During the 1960s and early 1970s, the drug culture adopted LSD as the psychedelic drug of choice, particularly amongst the hippie community. However, LSD dramatically decreased in popularity in the mid-1970s (see above graph which covers the period 2008). This decline was due to negative publicity centred on side-effects of LSD use, its criminalization, and the increasing effectiveness of drug law enforcement efforts, rather than new medical information. The last country to produce LSD legally (until 1975) was Czechoslovakia; during the 1960s, high-quality LSD was imported from the communist country to California, a fact appreciated by Leary in The Politics of Ecstasy.
Victor James Kapur had the first known home grown UK acid lab. Up to then, all LSD had been imported from the U.S. or was remnant produce of Sandoz before it stopped producing LSD. In 1967, Kapur was caught distributing 19 grams of crystalline LSD and subsequently the police raided both of his laboratories. One was in the back room of Kapur's chemist shop and another, larger one, was in a garage he rented from a friend of his brother-in-law.
A second group was busted in 1969. A lab in Kent, and a flat in London were raided simultaneously and quantities of equipment and LSD seized along with the two men who had been making the LSD, Quentin Theobald and Peter Simmons.
The availability of LSD had been drastically reduced by the late 1970s due to a combination of governmental controls and law enforcement. The supply of constituent chemicals including lysergic acid, which was used for production of LSD in the 1960s, and ergotamine tartrate, which was used for production in the 1970s, were placed under tight surveillance and government funding for LSD research was almost eliminated. These efforts were augmented by a series of major busts in England and Europe. One of the most famous was "Operation Julie" in Britain in 1978, named after the first name of the female drug squad officer involved; it broke up one of the largest LSD manufacturing and distribution operations in the world at that time, headed by chemist Richard Kemp. The group targeted by the Julie task force were reputed to have had links to the mysterious The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and to Ronald Stark.