Page 2 — THE PORTLAND DAILY SUN, Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Owsley Stanley, artisan of acid, dies
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(NY Times) — Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident in Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland. His car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near Mareeba, a town in Queensland, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Stanley’s wife, Sheilah, was injured in the accident. Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic fi gure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere. Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and fi ner than any other. He was also among the fi rst individuals (in many accounts, the very first) to mass-produce the drug; its resulting wide availability provided the chemical underpinnings of an era of love, music, grooviness and much else. Conservatively tallied, Mr. Stanley’s career output was more than a million doses, in some estimates more than five million. His was the acid behind the Acid Tests conducted by the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the group of psychedelic adherents whose exploits were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The music world immortalized Mr. Stanley in a host of songs, including the Dead’s “Alice D. Millionaire” (a play on a newspaper headline, describing one of his several arrests, that called him an “LSD Millionaire”) and Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.” So widely known was Mr. Stanley that he appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on LSD under the apparently unironic index term “Augustus Owsley Stanley III (American chemist).” The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” In 2007, Mr. Stanley was the subject of a long profi le in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
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Fire at reactor adds to challenges TOKYO (New York Times) — The company that runs the troubled Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan announced Wednesday that a fi re was burning there, just hours after offi cials said fl ames that erupted Tuesday had been doused. Soon after that announcement, a government offi cial at Japan’s nuclear watchdog agency said that fl ames and smoke were no longer visible, but he cautioned that it was unclear if the fi re had died out. The offi cial, Minoru Ogoda, said it was also unclear if this was a new fi re or if the fi re Tuesday had never really gone out. It is too dangerous for workers to get near the reactor, No. 4, to determine exactly what is happening. The reports are a troubling reminder
of the diffi culties the company is having bringing the plant, which has suffered multiple explosions since Saturday, under control. The situation became especially dire on Tuesday, when releases of radiation led the company to pull most of its workers from the plant. The authorities are especially concerned about pools for spent fuel rods at several reactors at the plant, including No. 4, where the pond has lost some of the water needed to keep the fuel rods stable. The rods are still radioactive and potentially as hot and dangerous as the fuel rods inside the reactors. Mr. Ogoda said a proposed plan to use helicopters to put more cold water into the pool was looking unlikely. He said the Tokyo Electric Power Com-
pany, which runs the plant, would probably try to spray water into the reactor building through a gaping hole in the wall blasted open by an earlier explosion. The hole or holes in the roof caused by that blast did not appear big enough to allow amounts of water in, he said. That explosion on Tuesday was caused by hydrogen gas bubbling up from chemical reactions set off by the fuel rods in the pool, Japanese offi cials said. Inspectors from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they had been told that what was burning was lubricating oil from machinery near the pool. Concern remained high about the storage pools at that reactor and at two other reactors, Nos. 5 and 6.
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Man dies in Portland apartment house fire
Bill weakening seat belt law advances in legislature
Authorities are investigating a fatal fi re yesterday morning at a multi-unit apartment house in the city’s Parkside neighborhood that killed a 43-year-old man. Steve McCausland, a state police spokesman, said investigators believe the victim’s clothes caught on fire. The fire reported started at around 8 a.m. yesterday, at 65 Grant Street, Portland police said in a news release. Paramedics and firefi ghters entered the building and found a male victim with serious injuries in apartment 6. He was transported to Maine Medical Center, but died soon afterward. Police have declined to identify the victim until they can consult with the state Medical Examiner’s Offi ce. Damage to the apartment building, and to apartment 6, where the fi re started, is said to be minimal.
Maine, a job he held for 20 years. Recently, he accepted an administrative position at a school in the California State University system. “I love serving in the Legislature, helping the people in my district solve problems and make Maine a better place,” Bliss said in a statement. “However, after 16 months of unemployment, my family and I needed to make some tough decisions and that included accepting work out of state.” Bliss has served in the Legislature for 11 years. He is currently serving his second term in the Maine State Senate, representing South Portland, Cape Elizabeth, and part of Scarborough. Prior to that, he served eight years in the Maine House. Democrats lost the majority in the state Senate in November’s election. They currently have 15 members, to 20 Republicans and 1 Independent. Bliss’ last day in the Maine State Senate is April 15. Under state law, Gov. Paul LePage will set the date for a special election to fi ll the seat sometime after Bliss’ last day.
Maine state senator to resign, move to Calif. for new job
State drug enforcement agents raid suspected meth lab
More layoffs announced for Bath Iron Works
SOUTH PORTLAND — State Sen. Larry Bliss, D., South Portland, announced yesterday he had accepted a new job in California, and would be resigning his seat in the Legislature next month. Bliss’ seat will be fi lled with a special election. Bliss was laid off 16 months ago from his position as director of the Career Center at the UniBliss versity of Southern
LEWISTON — Maine Drug Enforcement Agents and Lewiston police offi cers raided a suspected methamphetamine lab this week at 41 River Street. State police spokesman Steve McCausland said Lewiston police secured the apartment Monday night, while a meth lab team from MDEA searched the apartment Tuesday morning. Methamphetamine is a highly-addictive drug concocted from a mixture of chemicals. McCausland said offi cials believe the apartment was used to make the drug “in the recent past.” As such, Drug agents will wear protective suits and breathing masks to search the apartment, he said. There was no immediate word on what was found in the apartment.
Bath Iron Works has announced plans to lay off 84 employees by the end of March, according to the Portland Press Herald. A company spokesperson told the paper 10 supervisors and 74 other workers, including electricians, outside machinists, pipe coverers and insulators, will be let go effective March 25. BIW has laid-off 260 employees this year, and the spokesperson, Jim DeMartini, told the paper more layoffs are possible as “workfl ow ebbs and fl ows.” DeMartini told the Press Herald the cuts are the result of declining production of DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a ship BIW builds under contracts with the U.S. Navy.
A bill that would prevent police in Maine from stopping drivers who aren’t wearing seat belts advanced in the state Senate today by a 18-17 vote. However, the bill still faces another senate test before it moves on to the Maine House, according to published reports. Current state law requites motorists to wear their seat belts, or face fi nes ranging from $50 to $125, according to the Associated Press. Under the proposal, which was sponsored by state Sen. Ron Collins, R-Wells, seatbelt violations could only be issued if a driver was stopped for another infraction, the wire service is reporting. Wells is quoted in the Portland Press Herald as saying he typically wears a seat belt, but supported the bill because he is a “libertarian at heart.” Opponents say the measure sends a bad message to teens and would cost the state up to $1.2 million over the next two years, the paper said.