This Chemist Made 200KG of MDA a WEEK

A never before told tale of multi-ton MDA synthesis in the 1980s. Guided by a mysterious Monsanto chemist gone rogue, our interviewee embarked on a quest to synthesize vast quantities of MDA.

Subjects discussed include: Differential MDA enantiomer psychopharmacology, chocolate LSD cat food, and Raney nickel.

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Transcript

00;00;00;01 - 00;00;35;05
Hamilton
This is an interview that I have been very excited to release. Is this sort of a prime example? I think of what interesting stories can emerge from the smallest interaction. This was somebody who actually wrote a comment on a YouTube video that I released saying something about having synthesized large quantities of MDA using Rainie Nicole. And it was a weird enough reference that I thought I should reach out to that guy and see what's going on with him and if he is legit.

00;00;35;19 - 00;00;59;18
Hamilton
And we started talking on the phone and it was my impression that not only was he legit, he had a completely extraordinary story that illuminated aspects of the history of MDMA and MDMA, as well as the history of clandestine chemistry that I was previously unaware of. So this is a great example of where a little bit of curiosity can lead you.

00;00;59;21 - 00;01;31;18
Hamilton
I often see that when I release a video, there's discussion about whether or not the person is real. For example, in the interview with Mike Roberts, there is a comment from someone saying, Well, wait a second, this guy says that he's deaf, yet he mentions listening to music. I think he's a liar. Right. And of course, the reality is that he is deaf in the sense that he is hearing impaired, but not death in the sense that he is absolutely without auditory perception of any kind of simple explanation there.

00;01;33;04 - 00;01;59;15
Hamilton
And of course, a similar question emerged when I was talking to this gentleman whose story is also extraordinary. Is this true? Is this bullshit? How can I tell the difference? Well, first of all, this is someone who very modestly, is the first to acknowledge that he is not a trained chemist. In fact, throughout the interview, he points out that he doesn't consider himself a chemist at all.

00;01;59;23 - 00;02;41;07
Hamilton
And yet he is a non chemist who has a pretty strong understanding of the synthesis of psychoactive drugs. And for anybody listening to this who does understand the chemistry, they will quickly realize that virtually everything he says makes synthetic sense. He was making MDMA via a summarization of saffron to ISO several. They would then oxidize the saffron to MDP to P and conduct a reductive emanation using ammonium acetate as the nitrogen source and high pressure catalytic hydrogenation of the Imean, fascinating stuff.

00;02;41;15 - 00;03;08;25
Hamilton
The only aspect of the synthesis that is truly unusual is his claim that they were oxidizing the ISO sample using a combination of nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. For those of you that are familiar with clandestine MDMA synthesis or MDR synthesis for that matter, you might know that it's common to use pur acids as oxidizing agents. The most common is performing acid.

00;03;08;26 - 00;03;43;20
Hamilton
This is what is demonstrated in the Steve Gill episode of Pharmacopeia. People also use per acetic acid, although it's slower, as this gentleman points out in the interview. I have never heard of anybody using nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide. It seems like it could hypothetically work. You might produce some kind of hydroxy nitrate species, basically that per acid equivalent of nitric acid, and maybe that could act as an oxidizing agent.

00;03;43;29 - 00;04;09;20
Hamilton
I actually wanted to quickly test this just to see if it worked at all before releasing the podcast, but I haven't had the opportunity to do it. So if anybody has thoughts on the viability of a nitric acid, hydrogen peroxide, oxidation of a fennel propane, please let me know. It should go without saying that I don't encourage you to attempt something like that if you don't know what you're doing.

00;04;09;26 - 00;04;44;28
Hamilton
It's potentially very dangerous. Could be explosive. It's a really bad idea to do that on any kind of scale. So I'm just throwing that out there for any chemists who, like me, are a little bit curious about whether or not something like that could work. So in this story, this gentleman whose name I won't even get into, I don't know his name and I don't really understand what the name of the chemists that he was working with, but he meets a Prussian chemist previously employed by Monsanto who decides to dedicate his life to synthesizing psychedelics.

00;04;44;28 - 00;05;19;03
Hamilton
Sort of sounds like Alexander Shulgin, but a clandestine version of Alexander Shulgin. Somebody who is in industry decides to leave industry and dedicate themselves to the good fun that is creating new psychoactive drugs. And in this clandestine lab they make at least one synthetic cannabinoid Tripti means pineapple amines and primarily immense quantities of MDMA. According to this man, they were making 200 kilos of MDA each week at a lab in San Diego in the 1980s.

00;05;19;27 - 00;05;49;25
Hamilton
That's a huge amount. Has anything been published about this previously? I don't know. If you're able to dig something up, please let me know. There are a number of details woven throughout the story that might make it easy to dig something up. One of the most interesting things about this, aside from the scale and the scope and the weirdness and of course, the unusual oxidizing agent and the use of Rainie Nicole is that they were producing enantiomers pure are.

00;05;51;21 - 00;06;23;17
Hamilton
For those of you that don't know, many psychoactive molecules have what are called chiral centers. And if you have one chiral center, you typically will get something called an and hammer's. If you have two, you get DEA streamers and there's all sorts of other complicated variations on this theme. But what's interesting about psychedelic thenational amines is that you have a somewhat well-defined pharmacological distinction between these two enantiomers.

00;06;23;26 - 00;06;55;25
Hamilton
Sometimes it's the case that one enantiomers is active and the other is inactive. Sometimes both enantiomers do roughly the same thing. But in the case of psychedelic amphetamines, what you get is an s enantiomers that seems to have a predominantly stimulant effect and an orange and dimmer that has a predominantly psychedelic effect. So if you take our Dom for example, that is the active enantiomers, if you take ah MDMA, you get a pretty potently psychedelic compound.

00;06;55;29 - 00;07;23;29
Hamilton
So this is a really interesting idea and the way that you typically resolve enantiomers is a lot of different ways to do it, and it's typically very annoying. In fact, when people talk about chemistry, being an art instead of a science crystallization is usually the first thing that they reference when they're discussing the art of chemistry, because there's a lot of black magic, a lot of incantation and weirdness and confusion that goes into the crystallization of a substance.

00;07;24;06 - 00;07;42;27
Hamilton
Sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it doesn't work at all, and often nobody has the time or patience to figure out exactly why, which is why it starts to feel like an art. You're not really explaining it. You're just saying, All right, I don't know exactly why DMT doesn't tend to form hydrochloride salts very well, but there's something about it.

00;07;42;27 - 00;08;11;14
Hamilton
Maybe it's more polar. Who knows, right? You kind of just wave your hand and and maybe one day someone will dedicate a scientific publication to dissecting the exact reason for this phenomenon. But for the most part, nobody has time to really figure it out. One of the most common ways of producing in an antidote pure material, is to take a risk, make material that is a mixture of two enantiomers and to react it with an advantage of pure acid.

00;08;12;08 - 00;08;43;13
Hamilton
So if you have a recei MC base and in the nantong pure acid, there will be the preferential formation of a ananta pure salt, which will have a different solubility, allowing the undesirable enantiomers to be extracted from the solution either via a chemical extraction or dictation, or a number of different methods. There aren't, as far as I know, hard rules as to what base will crystallize with what acid.

00;08;43;22 - 00;09;11;12
Hamilton
For example, I think you can use d tartaric acid with L amphetamine. Right. So you have different stereo chemical orientations of the acid and the base forming in an anti a pure assault. I don't think that's always the case. And on top of that, sometimes people use all sorts of different steric hindered acids or monosodium salts of di carboxylic acid.

00;09;11;12 - 00;09;45;28
Hamilton
That's really quite complicated and probably beyond the scope of this discussion. But the basic idea here is that they were taking Simec MDA base, reacting it with what I assume was d tartaric acid and crystallizing to produce an anti pure r MDA. And as I understand it, they would decant off the super chain which contained the undesirable s MDA and repeat this crystallization over and over again until they had an anti pure or at the very least an anto enriched MDA.

00;09;46;04 - 00;10;06;14
Hamilton
And he thought this stuff was the bee's knees. You really liked it. Now this is a conversation that's full of weirdness and mystery. I'm curious what listeners will think of this. It's a prime example of why I love doing these sorts of interviews. The question of is this real? Could this synthetic process really work? When did this happen?

00;10;06;15 - 00;10;31;24
Hamilton
Who are these people? What are their motivations? I love this story and I love that the mystery is still unfolding. As a final note, the Prussian chemist referred to as Ben in this interview, is someone that I very much wanted to interview directly. And at the time that I first started talking to the gentleman in this interview, I said, Please put me in touch with the chemist, Ben, I need to talk to him about some of this.

00;10;32;02 - 00;10;54;23
Hamilton
And he asked Ben if I could speak with him. And Ben said no. Not long after Ben died, and I am shocked by how many times this has happened to me. People who say, you know, are you kidding me? Talk about this. I don't want to go to prison. Well, eventually all of us are going to die and a life's work can be lost very easily.

00;10;55;05 - 00;11;23;24
Hamilton
Whatever Ben was doing, whatever the synthetic cannabinoid that he made was whatever novel trip two means, he may or may not have made whatever interesting synthetic insights he may have had. All that remains of them are in this interview. Otherwise his work is gone. There's no where to find it, and that's tragic to me. I hate the idea of somebody spending their life doing this sort of research in an underground lab and then it all disappearing because they're afraid to tell anyone about it.

00;11;25;09 - 00;11;46;28
Hamilton
It's happened to me again and again. People are uncomfortable. The reasons are valid. I get it. But the information gets lost because of their fear. So I think that we should also be grateful that this person is even willing to say some of the things they said because if they were silent as well, this entire story would have been lost.

00;11;46;28 - 00;12;10;19
Hamilton
So here's his story and I hope you enjoy it. Hello. This podcast is available unedited and ad free at Patreon dot com slash Hamilton Morris. Each month I release 3 to 4 new podcasts and it was Patreon exclusive until recently. Many people contacted me and said they wanted me to figure out a way to make it freely available.

00;12;10;24 - 00;12;33;23
Hamilton
And so I decided to accept sponsorship from a few of my friends. One of them is David Renton, the founder of a company called Loosie Nicotine. They make nicotine gum, nicotine pouches, nicotine lozenges, some of which are made with synthetic nicotine, which I think is pretty cool. Now, if you don't already use nicotine, I recommend that you don't start.

00;12;34;09 - 00;13;18;27
Hamilton
It's habit forming. But if you already do use nicotine products and especially if you smoke tobacco cigarets. I can say that this is a cleaner product and it's also a product that I use personally. If you go to Lucy Dot CEO and use the code Hamilton, you get 20% off your purchase. Now maybe you should start at the beginning.

00;13;19;09 - 00;13;20;23
Indra
That's usually a good place.

00;13;20;25 - 00;13;28;11
Hamilton
So tell me, how did you get interested in doing work with psychedelics like interest?

00;13;28;15 - 00;14;08;03
Indra
Well, I guess I was in Vietnam and there was guys there who were doing acid, and I thought that was kind of unusual. I mean, I was I was smoking pot from the second day in Vietnam, and even though I promised my mother I wouldn't smoke marijuana, it got a hold of me on the second day. And so these guys were taking acid and I would hear them talking about it.

00;14;08;04 - 00;14;51;28
Indra
And I didn't think it was something that I wanted to take under the circumstances because we were getting shot at quite a bit. And I was this place called Barbed Wire and they were dropping in rockets and nonsense like that every two or three nights, and you'd wake up hearing these loud thumps. And if you look around in the hooch, everybody was God, you know, they heard the before you and they were all out in the sandbagged bunker.

00;14;52;25 - 00;15;22;27
Indra
There was outside the hooch, and I know I ran out the first night when a really nasty rocket attack came and it was coming great close by the hooch. I mean, we're talking 50, 75 feet away. Rockets were landing, and so I ran out. It was raining like nobody's business. I mean, it was in Vietnam. The rain came sideways and stone.

00;15;23;14 - 00;16;03;13
Indra
It was so hard. And I ran out the door and it was raining and the the little sandbag shelter that was there that you would get in was, of course, flooded to the max at this point in time. And I heard these guys laughing in there. And so I walked down and got in. And when I did, they all turned around and they're like, Oh, dude, we're dropped from acid to like now they're they're firing rockets at us.

00;16;03;20 - 00;16;33;20
Indra
I, I think I'm going to get on that for now. And so they're just laughing like crazy and I got to thinking to myself after I came back from Vietnam might not be a bad idea to try that. It was they seemed like these guys seemed like it was the hardest things to subvert. You know, they were just laughing their asses off and having a good time.

00;16;34;27 - 00;16;42;19
Hamilton
So what? Why do you think they were doing it? Do you think it was the stress of being in Vietnam? I mean, like you said, it seems like a terrible place to use LSD.

00;16;43;23 - 00;17;12;29
Indra
Yeah, I think it was stress. They were just everybody wanted to get high. I mean, a lot of people were doing said they were doing heroin because all of it was available in Vietnam. I mean, you could go downtown to the village and buy whatever get whatever kind of service you want. Well, while you're at it is just so crazy scenario and nobody really knew what was going on and nobody was really responsible for anything.

00;17;13;19 - 00;17;52;21
Indra
And everything was like, whatever you could get away with and do is what you do is like, for instance, if you would find yourself in a position where the local guy who is running the who does what, when you go out on patrol, sometimes he would affix you to the first position. You know, you're the lead guy on the patrols means you want to go around the jungle.

00;17;52;21 - 00;18;14;06
Indra
You have no idea if you're going to be seen or shot at or whatever the case is. And so a lot of guys, if you get picked two or three times in a row, they would resort to this thing called fragging. And fragging was where they would, you know, grenades. They don't leave a rifling of the barrel or anything.

00;18;14;06 - 00;18;37;13
Indra
And so you get killed by a grenade. There's no way to tell where it came from, who did it or whatever. And so these guys, after three or four times of being made the point, man, they would take a grenade, roll it in the sergeant's first time. You wouldn't take the pin out of it so that he would get the message right.

00;18;38;19 - 00;18;49;10
Indra
And then I guess after that, people were hardcore and so they pull the pin and roll it out there. Anyway, that was a very negative situation.

00;18;51;04 - 00;19;12;28
Hamilton
I'm going to pause momentarily for an ad. We got the guy right off camera right now. This is what you're telling me. I don't know. That's goofing. Great. It's become a meme on the Internet. This is a creative product. It's not intended for moving, even if the patch of the human rectum is between seven and eight and the peak of the tragedy is 8.1.

00;19;12;28 - 00;19;37;16
Hamilton
That's just not really relevant here. This is a tea consumption in hot water. That's what it's for. That's what it should be used for. If you want this tea, you can get it at top. Forbes.com. Yeah, I can imagine. And the other thing I wanted to ask is, you know, at that time, psychedelics were intimately associated with the anti-war movement, and.

00;19;37;16 - 00;19;49;22
Indra
They were people brought acid from the states. Guys would catch orders from Vietnam and they would bring a load of LSD or whatever along with them.

00;19;50;18 - 00;19;53;11
Hamilton
And so that affected.

00;19;53;11 - 00;20;27;15
Indra
I never did understand the lure of taking anything that was going to affect your mind and then having somebody shoot at you at the same time. That never seemed like something that I wanted to partake of. I always thought, yeah, that for me, you know, that's not what I want to do. But anyway, I got back to the States and I went and bought a two plus two Mustang because I had money from mustering out money and like that.

00;20;27;15 - 00;21;08;29
Indra
So I was driving around and I spotted this guy and this girl standing by the side of the road in rear end, and he had on a green pantsuit. It was I'm talking green, you know, we're talking like one of those things that the that they use in football games to dress up people and that that fierceness of green And he had a girl with him who was dressed in a probably 1890s dress and he had hair down to the heels of his shoes and they were hitchhiking.

00;21;09;08 - 00;21;53;23
Indra
So I pulled over and I said, Where you guys go? And they said, Right, we're going to go to a party up in the Oakland Hills and can you take us there? And I said, Maybe. So I pulled a joint out of my cup because I always carried jokes with me because when I was in Vietnam, I was very careful to make I didn't know if I was how I was going to get Stash when I came back to the States so you could buy these little Sanyo refrigerators, which you still can, but I would buy one of those and pack it full of Buddha sticks and tape it shut and pretty much go down

00;21;53;23 - 00;22;22;07
Indra
to the company post office. Because in those days, if you were on the combat line in Vietnam, your mail did not get looked at you. Whatever it was you sent back in the mail, it went directly to who you were sending it to. No customs, no inspections, nothing like that. And so I started buying these Sanyo refrigerators quite regularly, and I ended up sending 29 of them to my mom pack.

00;22;23;14 - 00;22;41;07
Indra
And when I got back home, I was like, Well, what's in those? You said they're dolls in there. And I said, Yeah, yeah, I got a doll for you. And so I and I did have a few dolls and I gave her one that quieted her down. It was a Vietnamese doll with a kimono, kind of really good.

00;22;42;09 - 00;23;06;09
Indra
And she kept all my refrigerators in the garage there until I came back. And then I picked them all up and burned to the house. But anyway, we're driving in this car. And I looked at these guys and I said, You guys smoke? And this guy says, Yeah. He goes, Hey, my name's Dandelion Cherries. And I said, My name's John.

00;23;06;17 - 00;23;32;11
Indra
And his dandelion. And he looked like a dandelion yellow hair, like nobody's business hanging down his shoes. This green pantsuit, they look like a big flower, you know. So anyway, they said, sure. So I passed them a couple of dubious and they started smoking it. And after a few minutes it was all quiet in the backseat in the car, a terrible look.

00;23;32;11 - 00;23;56;01
Indra
And I said, You guys okay? And he goes, Hey, where did she get that? And second most important question, Do you have any more? Huh? And I was like, Yeah, I did. And I got it while I was in Vietnam, I, I brought it back with me. I brought some back and he's like, Hey, you want to go to this party with us up in the Oakland Hills?

00;23;57;16 - 00;24;18;26
Indra
He goes, You got any more pot with you? And I said, Yeah, I had a never again. It was full of joints that I had made. I, I don't know. I was feeling more invulnerable in those days because in those days you could be in Berkeley smoking a joint on a bench and the cops would pull up and show you the side of the driveway.

00;24;20;01 - 00;24;44;06
Indra
So it was it it wasn't as crazy and controlled like it is now. And so so there I was with this, but these guys were smoking it. And we got to this party and it was up on the side of a hill. It was a three story house. And the guy who lived on the top floor was named Bobo.

00;24;44;21 - 00;25;10;02
Indra
He was a black guy and he had on a leopard skin cape and a skull cap. And the two other guys were on the second and first floor. These three guys decided to make this bogus birthday party, New Year's Eve, a Christmas party all in one. And so somebody after after I passed out a few of these joints, people were like, What the fuck, man?

00;25;10;07 - 00;25;32;12
Indra
There's where did you get that pot? And I was like, Yeah, I got it. Vietnam, the guy goes, really goes, You want to take some acid? You had acid? And I said, No, I haven't yet. It goes, you haven't at all. And I said, No, no, no, no. And he's like, well, this guy had on a big bouffant shirt with the sleeves rolled, puffy and long hair.

00;25;32;12 - 00;25;58;14
Indra
And his favorite saying was John Terry brother, even though he wasn't French, but he gave me a orange sunshine. And at the time it was just a really small little orange colored pill. And I took it and I guess about a half hour go by and he comes back by it. He goes, So what do you think so far?

00;25;58;14 - 00;26;16;26
Indra
And I said, Well, I you know, I'm probably I'm a big guy, so I could probably use some more because I'm not really feeling much of anything. He goes, really? He goes, You want more? And I said, well, I mean, I, I would take in other words. So he says, All right. He goes, here, try one of these.

00;26;16;26 - 00;26;43;13
Indra
And he gives me a blue microdot and an orange wedge which were popular ways to take as in those days. And so he said, Put them under your tongue. So I put it under my tongue. And I guess about 10 minutes went by and I became nonverbal. And I was just like, oh, you know, I was just really zooming.

00;26;43;17 - 00;27;17;26
Indra
And this guy Bobo came around with a tray full of tuna fish sandwiches and he's like, He was from South Africa. So he was like, Do you like to have a total of a sandwich? And I'm like, Yeah, sure, why not? So he gives me one and then I start getting a lot more stoned. And then the sandwich became a thing in my hand, which I lost any idea of what to do about it or do with it.

00;27;17;26 - 00;27;44;26
Indra
I certainly wasn't looking forward to eating it and the juices were running down my elbow and dripping off on the floor. And this very nice girl came and sat beside me and took the sandwich away from me. I was so happy to see that so good. Then she took me in the bathroom to me up and she asked me some questions, but I was in the hole, but still, you know.

00;27;45;00 - 00;28;33;03
Indra
Yeah, I guess some kind of verbal stuff was coming out, but it wasn't anything that made any sense. And she sort of latched on to me and she was the in on the guys in in the Brotherhood. Because in those days over here in the brotherhood of Light, these guys were you could buy a gram of acid for I forget what it was maybe 40 $400 for a gram and it would you know they would give it to you and a little bottle and it was a crystal down the bottom of the bottle.

00;28;33;06 - 00;29;02;06
Indra
So you had to deal with it. And she wanted to get some. And then together us go to the Grateful Dead concert. And so the Acid at the Dead concert. And I was like, okay, like that could possibly work out. So then we buy the acid and they give it to us. Then we go out the door and I look at her and I go, Hey, this is this is 4400 hits.

00;29;03;10 - 00;29;35;16
Indra
And she said, Yeah. She said, You have to put it on something, maybe some blotter or something like that. And so we went to the house and took a much stronger dose than I should have, and I was just really flying. And she was like, Well, how are we going to put this together so that we can take it to the Dead concert?

00;29;36;28 - 00;30;14;01
Indra
And I got to thinking about it and I said, Well, we can't go buy a pill machine because the FBI or show up on her doorstep says, We tried to buy one. So I went to a I found a guy who worked at a cat food company and they had a cat food stamping machine that looked a lot like a pill machine, except for it had these little crosses in the carved in the dye that it would step out and there would be this little cross of cat food.

00;30;14;28 - 00;30;38;11
Indra
So I bought one of these machines of EB, and I took the dye down to San Francisco, to San Francisco dye and something way back. We don't know if they're even still real. But I went in and I asked the guy, Could you make a dye like this? Except for have it look like a pill? And he grinned at me and he says, Yeah, sure, why not?

00;30;39;22 - 00;31;18;25
Indra
And so he made a set of dyes and we had a room in the house and we would take the vial with the acid in it and very carefully mix it with some chocolate or something that we could hammer a pill into and it would hold its shape, you know. And so yeah, we, we had to buy and like ten or 15 grams and I guess we were going to get into it in a big way right off the bat.

00;31;20;08 - 00;31;47;25
Indra
And sure enough, we put it in cocoa, chocolate and a few other things anyway, so that it would a binder of some sort. I remember we had a hard time finding a binder, but we found a binder to put in with it and the careful stamping machine worked gloriously. It would stamp out pills like nobody's business. I mean, who if you were the person who was in the room, sample the pills.

00;31;48;16 - 00;32;08;24
Indra
You're way the next day. You're still quite fucked up. But the it would make this perfect little pills that we would take them to the thing. And then people at the place who saw it, other vendors would say, who how did you get it in such a perfect little format? And I said, Well, we have a pill stamping machine.

00;32;09;19 - 00;32;38;10
Indra
So that opened up a whole new arm of business. I mean, all these people were like, Hey, you, you know, can you make a bunch of tabs for me that were like, Yeah, I suppose so. For, you know, gratuity of sorts, you can work something out. And so I remember that any this one chick, she said, Hey, I'm going to take you over to the hog farm and introduce you to Ben.

00;32;39;19 - 00;33;03;17
Indra
And I said, Who's been that? He's she's like, I think he's got something that you might find really interesting because I was really into acid. I was like, every other day tripping, you know, back then, as it was, you could trip every other day. It was clean and pure. And, you know, it wasn't one of these things where where you feel sorry the next day.

00;33;03;17 - 00;33;36;14
Indra
It was just amazing. Immaculate thing. So anyway, she brought me over to this answering service, which shall go unnamed right now. And there was a bunch of people there and she introduced me to this guy named Ben, who was talking to me about some of this stuff. And I was doing manipulation in those days because I was going studying to be a osteopath.

00;33;37;04 - 00;34;01;25
Indra
And so I worked on him a few times. It increased his breath. He had a real breathing problem. And like, like I may I increase his breath 100% to about 10 minutes. I learned how to do that in a very straightforward and good way. And after that, he was like, Well, that was amazing. He goes, You fixed my breath.

00;34;01;25 - 00;34;25;09
Indra
He goes, I've been suffering with that for like ten years. He goes, You went to work for me? And I said, Doing what? He said, Well, well, well, I make things and I could hire you and you could be one of my assistants. And I was like, I mean, we were all pretty stoned right then. So I was like, Sure, why not?

00;34;25;26 - 00;34;59;03
Indra
Then in the morning he came and he's like, Okay, grab yourself and come with me. You're going to go down to the factory and I was like, Well, okay, why not? So we went down to the factory and he showed me around, showed me all the stuff that he gave me a dose of this kind of MDA that, you know, when you make the regular MDA, it's a raise, makes it's two different things.

00;34;59;17 - 00;35;29;21
Indra
And it was like, well, look, I'm going to show you something here. You guys let us take a certain amount of it. We put it in a, you know, a piece of glassware and he poured in acetone and you could see that it wasn't, you know, really going great in the solution. Some of it did. But he said, here, come here.

00;35;29;25 - 00;36;03;27
Indra
We went into this other room and he had a microwave there that in order to make it explosion proof used gaffer's tape on the inside of thing where it sucks you know area in or blows there for the for the electric. I forget what he called the damn thing but anyway he said we're going to use this I'll show you how so he took the glass, put it in the acetone.

00;36;04;00 - 00;36;28;03
Indra
We started up quite a bit and then he added a couple of teaspoons of tartaric acid and we stuck it in the microwave and turned the microwave on. And then after a few, maybe a minute or so, everything went in the solution. It was just all in there. So he pulled that out and he it was kind of a little bit yellowish.

00;36;28;10 - 00;36;59;27
Indra
And he said, Now here's what we do. We stick it in the freezer. So he stuck it in the freezer and come morning, there was quite a proliferation of crystals there, and a lot of them looked like little domes, you know, really tiny, though. And so he's like, okay, so we're going to grind this up again, put more acetone on it, and with a little more tartaric acid and back in the solution.

00;37;00;05 - 00;37;14;26
Indra
Yes. In the morning there was dime sized domes all around the inside of the glass. But you know what they looked like? They looked like, you know what a sand dollar looks like, right?

00;37;15;05 - 00;37;15;22
Hamilton
Yes.

00;37;16;06 - 00;37;51;15
Indra
So it looked just like sand dollars. They had this something a design on top of the dome. It was I don't know exactly what if some molecular display of how pure it was. So then we took it and ground that up and treated it again. We did a number of times that row until finally in the morning when we came and opened the freezer, there was just this one huge dome in the glass where it was just it was like maybe three inches tall.

00;37;52;05 - 00;38;14;03
Indra
And it had the same kind of markings that Sandler's have on them. And it was a beautiful thing to look at. And Ben explained to me that now this is our right hand molecule. This is no left hand molecule or left in here. This is just just the one that's going to be very pure. He goes, How about we trip on that together?

00;38;14;16 - 00;38;50;17
Indra
It'll make sure we're not so scraped it off and took it there. It was just literally the most incredible, amazing elevation of. My big heart chakra burst open and I wanted to love the world and love everybody. Nothing, no negativity could penetrate my being there. It was just it's just beautifully, beautifully high enough. And I had regular empty MDA, which was nothing like this.

00;38;50;17 - 00;39;23;16
Indra
All right. Here, molecules, stuff. It was a whole nother story. And so I, of course, made myself a quart mayonnaise jar full of that. And I had it around for years, but unfortunately, I don't have it anymore. I wish I did because it was just one of the most beautiful experiences that I ever had. And I think it's not that hard to make the the MDA workup itself was pretty straightforward.

00;39;23;16 - 00;39;58;25
Indra
I mean, we we had we got Safra, we summarized it, and once we got it summarized and we're happy the way things were looking in the first, at first we would put it in with nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide and we would mix. We had 98% hydrogen peroxide around, which was, you know, we were being very careful with it because what Ben showed me, he says, Give me an old glove.

00;39;59;17 - 00;40;35;01
Indra
I gave it to him. He dropped one drop of that 98% out there. That ship burst into flames. And he says, You got it. And I'm like, Yep, I got it crystal clear on that one. So he would mix it 98% hydrogen peroxide along with the ISO several and heat it up and after a certain period of time, Ben just he's like, okay, just let it run for 3 hours.

00;40;35;20 - 00;41;11;28
Indra
And he just arbitrarily would just tell me how long you run it for. So he'd run it for 3 hours and then, then I remember it was always kind of a pain in the ass to separate the oil off of the nitric acid peroxide scenario. So I think this is why Ben sort of kept me around, because I was a not a chemist, but I had common sense.

00;41;13;06 - 00;41;47;17
Indra
And so he was asking me when they were, Well, what do you want to do about this operation? It's going to take you four or five. And I said, Yeah, I've been thinking, what about if we just took like, say, five gallons of the stuff? What's it's done? Imported 20 gallon tank of water. And I said, that way the nitric acid and we'll go into the water and the thing we want will float on top and we can just get it off and we're good to go, then we can eliminate it.

00;41;47;17 - 00;42;08;16
Indra
After that. So Ben was like, Oh, that's a good idea. He said, Let's do that. So we rigged up a whole setup where we would just pump in like 100 gallons of the stuff at a time with water. It would all separate out. We put it in drums and it's kind of funny if we put it in those drums.

00;42;08;16 - 00;42;18;28
Indra
And then we had a big truck and we drove about in the desert somewhere and leave them.

00;42;18;28 - 00;42;43;15
Hamilton
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00;42;43;28 - 00;43;12;28
Hamilton
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00;43;12;29 - 00;43;43;19
Hamilton
You can actually sleep wearing it and it seems to help sleep or you can change the frequency. And it has a sort of stimulating effect, which I sometimes use while I'm on a long drive. I've tried a lot of these different non-pharmacological means for alteration of consciousness, like binaural beats and various types of strobe, ascorbic visual stimulation. Usually I'm skeptical of this sort of thing, but this tactile modulation of mood actually does seem to work, the idea being that it delivers a gentle, soothing vibration that conditions your nervous system to recover and rebalance after stress.

00;43;43;19 - 00;44;02;02
Hamilton
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00;44;02;07 - 00;44;05;14
Hamilton
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00;44;06;15 - 00;44;43;00
Indra
And anyway, the we would make this it was quite a nice thing to make up the way we made it up because it was very straightforward and we didn't really have any difficulty pulling it off. And the idea of putting it in with the water to separate the oil out worked out really well. And Ben gave me a $10,000 bonus for thinking of that.

00;44;43;00 - 00;45;09;03
Indra
When the next payday came. He's like, he it's an extra take every if we come up with that water thing that was good. And so I kind of had that kind of common sense and I would do a lot of, you know, straight chemistry or underground chemistry based on its suggestions he would give me and then I would take off and do it.

00;45;09;08 - 00;45;54;21
Indra
He trusted me to get everything done right because it always came out good. It always came out right. So I was very fastidious and we used to once we had the material ready for Emanation, that was interesting. We had these we went down to Boeing at that point in time years ago, and the Boeing surplus store had all these ten and 20 gallon titanium balls that were just and what they were had been used for was to put liquid oxygen in a rocket.

00;45;55;09 - 00;46;30;08
Indra
And so these balls were rated at 26,000 PSA. And so beds their losses by these up that way you always get something to work with because we're when we were running it, we would run at 1200 psi max, you know, you'd put the hydrogen in. You keep putting the hydrogen in until all of the oxygen is out. Then we would put our material in there and put the ammonia in the everything else they did.

00;46;31;20 - 00;47;09;19
Indra
And we had a big shaker and the shaker had a huge heating pad underneath it to accommodate this 20 gallon piece of titanium. And so I think what we ended up having about six of those so that we could start one. And then while it was shaky getting going, we'd go right to the next one because all you had to do is keep coming back and checking it to see if the hydrogen had dropped off from 250, then you would bring it back up to that pressure.

00;47;09;19 - 00;47;35;12
Indra
You know, it would drop down. And as long as it was dropping down, good. That was good because that meant the material was going to come out good and it was going right low. It was quite interesting to watch it. And I got the watch. That was the first time I'd ever done The Hydrogenation. And and of course, then I did it for like three years.

00;47;35;12 - 00;48;02;20
Indra
I don't know how many different times I got to be really good with putting the hydrogenation together because. I was the only one there, but Ben was like he said, he got poisoned too much at Monsanto and he had to stay away from the solvents and stuff because it made him quite ill. And so he would just show me what was going on and leave me to take care.

00;48;02;20 - 00;48;02;25
Indra
Or is.

00;48;02;25 - 00;48;03;09
Hamilton
He doing.

00;48;03;25 - 00;48;04;21
Indra
What was he doing?

00;48;05;03 - 00;48;06;19
Hamilton
Yeah, what was he doing at Monsanto?

00;48;07;03 - 00;48;32;03
Indra
He was a line chemist. So he the way he explained to me in those days was sometimes they would give you jobs if there was no job, you would. You could just do whatever you wanted. And if you came up with something good, it belonged to the company. And so he he was doing that for quite a while.

00;48;32;03 - 00;49;05;11
Indra
And then he read in the American manual MDA synthesis one day, and he was like, That's interesting. I'll go over to the chem, would draw out the right stuff and make a little batch up and see what what it's all about. So he did. And after that he was like, his thing was, you know, we got to make enough stuff for this for a bunch of people in the world because his thing was you got to make it for the young people.

00;49;05;11 - 00;49;36;11
Indra
He goes, because you got to get there, stone up the kids because the old ones are too set in their ways and they're never going to change. And so you, you make this good stuff and you pass it out and you see that the right people get it. And you have done the world a big favor because you have opened up tens of thousands of heart chakras and then was a believer that once your heart chakra was opened one way or the other, it would stay that way.

00;49;36;15 - 00;49;44;04
Indra
And you would affect all your decisions in who you are and what you did and the future is.

00;49;44;12 - 00;49;48;04
Hamilton
And you told me that Ben died recently, is that correct?

00;49;48;13 - 00;49;50;11
Indra
Yes, unfortunately.

00;49;51;09 - 00;49;55;08
Hamilton
Could you tell me his last name? Is that something that can be said.

00;49;56;06 - 00;50;33;23
Indra
That Ben wasn't even his real name? That was just the name that I mean, for a long time we called Ben, and then once we were really high down in the Salton. Yeah, Salton was a hot spring out in South. Todd No, not in South Ajo. Borrego In the little town of here. So I go outside of it there, about three miles off the big giant curve of the road.

00;50;33;23 - 00;51;09;00
Indra
There's a natural hot spring out there that's called No Name Hot Springs. And we used to go there and get high. And while we were there, he and I had an experience with some big or some creature of some sort that we were sitting in the hot tub and all of a sudden, if you'd look over to the right, there was a vehicle there with green windows and otherwise it was black.

00;51;09;00 - 00;51;27;03
Indra
You couldn't see anything except the windows. And there were some people in the windows looking out at us. And I mentioned it to Ben, and he said, Yeah. He goes, Let's walk over there and see what's going on and see who they are. So he got out, walk over there, boom, It was this. You could even tell that it left, but it was gone.

00;51;28;16 - 00;51;52;14
Indra
It just instantly moved. So we went back and sat down and we were pretty high and we looked up and it was back again. It was sitting in the same spot. These people were looking at us and I said, What do you think that is? That he said, I don't know. He goes, But they don't want to talk to us right now.

00;51;53;04 - 00;52;22;10
Indra
And the reason I think we can leave and see him is because we're really high. And so we could see them and they're watching us, but they don't want to be approached. And I was like, I thought they were aliens. You know, the vehicle looked like a turtle shell that they were in, and they had these small windows with a green light inside.

00;52;23;08 - 00;52;51;03
Indra
And after that, we were sitting there in the morning and I said, Hey, Ben, He goes, He is. You don't have to call me Ben John. And he goes, Discovery, John. He goes, That's my real name. So we crossed over a trust bridge, and I found that his name was John, but I didn't ask him to divulge his last name ever in five years.

00;52;52;08 - 00;53;21;16
Indra
And it just wasn't important to me at the time because we were doing this thing. It was working out really well. I was getting grocery bags full of $100 bills every few weeks, and so I was yeah, I was just living, living the life the way that a lot of people would dream. They might like to live it.

00;53;21;23 - 00;53;22;13
Indra
I mean, I.

00;53;24;21 - 00;53;48;10
Hamilton
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00;53;48;10 - 00;54;09;02
Hamilton
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00;54;09;09 - 00;54;26;08
Hamilton
Thank you very much. Com but but I'm curious, who like could you tell me about his background, where he came from? Who is this man? This John? He had a Ph.D. He worked in Monsanto. What? What is his story?

00;54;26;21 - 00;55;04;27
Indra
Yeah, he he was a Prussian guy, you know, very, very white skin, fierce blue eyes, black hair, a real Prussian homeboy. And I used to ask him things all the time. And you know, he he didn't really want to divulge lot. He said he went to school, he became a chemist. He got a job. It was that he realized how badly it sucked.

00;55;04;27 - 00;55;36;27
Indra
Is he? He was like, Well, again, he made that day the first time and then he decided to make it. And so we got into that the really big way and I wasn't sure if I even ever told him my last name. You know, it was it just wasn't a thing at that point in time. We were we were so busy we couldn't make the demand for it was just out the window.

00;55;36;27 - 00;55;46;01
Indra
I mean, we we could make 200 kilos in a week and we needed 200 more for the next week. It just, you know, it wasn't enough.

00;55;47;12 - 00;55;50;25
Hamilton
And were you pressing it into tablets again or how were you distributing it?

00;55;50;27 - 00;56;34;08
Indra
No, we weren't pressing it into tablets. The tablet thing was when I was we did that with the LSD. We would just sell it in bags of ten kilos a bag and people would go and buy it and whatever they wanted to do with. I know some of them cut it so tabbed it. A good friend who I ended up meeting and going to Afghanistan with at the time because he wanted to buy carpets that were woven with not heroin, but you know, the thing just before heroin.

00;56;35;23 - 00;57;01;28
Indra
And so we would go there and he would get these carpets. We would just get a container full of them. And I went twice the second time where I saw this giant bookcases there. And I asked the guy, What's up with those? And he said, You want to take it? So I threw these seeds out of this container onto the rugs and they would just dump around on them till the seeds were stuffed down into the carpet.

00;57;01;28 - 00;57;32;25
Indra
And we got back to the States. They went right by customs. Nobody those days people were looking for that kind of stuff. They were busy looking different things. And so, yeah, you know, I just bed. He was a brilliant guy. We made he made pretty much, I'm going to say he made about 35 or 40 of the things out of the out of the book.

00;57;34;07 - 00;58;01;00
Indra
All. Well, he did make some things that were in physical or thick or either wood, but he'd made that long before that. That book came out. He would he would just say to me one night, he said, let's make some synthetic THC come out of jail or we'll make up synthetic synthetic THC and would be like, All right, I'm all in.

00;58;02;01 - 00;58;28;11
Indra
So I got with him and he would whip up some synthetic THC, then we would smoke it. No man, talk about fucking your fruit, your rules of perception up. I mean, this that THC was like hammer down. It was, it was red, it was very oily. It was wonderful stuff. And I mean, we made a lot of things.

00;58;28;11 - 00;59;07;27
Indra
He made mescaline. He loved making mescaline. And so we would make mescaline. You know, it's a couple standard ways he did it. You make the stereo, Then after you get the stereo made up, you going to reduce Redux with either lithium hydride or if you've got a big enough container and a bottle of hydrogen, then hydrogenated, because that way you can make up like kilos and kilos of it.

00;59;07;27 - 00;59;39;07
Indra
And the other way with lithium aluminum hydride, it's such a pain in the ass to do it, that you just make small amounts of it, you know, it's more or less for heads dash. But the you see is like 5% palladium on carbon and make up the story. We just make up a fucking shitload of the styrene, which is, you know, very easy to make up.

00;59;39;25 - 01;00;31;05
Indra
You just a bunch of glacial acetic acid, a few other things and put them on the steam bath and turn it in at one point in time was the right color and put it on the mixer and start pouring water and then boom, it all changes. These beautiful yellow crystals and the drive out, the more we have, the better chance of making a good load of hydrogenation because they you know, it is that 5% and, about 80 say 90 is a shaker for five or 6 hours and shake, rattle and roll.

01;00;31;09 - 01;00;55;26
Indra
You know a you came out with the goods and I used to love taking the mescaline that we made. It was just it was just a whole nother thing, you know? I mean, you would we make mescaline, I would take it you did want to harm anything. Or you were. I on mescaline. This one thing I never understood about drugs.

01;00;56;05 - 01;01;32;28
Indra
Most of them, except for nasty things like speed and heroin. Most of the other things you don't want to do Horrible shit on it. You know, it's. It's the thought that crosses your mind. You're. It's dead having this blissful moment. And if you made it yourself, it's even more blissful because it's a sense of accomplishment. And we certainly did get a incredible sense of accomplishment the first time we made a big batch, 200 kilos.

01;01;32;28 - 01;02;11;10
Indra
It was like we were sweating like dogs. I mean, it was, you know, everything was hard, hard to do and be careful and everything stink. And, you know, the guards. And after I got the first one done, the second was a lot easier. It was when you make that much, we I mean, we had a hot tub sized thing that with a vacuum bag in and we would put all those well, we would take this make the stuff in the titanium thing.

01;02;11;10 - 01;02;44;03
Indra
So what that was done, we'd put that into a square container that we made up to put into the freezer and in that square container we would make 12.5% sulfuric acid in the water. And then you dump that in with the the MDA stuff, stir it up, stick it in the freezer. And we taped those shut, too, so that they were explosion proof the world you'd committed.

01;02;44;03 - 01;03;16;09
Indra
There'd be this, you know, look like a 20 guards preach thing full of sulfur sulfate MDA sulfate. And we had pour all of those into this hot tub size bag and we had a four inch vacuum pump pulling on it. And you toss everything in there that vacuum power board and the, you know, pretty soon all the fluid was out of it.

01;03;17;13 - 01;03;29;22
Indra
Then we would set it in the drying booth in, let it dry. But it was it was it was tons of fun.

01;03;29;22 - 01;03;44;10
Hamilton
And when he was making these other substances, what was he doing it all in the same lab? I mean, it's synthesis of these THC derivatives must have been a little bit more challenging than making something like mescaline. And it sounds like he was making other compounds as well.

01;03;44;29 - 01;04;16;07
Indra
Oh, yeah. Well, we had well, we had outside the building in the back. We had of these big reefer vans that used to be a refrigerator van, and we converted them into laboratory and one of them had supplies and one had glassware, and the other one was the laboratory where we would work. We would make things. And quite more often than not, on Friday night, he'd used to stop everything we were doing.

01;04;16;08 - 01;04;56;17
Indra
He said, What do you want to make up tonight? And he had a big sheet of different things that he had. He said, we could make any of these pretty easy. We got everything. And so I got to be in on the the mixing and the understanding and the rest of it, which for me at the time was it was a great education, you know, because previous to that I had zero chemical education and he really brought me around and it gave me a lot of common sense.

01;04;56;17 - 01;05;21;13
Indra
It made it was a good thing all the way around because as years went by and I would be doing things with other people, they would go to do something stupid and I would be like, No, no, no, no. You know, you're trying to fucking kill us or what? And so it gave me it gave me a feeling of wherewithal.

01;05;21;19 - 01;05;58;06
Indra
I mean, I knew that I wasn't going to do anything. Boneheaded stuff and all the stuff we made the trailer that was experimental. Was it micro-sized? I mean, we would make, you know, a very tiny amount of it, maybe maybe 50 as well. And because there wasn't really anybody else that we were that turned on to it because he trusted me and I trusted him and he was trusted and one or two other people.

01;05;58;06 - 01;06;13;12
Indra
And that was about it. Nobody else really knew what we were doing because you keep your mouth shut, you know, You know, when you're doing something like that, last thing you would do is make it public, you know, so.

01;06;14;02 - 01;06;22;16
Hamilton
Right. And just for some context, what time frame and location are we talking about for this San Diego?

01;06;22;28 - 01;06;28;18
Indra
And we're talking late eighties and that area.

01;06;29;20 - 01;06;37;20
Hamilton
Yeah. And how much MDA do you think you synthesized in this lab?

01;06;37;20 - 01;06;50;10
Indra
We just delayed about that, but I think for two and a half years, steady, we were turned into 200 kilos a week.

01;06;51;26 - 01;06;52;19
Hamilton
Wow.

01;06;53;04 - 01;07;21;00
Indra
So it was a lot. It was quite a bit. I mean, we would put it we had a way of getting it up to San Francisco, which is where the vendors mostly were right. And so we had this Dodge Ram and I bought one of these grape picking big wooden tubs. You know, when they're picking fruit and stuff, they fill one of these wooden things.

01;07;21;12 - 01;07;46;00
Indra
It's like it's the size of a hot tub, the big thing. And so it just fit in the Dodge van. I mean, just, you know, there was a quarter inch on either side and a half inch on top, and it would slide up in there. And otherwise, you, you know, it was heavy. It was made out of Oak.

01;07;46;00 - 01;08;12;08
Indra
And so we would make up all these five gallon buckets of product enough to fill this thing. This thing was like the back of like the bed of a pickup truck size. But it would it went all the way up to the roof of the van, so we'd fill it up with all of those, take the forklift, shoved the thing in the back of the van cause it up.

01;08;12;08 - 01;08;38;18
Indra
And then by how many kilos were there would be my paycheck for driving it to San Francisco. And so I was driving that back and forth quite a bit. I only got stopped once by a highway patrol lady and she said, What's that you got in there? And I said, It's a by bus, but he's going to change it to a hot tub.

01;08;40;00 - 01;09;03;10
Indra
And she said, Well, no way we're ever going to get a look at that. And I said, No, it was empty. I mean, we we got it. They slept in in there with work. It seems like, okay, you have a good day now. You know, I had like 300 kilos in the in the wooden box. Right. And she was just like, happy to see me go.

01;09;03;10 - 01;09;29;02
Indra
She was cordial and that's another reason that Ben kept me around, because I was I was up for I could do something like that, you know, I could drive 300 kilos up. And it was like I didn't smoke pot on the way. I didn't drive fast, you know, all of the footpaths that would do if you're doing that sort of thing.

01;09;30;10 - 01;09;58;24
Indra
And so yeah, he, I would get paid for making it paid for cleaning it up and I would get paid for driving it to San Francisco. And I, they had a house in San Francisco that I could just let them know on the phone that I was coming and it was a garage door right on the street that would open up and I would just drive in and close the garage door and la la.

01;09;58;24 - 01;10;35;00
Indra
That was that, you know, just hop out, catch a taxi, go get something to eat. And so, yeah, the little, you know, they would bag at that house, put it in five and ten and £20 bags and people would come from is a lot of San Francisco eight. It was extremely popular with the gay crowd and they just bought it like there was no tomorrow.

01;10;35;04 - 01;11;19;08
Indra
It was just it was just incredible. And Ben, he was like, well, I don't care what they use it for. They want to fool around with each other. It it creates love. And he said, That's all I was ever interested in that created love. That's why we didn't really make a big amount of anything else. I mean, we did make a bunch mescaline for a little while there, but we saturated the market who he was after he made enough of it, everybody was still like, No, I still got like a pound, you know.

01;11;20;12 - 01;11;29;05
Hamilton
So and so. At this time in the eighties, MDMA was already known. Why were you making MDMA as opposed to MDMA?

01;11;30;00 - 01;12;02;20
Indra
Well, a couple of reasons. The MDR is how you made the right hand molecule stuff. And that was the what we used that for. And the the other one, the MDMA, none of us. I wasn't very crazy about it because you made you grind your teeth and you wanted to dance and, you know, and there the right hand molecule stuff, you sit there for 12 hours and never even move, would just be happy as a clam, you know.

01;12;02;20 - 01;12;34;01
Indra
So, yeah, MDA MDMA was a big thing and we actually ended up making a lot of it. It was it was more popular than the MDA for some reason. I don't know why I prefer MDA, but Yeah, we ended up making MDMA in another offshoot. I can't remember him MDMA, M, A anyway.

01;12;34;21 - 01;12;40;00
Hamilton
MDMA, B or it would be or MDA.

01;12;40;17 - 01;12;53;22
Indra
And I think it was MDA, and we also made up some MDA which didn't did really push a lot of buttons for anybody. And so we did carry on with that very much at all.

01;12;55;13 - 01;13;07;13
Hamilton
And and so when you were selling the MDA, you were selling exclusively the in Antioch, pure right handed MDA or were you selling the receiver material?

01;13;07;19 - 01;13;34;29
Indra
We were selling the receiving material, the right hand stuff. I mean, it's a 50% drop in yield, of course, when you do that. And so if you got a pound now, you got half a pound. And so been unless people ask for it, we would give him the other stuff because everybody was happy as a clam with that.

01;13;35;01 - 01;13;46;04
Indra
I mean, you know, people would come over to buy it, they would always have that shitty grin on their face, you know. So yeah, it was.

01;13;47;25 - 01;13;53;10
Hamilton
And where were you obtaining the after all, to make it?

01;13;53;10 - 01;14;16;25
Indra
Well, Ben, first off, we would just buy it not as several. We would just buy the phosphorescent green stuff in droves and we could actually buy it from some South American company that used it for something. And they made 50 gallon drums.

01;14;17;29 - 01;14;22;10
Hamilton
Was this MDP P2P that you were getting the green stuff.

01;14;22;10 - 01;14;35;12
Indra
Yeah could could be yeah yeah M.D P2P that's what it was and sorry my my memory's a little scratchy because it's been a while. It's been a while.

01;14;36;04 - 01;14;37;18
Hamilton
I'm very glad you're talking about it.

01;14;38;07 - 01;15;31;05
Indra
Yeah. The, the green stuff was. Yeah, that was the easiest one we got that the beginning. It was easiest to change that, to eliminate it and be on your way. And we did a couple of different emanation routes that we would do depending on how much we were going to looking at or wanted to do. I mean, sometimes they would just do small batches and so we would emanate it really straightforward, fairly simple, you know just use a little bit of I think at first we used to take aluminum pipe pads and throw them in blender and would use those.

01;15;32;01 - 01;15;36;05
Indra
And you, you know that route. Yeah.

01;15;36;05 - 01;15;39;13
Hamilton
Yeah. And you'd use mercury with the aluminum to make a melt.

01;15;40;01 - 01;15;43;18
Indra
Well yeah, but you use mercury too you know.

01;15;44;09 - 01;15;44;18
Hamilton
Right.

01;15;44;28 - 01;16;11;20
Indra
And, and you start the amalgam up and that was another $10,000 bonus I got from Ben. It was always the thing, always ran really hot. So we'd always have to go buy like 25 bags of ice to put around the reaction chamber because once it started going off it would just be hot as a firecracker. And so I said to Ben, When?

01;16;11;20 - 01;16;38;22
Indra
Afternoon, Hey, why don't we put in twice as much solvent and see if that doesn't that doesn't change things around. So he's like, okay, so he did. And sure enough, you know, it wasn't hot anymore. It ran off nice and smooth and easy. So he gave me I forget it, He gave it to me. I think it was it gave a $15,000 bonus for that one.

01;16;38;22 - 01;16;49;04
Indra
He kept his two pat me on the head and go, You're my little lab rat, you know, No shit, but you know shit. So.

01;16;49;04 - 01;16;51;11
Hamilton
And what was Ben doing with all of this money?

01;16;53;05 - 01;17;26;17
Indra
Well, there's some groups that he was interested in helping, like Grateful Dead gang. He helped them out a lot. Tremendous amount. He gave them all kinds of material. And then he would. He was a philanthropist. I mean, he would find out where kids are if you if you were going to school and you were running out of money, he'd give you money to finish school.

01;17;27;26 - 01;18;13;01
Indra
He would he had his own little he liked collecting crystals. So he had this huge crystal collection and he would do that, but he would wear $9 J.C. Penney shirts. And, you know, he was not a greedy guy or a guy who wanted to do something bad. He did only good stuff with it. I watched him help hundreds of families that were having problems that he knew about through other friends and he would he would help them out.

01;18;13;03 - 01;18;42;16
Indra
And like I said, he gave the fire department and the police department you guys were money that you could shake a stick at. I used to wonder, how would it how come those guys are exactly. They don't want to know what's going on. You know because every year they would come round here we give him, you know, I had 50 grand and here's this and that and I used to wonder, you know, what do those guys think?

01;18;42;16 - 01;18;51;15
Indra
This is our cover room. But then I came to the realization they don't want to know, you know, they're everything's going good. Why would you want to fuck things up?

01;18;53;05 - 01;19;07;18
Hamilton
So it's very smart and bold of him to have done that. So what was his did he describe his motivation? He said, I make some donations to the fire department and the police department to make sure we're on their good side. What did he say about doing that?

01;19;08;00 - 01;19;32;18
Indra
Well, no. What happened? I was busy grinding up some chunks of crystal the size of your head in the grinding booth one day, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. Look, there's these two guys there in suits with badges on and a clipboard, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, now you're fucked. This is good.

01;19;33;18 - 01;20;05;19
Indra
Just ask them. Anyway, I go, What's up, guys? And they go, My name's Bob and this is ready. And we work at the fire department down the street. We were wondering if you guys would like to buy tickets to the firemen's ball this year. And so I was like, Oh, sure. Here, come with me. I brought him up to the office for a bed was they said, Hey, these guys are selling tickets to the various bar and they want to know if you're interested that Ben, of course, He's like, How many you got the guys?

01;20;05;29 - 01;20;35;03
Indra
I got 75. Ben says, I'll take them right to the check. So a week went by and they're grinding away again because when you make a tequilas a week, you spend a lot of time grinding. And so I tapped me on the shoulder again. I turn around, look and there's two uniform cops standing there with a clipboard and they're in full uniform.

01;20;36;02 - 01;21;07;25
Indra
They turn around and I look at him and I'm like, Bozo, play it out. I go, What's up, guys? They said, Hey, do you remember meeting this fire department guys here last week? I said, Yeah, yeah, they were here. And he goes, Well, we were wondering if you guys would like to buy tickets to the policeman's bar and to help the Toys for Tots program, because 75 tickets, 100 bucks each was they realized that there was had some money.

01;21;07;25 - 01;21;35;05
Indra
Right. So they asked us about the Toys for Tots. So Ben's like, Yeah, we bought the all the tickets they had. And then he gave them the Toys for Tots thing the first time he told them, okay, come back over here day after tomorrow and I'll have something you. And so they're like, okay, So they took off of me while I was just about shake my pants because these guys were uniformed cops.

01;21;35;05 - 01;21;57;21
Indra
I so I looked at Ben after they leave and I said, Now these here gave me this credit card. And he says, Go to Toys R US, buy the fucking place out. That's What do you mean by that? And he said, Buy all the toys. They've got their stop and get a rental truck, a 25 footer and go there and buy it.

01;21;57;21 - 01;22;20;15
Indra
Huh. So I went there and I walked into the place and the major, I mean, there was like ten people there. I major there and I said, Hey, I want to buy all the toys that are here. And he's like, Yeah, right. And I said, No, no, really, I want to buy every toy in the building. These like, for what?

01;22;20;15 - 01;22;50;23
Indra
And I said, For this. I had every credit card. He looked at it, they said just a minute and he went away and, and he came back about 10 minutes later and he goes, did this. It's so good. He goes, I got three guys in the back and we'll help you load your truck. So they loaded truck up and I drove back over to the place and we parked outside it with the cops, came to see what the thing Ben was going to give was he gave the keys to this 25 foot jacket.

01;22;50;23 - 01;23;17;05
Indra
He goes, There's your Toys for Tots for this year. They went out and opened it up and those guys were in tears. I mean, these guys were like real cops, you know, They were like real neighborhood people. And they understood giving and taking. Not everybody does, but these guys did. And so he gave them the keys to the truck.

01;23;17;05 - 01;23;41;15
Indra
They took it over and did it out and came back. So then every year after that, we just give him 25 grand for Toys for Tots. And these guys, they probably thought once or twice about where's it all coming from? But as I said before, I don't think they really want to know. They didn't want to say anything.

01;23;41;21 - 01;24;13;22
Indra
And in fact, many years later, Ben hired a jackass who ratted him out and he got busted. And the lifesaver was when he went to court, the entire fire department and most of the cops from the station showed up at the trial as character witnesses and they just told the judge, Yes, Your Honor, we know he's making drugs, but but he's a good man.

01;24;14;27 - 01;24;44;26
Indra
You know, he wasn't just, you know, getting high and getting hosed. He was using it for good things. And so the judge gave him only one year in the can on account of that. And so although he had thought of that as a way, the cosmos started it for us. They presented the fire department guys and the police.

01;24;44;26 - 01;25;12;10
Indra
And, you know, the whole thing was kind of just set up by the cosmos. And so with, you know, he went it, but he did many other things. He bought families, cars who didn't have a car or piece of transportation. He would pay people's rent for a year if especially if you were going to school or something, he would pay your expenses or your in school.

01;25;13;01 - 01;25;40;16
Indra
And I don't think he did any of it with an ulterior motive. Like if I do this, I have good karma. He just did it because he loved people and he wanted to help people. And he saw this as a path towards empowerment. And he he taught me that very much when I was with him. Empowerment is so much better than disempowerment.

01;25;40;16 - 01;26;23;28
Indra
You know, and it's such a wonderful thing to witness when you are able to empower someone. And so it was a it was a great thing to watch. He would do it all the time, especially Christmas. We'd go around and truckloads of toys and stuff to families that didn't have anything. Yeah, it was. Everybody knew bad was the bad that he was a hell of a guy and that although he definitely got you stoned, he also made your heart crank open and feel it in.

01;26;23;28 - 01;26;27;13
Indra
Feel who you were, right.

01;26;27;14 - 01;26;28;28
Hamilton
It sounds like an amazing person.

01;26;29;08 - 01;26;32;09
Indra
Oh, he was. He was.

01;26;34;04 - 01;26;37;23
Hamilton
And what were you doing with the money that you were making?

01;26;37;23 - 01;27;22;14
Indra
Oh, getting high in whores. So this now, I just had to say that. No, You know what? The money I made. I used to go to school and I finished school as last. Beth and it was a long road to hoe. And it was a tough one. And when I got down with that, I after all the drug stuff and everything, and I decided to go to India for a while, so I packed my stuff and I would do it.

01;27;22;23 - 01;27;51;27
Indra
And I worked at a free hospital in India for 11 years as an osteopath. I was able to a I was a manipulative osteopath. I manipulate your soft tissue and your body. And so it was I was very popular at the hospital of the super specialty hospital people. I would see 50 people a day, seven days a week.

01;27;53;19 - 01;28;02;13
Indra
And that's a lot of people to see and treat and Yeah, yeah, it was.

01;28;02;13 - 01;28;22;09
Hamilton
Good. Go ahead. Amazing. And so back to the chemistry. When you were getting several earlier in the conversation, you said that you would use hydrogen peroxide and nitric acid. Yes. Are you sure it wasn't formic or acetic acid or was nitric oxide?

01;28;22;22 - 01;28;51;01
Indra
No, you could do it with acetic acid, but the results weren't as good as when you did it with nitric acid and the 98% peroxide that that made it work really wham, bam, acetic acid. Acetic acid was very slow scenario as well. The neither one of those worked as well as the the nitric. Yeah right.

01;28;51;24 - 01;28;59;08
Hamilton
Right. And so and when we spoke a little while back, you said that Rainey Nicole was also used. Can you tell me about that?

01;28;59;09 - 01;29;12;18
Indra
Yeah, that's what we would. We would take them deep to be it. Along with the ammonia. Ammonia, something not hydroxide. But anyway.

01;29;13;24 - 01;29;15;22
Hamilton
Ammonium hydroxide is out. No.

01;29;16;16 - 01;29;36;06
Indra
No, no, no It wasn't ammonia hydroxide. We would put them deep here and then you know when you, when you take glacial acetic and you bubble ammonia through it.

01;29;36;06 - 01;29;37;23
Hamilton
Yeah. Ammonium acetate.

01;29;38;02 - 01;30;21;15
Indra
Yeah. And it makes ammonia acetate. That's what we would use. It is we, we would make our own acetate and that was the smelly deal but, and hot too. Boy when you start bubbling ammonia into the glacial acetic acid that's it gets hot and we're talking like mega hot. But anyway yeah we would make of that and you mix that together with the solvent and then you put it in, I think it was like in this together thing, we would put in two tablespoons of really.

01;30;21;15 - 01;30;49;21
Indra
NaCl Yeah. You take two tablespoons out of the jar, had water, you dump a bit there pretty quick and we would just put the top on and then you start shaking it a little bit. But we would put hydrogen in one opening and out on the other we would, we wanted to get all the oxygen out of the container so that there was none present the reaction.

01;30;50;20 - 01;31;22;28
Indra
So we would, I don't know, maybe we'd use one whole tank to make sure that it was, you know, the right thing, clean and safe, because we didn't want any hydrogen explosions. Right? Boom, surprise. So anyway, we we would fill the tank up with our materials and then put in £150 of hydrogen. You'd put it in the first time and then you let it right out again right away.

01;31;22;28 - 01;31;50;27
Indra
Then you put it in again and let it out. Then the third time, which is actually you're on the 10th time by now because you, you know driven off the oxygen with the, with the hydrogen. And so about three or fourth time you'd fill it up with 200 dips. I'd turn on the heat and turn the shaker on and the full weight would go to work me shake it and.

01;31;50;27 - 01;31;56;11
Hamilton
You said that you were using these spheres that you had repurposed for the hydrogenation, right?

01;31;56;16 - 01;31;58;04
Indra
Yep. The bottom.

01;31;58;07 - 01;32;02;04
Hamilton
What was and what was the shaking apparatus? How are you shaking them?

01;32;03;04 - 01;32;35;08
Indra
Well, there was a regular shaking thing. It was made for it was. An ancient old yesterday cam set up from yesteryear. They had these two shakers that would shake back and forth. They're on a slide and we would put the titanium filled up in there, hook it up to the gas and make sure that the lines weren't going to be compromised in any way.

01;32;35;24 - 01;33;02;15
Indra
It turned to shake and turn the heat on and we turned it on and it would just start cooking away and you'd see it's next thing you do at 800 upside bulb, turn it back up to 1250, dropped down, turned it back. Just kept doing that until no more hydrogen was being taken up that way. We knew that the reaction had run its course, right?

01;33;03;15 - 01;33;15;20
Hamilton
I And what was Ben doing before he met you? I mean, this is sounds like quite a big operation. How is he managing this by himself? That was he.

01;33;16;02 - 01;33;48;07
Indra
He was he wasn't really he was just trying to get ready to I mean, he bought tons of glass and he bought all kinds of materials. He was had it in mind to start making it in a big way. And so he would go to these auctions where they would be selling out a chemistry place, glassware and everything, and he'd buy it all and and so pretty soon we had quite a stash of everything we needed and then some.

01;33;49;08 - 01;34;32;12
Indra
And he would he kept telling me all the well, hey, you know what we're going to do? We're going to make this in a big quantity. And I was like, Yeah, okay, I'm. And we started off by just making one batch with the titanium chamber so that we could see how it was all going to work out. In fact, that batch turned out like it was just the gas pajamas, you know, you got it was so clean and straight.

01;34;32;12 - 01;35;04;25
Indra
Those titanium chambers. The beauty of those was they were good for 26,000 PSA and we release them for 1250. So we weren't really, you know, stretched anything or put ourselves in an unusual spot because two over 50 PSA and 26,000 B, that's like, you know, a fire in the wind. You know, it's just it's not going to be a thing.

01;35;04;25 - 01;35;13;07
Hamilton
And I'm interested in why. MDA And not did you ever talk about making LSD or anything like that? Was that ever something? Yeah.

01;35;14;04 - 01;35;41;11
Indra
Yeah. We we made LSD a couple of times, LSA actually, I think that was and we made and it was such a long, drawn out thing. In fact, we had to do part of it under red lights in a room with a like a photographer's darkroom and besides that, we knew the guys over it were in that were the brotherhood was making it in vast quantities.

01;35;41;29 - 01;36;18;23
Indra
And so we didn't really feel the need to make another vest quality or half vest. I love English language. Half vest. Anyway, we didn't think that we needed to make a lot of that at the time. What was lacking around was this feeling of love. So Ben settled on the making, the MDA, and maybe it was maybe a year and a half or two years later we started making MDMA as well.

01;36;18;23 - 01;36;50;13
Indra
But there was always a pretty big market for the MDA. It we didn't suffer from low sales because you could sell it as far as we could make it right, But MDMA became popular, so we made a lot of that too. I never liked it, though. I tried MDMA and after that, after trying right hand molecule MDA, all the rest was just, you know, an experience That's about it.

01;36;50;24 - 01;37;03;02
Hamilton
And just to be clear about the method that he was using, so you said that he would add the tartaric acid. Do you remember where he was getting the tartaric acid?

01;37;03;02 - 01;37;07;29
Indra
Yeah. We went to one of the big chemical supply places, about £50 bags of.

01;37;10;22 - 01;37;16;25
Hamilton
And it was one enantiomers of it, the D or the L tartaric acid I assume.

01;37;19;24 - 01;37;39;11
Indra
You know, probably that's a question if Ben would still be allowed to ask him because but he used to send me to this place to buy these £50 bags of it. And that was the only the only way of it I knew was to buy that one bag and bring it back.

01;37;40;18 - 01;37;54;18
Hamilton
And so he would make the salt with the base and the tartaric acid and then grow the crystal like you described. And then would he isolate that crystal, convert it back to the base and then make it again with tartaric acid a second time?

01;37;55;05 - 01;38;22;13
Indra
No, he didn't isolate it. We would just grind up the wherever it was that crystallized out, we would just grind that up and pour new acetone in on it. And pretty soon after, about three or four times, it stopped being yellow in the, you know, the the early woods when it would crystallize that the fluid left over would be quite yellow.

01;38;22;23 - 01;38;52;19
Indra
And I'm assuming that was the right hand molecule stuff or left hand molecule stuff. And Ben was not he didn't want to save it or anything. He did say, I pour that out, we put it out and just make and like I said, after about four or five times or maybe six times, it didn't. It crystallized that without leaving any yellow patina, it would just be this one huge dome.

01;38;54;00 - 01;39;17;00
Indra
I remember the first time I saw it, it was like 2001, A Space Odyssey. You know, I saw this dome. It had all these little hieroglyphs on the top of it, heading in all different directions. And I still don't know exactly for sure what those. Perhaps you can shed light on that, but it was just.

01;39;17;00 - 01;39;23;24
Hamilton
And would you characterize this right handed molecule as being a psychedelic or not?

01;39;25;00 - 01;40;00;27
Indra
It was psychedelic, but it was a rare they call it an pathogenic. Yeah, it was an pathogenic, Absolutely. Tremendously so. I mean, you it was psychedelic because everything would have a very interesting sparkle in it, like the way the world looked when you were on it. It didn't look quite as nice when you weren't high on it. And so, yeah, sounds.

01;40;01;13 - 01;40;14;24
Hamilton
What you describe. I mean, chemistry is a lot of fun and making psychedelics is a lot of fun and making money is lot of fun. Sounds like a pretty good life. So what made you want to stop doing this?

01;40;15;19 - 01;41;01;24
Indra
Or maybe stop doing it? Well, um, I went to India. I worked in a free hospital, and when I came back, I had a wife and four kids now. And so and I wasn't sure of then. That was the year he got popped. We came back and so he was in jail for maybe almost two years. And I started I opened up a practice, I opened up my medical practice, and I was just accepting patients.

01;41;01;24 - 01;41;37;09
Indra
I had a lot of a lot of them because when I was in India, I was at this guru's ashram, Sai Baba, who everybody was, knew about him at the time, and the fact that he picked me out to work at his hospital for those years made a lot of people want to get treated by me. One of the reasons was because the Swami one day during his birthday, what about 3 million people showed up, told me to come sit on the stage with him and I had no idea why.

01;41;38;16 - 01;42;02;05
Indra
So he told sit down in front of me. And I sat there and I was facing the crowd and I was trying to figure out what the hell is going on here? Why am I sitting here like this? And pretty soon he started talking and after a little while he told me to raise both my hands up. So I raised my hands up and he took both hold of both of my wrists.

01;42;02;21 - 01;42;29;13
Indra
And he said into the microphone there that when people came to the hospital to get healed, they would be worked on by me, but he would be there in my hands doing it. And so I can't tell you it at that point in time, the whole thing took a diametric turn. What was going on all? Kinds of stuff was happening then.

01;42;29;13 - 01;42;56;25
Indra
Now that I had politicians in India coming to see me and by the way, while I was in India and everything was so easy to obtain for those 11 years, I didn't give up making it. I made it there in India. It was quite easy to get everything you need in India, you know, so.

01;42;57;26 - 01;42;59;02
Hamilton
I could continue making.

01;42;59;02 - 01;43;03;25
Indra
MDA Yeah, I continued making India India right hand molecule to.

01;43;05;01 - 01;43;10;00
Hamilton
And did you just make it for yourself or were there people in India that were interested in using it?

01;43;10;04 - 01;43;15;04
Indra
Are you kidding? The Goa? I don't know if you ever heard of Goa.

01;43;15;04 - 01;43;15;21
Hamilton
I have.

01;43;16;07 - 01;43;44;13
Indra
Yeah, but it was quite the scene and quite popular at these Goa dance parties and stuff in my my son and my daughter would go there and openly pretty much sell it in Goa. And a lot of it, I mean, people would go were going to Bali, they would, you know, 1000 hits and take the Bali with me, man.

01;43;44;14 - 01;44;10;21
Indra
And, you know, so yeah, it was how I supported the family in India, because at the hospital I worked for Swami, there was no no pay and I wouldn't have taken it anyway because I didn't I wasn't looking for a paying job at the hospital. So.

01;44;10;21 - 01;44;17;15
Hamilton
So while you were gone, Ben is working with somebody else that rats on him. What happened?

01;44;17;15 - 01;44;45;29
Indra
Yeah, he working with this guy named Uggie, who was a real piece of shit, but so that you know the whole story. Uggie. He's a Jewish boy, and he looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You know, he had that kind of body. He was small and big. The middle and tiny legs annoyed, you know, Tweedledum and Will. They are right.

01;44;46;10 - 01;44;47;06
Hamilton
I do, yeah.

01;44;47;13 - 01;45;21;24
Indra
Right. So Uggie looked just like Tweedledum and he was too, by the way. But but his parents were filthy fucking rich and they wanted him to marry a girl that they would choose. So they a girl for him to marry. And she was like, Man, I would either perceive for my you know, this girl was so pretty. He just unbelievable.

01;45;21;24 - 01;45;54;01
Indra
She was just gorgeous. And our guy was like, I mean, oh, man. It was like he was the monster. She was the princess, you know? And so then being the kind of guy who was very eloquent, very good man, his wife started realizing that Ben was a really upright guy. And to argue is just a fucking lowlife criminal fuck.

01;45;55;13 - 01;46;26;10
Indra
And so she actually I guess I'm partly guilty. I got him together and him and his wife really hit it off. And so Ben wanted to marry her, and Angie ratted him out because of that. And So, yeah, I'm surprised the old guy still walking around alive. But Ben's that that kind of person to do something like that, you know, too.

01;46;26;10 - 01;46;32;02
Hamilton
Wasn't Angie in on the operation as well? How did he. He did this in exchange for some kind of immunity?

01;46;32;18 - 01;47;16;07
Indra
No, he. He ran. He did the laboratory work for Ben for a while. He met another guy, the other guy who was a fucking walking disaster. And OJ was no prize himself. The other guy who was mixed, he was named Jack and he was a junkie. And he went to sleep in his van on the railroad tracks one night in Berkeley, and the train came along and exactly cut the other part that he was laying asleep in off.

01;47;16;07 - 01;47;41;15
Indra
But Jack being dumb dumbass that he was bed shit candy variety that we can't have doing things like that because the police are going to jack your ass up and anyway, you're a dummy. So here's the money. Go away. What is he anymore? He was always, always like that. Whenever he would get arrested by here, 50 grand go away.

01;47;42;28 - 01;48;14;01
Indra
And so they would in Jack, he went away first. Then Guy discovered that Ben was porking his wife and. So. And he had been out and the cops that came to bust Ben were the same would they had been going over ten fucking years collecting money and getting to it through dots. And so they came down. They locked the door.

01;48;14;01 - 01;48;30;29
Indra
Ben Later. Ben He told me the story because I was gone for a but for a year by now. But he said they knocked on the door and he said, Can we come in? A doctor goes, Yeah. He goes, You know what? Because I hate to say this, but we have to arrest you because. You got a drug operation going on here.

01;48;32;01 - 01;49;12;16
Indra
We'll try to help you in every way we can, but you're going to have to go to the cab with. So our guy, of course, ripped Ben off for an enormous amount of things and money When that happened, the argument over to his house is still his $200,000 crystal collection and sold it because it turned out our guy had a habit that he couldn't quit and he had to always have his drug of choice, which was, you know, heroin is you know, heroin addicts sell their mom.

01;49;13;23 - 01;49;23;02
Indra
You know, they can get it, but How much is mom worth? You know?

01;49;23;02 - 01;49;29;05
Hamilton
And what did Ben do after he got out of prison? Did he get back to work or did he put that behind him for good?

01;49;29;20 - 01;50;00;07
Indra
Yeah, he put it behind him for I would say for good. At that point, he went it to relax. He did have an enormous amount of money saved that nobody knew about because he didn't tell everybody everything. And in fact, he had me go to this place and pick up this container. It was like a ten foot container.

01;50;00;07 - 01;50;22;27
Indra
You know, just the smallest one that they make. And he had we go over there to truck and grab hold of it and bring it to a certain place for him. And he opened up the door and I left it there and just bags and bags and bags and bags of money. So he said, I'm going to go to Hawaii and, chill out.

01;50;22;27 - 01;50;26;27
Indra
So he went to Hawaii. That's free in the past.

01;50;28;19 - 01;50;31;23
Hamilton
Did he stay with what was his name on his wife.

01;50;34;06 - 01;50;56;03
Indra
For a long time until he went to jail and then she being the horror that she was in the first place, take somebody else who had money and transferred. She she was one of those girls, is you you take one look at her and you go, This is a bitch. I know. This is definitely going to be a bitch.

01;50;56;03 - 01;51;01;28
Indra
This woman is used to everything twice the. Yeah.

01;51;02;06 - 01;51;13;23
Hamilton
And did Ben leave anything behind? Any notes, any stories? I mean, this it sounds like you lived quite a remarkable life. And as a scientist. It sounds like he did a lot of research. Is all of that lost?

01;51;15;14 - 01;51;55;18
Indra
Well, the problem was, is along the way, Ben got married a couple of times. He just neglected to get unmarried when he picked out somebody new. And he this one that he married a European woman, she right away got pregnant so that she could so she'd always have been under a finger. And yeah, she, she was a real prize.

01;51;55;27 - 01;52;11;25
Indra
But he had to take care of him because he, she had a son. So yeah. You know, everybody wanted a piece of Ben, you know.

01;52;11;26 - 01;52;17;17
Hamilton
Where do you think all of his did leave lab notebooks or research? Is any of that recoverable or it's all gone?

01;52;17;21 - 01;52;46;15
Indra
Well, I asked her and she was, you know, when you me last time I got in touch her there and asked her, she was like, no, she goes, Either Ben threw it away or we threw it away, or I'll look and see if there's anything. If there's anything, I'll let you know and let you have it. But she never did it so I could never get anything out of her.

01;52;47;27 - 01;52;56;08
Indra
The only the only thing is all the stuff I remember is pretty much it. You know, that's.

01;52;57;19 - 01;53;04;12
Hamilton
And in terms of the new drugs that you synthesize, did, was it things like to CB or do you remember some of the names.

01;53;04;12 - 01;53;40;12
Indra
Oh yeah, yeah. We made two. CB We made two C, E to C, H, and then we changed it to two. CB Putting bromine in something turns out to be pretty interesting scenario. Scared Scared me a little bit, but yeah, yeah. We made that. We would have said we make a number of the I said I've got my old drawing book at home I should take a look at it.

01;53;40;14 - 01;53;52;03
Indra
See because I did write down some stuff in it, some things that I was interested in that we did. I often thought maybe in the future, you know, make this again.

01;53;53;11 - 01;53;57;25
Hamilton
I'd love to see that. And what about Kryptonians? Did you ever make things like DMT?

01;53;58;14 - 01;54;27;29
Indra
Yes, I made them t quite often. He had a friend who was empty addict. Really? Yeah. I mean, this was a guy who wanted to do DMT every few days, and I, you know, he was a space case, so, you know, he thought it was a good idea, But I saw him around and talked to him a lot and I think it was such a great idea.

01;54;27;29 - 01;54;41;11
Indra
He was space case. But yeah, we made a DMP and a DEA, Petey and the auditory drug. Yeah.

01;54;42;24 - 01;54;43;21
Hamilton
What was that like?

01;54;44;16 - 01;55;14;16
Indra
It was very auditory. Oh. You know, for me to sort out all the different things that happened, then there's going to be a little difficult because we made so much stuff and we we were in a playground. I mean, whatever we wanted to try or do. Ben knew the process and the procedure and what to do. So he would direct us.

01;55;15;01 - 01;55;29;12
Indra
He would direct me in. I would just go to work on it, follow his instructions. He would be sitting right there with a mask on and he'd say, Do this now, do that. You know, kept me on my toes.

01;55;31;09 - 01;55;38;23
Hamilton
And could you tell me a little bit about what this lab looked like visually? I mean, was there a fume hood? Were there rotary? What did it look like?

01;55;38;29 - 01;56;17;25
Indra
All of those things. Yes. It had an incredible fume hood in it because it used to be a a reefer van. And so the the lab part of it was up at the end or old reefer would have set. But now it was just a big hole. And so Ben built a fume hood. There. So, I mean, their fume hood was so good we could mix glacial acetic acid and ammonia gas and you could smell it inside.

01;56;17;25 - 01;56;47;13
Indra
It was be drawn outside really, really well. And and believe you me, that I only did that about four or five times because I would try to make enough. So we needed again right away. Right. Because I, I objected to it simply because it was dangerous hot smelly, you know, chemistry.

01;56;48;26 - 01;56;52;25
Hamilton
And where were you getting the ammonia you had tanks of in hydrous ammonia or where did it come from.

01;56;52;25 - 01;57;22;29
Indra
We bought it from the company that supplied it for refrigerated ammonia refrigeration. Uh, you know, they make these really super cold freezers that run on ammonia and they would go by take that we would tell the guy, Yeah, ammonia free age, we need to. It's been naked, so we need some more to put it together again. We supply big tanks.

01;57;23;05 - 01;57;57;01
Indra
Nobody ever gets a schedule. I mean, we would go to Los Angeles, to the gas place there, and we would have in the back of the truck maybe 200 gas bottles for hydrogen and we would go to the place in L.A., get the truck loaded up with 200 bottles of hydrogen. And then we had these stickers that we would put on it that said Oxygen.

01;57;57;01 - 01;58;21;26
Indra
And so we would put stickers on all the hydrogen tanks after they were filled that said Oxygen. You? Yeah. I mean, we used to do all that kind of stuff to make sure that we weren't hamstrung. Somewhere along the way. But yeah, in in L.A., there's a giant chemical supply place. I forget the name of it, but we could buy gas there.

01;58;22;06 - 01;58;33;26
Indra
But it was probably a, you know, one of the big gas companies that makes it all kinds of stuff. I can't think of it. HAND but.

01;58;35;14 - 01;58;58;19
Hamilton
Right. And normally when people think of these operations, everything that they know about them comes from people that have been caught. And the stories of people that haven't been caught are rarely told. That's why I think it's so exciting to talk to you, because this is a perspective that very few people to hear what it was like doing all this work and getting away with it.

01;58;58;19 - 01;59;10;13
Hamilton
You know, you you did everything right. So what advice do you have about the way that you conducted yourself to people that enter this kind of work? How to succeed, the way that you did.

01;59;11;28 - 01;59;50;18
Indra
Learn to your mouth shut first and foremost, tell no one anything and sell the stuff away and through a different vendor. You know, never, never put yourself in a spot where you're exchanging the stuff for cash. You know, that never happened. We always, whenever we sold like a £20 bag, they would bring in cash, but they would seal it up in a bag and wrap.

01;59;50;18 - 02;00;13;06
Indra
And I mean, we just knew that we could trust them. And so they would pull up outside the place and just toss these a couple of these huge duffle bag scenario things in the back of a pickup truck and then come in the house and get the stuff. And nobody was you know, there wasn't anybody out back, Hey, what's in the duffel bag?

02;00;13;19 - 02;00;54;17
Indra
You know, that I consulted having because everybody that we were doing it with was had their shit together. Everybody, you know, nobody was getting busted all the time or anything and we were all very, very careful. I mean, I could tell you the I mean, if some of the stories I would tell you like driving 300 kilos up in the back of a van in a wooden box that couldn't be looked into, well, that was I was the one who thought of that event.

02;00;54;22 - 02;01;29;23
Indra
If you're willing to do that, okay, you know, I'm going to give you $500 a kilo for every kilo you take up there. So I'd Sure. I work 300 kilos with it. Right. 300 times 500. Pretty, pretty petty. And I used to take care, you know, I have wife and kids too. So any in those days my wife then, she was the sweetest, kindest little creature on the planet.

02;01;30;15 - 02;01;54;03
Indra
And So I would get her whatever it was that she was wanting. She had a garden tools. I'd buy some garden tools if she wanted to give money to one of her no good, low down piece of shit sisters I would give her money to give to one of them assholes and I mean, her sister's are like the worst of the worst.

02;01;54;03 - 02;02;15;28
Indra
I mean, they were, you know, the the three witches of whatever they were them. I mean, they were just. And he was the black sheep of the family. None of her sisters are like drugs. No way. And, you know, and he was like, well, what do you got? Let's try it. So it was like a whole different thing.

02;02;16;19 - 02;02;53;11
Indra
And he in past years had a triple aneurysm a few years ago and a triple at age 62 was quite a thing. You know, her her doctor told me that when I asked him two days later, what's the prognosis? He said, Well, usually women her age have a single aneurysm die within 7 to 14 days. And I sat there looking, I really was married.

02;02;53;11 - 02;03;18;17
Indra
And I said, Do you have a side gig working for Forest Lawn where you give people bad news and watch him die? He's like, Oh, I just say, Yeah. And I said, Because you just said that. Like it. The by the way, you then added that your wife is dead. And that was almost four years ago and she's still fine.

02;03;18;27 - 02;03;48;08
Indra
She she had a triple aneurysm, a golf ball sized blood clot and water on the brain and they had to drill, hold her skull and pass it down to her powder so that the cerebrospinal fluid can get out, though. And she's as sweet as can be. She's not the same person at all. You know, the person that had the triple injuries and was not there anymore.

02;03;49;08 - 02;04;17;19
Indra
And, uh, yeah, it was. But she's extra, extra sweet. So my kids are like, I mean, before that she was could be rough around the edges on occasion when she wanted to and because she's you know, she's tough, you know, if she had a bunch of bad sisters and brothers. So anyway, my kids are like, Oh, mom's really sweet these days.

02;04;17;19 - 02;04;43;11
Indra
What's up with that, Dad? I'd say that that's just what you're seeing there is who your mother really is. Because with the all of her old personality and stuff went out, all that was left was this sugary sweet being that you're seeing now, They wouldn't say a mean word to anybody, Right.

02;04;43;22 - 02;04;52;09
Hamilton
And if I wanted to learn more about Ben, could you tell me his his name? Is it safe now to know his name.

02;04;52;09 - 02;05;04;25
Indra
Yeah. Problem is how it is. I don't really know his last name. You know, he never we never got around to that. Like I said, I don't think would ever do mine.

02;05;04;25 - 02;05;11;27
Hamilton
And for example, there must be an arrest record or a police report or news reports associated with his arrest. Right.

02;05;12;04 - 02;05;15;29
Indra
Probably.

02;05;15;29 - 02;05;17;08
Hamilton
Do you know how those could be found?

02;05;18;06 - 02;05;21;04
Indra
Uh, searching the police records.

02;05;22;20 - 02;05;26;27
Hamilton
And just out of curiosity, so what year was it that he was arrested?

02;05;28;00 - 02;05;45;08
Indra
Uh, boy, is he the last of the eighties or the early in the nineties? I mean, there's not going to be very many people who were arrested in San Diego with a couple of hundred pounds of MDA.

02;05;45;08 - 02;05;52;09
Hamilton
Is there do you remember the address of the location?

02;05;52;09 - 02;06;08;12
Indra
No, It was right behind the police station. It was it was I mean, you could look out the front window of our place and there was 25 cop cars and the police station was there.

02;06;08;12 - 02;06;11;24
Hamilton
Yeah. Wow. Do you remember what part of town it was?

02;06;11;24 - 02;06;15;09
Indra
Maybe commercial district.

02;06;16;09 - 02;06;21;12
Hamilton
Commercial district. Okay, well, maybe I'll try to look and maybe I can figure out what his last name is.

02;06;22;19 - 02;06;30;17
Indra
Yeah, you probably believe it's possible that you could. I mean, I suppose I could do it that way.

02;06;30;17 - 02;06;34;23
Hamilton
Do you could ask his ex-wife, right?

02;06;34;24 - 02;06;56;05
Indra
His miserable ex-wife. I don't know about her her. She's like, What are you going to give me if, you know, like, I remember when I asked her about the notes, that was the first thing out of her mouth. Yeah. What are you going to give me? You know.

02;06;56;11 - 02;06;58;03
Hamilton
I'll give her a hundred bucks.

02;06;58;03 - 02;07;30;18
Indra
Yeah. I don't think that you wouldn't get her attention with a hundred bucks. You know, she's. She's not that she was a a German fraulein, and, you know, I was around her enough to know that, uh, she's not somebody that going to snuggle up to or anything because she's just, you know, reprehensible person.

02;07;32;12 - 02;07;43;26
Hamilton
And before Ben died, you told me that you reached out to him and asked him if him and I could speak. And I think you're words were it went over like a lead balloon. Was that how you described it?

02;07;44;09 - 02;08;09;15
Indra
Yeah, very much. See, when I mentioned it time, his thing was, Oh, you. You want me to go back to jail, huh? I was like, No, no, that wasn't it at all. And he goes, Well, sounds like it. Leroy He used to call me Leroy. And I would say, Well, no, I'm not trying to get you to jail.

02;08;09;15 - 02;08;44;27
Indra
I'm just I was thinking about telling this story because I thought he probably would be cool. It should be told because a lot of stuff happened and went down and I was very lucky that I walked away from it all untouched. You know, I didn't I did find myself in any kind of a bad spot, but it's just because I used to pay attention to everything he's told me all the time.

02;08;44;27 - 02;09;11;19
Indra
And he would you know, he would always warn me, Don't talk to people. Don't tell anybody anything. No. You know, So I was pretty much mum is the word and he was that way forever. And so when you first even asked me about talking to him, I was like, This is probably standby, but his ice cube in hell of happening.

02;09;12;20 - 02;09;35;02
Indra
And yeah, he was like, You're trying to jail me. I know you're trying to jam me. I said, I will jail you way earlier for lot bigger stuff. And he of course, he had he had a sense of humor, you know, So he's like, Yeah, yeah. But the answer was he didn't really feel like it was something he would have to do.

02;09;35;02 - 02;09;54;26
Indra
He said he was telling me he'd been feeling really bad and physically bad in a I'm pretty sure that finally I mean, he was like in his nineties, right? So yeah, right.

02;09;54;27 - 02;09;57;26
Hamilton
So he went to his grave, not having told anyone about his work.

02;09;59;01 - 02;10;23;25
Indra
He went to his grave. I didn't go to his grave. I just at that point in time, I didn't want to show my face there because I knew there was going to be a lot of people there who some of which I didn't really necessarily want to see again, because you have to understand a lot of stuff happened.

02;10;23;26 - 02;10;50;10
Indra
I mean, we used to have these big parties down in the desert where the Grapefruit Ranch was, and there would be like 150 people there and it would be a fuckin you know, so would be who everybody and their brother was fucking like, crazy. And, you know, it was all and I remember one of the girls who who also was named Annie, who was his girlfriend for a while.

02;10;51;00 - 02;11;29;11
Indra
I asked her recently about getting back together. In the interim, she became a doctor and she was like too much water under the bridge, you know, she didn't want to entertain any of that again because Ben was gone and how I met her and he was she was one of the early ones that got me in with to see Ben to she her husband, Tom, who was an American Indian.

02;11;29;11 - 02;12;06;12
Indra
And I hit it off, became really good friends and I bought a house. I cook one night and went over there and the whole bunch of us set around and snorted and about six months later, I saw Annie. She was crying and I said, What's wrong? And she goes, Tom died. And I said, From what? She goes, Well, actually it's kind of Ben's for.

02;12;06;12 - 02;12;30;18
Indra
And I said, Why is it Ben's for it? She said, Well, because he he helped Tom make a lot of money. And so Tom bought some really good heroin because he went heroin and he did some heroin on Christmas Eve that year and aspirated his own vomit while he was laying on the floor sound asleep next to her.

02;12;31;28 - 02;12;41;16
Indra
So, yeah, so much for Tom. He was a great guy, man. He was a real brother to me. A trip that he left that way.

02;12;41;28 - 02;13;01;29
Hamilton
But yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, are there other things that about operation, about the chemistry, about what you learned using these substances that you think should be conveyed?

02;13;01;29 - 02;13;38;28
Indra
Well, I start from the first time I took the MDA. It's definitely created by the gods. That is, the world deserves a chance to see this and feel it and understand it. Like, I think if if we gave Putin phrases a good sized dose of it, I think he would draw that whole scenario in the Ukraine, do whole pretty fast, and then he'd would cry and ask forgiveness from everybody.

02;13;38;28 - 02;14;06;14
Indra
But what God has already. We So, yeah, but there's there's so much negative energy, the world and things like this, like this, this kind of a drug appear on the cosmic scene because of the negativity. We need some you know, everything it has is balanced. If there's a lot of bad stuff there is a lot of good stuff as well.

02;14;08;04 - 02;14;34;22
Indra
And I thought it was bad because it was something that I'd taken them many times and I only felt good things from it. And so I thought, yeah, too bad the whole world doesn't get a chance at this. I still feel that. I still feel that way. I still think that it would be a fabulous thing, but yeah.

02;14;34;22 - 02;14;45;14
Hamilton
And, and do you have any memories specifically of what Ben was doing at Monsanto or what kind of research he was doing? Did he have a PhD? What was he working on that gave him this chemical sensitivity?

02;14;46;10 - 02;15;17;07
Indra
He he worked well. He he was much older than me. So you got to realize part of his life was he started out by working at 3 a.m. and then Monsanto and he was a line chemist for like 20 some years doing that. And, you know, he was kind of bored with that. And so he started reading the work to see who made what with which to whom.

02;15;17;21 - 02;15;51;27
Indra
So that's where he came across the MDA, the Merck Mail, because the Germans wanted to use it as a diet drug until all those trials had started. Sean, back up. God. Hey, I want another one of those, please. So they they shut that down. That was in 1938. I guess the German guys were like, Why are these women all coming back for more of this drug?

02;15;51;27 - 02;16;07;24
Indra
So anyway, yeah, it was it was very interesting. We made it by the Merck recipe words. It didn't really come out any different than the way we did it.

02;16;08;20 - 02;16;12;08
Hamilton
Was that starting with Piper now.

02;16;12;08 - 02;16;24;11
Indra
Maybe I'd have to look at the very thing I get to tell you. But yeah, it was a complicated thing that they did with that at that point in time.

02;16;25;15 - 02;16;28;11
Hamilton
You know, Piper now has a really wonderful smell.

02;16;28;13 - 02;16;28;23
Indra
Yeah.

02;16;30;10 - 02;16;36;03
Hamilton
I mean, are other things that we should talk about?

02;16;36;03 - 02;16;41;09
Indra
Well, I mean, if you've got other questions that you want to ask me. Well, one.

02;16;41;20 - 02;16;52;04
Hamilton
One other question is so did you all you mentioned Grateful Dead. Did you all interact with various figures in the psychedelic scene like Alexander Shulgin or other chemists?

02;16;52;19 - 02;17;18;14
Indra
We did interact a little bit with Shogun, the Grateful Dead and the Grateful Dead. When they were going to play in Jamaica. They wanted somebody make a picture to put it on. The Berkeley used to be a pink entertainment page in the Berkeley paper, and I watch exactly what it was, but they always had a pink paper which said, What's going on?

02;17;18;20 - 02;17;51;25
Indra
What movies playing, what groups are down? And so a owl, who was the head of the travel agency for the Grateful Dead, asked Annie, who played the flute if my Annie could draw a picture for him. And so Annie drew the You seen it? I'm sure. The skull with dreadlocks. Okay. There's a Grateful Dead thing that they used for ever without ever paying any a penny for it.

02;17;51;25 - 02;18;21;17
Indra
But she drew that in their kitchen on the back of a piece of Grateful Dead stationery and Jerry, who was there at the time, came out, and he kept looking over his shoulder because it was a dot drawing. She just kept making these dots. But that skull is immaculate. But anyway, he looked over at me and he says, Man, she's really something with that that thing.

02;18;21;17 - 02;18;51;20
Indra
And I said, Yeah, she's very, very good at it. And he says, You guys want some coke? And I'm like, No, you don't. You don't do coke. And He didn't want coke either. So he's like, Well, can I sit down with Doug? We're a little bit. I said, No, I don't care. He said, Oh, go ahead. So he sits down and we're talking for a while and he gets on to the fact that I am not.

02;18;52;08 - 02;19;17;13
Indra
Yes, Jerry. No. Jerry. Yes. Jerry. Death. Jerry. Oh, Jerry. You know, the people that hung around him, that was their whole thing. I mean, it was unbelievable to even hear and see him. They would come in and and they would look. They would go, Can I get you, Jerry? And then they would look at you like, What are you doing here, you filthy piece of shit?

02;19;17;13 - 02;19;44;21
Indra
Because they were asking us on coke. There are coked up. The whole crew is cooked up like nobody's business and so Jerry figured out that I wasn't a yes boy. And so we start talking about fishing and all kinds other shit. You know, nothing to do with any of the drugs or anything. And he even didn't. He didn't do any more coke.

02;19;44;21 - 02;20;32;14
Indra
You put the coke, they told this Martha, this girl where they go put that away and he gave it to her and she took it away. I'm pretty sure she was just like put her away and it was it was just one of those situations where you want to always do the what was right here because he knew Jerry was a popular guy and there was all these people around him trying to get his attention all the fucking time about inane bullshit for the most part that seem really stupid questions, but they feel like they got to, you know, I got it right.

02;20;32;14 - 02;20;55;18
Indra
Jerry answered me, hey, you know, kind of thing. And he was he was down home, you know, down there. He didn't he wasn't in any of that. But it was there and there wasn't much he could do about. So a lot of times he joined in with a snort coke with them and he offered it to me and a number of times.

02;20;55;18 - 02;21;25;18
Indra
And I always just told you, hey, wrong stuff for this boy. I don't do any downers or cocaine like things or speed. He was like, Yeah, I had my. He goes, They do everything around here. Like, yeah, I know. But anyway and he drew that picture form on the back of the stationery, they took it, it had, it gave it to the Berkeley newspaper outfit.

02;21;26;01 - 02;21;53;28
Indra
They, it on the front page of the pink sheet and his drawing of the Grateful Dead thing there. And then they never paid or gave it to anybody. They kept over cocaine. But she was like, Nah, I don't want any cocaine. But yeah, they never did get around to giving her money for doing that. And she did. I mean, I don't know how many different things they use it for.

02;21;53;28 - 02;22;08;07
Indra
To this day, it's all cabs on T-shirts and stuff, but he never got paid a nickel. So that's that's dopers for you.

02;22;08;07 - 02;22;15;11
Hamilton
Wow. I mean, I really just love the story. And I'd really appreciate that you took the time to tell me about it. Thank you so much.

02;22;16;01 - 02;22;40;00
Indra
You Asked so, you know, I told you about it in the first place because I thought, well, I looked at a few of your things and I thought he might be interested. Who knows? So I see that email saying, Hey, I made it. The air is ready to go. The interest that you said, Yeah, he went Duck.

02;22;40;00 - 02;22;42;02
Hamilton
Yeah. You caught my attention with the rainy Nicole.

02;22;43;05 - 02;22;48;08
Indra
Well, I don't think there was anybody else use a rainy day or to make it with in those days.

02;22;48;08 - 02;22;50;28
Hamilton
Yeah, No, I don't think so either at all.

02;22;51;18 - 02;23;18;12
Indra
And we used to buy like big containers or any nickel because we're making a lot of. So yeah, you know, I got to the point where I could handle it all. At first I was frightened to death of it all I really was and then would just give me little things. Heads up. Because, by the way, notes below your shoe burst into and burning.

02;23;18;12 - 02;23;44;07
Indra
And I'm like, okay, thank you. Don't do this. Don't add any of this, any of that. So that he bought me the book of adverse chemical reactions so I didn't blow myself up. Yeah. Which was a lightning book because of some of the things I had been thinking about doing were verboten in that book.

02;23;44;29 - 02;23;47;07
Hamilton
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great book.

02;23;47;11 - 02;23;49;27
Indra
Yeah, it was. I really enjoyed it. I still have it.

02;23;50;10 - 02;24;03;23
Hamilton
Wow. Well, you should take a look at your sketchbook and let me know if you find anything and I'm going to edit this interview and send it to you for your approval. And if you're okay with everything will make it available.

02;24;04;13 - 02;24;35;03
Indra
Okay, I'll be good. I'll give it a shot. Now, my drawing book, man, it's 15 years old. It's this thick. It's got thousands drawings and notes and stuff in it. I have to take a look through it. I haven't looked through it for years now, but I used to be. I used to draw pictures of people, but a caricature of them.

02;24;36;20 - 02;25;02;10
Indra
Like, you know, I would draw the person, although I could draw the person identically, I would catch the parts of their personality and added into the caricature. And I, I did that a lot. Some people liked it, some people didn't I depended on it. If you were the one I was making, the caricature of it. And what I decided was your thing.

02;25;02;10 - 02;25;05;02
Indra
But yeah.

02;25;05;02 - 02;25;15;02
Hamilton
All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate you telling the story and I hope to talk to you again soon.

02;25;15;02 - 02;25;18;07
Indra
Well, I'm easy to find as long as I'm still alive.