To Live Outside the Law: Caught by Operation Julie, Britain's Biggest Drugs Bust [Paperback]

This memoir tells the amazing story of a young man scarred and toughened by his childhood experiences of boarding school and harsh family circumstances who discovers unshackled life through LSD. The author starts turning on everyone he can to the light he has seen, travels the world, starts a successful whole food business and plays a vital role in what was possibly the world's largest recreational LSD manufacturer. Arrested in a massive and, at the time, world famous police crackdown known as Operation Julie, Leaf Fielding is returned to institutionalised life where he not only survives but learns how to kick ass.

The book is very well crafted and grabs the reader from the first page. The author switches back and forth between events after his arrest and his life leading up to that point. This device creates the tension and anticipation which makes it a racy page-turner.

On the other hand the book is laced with sparkling phrases and tellingly original ways of stating things which gives it a literary quality rarely found in works of this genre. Three examples that struck me as I read them and have stuck in my mind the way good movie dialogue lingers on long after watching a film: "my tongue was as big as my mouth and too big for its boots.", "I took off before the plane did." and "Not a murderer, just a leaf-mould thief."

Though the time switching is fairly linear for the most part, Fielding shows his command of the technique when he slowly reveals the details of a tragic incident involving his mother. We know something happened and see the impact this has had on the young boy and only then do we learn about the full horror of the event.

The author does a very good job of describing the effects of LSD. It is notoriously difficult to describe hallucinatory drug experiences without them sounding hopelessly banal or so relentlessly over the top that the reader ends up unable to keep up. But more than just describing the actual effects of LSD, Fielding manages to accurately position his contact with acid within the framework of his whole life and his psyche. At one point the author reflects on the limits of acid in changing the world and does so in a way that is neither preachy nor a renunciation of his past beliefs.

Fielding's account of prison life is refreshing in that it does not over emphasise its grimness. The author very subtly allows us to gradually grasp the full horror of what five years being locked up does to a young person who loves nothing more than freedom and "that fine stretchy feeling" that life is good.

For someone who has led a remarkable life this memoir is devoid of any bombast and the subject's ego is never in one's face. The work is even tempered and victorious even when self-effacing. A striking example of this is when Fielding writes:
"There's something in my essentially cowardly frame which won't allow me to be ruled by my fears."

At one point the author interrupts his story in a cursive paragraph which ends:
"I can hardly believe how consistently, stupidly reckless I was in my youth. And yet, at the time, I always felt I knew what I was doing..."

So many memoirs of ex-cons are quietly obsessed with regret and celebrates the fact that the writer eventually realised the error of their ways and is now happily leading a straighter life, often as poacher turned gamekeeper. Happily not this one. Though the author's increasing maturity is evident throughout the work he never betrays his earlier self. He regrets nothing and rightly so. To Live Outside the Law is a tale of triumph over adversity and growth though experience. It reads like an airport novel but provides the sustenance of a bildungsroman.

... not a lot I can add to the 5* review here! Although I'm deducting a star because the publishers have been too mean to include any photographs or an index.

I've always been interested in the Operation Julie story, having known a couple of the people involved, & the '70s LSD scene in general. It's good to read an account of what happened that isn't written from the point of view of describing a triumphant & faultless investigation which saved society from being swept away by a psychedelic tsunami (as in Dick Lee's book). It wasn't quite like that, as this book shows. It certainly makes one wonder what would happen if the authorities were to approach the apparently invincible heroin & cocaine trades with the same vigour & resources as were devoted to the hippies & idealists of the Julie bust.

It's a very well-written book too. Leaf Fielding is very good at describing people & places, & I certainly found the book "un-put-down-able." I picked it up to have a flick through & was soon totally immersed in his description of a 1950's childhood & upbringing which were totally recognisable to me. Similarly, the sections describing his teenage wanderings around Europe, & the adventures he fell into with the folk he met along the way will be very evocative to anyone who's followed that trail. In the same way, the prison descriptions are very straightforward & honest, without any self-pity or sensationalism. In the end I barely put the book down until I'd finished it some 24 hours later.

Anyone hoping for tantalising post-Julie gossip will be disappointed tho - another book I read recently made much of various hints about the possible whereabouts of ancient caches of acid & money, & who might be in the know - but throughout the book Leaf avoids speculation & simply talks about the actual parts he was involved in & knows about. He does however make some very good points - if he & his associates had made the millions of trips alleged by the prosecution, where were they? Same thing with the money - sure, finding a woodland stash of 100,000 microdots is a significant haul, but nowhere near the amounts that were invoked by the police, prosecution & subservient media. Or again as Leaf says, if LSD was such a dangerous & destructive substance, & he'd been involved in propagating it nation-wide, where was the wave of acid-casualties that should be swamping the health services as a result?

This is a much better book that I'd expected. It's a fascinating story, & Leaf Fielding shows an enormous amount of perception, honesty & awareness in his writing. There are times when his self-belief wavers, like when his marriage is destroyed & he's left wondering how on earth he'd let his life get to the situation he was in. It's interesting to see how his passionate youthful idealism - to spread the word that LSD is a tool which will heal & free the user, so if enough people are taking it, society could be changed permanently for the better (see also Aldous Huxley's "Island") - gradually changes as he recognises that LSD isn't for everyone & you can't put people where they aren't ready to be, however right you might think you are. The author is above any tub-thumping politics or manifestoes, but anyone reading this book will surely wonder why the "consenting adults" principle can't be extended to some of the areas of drug use discussed in this book.

This is a book of many facets: part personal memoir of the '60s-'70s psychedelic scene, part `true crime'-style insider account of the Operation Julie escapade, subsequent bust and jail time, and also a larger meditation on the cultural and spiritual impact on humanity of that most potent and exotic of illegal substances--LSD.

It is tightly and economically written, telling us enough but without going into burgeoning detail, so that a large swathe of time is covered efficiently in its near 300 pages. The structure takes the time-honoured form of two interwoven strands, the first starting with the Julie bust and continuing on through the legal proceeding and imprisonment, and the second dealing with Leaf's past life up to the bust. It works very well, with the unrelenting downbeat dourness of the former strand contrasting strikingly with the colour of the latter; and the two synergise together beautifully to answer the book's central question, poised on its cover: How did I get into this mess?

The answer is complicated, but the honest and candid writing, coupled with the willingness to reveal intimate details, build into a lucid and fascinating portrait of a talented individual whose youthful waywardness and `rebellion' ultimately stretched too far for his own good. The roots, as ever, lie in childhood, and Leaf's, though middle class and not `deprived' in the usual sense, had huge shortcomings. From the age of seven onwards, with an army officer father often serving overseas and no mother, Leaf had virtually no proper family life and was subject to the institutionalised sadism of boarding school, where he didn't fit in. What with having to fight the school bully to prove himself, enduring vicious canings from the headmaster and slipperings from prefects for the most trivial of `offences', he became radicalised early. Through George Orwell he got interested in the Spanish Civil War and developed an anti-fascist stance that both alienated him at school but secured him a place at Reading University.

By now it was 1966, the dawn of the hippy era, and in more congenial surroundings, Leaf made new friends and had an early taste of acid, which proved a highly positive life-changing experience. In the trip account, he doesn't indulge in protracted descriptions of way-out visuals, but instead concentrates on the sense of existential transformation: `I was a human archetype, making every journey of exploration that every man has ever made for as long as we've been walking the earth. I watched myself moving forward, assessing danger, looking for opportunity, alert to the possibility of treasure. With an instant change of perspective, I saw myself leaning out of my narrow window of consciousness and scanning the wide horizons, observing the very processes of existence unfolding.'

Interestingly there was also a spontaneous psychotherapeutic element to this first trip, with Leaf able to plumb some of the painful issues of his childhood and reach a catharsis. Now fired with purpose and the belief that acid could change humanity, Leaf and his friend Jack became proselytisers, turning on as many people as were willing and going full swing into the '67 Summer of Love. Leaf didn't even bother to turn up for his exams, rationalising that `dropping out' was the higher and nobler thing to do. Yet interestingly the text invites us to read between the lines and perhaps conclude that the decision had as much to do with economics as idealism, and the act was as much a rebellion against an unsatisfactory upbringing as a `political' act against `society'. Leaf's father's upright military bearing and his insistence on conducting himself according to a rigid set of rules led to considerable pusillanimity in his role as a parent. One example of this was his refusal to pay his parental contribution towards Leaf's student grant, making university life far less tenable than it might have been. Ironically in those days students from low-income backgrounds were often better off, as they received the full grant automatically and were free from the scourge of parental tyranny. Poverty stricken, Leaf at first had to resort to gambling to make ends meet, and later, as his immersement in the growing alternative society became more complete, he financed himself through drug dealing and trafficking.

With picaresque tales of hitchhiking, partying and dope running in Europe, Turkey, Morocco and Thailand, To Live Outside the Law starts to resemble Howard Marks' Mr Nice in giving an uplifting sense of the wide-open frontiers of the dope trade in those earlier halcyon days. Like Howard, Leaf rose steadily through the ranks of the trafficking `industry' to a position of importance, and similarly eschewed dealing in `hard' drugs, staying with the more ethical psychedelically oriented fare. Back in England, he became a key member of the outfit that manufactured and supplied millions of doses of acid in the '70s--including my own first trip--leading eventually to the Julie debacle: that most horrendous collision of hippy idealism and law enforcement overkill. By that time Leaf had settled down, was married and involved in a successful wholefoods business. His view of acid had become somewhat tempered, and he no longer retained the youthful, Learyesque belief that it could transform the world:

`...taking a drug that expands your consciousness doesn't, in itself, change your life. You come back to your everyday reality... A glimpse of heaven can be inspiring, but when it contrasts so strongly with your life it can also be dispiriting. And it's no good taking more mind-expanding stuff to lift you above the fray, because acid operates on the law of diminishing marginal utility: the more you take, the less it does.'

And if the rose tint had faded somewhat from the vision, the reality of Leaf's role as the link man between manufacturers and dealers, carrying around 50 or 100,000 tabs at a time, was hardly much fun either, producing jitters, paranoia and eerie precognitive nightmares. The actual bust and the static horror of living through interrogation, remand, trial and a lengthy stretch inside are conveyed with a sobering immediacy, stripped of any false bravado or the kind of defiance a real criminal might display. As Leaf tells it, there was also a surreal element to the treatment the gang received, with Sweeney-style cops with guns escorting them whenever they were at large and rooftop marksmen at the court proceedings. `Who did they think was going to come and save me--the acid army?'

Tellingly Leaf quotes Evelyn Waugh, who said, `Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.' And the two have striking similarities--a life of day-by-day survival, flying by the seat of one's pants, `putting up with unpleasant company and disagreeable surroundings.' Having to sew mailbags whilst listening to the continual dirge of `Mull of Kintyre' is about as bad as it gets! In a conversation with the acid chemist Richard Kemp, both men agreed that their sense of being on a mission had done them a fat lot of good from the perspective of inside prison walls.

Overall the account comes over as an especially extreme version of the crash of the hippy dream; yet the indomitability of Leaf's spirit and the survival of his core beliefs and attitudes is inspiring indeed. What makes To Live Outside the Law an excellent work is the way Leaf succeeds in conveying his shifting points of view in a kind of `Seven Ages of an Acid Idealist' fashion, so that we get the frank and honest fruits of his experience and not some loaded piece of propaganda or regilded tale of romanticised outlawhood. It is a great read--an entertaining peculiarly British nostalgia-trip page-turner and an invaluable addition to the canon of acid literature.