Later that same year, Pickard headed west. California was a revelation: a land of “naked moonlight swimming, endless campfires and theology in the High Sierra, refinement of the soul in the vast deserts, finding what was of true value in the world and what was proper conduct among others.”
He fondly recalled his first trip to Berkeley in ’67. “I was amazed by all the long hair on Telegraph, and the obvious social movement of the times. The first large gatherings for music and be-ins. I was tear-gassed at anti-war demonstrations as barricades burned.”
His dismal record at Princeton ruled out admission to Berkeley, but not employment. His experience with Boston’s Retina Foundation helped him land a job with Berkeley’s Department of Bacteriology & Immunology, where he worked his way up the research ladder.
“It was an extraordinary time,” recalled Talitha Stills, younger sister of rock star Stephen Stills, and one of Pickard’s first California companions. “Everybody was hanging around Berkeley and Stanford, whether they were enrolled or not, because they were involved in the protests.”
A twenty-two-year-old college dropout, Pickard was ripe for the draft, but he’d always been on the move and never bothered to re-register. He retained his student deferment throughout the Vietnam War.
“There was no draft avoidance,” he said. “I lost a cousin in Vietnam. If called, I would have gone. I thought carefully about enlisting in the Navy twice, possibly as a Corpsman. Maybe I would have been more useful that way.”
Instead, he hunkered down in Berkeley’s Latimer Hall and took up organic chemistry alongside a future Nobel laureate.
“While I was managing Bacteriology at Berkeley, Kary Mullis was a young PhD candidate in biochemistry, fresh from Georgia Tech,” said Pickard. “As he noted in his autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Fields, Kary managed to synthesize a gram of LSD, which lit up the Biochem building most thoroughly.”
Pickard speculated that Mullis made his acid using Claviceps purpurea (ergot) grown in Biochem’s vast subterranean culture rooms. Leonard coyly suggested that a research associate such as himself would have had unfettered access to those essential ingredients.
Indeed, without mentioning Leonard by name, Mullis conceded he was not the only impatient, impulsive Berkeley researcher tinkering with acid during the late sixties:
As we learned very quickly, LSD was not the only mind-altering chemical. When it became illegal, we started synthesizing other chemical compounds. It usually took the government about two years from the time the formula for a new psycho-active compound was published to make it illegal. Numerous derivatives of methoxylated amphetamines were created, for example, and every one of them had a different effect on the brain.
I was very careful to make only legal compounds. Other people were not. And the authorities were serious about this business. People were going to jail for chemistry.1
Mullis was not among them. When cops busted a fellow researcher, his biochem professor Dr. Joe Neilands took Mullis aside and warned, “If there’s anything in the freezer that shouldn’t be there, maybe now would be a good time to clean it out.”
Paranoia infected Mullis and Pickard at the same time and for the same reasons:
LSD somehow got connected with the anti-Vietnam War movement. Drugs had to be the reason that the youth of America had long hair, wore beads, enjoyed sex, and didn’t think it was a good idea to go to a foreign country and kill the locals. Psychedelic drugs were made illegal.
The one serious side effect it had, besides putting a lot of people in overcrowded jails, was to bring to an end serious research by people who knew what to look for. The only scientists permitted to work with psychoactive chemicals now were people who never used them and knew nothing about them. For the first time, science reference books were censored. Standard chemical reference books like the Dictionary of Organic Chemicals eliminated all mention of LSD and methamphetamine. How dare they censor reference books? It was as if an entire class of chemicals no longer existed. It was getting darker in America.2
Tim Scully was a tall, geeky prodigy from the East Bay headed for the same precocious glory as Kary Mullis and Leonard Pickard. Born within a year of each other, Scully mirrored Pickard’s early schooling: both excelled at science and gravitated toward post-Sputnik STEM programs; both interned at nuclear think tanks;3 both created model linear accelerators while still in their teens, and both were unmitigated nerds.
“I think I have a touch of Asperger’s, although no one’s ever formally diagnosed me,” said Scully.
Scully and Pickard each won easy admission to prestigious universities. In Scully’s case, the school was UC Berkeley. Unlike Pickard, Scully stuck it out for two years.
But once he and childhood pal Don Douglas dropped acid on April 15, 1965, all bets were off.
“We agreed that we wanted to try to make a lot of LSD and make it available to everyone,” he recalled.
Scully spent weeks at the library boning up on Dr. Hofmann’s problem child. He scoured the East Bay for ingredients. Eventually Owsley Stanley heard about him and came knocking at his door, but not because he wanted his help.
Scully was twenty-one, Owsley was thirty, but they shared a passion for the Grateful Dead. Warily, Owsley got the younger man and his friend Don Douglas hired as Dead roadies. When finally satisfied they weren’t narcs, he brought them on as trainees at a new lab in Point Richmond. Just weeks before California declared LSD illegal, the new Bear Research crew cranked out 300,000 doses.
The first thing Scully and Douglas learned was that making LSD is not like cooking mac and cheese. The finesse, care, and attention to detail rivaled requirements for a perfect soufflé.
“Lysergic acid compounds are very fragile, and they have to be handled with much more care than many chemists would believe,” said Scully. “So someone who hasn’t had experience working with those compounds is likely to not have very high
