Operation Julie: The World's Greatest LSD Bust [Paperback]

Despite a couple of glaring bloopers, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gleaning a few more fact bites from the case, but this story is still begging for another author. In fact, Matthew Rhys bought the film rights to the book in 2010 and Leaf Fielding (one of the dealers jailed as a result of Julie) is due to release his book detailing the story. Lyn Ebenezer writes a straight forward, informative and interesting report of the events surrounding Operation Julie and the main players, although I sometimes found it difficult to get my head around the stream of names, dates and faces involved.

The world needs more intuitive and intelligent ecologists and conservationists such as Richard Kemp and his 53 page testimony written in the late 70's serves as a forewarning to the global problems we face today. Kemp manufactured LSD on ideological grounds...he believed that the more people turned on, the greater the chance of saving our doomed planet! Clinical research into LSD is making a comeback. MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Pychedelic Studies) is currently designing and funding clinical trials intended to develop psilocybin and LSD into prescription medicines for treating end-of-life anxiety, amongst other trials. Hark back to Aldous Huxley's last trip and here you have truth and insight ringing back through the ages.

After reading the book I recommend watching the operation Julie tv documentary (which can be found on youtube) where Lyn Ebenezer makes frequent appearances and shares his often amusing tales from the high times. Another essential companion to this book is Andy Robert's excellent 'Albion Dreaming - A popular History of LSD in Britain'.

This is a greatly expanded version of Lyn's Welsh language only book on the same topic. Somewhat bizarrely, it is the first English language book on Operation Julie to be written by a civilian (notwithstanding my own chapter on the case in Albion Dreaming). Of the other contenders, Dick Lee's Operation Julie was a workman like account from the police perspective but heavily biased toward the forces of lawn order, and the information about the case in Pritchard and Laxton's Busted! is shot through with breathless tabloid prose and anti hippie sentiment of the worse kind.
Lyn Ebenezer's Operation Julie is quite the opposite of the above. With an easy but insightful writing style and hitherto unseen photographs Lyn guides you through the intricacies of the case. Although there were two chemists involved in the Operation Julie events, Richard Kemp (Wales) and Andy Munro (London), Lyn concentrates primarily on the Welsh angle, and thus Kemp's role, but is no worse for doing so. Lyn's job as a journalist who covered the case, along with his detailed geographical and social knowledge of the area, as well as his connections with people who knew some of the main players ideally places him to tell the story of the welsh connection.
And what a story. Part international criminal master plan, part hippie ideological adventure and in some cases, part farce. Rural Wales was a hotbed of hippie activity in the early 70s and Lyn's tales of bags of cash being exchanged for bags of acid in out of the way farmers' pubs has an element of Carry on Tripping about it. Lyn makes it clear that the acid makers and their ilk were accepted into the local community and well liked - hardly the chisel faced villainous exploiters of youth that the judiciary and media would soon paint them. And there's the rub. The Operation Julie chemists, distributors, dealers and the scene that surrounded them were, for the most part, well-educated decent people. Sure, most of them made a lot of money from producing and distributing the finest LSD the world has known. But surely, that's just capitalism with a Smile? It wasn't the local farmers and villagers who feared what the Julie crew were up to, it was straight-laced middle England who could not- would not- countenance its sons and daughters having their minds expanded and not becoming a child-breeding, order-obeying, production unit for the consumerist state.
Our pampered lives belie the fact that there appears to be an unspoken establishment `conspiracy' to maintain order and control at all costs. The burgeoning free festival scene and `back to the land' movement in the UK during the 70s was fuelled by and often paid for by LSD, and new ways of living and being born of the LSD experience were developing. This couldn't be allowed to happen and so millions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of man hours was invested to smashing this perceived threat to society.
The authorities need not have worried though. As Lyn points out, there was no real counter culture response to the Operation Julie busts. Acid was freely available from elsewhere and it took a while for the stocks of Operation Julie acid already in circulation to be depleted (Kemp's acid still turns up in busts apparently-vintage acid, wow!). In short, the people who had so much to thank Kemp and Munro for exhibited the same selfish traits as the society they wished to change.
But despite the time, effort and money invested in shutting down the LSD labs, what the authorities failed to realise is that the true LSD revolution is in the head and Kemp and Munro's acid had caused the lives of thousands to change tremendously. Those people are out there, still spreading the acid vision in their own way, still using what they learned to change and fighting a guerrilla against the forces of grey conformity and `straight' society. True, there have been some acid casualties- but what war doesn't have?
There are still many loose ends to be tied up, at which Lyn hints but doesn't have the space to explore. Was Ronald Stark really an agent working for a security service, or just a clever manipulator? How deep were the links to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love? Which of the Julie team betrayed Kemp and revealed the location of 1.3 kg of crystal acid under Kemp's kitchen floor (I asked Mark Tcharney, who might have known, about this and he refused to comment)? What is the Princess Margaret connection of which we dare not speak for fear of being sued by Roddy Llewelyn? Where did the `missing' money and acid go? The list goes on, and is not clarified by the passage of time.
I did find one error though- Lyn states that LSD did not become illegal in the UK until 1974 (p.34). This most definitely not the case, LSD was outlawed in September 1966, a month before its banning in the USA. However, this error does not in any way detract from the quality of Lyn's research.
The definitive book unravelling Operation Julie has yet to be written. Much of the information is out there in media and official sources (courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act). But what is really needed for such a book to be written is for one or more of the principals to come forward and talk about the case so an informed story can be told from their angle as well as that of the police.
In the meantime, Lyn Ebenezer has done an excellent and well balanced job in sifting the known facts about what it surely one of the pivotal cultural events of the late 2oth century. Whether or not you were fortunate enough to have taken any of Kemp and Munro's acid- and I was lucky to have done so- Operation Julie is a well researched and though provoking book that deserves to be read by anyone who has got as far as the end of this review! Really, it's good.

Iv always wanted a copy of this book,because the story took place in a place where me and my family have been going for at least 35 years, all our lads were more or less bought up on a farm in Llanddewi Brefi, although we wernt awere of at that time, what exactly went on there. (in fact i think it was befor we started going there). But the farmer and the loacals still talk about it all, and its nice to read about it. there have been a couple of books written about it i belive, so we know where a lot of the place,s are thats in the book..