To_Live_Outside_the_Law-Leaf_Fielding

Hands up who takes LSD?  Well shame on you,  What would your mother say?  Anyway, before people were growing their own mushrooms (a criminally easy thing to do), they had to buy their hallucinogens.  LSD being considered the gold standard.  Very hard to synthesize.



Operation Julie was the name for the UK police's operation to destroy one of the largest LSD manufacture and distribution operations in the world.  A fantastic tale, that if this was America they'd have made the film + Netfilx series of this years ago.



As a result of the seizure it was estimated the price of LSD tabs rose from £1 to £5 each, and that Operation Julie had removed 90% of LSD from the British market. It is thought that LSD produced by the two labs had been exported to over 100 countries. In total, 1.1 million tabs and enough LSD crystal to make a further 6.5 million, were discovered and destroyed.



Leaf Fielding was one of the crew.  He wrote this book after his release.



The write up:



To Live Outside the Law is the first insider account of the LSD conspiracy ended by Operation Julie, Britain's biggest drug bust. The book opens with Leaf Fielding's arrest in a pre-dawn police raid and ends five years later with his release from jail.



The narrative moves back and forth between the harsh world of prison and his previous life - from a childhood at a brutal boarding school onto undergraduate days and his LSD epiphany in the summer of love, 1967.



Acid transformed him in an instant from nerdy scholar to footloose freak. His ten years of adventures in the hippie underground gave the title to this book - a quote from a Bob Dylan song - they also took him across Europe, to the Andes, to Indochina and on to the edge of the known universe. They also led inexorably to his downfall.



Review



'This book is f***ing good....As bold and innovative as its author, To Live Outside the Law takes the reader on a breath-taking guided tour of academic acid absorption, hitch-hiking hells, emotional whirlwinds, years in the slammer, and colossal amounts of dope’-Howard Marks, Mr Nice



‘Fielding has encapsulated an era – the transgression, the crime, the clothes, the music, the makeshift drug labs.’ -Guardian



About the Author



Leaf Fielding: Twenty-eight years after his release from prison Leaf Fielding has been a teacher in Spain and a philanthropist, setting up a home for orphans in Malawi. He now sells organic produce in the region of the south of France where he lives.