“We were there when the first pebble dropped and the ripple became a tidal wave,” remembered “Dr. Oz” Janiger. “It was like living in Mesmer’s time and seeing hypnosis develop.”
The consensus was that LSD’s story arc had been inevitable. Leary and Alpert should have been less confrontational. Enthusiasts like Owsley and Ken Kesey might have tamped down their hyperbole. Serious scientists like Cohen and Stolaroff might have done a better job extolling acid’s positive potential.
But in the aftermath of the sixties, it was clear that all had played important roles in letting the genie out of the bottle.
“We need people like Tim and Al Hubbard,” said Cohen. “They are necessary to get out, way out, too far out, in fact—in order to shift things around. We need people like Osmond to be reflective about it and study it. Then little by little, a slight movement is made in the total picture. So I can’t think how things could have worked out other than how they did.”
Despite the setbacks, all remained hopeful. At seventy-seven, Hubbard still hyped his favorite mind bender: “It seemed the only way that man could ever understand himself. You could take [LSD] and you wouldn’t understand me any better, but you would understand yourself.”
But understanding was in short supply that season. The unacknowledged elephant in Dr. Oz’s living room was the DEA. With each bust, sentences grew longer, penalties more severe.
The government had also made the LSD permission process so onerous that few even bothered to submit clinical proposals. Psychedelic study spelled career suicide. Only outliers like Sasha Shulgin dared dabble. Research wound down to nothing.
And yet, psychonauts remained optimistic. It was in their nature.
Nonetheless, those who persisted did so at their own risk and increasingly, outside of the law. Daredevils in lab coats. Fugitives at the fringe of academe. Chemists who vanished like thieves in the night.
Ghosts like Leonard Pickard.
1. Chief of the Sandoz labs where Hofmann discovered LSD; credited with developing migraine medicine from the same ergot alkaloids Hofmann used for Delysid.
2. 3,4-methylenedioxybenzylmethylketone, a.k.a. piperonyl methyl ketone, a.k.a. 3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl-2-propanone. “All are synonyms for a substance that was legal through the seventies and eighties, but was scheduled in the nineties as MDMA prevalence grew.”
3. “He is now a high federal official, and I would never compromise him.”
4. Per Peter Wilkinson’s July 5, 2001, Rolling Stone article, “The Acid King.”
5. “Only car I ever owned. Alas, it was no more by ’84.”
6. Known for a wide range of products from breast implants to Agent Orange, Dow seesawed with DuPont for a century as the nation’s best-known chemical manufacturer until the two merged in 2017.
7. Shulgin got the credit but Dow got the cash. As with the method for making LSD perfected by William Garbrecht, his employer Eli Lilly and Co. paid $1 for the patent—the same price Dow paid Shulgin for Zectran.
8. Tors introduced Dr. John C. Lilly to LSD. Lilly dosed dolphins, noting their subsequent affection for humans. His work inspired popular acid sci-fi films Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Altered States (1980).
9. Founded by NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon.
VI.
ON JUNE 17, 1980, DR. Lucille Georg Pickard collapsed at home. She was sixty-seven.
“Lucille died of a hemorrhage, quickly,” said her stepson. “I returned for her funeral, but was unable to do so for my father’s.”
William Leonard Pickard Sr. died on Sept. 5, 1980, four months after his wife. He was fifty-nine, a suicide. When Lennie turned twenty-one, his father told him, “You’re Leonard now, son,” and never used his nickname again. He was not big on public displays of affection, but did leave Leonard somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000.
“They had a pact that when one left, the other would follow,” recalled Pickard. “Father put his affairs in order, made his will, gave away his dog, sold off the herd of Angus, phoned everyone he loved, and that was that. It was no surprise. I was told at fifteen that it would occur, and occasionally every few years thereafter. Such pacts were not uncommon in the Old South. A way of stating their love for each other.”
His stepmother’s funeral struck Leonard as something of a feminist celebration.
“During her memorial at the Unitarian Church, I was approached by Lucille’s fellow CDC researchers, many of whom I had met as a youngster. I was amazed they remembered me. Crowds of young women post-docs and female students whispering, ‘Dr. Georg, Dr. Georg. . . .’”
Her celebrity was rarified but significant. Over her lifetime, Lucille Pickard published more than ninety scientific papers. A bound compilation remains a permanent part of the CDC library. Several of her cites can still be found on the Internet.
Lucille Georg Pickard was a past president of the Mycological Society of the Americas. In 1982, the International Society of Human and Animal Mycology began presenting an annual lifetime achievement award in her honor. A microbe is named for her. “A. georgiai or some such,” said Pickard. “One of the Actinomyces.
“She was the first to identify Valley Fever among migrant workers as being fungal in origin. This was a great unknown and effectively untreatable killer among Mexican field hands throughout the Southwest. It resulted in hundreds if not thousands of deaths annually. She called it ‘coccidioidomycosis.’”
On a more nostalgic note, Leonard remembers two other women from that feminist funeral—each an anachronism straight out of Gone with the Wind.
“Our maid Gladys came dressed in her finest,” he recalled. “She said of Lucille, ‘She was a great lady.’ I gave her an embrace, and thanked her for her many kindnesses to me as a boy.
“But it was Gala who I remember taking it hardest. She was easily the principal mourner.”
Like Leonard, his older sister inherited Audrey Pickard’s sturdy DNA, yet it was Lucille who shaped her destiny.
