say. It’s a shame it’s been seen by so few people, and I appreciate the effort you have gone to to get her story told.” Kemp, who is now 79 years-old, is keeping his current whereabouts secret. He has no wish to be ‘found’ by the TV documentary makers who have been seeking him.
- On 19 May Bentley was interviewed by Jane Garvey on BBC Radio 4’s series Life Changing, about his undercover assignment in Wales, which involved spying on acid distributor, Alston Hughes (AKA ‘Smiles’),.
- Alston Hughes is currently working on his own memoirs with Andy Roberts, Britain’s leading authority on psychedelic history. Hughes’ interpretation of events will doubtless differ from Bentley’s. Julie buffs are looking forward to a literary bunfight between the two.
- History Press, a major British publishing house, is launching James Wyllie’s The Microdot Gang: The Rise and Fall of the LSD Network That Turned On the World.
- Aberystwyth Arts Centre is hosting a production by Theatr na nÓg of Operation Julie, a rock opera, which premiers on 31 July. The publicity promises “one of the most jaw-dropping true stories ever to come out of Wales… in which Breaking Bad collides with The Good Life in a psychedelic true story from the hillsides…”
- Summer 2022 also sees publication of a new paperback by David Black, entitled LSD UNDERGROUND: Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love; and a second edition of his previous book, Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD.
One of the mysteries relating to Operation Julie is how the underground labs managed to churn out tens of millions of high-quality LSD tabs for nearly nine years without the police being able to catch them. Certainly the corruption and incompetence of the London Metropolitan Police and its computerised Drugs Intelligence Unit were factors, as well as (to some extent) the dark doings of the CIA. But most importantly, the police, like the British establishment, had little idea of what they were up against. As the Theatr na nÓg publicity says of the “vast LSD co-operative”: “Its leading members included doctors, scientists and university graduates – motivated, they insisted, by an evangelical drive to transform human consciousness itself.”
Currently there is much scrutiny of events in British history, which on closer inspection seem neither happy nor glorious (slavery, institutional racism, police corruption; you name it). It now seems timely to throw the legacy of the psychedelic 1960s and ‘70s into the controversy. At the time of the trial in 1978, there were a few voices of dissent in the mainstream media. One of them, ‘Dick Tracy’ (John May) in the New Musical Express (NME) commented:
“It has been standard practice in the British and American media for many years now to distort the true nature of the drug LSD. Medical research into the subject has been officially frowned on, but nevertheless there is a considerable body of evidence available, enough to refute most of the basic untruths. Needless to say, medical facts were ignored in favour of selling newspapers. Operation Julie provided the press with a field day, allowing them to dust off all the old cliches and trot them out into print.”
The article was well-placed, in that the NME at the time was the music weekly most favoured by punk rockers, many of whom tended to hold ‘old hippies’ (and their music) in contempt.
In considering the impact LSD had on the ‘culture’, we may quote David Solomon, the American author and 1950s Beat luminary, who recruited Richard Kemp into his psychedelic chemistry conspiracy in 1968. Remanded in Horfield prison before the trial, Solomon wrote to his friend Lee Harris, editor of Home Grown magazine, suggesting that it was time for the LSD counterculture to treat the Julie defendants as political prisoners facing a show trial:
“It seems morally unthinkable that famous pop artists and groups—who owe much to Alice– would not cough up. Everyone from Bob Dylan to the Stones, Lennon, McCartney et alia infinitum should be asked for sizeable contributions to help pay for our immense legal bill and keep our families fed abd housed.”
The solidarity was not forthcoming. Those who owed so much to ‘Alice’ [LSD] were lauded with acclaim, fame and fortune; those who provided it were landed with prison, poverty and notoriety. If anything Solomon was understating his case. The British Acid Underground was characterised by talent, idealism and courage, as well as greed, cynicism and treachery. The same thing could be said, however, of the entire acid-fuelled sub-culture of the 1960s and ‘70s that impacted on the social totality; not just in music, but also in the visual arts, literature, religion, philosophy, and the sciences – and did so for the better.
Whilst on remand in Her Majesty’s Prison Bristol, in 1977, Leaf Fielding, LSD distribution manager, met LSD chemist, Richard Kemp:
“Richard was a man after my own heart. We talked long and excitedly in one-hour bursts. He too had wanted to turn the world on and he’d gone a long way towards achieving his aim by producing kilos of acid, enough for tens of millions of trips…
‘And look where our idealism got us.’
His despondently waving arm took in the prison walls, D wing and the punishment block.
‘Well we’re not the first people to be persecuted for what we believe in,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t suppose for a moment we’ll be the last. We’ll be exonerated in the future, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe. But that doesn’t help us now.’”
It didn’t then. Perhaps now it should.
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(It was all bollocks, see LSD Underground)
