The Psychedelic 'Drugs Wizard' Who Ran One of England's Biggest LSD Labs
By Michael Allen Oct 29 2014
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Casey making 2C-B in 2001 in the back of a school bus he lived in for seven years. All photos courtesy of Casey William Hardison
In the grand scheme of things, Casey William Hardison didn’t have the worst time in prison. “LSD, 2C-B, DMT, pharmahuasca, research chemicals, kratom, cannabis, home-brewed alcohol—I did a whole bunch of shit in there,” he says. “Drugs are more available in prison than they would be for the common man trying to find them on the street. And the British prison system is fairly gentle—it’s pretty damn civilized.”
Casey, a 43-year-old American, was released in May of 2013 after spending nine years in as many British jails. Originally sentenced to 20 years for
running a psychedelic drug lab in Ovingdean—an English village near Brighton full of cottages, sheep, and senior citizens—he’s now campaigning for reform of the Misuse of Drugs Act. But it’s been a long process for the man dubbed a “drugs wizard” by the UK press to get to where he is today.
Born in Washington state in the summer of 1971, Casey began wrestling his “psycho-spiritual” demons at an early age—as in the kind of age where your mom’s still deciding what shoes you wear to school. “Alcohol and cannabis were basically the only drugs I could use at that time,” he tells me over the phone from his home in Victor, Idaho. “I first smoked cannabis when I was about five, when my brother got me high by shotgun. I fucking loved it in my early childhood.”
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As Casey soon found out, problems can arise when you use weed and booze to battle whatever demons are marauding around your mind—the main issue being that both substances usually end up weaving their way into every other facet of your life. That, of course, is not exactly an ideal situation for anyone to find themselves in, let alone a teenager in the throes of puberty. So in 1985, at the age of 14, Casey declared himself an alcoholic and signed up to both Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
After “delving headlong” into AA’s 12-step program, he made what he describes as his "full recovery" during Halloween of 1993 while drinking spiced wine (with the alcohol removed) as part of a ritual ceremony.
“As we journeyed through the ritual, I pondered the rigid way in which I’d insisted on having the alcohol removed from my ‘sacrament,’” he says. “I’d recalled seeing a heart-rate monitor flat-line. Life had pulse—it had cycles—and a flat-line meant only one thing: death. In a flash, I realized the most important insight: Life is transformation. Life is a cycle of death and rebirth, renewing itself each day.”
It was soon after this that Casey took LSD for the first time. His friend John, whom he’d met at an AA meeting in Yosemite Valley, California, came to visit him in Idaho. On a cold night in December, they went to Blockbuster and rented a VHS copy of Stephen Hawking’s
The Making of ‘A Brief History of Time.'
Casey at the Crowley Hot Springs, California, with John (seated), circa 1992
As the video began to play, John mentioned he had some liquid LSD on him, made by a “mad, old-school chemist” called “the Lorax."
“I knew the Lorax, and I trusted and respected him,” says Casey. “I’d also heard a few stories of people having spiritual adventures with LSD, not least from the Deadheads I’d met on a Grateful Dead tour. I also knew that Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA,
had consumed LSD with spiritual intent.”
Casey took 250 micrograms of acid and, within the hour, was “losing the plot a little.” Which is understandable, considering 250 micrograms is the equivalent of six to seven hits of the standard street acid you’d get today.
“I covered myself in gravel while I was tripping my brains out and felt one with all there is, and with nature,” he recalls. “My mind just got still, yet exceptionally fast at the same time.”
At around 3 AM, the bells of the local community college began to ring and Casey had a revelation that he should go back to school. “At that point, I’d dropped out of high school and was on another path, but then I went to North Idaho college for nearly three years and got a natural science degree, before going to the University of Idaho to do biochemistry and botany degrees. That’s the great thing about LSD—a lot of people have trips and have these insights, but then attempt to forget or run away from them. But if you translate them into action and do something about it, you can have a greater life.”
