LSD today is a much lower dose (20 micrograms versus 200-plus) than the high-test stuff Augustus Owsley Stanley III sold as “orange sunshine” in the Sixties more of a party high than an eight-hour trip. And its moral will be clear even before the judge calls the court to order: The sweet but easily corruptible dream of the flower-power generation never really stood a chance - but it was fun while it lasted. In some ways, the story of Leonard Pickard and Todd Skinner is a story about the collision of Sixties idealism with the materialism and pragmatism of the Nineties - Timothy Leary’s America versus Bill Clinton’s, if you will. Perhaps greater truths will be revealed, too. When Pickard comes to trial, most likely later this year, the proceedings promise to shed light on the dangerous and secret world of LSD manufacturing for the first time in decades. But he had also become bizarrely entwined with - and then, he says, hideously betrayed by - a man named Gordon Todd Skinner, a Porsche-driving pot dealer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, 20 years younger than Pickard. He had a job at a respected drug-policy think tank, and he planned to attend medical school so he could finally dedicate his life to alleviating the suffering of others. In recent years, though, his life seemed to come together - he’d fathered a child and had become a serious convert to Buddhism. Pickard also has a rap sheet stretching back to his teens and has served two prison terms for manufacturing drugs, including LSD and the rarely seen synthetic mescaline. He earned a master’s from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he studied drug trends in the former Soviet Union. Along the way - under various aliases - he crossed paths with such rock stars as Sting, and befriended members of the British House of Lords, State Department officials and the district attorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan. Pickard is just the latest, and perhaps final, chapter in the strange and often fantastic tale of William Leonard Pickard and his journey from a privileged boyhood in Atlanta, through the manic, hallucinogenic heart of the 1960s, to the forefront of social- drugs research in the 1990s, conducted at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities.
The Drug Enforcement Administration has not taken down an LSD lab since 1991. Members of this small band operate with great stealth and are rarely informed on by their associates, even those facing long prison terms.
Even now, more than three decades on from the Summer of Love, to cook acid is to perform a sacrament, a public service. Heavily regulated in this country, where it is used to treat migraines, ET is often smuggled in from Eastern Europe, where sale of the compound is less restricted.Īcid manufacturing might be one of the last criminal enterprises where those involved are motivated by more than the prospect of making money. The trickiest part of the process is obtaining the precursor chemical known as ergotamine tartrate, or ET.
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A lab can be set up quickly and broken down easily, and it only takes about ten days to perform a series of complicated chemical reactions that produce a sizable batch of the drug - enough, once diluted and dipped onto blotter paper, for hundreds of thousands of hits. If the government’s charges prove true, this would make him one of the high priests of acid manufacture, part of a clandestine fraternity that probably numbers no more than a dozen worldwide.Īcid cookers are notoriously hard to catch. A few days before, on November 7th, 2000, the 55-year-old Harvard graduate had been arrested not far from an abandoned Atlas E missile silo outside Topeka and charged with being one of the busiest manufacturers of LSD in the world, a chemist with the means to cook up acid by the kilo. The man’s name was William Leonard Pickard. A princely mane of silver hair fell almost to his shoulders. Along with his prison blues, he wore sandals with socks. He spoke in a rapid whisper, practiced yoga, meditated in his cell and read difficult books on mathematics and physics. Late last year, a new prisoner arrived at the Shawnee County Jail in Topeka, Kansas - a polite beanstalk of a man from the San Francisco Bay Area who stood out among the petty criminals who make up the majority of Shawnee’s inmate population.
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