4. His son Hamilton Morris is a psychonaut columnist for Harper’s and producer of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a Vice TV documentary series about hallucinogens.
5. One of Osmond’s patients was Bill Wilson (Bill W.), cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who later declared that acid was the only drug he’d ever encountered that appeared to curb alcohol addiction.
6. Pride and Prejudice (1940), Jane Eyre (1943) and A Woman’s Vengeance (1945) were among the screenplays he adapted that allowed him to purchase a home at the foot of the Hollywood sign. One of his unproduced scripts was an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that Walt Disney commissioned in 1945. When the studio released its 1951 feature-length cartoon to a tepid box office, thirteen different writers were credited, but Huxley was not among them.
7. From William Blake’s eighteenth-century book of poetry, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
8. The book also became namesake and inspiration for the classic ’60s LA acid rock group, The Doors.
9. From the Greek phanein, “to reveal,” and thymos, “mind-soul.”
10. Chief among them, R. Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan executive and amateur ethnomycologist who published a Life magazine article in 1958 about Mexican magic mushrooms, which is now credited with launching the psychedelic experience into America’s cultural mainstream.
11. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became a psychonaut in 1958 at the V.A. hospital in Menlo Park, where the CIA paid volunteers like Kesey $75 a day to take LSD.
12. Notably, future Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who participated in a 1966 Millbrook raid that resulted in no conviction.
13. Leary’s notorious catch phrase, inspired by media guru Marshall McLuhan, became a clarion call during the first Human Be-In held on Jan. 14, 1967, at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where over 30,000 flower children launched the counterculture movement.
14. In 2009, Arthur King and his bride of more than fifty years told the author that he’d never touched alcohol since CBS televised his LSD treatments at Maryland’s Spring Grove Hospital in 1966.
15. Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1966
16. Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, February 6, 1966
17. San Francisco Examiner, June 6, 1966
18. Underwritten by the Pentagon, a salaried chemist for Eli Lilly and Co. named William Garbrecht refined the Sandoz process in 1954, then later patented the procedure and published the formula in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The cumbersome twelve to fifteen step Garbrecht method yielded small batches of a few hundred milligrams and became a blueprint for early underground chemists, but was considered “antique” by the time LSD was outlawed in 1966.
19. At the same time the two Bernards were distributing their LSD, Aerojet General physicist Douglas George was synthesizing his own poor-quality “green goo” acid. Unlike Roseman and Copley, George never ran afoul of the FDA. He stopped his alchemy before it was outlawed.
20. San Francisco Examiner, May 21, 1964.
21. Roseman fled to Mexico, Copley to Brazil. They were extradited in 1968, all but forgotten in the press.
22. Kesey staged his first “acid test” with Owsley tabs in November 1965, the Warlocks supplying the soundtrack. “The whole world just went kablooey,” recalled Jerry Garcia. “My little attempt at having a straight life was really a fiction.” Months later, he changed the band’s name to the Grateful Dead.
23. The Dead commemorated Owsley’s first bust in their song “Alice D. Millionaire.”
III.
LEONARD PICKARD LIKED TO BELIEVE he was Old School, descended from a finer tradition of psychedelic exploration dedicated to altruism and universal enlightenment. He never was, nor ever could be, a Yuppie.
He first read about LSD in junior high. He remembered Time, Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post alternately praising, then condemning LSD.
“I was reading a magazine in a barber shop once when I was twelve. I noticed mention of a drug that had philosophical implications,” he said.
The hallucinogenic stories intrigued him, but he didn’t enter the acid fraternity until years later, at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
After his release from the Institute of Living, he returned home to Atlanta, where not a lot had changed. His mother had divorced and remarried for a third time. His older sister wed a nascent alcoholic. His father retired from Southern Bell as a systems analyst. He and Leonard’s stepmother moved to the tony suburb of Decatur. The elder Pickard became a gentleman farmer. He eventually purchased his own herd of Angus beef and joined the Georgia Cattlemen’s Association.
Meanwhile Leonard floundered. His time in rehab had little impact on his respect for the law. If anything, it killed his passion for formal education.
“I sought a greater breadth of the human condition than tenure-track would allow,” he said, tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Even if Princeton had let him return, he would probably have refused to go. He settled instead near Harvard, seeking out rebel heirs of the Leary/Alpert tradition.
“Harvard Square was lively in those days,” said Leonard. “I was always fond of Tim Leary’s attempts to describe the ineffable. There were no elders to ask, or vast online feedback the way there is now, so people were often alone or in small groups as they encountered transcendent phenomena.
“My circles tended to be very circumscribed—just a handful of friends, but close ones. I worked in ’66 and ’67 at the Retina Foundation for Experimental Biology in Boston, preparing mitochondria from beef hearts for biochemists.”
Pickard built a reputation as a reliable, efficient second-tier lab rat who could be depended upon to perform routine research. Soft-spoken yet uncommonly skilled, his arrest record and the time he’d spent at the Institute of Living never came up. During off hours, he dabbled in his own experiments.
“Joan Baez played Cambridge sometimes. Loved her ethereal voice,” he said. “My hangout in the Square was the Blue Parrot in the basement of the Brattle Theater. I recall hearing Sergeant Pepper there for the first time, like no music there ever was before. Young people
