Owsley "Bear" Stanley, '60s Counterculture Icon and LSD Producer, Dies at 76

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture icon and prolific LSD producer who worked with The Grateful Dead, has died. He was 76.
Stanley died Saturday after a car he was driving swerved off a highway and hit trees down an embanked near Mareeba in Queensland, Australia, The Associated Press reports. His wife, Sheila, was treated for minor injuries from the crash.

See other stars we've lost this year

One of the pioneers of California's drug culture, Stanley produced an estimated pound of pure LSD, or roughly 5 million "trips" of normal potency of the hallucinogenic drug in the mid-1960s while at the University of California at Berkeley.After meeting Grateful Dead members in 1966, he became the psychedelic band's first financial backer and served as manager before becoming its sound engineer. He designed the band's famous lightning bolt logo, aka Steal Your Face, with his friend, Bob Thomas.

Watch Grateful Dead videos

He was arrested in 1967 at his secret lab in Orinda, Calif., and wound up serving two years after a 1970 pot bust.
A Kentucky native, Stanley — whose namesake grandfather, Augustus Owsley Stanley, was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator — adopted Australia as his new home country in the '80s when he became convinced that a new ice age was near and that region would be the most likely to survive.
Stanley is survived by his wife, four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.