Minakov will appear in court for sentencing on Oct. 4. His son Barton remains at large. Adam Vorhees served 10 months in jail, and, after his release in the fall of 1994, got a job at a South of Market stone-cutting business. On New Year's Eve, he was killed when 37 pieces of stone fell and crushed him.
So -- after spending thousands of dollars on an undercover operation lasting more than a year, the DEA ended up with a couple of old hippies who worked on cars, with one son dead and one at large. No kingpins, and no LSD lab. Life goes on.
The real world always plays differently than network television. Finales aren't neatly wrapped in the murky, Darwinian world of drug politics, where today's dealer is tomorrow's informant. It's a thin line between lawless and lawful, when people whisper names and phone numbers to coax the right words out of a casual acquaintance. Friends become useful stepping stones to cross the river to freedom. And DEA agents proudly admit they listen to the Grateful Dead in their cars.
The case of Captain Clearlight casts a harsh light of pathos upon Northern California's LSD community. Oddly enough, this sophisticated era of high-tech surveillance and info overload still depends on human betrayal -- and gullibility. The DEA believed its informant. The informant believed that Vorhees was the LSD King. Vorhees believed he was Captain Clearlight. And Captain Clearlight still knew enough people who believed in him to bring folks down with him.
When asked why he is so forthcoming about his case, despite repeated warnings from his friends, Vorhees simply shrugs. He is now elderly, a product of 30 years of acid culture, a man suffering from both Lyme disease and prostate cancer, a man with no money in the bank and forever indebted to friends, a man who will soon be sitting in prison for a drug he still reveres. He doesn't have much time left on life's clock. But unlike the past five years of wiretaps, today, in the Mill Valley home of his former girlfriend Marcie, he's clearly happy there's a tape recorder in the room. He leans forward in his chair.
"What I'm trying to tell the world and ask the world is ... here, I turned on 50 million people. Why don't you all send me a dollar? I'd like to do an appeal. If some heavy-duty lawyer wants to be associated with the person who turned on 50 million people and probably created a lot of the computers and the virtual reality and all the rest of it. ... People come up to me and they say, 'Man, I would never have thought of any of this shit without acid.' The extrapolating, interpolating ... nothing connects, but on acid it all connects, you know. Synchronicity and divine intervention and projection."
Marcie, making iced tea in the kitchen, is getting increasingly nervous at the tape rolling during Waldron's familiar rap. Vorhees has left the room. It's now Captain Clearlight conducting the interview.
"I'd like all the people who took acid to massively write in: 'This is what acid did for me.' And if you had bad experiences, I'd like to hear about those, too. I'd like to build up this giant Internet explosion -- of what acid really is. Why it is that they're after the acid people. Why in particular are they after me, when I have not been in the acid business for 20 years? Why is it that the government is allowed to mess with people, hire criminals to make other people look like criminals, so they can put them in jail for doing nothing?"
"You still don't understand, do you?" says Marcie.
Outside the window of Marcie's home on Mount Tamalpais, the air is completely still.
"I think he's going to get in trouble if he keeps talking," she says.
"I am in trouble," answers Vorhees. "How can I get in any more trouble?"
"You can find out! When you do braggadocio -- and you may be telling the truth, but you're still bragging -- the energies today have to make a crime out of it. And there are people out there who are still making a lot of money on acid, and they don't want that kind of attention."
Vorhees chuckles. "I think they want more attention, so they can sell more acid, personally."
"I don't think they need any help," says Marcie. "Acid sells itself.
