Review: Leaf by Leaf by Leaf Fielding

Leaf Fielding, member of the legendary ‘Operation Julie’ LSD-manufacturing-and-distribution ring, was busted in 1977 and spent five years in jail, ending his sentence at Leyhill Open Prison. He published his memoir, To Live Outside the Law, in 2011 – a gripping account of the Julie bust, the events that led up to it, and Leaf’s more general life story, involving a difficult childhood, bad times at boarding school and eventual flowering into a young hippy in the mid-1960s. The book was the first insider account of the Julie affair and was well received, earning plaudits from luminaries such as Howard Marks, who typically described it as: ‘F***ing good!’

Several years on, Leaf has now published Part 2 of his memoirs, entitled Leaf by Leaf, which continue the story from the point where To Live Outside the Law ended – his release from prison. After initial exhilaration, Leaf is subject to volatile mood swings as he faces the inescapable tally of traumas that prison life has inflicted on him, and also the realisation that healing himself won’t be a simple process. Moreover it is now the early 80s, the grim Thatcher era, and by this time the vivid psychedelic colour that infused the previous two decades of British life has all but drained away.

Read more on: Psychedelic Press UK

The Man and the Legend: An Appreciation of Howard Marks

The new Psychedelic Press Journal Volume XXI contains my in-depth appreciation of Howard Marks, alongside some other excellent articles and fronted by a fabulously trippy cover from artist Rebecca Jordan.

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Dennis Howard Marks, cannabis smuggler extraordinaire, died from cancer in 2016 at the age of seventy. Born in 1945, he belonged to that generation who came of age as the alternative society and psychedelic drug culture really began to flower in the second half of the 1960s, and like so many who are now venerated icons he rode that wave for all it was worth. He looked like a member of a hard rock band and he brought pop star glamour and celebrity sheen to the world of drug crime like no other figure. In this he was harking back to earlier, more romantic ages, taking the form of a twentieth century Robin Hood, Dick Turpin or Captain Kidd – in fact in Señor Nice he claims family connections to the Welsh buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan. Howard also acted in several films, and had he been given the chance, he would have fitted perfectly into the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, alongside Johnny Depp and Keith Richards.

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