For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area:
The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael, although he is one of the men who virtually made the ’60s. Because Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs, few people would know what he looks like.
The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture the psychedelic, “Owsley” is a folk hero of the counterculture, celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
For more than 20 years, Stanley — a