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The Acid KingBy Peter WilkinsonRolling Stone Issue 872July 5, 2001For more than two decades, authorities believe, Leonard Pickard was amajor player in the LSD underground. Now, sitting in a federal prison,he tells his tale for the first time.Late last year, a new prisoner arrived at the Shawnee County Jail inTopeka, Kansas a polite beanstalk of a man from the San Francisco BayArea who stood out amoung the petty criminals who make up the majorityof Shawnees inmate population. He spoke in a rapid whisper, practicedyoga, meditated in his cell and read difficult books on mathematics andphysics. Along with his prison blues, he wore sandals with socks. Aprincely mane of silver hair fell almost to his shoulders.The mans name was William Leonard Pickard. A few days before, onNovember 7th, 200, the fifty-five-year-old Harvard graduate had beenarrested not far from an abandoned Atlas E missile silo outside Topekaand charged with being one of the busiest manufacturers of LSD in theworld, a chemist with the means to cook up acid by the kilos. If thegovernments charges prove true, this would make him one of the highpriests of acid manufacture, part of a clandestine fraternity thatprobably numbers no more than a dozen worldwide.Acid cookers are notoriously hard to catch. A lab can be set up quicklyand broken down easily, and it only takes about ten days to perform aseries of complicated chemical reactions to produce a sizable batch ofthe drug enough, once diluted and dipped onto blotter paper, forhundreds of thousands of hits. The trickiest part of the process isobtaining the precursor chemical known as ergotamine tartrate, or ET.Heavily regulated in this country, where it is used to treat migraines,ET is often smuggled in from Eastern Europe, where sale of the compoundis less restricted.Acid manufacturing might be one of the last criminal enterprises wherethose involved are motivated by more than the prospect of making money.Even now, more than three decades after the Summer of Love, to cook acidis to perform a sacrament, a public service. Members of this small bandoperate with great stealth and are rarely informed on by theirassociates, even those facing long prison terms. The Drug EnforcementAdministration had not taken down an LSD lab since 1991.The case of U.S. v. Pickard is just the latest, and perhaps final,chapter in the strange and often fantastic tale of William LeonardPickard and his journey from a privileged boyhood in Atlanta, throughthe manic, hallucinogenic heart of the 1960s, to the forefront of socialdrugs research in the 1990s, conducted at some of the nation's mostprestigious universities. Along the way, under various aliases - hecrossed paths with such rock stars as Sting, and befriended members ofthe British House of Lords, State Department officials and the districtattorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan.He earned a master's from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, wherehe studied drug trends in the former Soviet Union.

Pickard also has a rap sheet stretching back to his teens and has servedtwo prison terms for manufacturing drugs, including LSD and the rarelyseen synthetic mescaline. In recent years, though, his life seemed tocome together - he'd fathered a child and had become a serious convertto Buddhism. He had a Job at a respected drug-policy think tank, and heplanned to attend medical school so he could finally dedicate his lifeto alleviating the suffering of others. But he had also become bizarrelyentwined with - and then, he says, hideously betrayed by - a man namedGordon Todd Skinner, a Porsche-driving pot dealer from Tulsa, Oklahoma,twenty years younger than Pickard When Pickard comes to trial, mostlikely later this year, the proceedings promise to shed light on thedangerous and secret world of LSD manufacturing for the first time indecades. Perhaps greater truths will be revealed, too.In some ways, the story of Leonard Pickard and Todd Skinner is a storyabout the collision of Sixties idealism with the materialism andpragmatism of the nineties -Timothy Leary's America versus BillClinton's, if you will. And its moral will be clear even before theJudge calls the court to order; The sweet but easily corruptible dreamof the flower-power generation never really stood a chance - but It wasfun while it lasted.The Acid TriangleMost of the Acid consumed in the past thirty years is believed to havebeen made in temporary basement and warehouse labs in and around SanFrancisco's Bay Area, a part of California drug agents call the AcidTriangle. The last time those agents made a significant (1 million hitsplus) acid bust, in 1993, they identified a supplier who lived inBolinas, the northernmost point of the triangle.A supplier, that is - not a chemist. The narcs never located thechemist. LSD today is a much lower dose (20 micrograms versus 2oo-plus)than the high-test stuff Augustus Owsley Stanley III sold as orangesunshine'' in the Sixties; more of a party high than an eight-hour trip."Triple set - LSD that is reworked three times to in- crease purity -it's not found as often," says Dave Tresmontan, special agent in chargeof the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement's San Francisco office."The LSD today tends to be a little dirtier and not nearly assophisticated as it once was," It's difficult to tell exactly whenLeonard Pickard first involved himself with LSD. BNE believes he waspart of the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which operated in andaround the Acid Triangle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sellinghashish and LSD cooked by Owsley and other important chemists like TimScully and Nick Sand.The Brotherhood's philosophy, at least the beginning, was simple andbeneficent: with LSD, turning people on, expanding consciousness andchanging the way people perceived the world took precedence over makinga profit.When the subject of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love came up one day inthe Shawnee County jail, Pickard stopped short of admitting any contactwith the group, but did speak of their activities with a certain knowingreverence: "I understand there have been a few LSD chemists that wouldnever make a batch of LSD ever, ever, without offering prayers for the

safety of the people that might use it. And it should act as a goodmedicine throughout the world. So I'm told." He added, "I think theirmantra was something on the order of, 'Those that say, don't know. Andthose that know, don't say." Pickard smiled, conspiratorially, as hetalked, sitting cross-legged and as calm as a Buddha on a plastic chairin an interview room barely big enough to contain hissix-and-a-half-foot frame.A federal trial in San Francisco in 1973 crippled Brotherhood operationsand seemed to fragment the cooking culture, or at least send it furtherunderground. BNE didn't take down a lab of any real size in the AcidTriangle for years after the Brotherhood case, just a few seizures nowand again. "We might find some pretty good chunks, 15,000 hits or100,000 hits," says Dave Tresmontan. Then, in 1988, reports came intothe Bureau of strong chemical smells emanating from a ware- house in thecity of Mountain View, California, about forty-five mites south of SanFrancisco. On December 28th, as the narcs arrived to execute a searchwarrant, a tall, pleasant man of forty strolled out of the warehouse,carrying multiple pieces of identification bearing a number of differentnames. His real name was William Leonard Pickard.A Little PreppyLeonard Pickard grew up precociously in Atlanta, a city unfamiliar inthe 1960s with the concepts of tolerance and experimentation. Hisfather, William, practiced civil law. His mother, Lucille, a ColumbiaUniversity Ph.D., researched fungal diseases at the Centers for DiseaseControl. The Packards lived comfortably in the city's genteel northwestsuburbs, a social, church-oriented neighborhood populated by academicfamilies."The governor of Georgia's mother taught me Sunday school," Pickardrhapsodized in a letter from prison."Suits on Sunday, no alcohol, learned to handle rifles at nine. Readendlessly. Azaleas, rhododendrons, lightning, Fireflies. Many happymoments as a small boy observing paramecia under my great-grandfather'smicroscope. Visiting scientists from all over the world stayed with us.Much conversation." Something of a science prodigy, Pickard spent thesummer of 1962 interning at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.A year later, at the age of seventeen, he won a Westinghouse TalentSearch, one of forty teenagers recognized as he top science students inthe United States. Twenty-two scholarship offers rolled in, unsolicited.Pickard chose Princeton.The temptations of Greenwich Village jazz clubs, a brief train rideaway, distracted him, and after less than a year, he dropped out: "Iwasn't as smart as I thought I was,'' out: Supported by his trust fund,Pickard hit the road, looking for "greater experience of the humancondition than tenure track might have provided.''As he wandered the country in the mid-196os, trouble found himeverywhere. Eighteen years old and freshly removed from Princeton,Pickard was arrested twice in Alabama in 1964 for forging checks. Thefollowing January, he was arrested for stealing a car, "joy riding," ashe recalls. "Youthful idiocy." Pickard showed up on the West Coast in1967, where he met Talitha Stills, Stephen Stills' sister. "It was an

extraordinary time," she says. Everybody was hanging around Berkeley andStanford, whether they were enrolled or not, because they were involvedin the protests. Leonard was hanging out at Stanford with a lot of thepeople who were in the know. He was beyond university before he ever gotto university. He had a real interest in medicine and the chemistry andpharmacology underlying the drug movement.Stills also remembers a less studious aspect of her friend'spersonality. We were sort of the rich, bright kids she says. "Leonardhad his little trust fund, so he could just dedicate himself to goingout. He was all over the place. It was almost impossible to keep tabs onhim. He was a pretty serious ladies' man." For a period of about sevenyears, Pickard lived the life of a psychedelic freebooter, part of it ina commune in Austin.It was a time, he says, of "naked moonlight swimming, endless campfiresand theology in the High Sierra, refinement of the soul in the vastdeserts, finding what was of true value in the world and what was properconduct among others." In 1974, Pickard formally returned to school,enrolling at Foothill College, in Los A1tos Hills, to study biology andchemistry. Then he was off to San Jose State, from 1976 through 1978, tostudy organic chemistry and neurophysiology. Then Pickard, in his earlythirties, seemed to discover his calling: cooking illegal drugs, butdoing so with a Californian epicure's taste and sophistication.Besides chemistry, he knew the law, and rather than brazenly break it,Pickard tried to skirt it. The first compound he experimented with wasMDMA - a drug few had even heard of at the time but now known asEcstacy.To get around the fact that it was illegal, Pickard fiddled wit theformula and came up with a chemical cousin, MDA, a somewhat trippierversion of the drug. In time, Pickard's neighbors in Redwood Citycomplained about chemical odors wafting from his apartment. Sheriff'sdeputies who knocked on the door on October 10th, 1977, discovered afunctioning drug lab in the basement.Alan Johnson, chief inspector at the Santa Cruz, district attorneysoffice, interviewed the young chemist. "I had a delightful conversationwith Leonard," Johnson says. "He struck me as a really bright kid. Hewas dressed in a little V-neck sweater. He was a little Preppy. We'retalking about a whole different culture back then," Johnson recalls."Todays Cookers just get a recipe from some criminal. They mix a littleof this and a little of that. They don't really know what they're doing.This fellow was trying to change the MDMA to make it legal. He wasmaking the argument, and it was a new argument, that he's manufacturingan analogue.''Ultimately, Leonard's analogue argument failed. In 1978, while takingchemistry classes at Stanford, he was found guilty of attempting tomanufacture a controlled substance, a felony, and served eighteen monthsof a three-year sentence. In a letter from prison, Pickard offered up anelaborate excuse, denying that he had been brewing illegal drugs.He claims that he was busted after he was trying to sell some lab gearthat once belonged to a brotherhood of Eternal Love chemist, gear thatcontained traces of MDA.

Incarceration didn't seem to quell his fascination with clandestinechemistry. In February 1980 not long after his release, police inGainesville, Georgia, arrested Leonard Pickard for making amphetamines.A few months later, in June, authorities in Deland Florida, pinched himfor distributing MDA, the Ecstasy analogue.No threat of imprisonment, it seemed, could interfere with Leonard'squest to liberate the collective mind. "I believe it was genuine, hisbelief that psychedelics were helpful," says Rick Doblin, a HarvardPh.D. who is leading the effort to have Ecstasy for clinical study inthe United States, and an acquaintance of Packard's. "I think he wasafter money, but he had a romantic notion about the value ofpsychedelics, like a lot of us do."123,278 Pills and 89,802 TabsBy 1987, the two strands of Pickard's life came together when he turnedup at San Francisco State University and fell under the influence of thelegendary drug researcher Alexander Shulgin, a white-haired eccentricwho, with his wife, Ann, has dedicated his life to studyinghallucinogens and advocating their therapeutic value.For many years, Shulgin counted himself among the few researchers in thenation allowed to possess Schedule I drugs (like MDMA and 2C-cool.gif,and his books on the subject, among them PIHKAL, A Chemical Love Story(PIHKAL stands for "Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved" areperennial underground best sellers. "I hold Sasha as a real hero," saysPickard, who claims to have received "letters of condolence'' fromShulgin after his arrest.Nobody is exactly sure when, or if, Pickard actually set up the LSD labin Mountain View, but by 1988 it was operational. The lab was containedinside a trailer - of the type you might see at a construction site -that had been dragged into a warehouse in an industrial section of thecity. It contained state-of-the-art lab equipment, including aroto-evaporator, heating mantles and a pill press, an item that DEArestrictions make almost impossible to obtain. On the floor were stackedboxes of blotter paper in a raft of colorful, eye-catching designs:Escher heads, album covers, samurai shields and black-and-white tropicalscenes.After Pickard had been at the spot for some time, apparently cookingacid by the kilo, neighboring businessmen reported smelling chemicalodors. Agents of the BNE moved in. "It was a huge lab," says Ron Brooks,special agent in charge of the BNE'S San Jose office, who was on thescene that day in Mountain View. "He was making windowpane, microdot andblotter.'' And it was a diversified operation. Pickard was making notonly LSD but a synthetic mescaline, which is very difficult tosynthesize, and a bunch of other stuff. He was an excellent chemist.Excellent and prolific, on par almost with Owsley himself in terms ofoutput. Bear, as he was known, claimed to have turned out a total ofthree or four kilos during his storied career. Agents found a beguilingnote tucked inside a brown vial in the Mountain View trailer, whichseemed to be addressed to one of the chemists distributors and to

describe the scale of his operation. As I prepare my third kilogram ofLSD, it said, I think with amusement of our last conversation threeweeks ago, when you called me a liar, and I had to walk you down thehall to get you the very first gram that was supposed to be offered toyou preferentially. Since July of 1984, our friend has taken thirtygrams in that year, thirty grams in the second year and seventy-fivegrams in the last six to eight weeks. The recent change indicates thatsomeone close to you has accessed an existing system as well as itspotential problems. I hope you can monitor these proceedings in someway, since you come from the finest psychedelic heritage, prior to beingseduced by some sleezy cocaine and qualude {sic}nightmare. WhetherPickard wrote this note, and who the intended recipient was, have neverbeen made clear.A kilo of drugs might not sound like much if youre talking about pot orcoke or heroin, but a kilo of pure LSD is enough, DEA estimates, for 10million trips. One of the criminalists who donned protective gear toprocess the trailer crime scene, Lisa Brewer, counted 89,802 tabs ofacid and 123,278 acid pills, a form of acid rarely seen in 1988. OnlyPickard knew how much product had been already mailed to middlemen. Thiswas not the big one, Brewer says of Pickards laboratory. Nobody seesthese.Later, when Ron Brooks consulted Darryl Inaba, a leading drug expert atthe Haight-Ashbusy Free Clinic, he mentioned the fact that hed collareda guy making synthetic mescaline. No fucking way, Inaba replied. Thatsjust too hard to make. There are only a few people in the whole worldthat might have the capability.It was a beautiful, pure white, needlelike crystal, recalls Brooks.Aparently, it was only synthesized several times, ever, and Pickard wasa guy who knew how to do it. That was the only time we ever saw it. Guyslike him do that just as a challenge, just to prove they can do it. Idont think theres a market for it. It probably cost him way more to makethan he could ever sell it for.Not surprisingly, a BNE search for Pickard accomplices proved fruitless.We followed up leads in Daly City and in San Francisco, says Brooks,also out in the southern East Bay, but never had anything solid. He wasvery good about covering his tracks, and he and his circle of friendswere all the masters of using multiple identities and blind mail dropsand phones forwarded to other phones. I recall Mr. Pickard back in theinterview room, says BNE agent Tresmontan. He played a lot of thingsclose to the vest. I remember him sitting there with his legs crossed,very calm, very friendly, somewhat guarded. My thought was, Heres a veryintelligent individual, maybe slightly eccentris.When agents first encountered Pickard in the warehouse, he warned themnot to dismantle the lab. This is all bad stuff, Pickard advised. If Iwere you, Id burn this place to the ground. I wouldnt process thisscene. Somebodyll get hurt.Pickard proved to be right. One BNE agent on the scene, Max Houser,somehow got dosed upon entering the lab, even though he wore a full-bodyprotective suit and a respirator. Whitin an hour or two, Houser wentinto convulsions. An article about the case in a California forensicsjournal describes what happened next: The agent was taken to thehospital, where they administered Valium by IV to calm the anxiety. A

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