The Microdot Gang: The Rise and Fall of the LSD Network That Turned on the World by James Wyllie

Author:James Wyllie [Wyllie, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Organized Crime, Social Science, Criminology, General
ISBN: 9781803990934
Google: E-pdEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: History Press
Published: 2022-06-09T20:35:32+00:00

The final destination on the microdot’s journey was Llanddewi Brefi, a small Welsh village with two pubs, a hall, a store, a police house and St David’s Church, named after the patron saint of Wales and allegedly built on the spot where he was said to have preached at some point during the sixth century. Llanddewi Brefi sat quietly in a region known as the Green Desert, a relatively unspoilt landscape that gave the impression that the past co-existed with the present. All around were traces of Celtic legends, woven into the fabric of hills and ancient stones, not merely relics but living and breathing entities, as if supernatural beings lived side by side with the human inhabitants, visible to those who looked hard enough.

The Microdot Gang’s contact in Llanddewi Brefi was known to everybody as Smiles. He passed through the village in 1971 before returning with his partner and her two kids in 1973 to buy a terraced cottage near the centre of the village that was called Y Glyn (The Hollow). Working class and ex-army, Smiles had lived in Birmingham, Manchester and London – his accent bore the imprint of all three cities – and he was perfectly at home in a world of pubs, clubs, after-hours poker games, betting shops and racetracks, where wages were blown on Friday and Saturday nights, you expected to rub shoulders with the criminal fraternity and nobody batted an eye if you bought and sold stolen goods or did some dealing on the side for a bit of extra cash. In March 1970, Smiles was convicted of conspiracy to steal and given a three-year conditional discharge. Two years later, he was fined £50 for possession of cannabis. Though he’d briefly been employed as a social worker in the late 1960s, by the time he moved to Llanddewi Brefi drugs were his sole source of income. But for Smiles, LSD was not merely about raking in the cash or having a bit of fun at the weekend; he’d had his own acid awakening. Years later, he remembered how LSD had opened his mind and helped him understand ‘that everything is ultimately connected’. Searching ‘for the divine spark within’, Smiles took up meditation, travelled to India, studied Buddhism and encouraged everybody in the village ‘to experience’ the same ‘one-ness’ that he had: ‘I turned the bread-man onto acid, the milkman onto acid, even the man who sold me the house’.

The residents of Llanddewi Brefi were unfazed by Smiles’ presence in their midst. He wasn’t the first LSD evangelist to fall for the village’s charms. Since the late 1960s that part of Wales held a magnetic attraction for those in the counter-culture looking for an alternative to hard-edged urbanised modernity. Part of the appeal was due to its remoteness and rugged beauty, separated from the border with England by a central rib of mountains, interspersed with deep valleys, and close to stunning coastline. Even more tempting was the fact that, due to the steady decline

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