“The Jungian analysts in Berlin were first, with their archetypes springing up from the unconscious,” said Pickard. “They were among the progenitors, circulating LSD after Albert Hofmann’s initial discovery. Dr. (Arthur) Stoll1 was second. It went out from there like a Sea of Radiance, long before the CIA launched MKULTRA in 1951.”
Pickard eventually wrote an entire book about the Six—652 pages without identifying a single chemist. The Rose of Paracelsus, written by hand from his prison cell and self-published in 2015, offers a fanciful travelogue with Leonard meeting face to face with five of the Six. His critics, including his avowed enemies within the DEA, scoff at the existence of such a clandestine international cabal. Pickard just shrugs.
“Funny how people think The Rose is fiction, but perhaps that’s best. A few people recently concluded that the Six are facets of One—one person who cannot otherwise speak.”
The mantra of the Six, then and now according to Pickard, is as much omerta as it is mystic slogan: “Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.”
Leonard purports to know, but tells as little as possible, as do the half-dozen psychonauts like himself scattered around the globe who have dedicated their lives to perfecting, extolling, and dispensing Dr. Hofmann’s transcendent chemistry. He maintains that he stumbled into their midst while still in high school. The Six alone, he said, have the skill and purpose to synthesize pure LSD by the pound.
“The Six are of an entirely different order,” said Pickard. “The system, if there is one, has no name. Their syntheses were the most advanced, and not published. The manufacturing, if there is any, clearly required advanced training of a special order. And the personal practices were such that great discipline prevented their detection for decades, and perhaps even now.”
Leonard identifies these brothers (none are female) in arms only by color code, ascending the spectrum from Crimson to Indigo, Vermilion, Magenta, and Cobalt. Perhaps they exist only in his imagination, but then how does one explain the persistent availability of acid over decades despite the end of Delysid and all the failed efforts of the DEA thereafter to wipe LSD off the face of the earth?
Before Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan declared War on Drugs, organic chemistry was a calling like any other. Youngsters were either suited to the craft or they were not; if they were not, they became firemen, preachers, songsmiths, janitors, doctors, or a host of other professions.
Wunderkinds like Leonard were born chemists—intent on unraveling the mysteries of the universe one catalytic reaction at a time. Even today, Pickard refers to the very best of this rarified fraternity as “the Westinghouse people”: those forty high school students selected each year as the finest young scientists in America.
“The government liked to keep track of the Westinghouse people as some sort of wizard asset list,” he said.
According to Pickard, he was not the only Westinghouse winner who went underground following the upheavals of the sixties. He implies that the Six may have sprung out of that chaos. The generational civil war that erupted during the Summer of Love ended chemistry’s benign nature. By Watergate, when the political dust finally began to settle comfortably into the Me Decade, chemistry in general, and neurochemistry in particular, had evolved into a dangerous game.
“Interestingly, I was detained in 1976 for an MDA lab in Woodside,” recalled Pickard.
Two days before Pickard’s thirty-first birthday, San Mateo Sheriff ’s deputies stormed his wood-framed cottage near the Stanford University campus looking for drugs.
“Only traces were found,” he said. “The precursor2 for MDA—which is the same for MDMA—is also the precursor for the Parkinson’s drug L-DOPA. My attorney in those years3 petitioned the FDA for permission to work with it.”
Because the DEA hadn’t gotten around to forbidding MDMA, Leonard and his lawyer assumed correctly that he could experiment with the L-DOPA compound. The incident report the deputies submitted said they came looking for peyote but found none. Leonard was released without being charged, but he now knew that he was on law enforcement’s radar. He assumed his cheerleading at the Sand and Scully trials probably put a target on his back.
The following year, Pickard moved south to Portola Valley and tried his hand at home chemistry again. This time, neighbors complained of rank odors rising through the floorboards—something akin to burning tires doused in Airedale urine. Deputies who were called to his apartment complex found Pickard’s MDMA lab in the basement.
Pickard told them he picked up the lab equipment from a recycling center. It might once have belonged to a Brotherhood chemist, but Leonard, on the other hand, was just a Stanford undergrad tinkering with chemistry in his off hours. He knew nothing about any MDA, the so-called “love drug,” which had been outlawed as a Schedule One substance at the same time as LSD. When that argument failed, he maintained he was producing the analogue MDMA which had a slightly different molecular structure than the illegal MDA.
“I had a delightful conversation with Leonard,” said Alan Johnson, chief inspector for the Santa Cruz County DA.4 “He struck me as a really bright kid. He was dressed in a little V-neck sweater. He was a little preppy. We’re talking about a whole different culture back then.
“Today’s cookers just get a recipe from some criminal. They mix a little of 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 was making the argument, and it was a new argument, that he’s manufacturing an analogue.”
The argument failed in court. Forensic analysis showed traces of MDA and he wound up with a three-year sentence in the county jail. He served half before agreeing to a nolo contendre plea.
“The time served was the maximum under California state law, minus good time,” he said.
Up to then, Pickard had lived a charmed existence out West. The only time he’d
