In 1986, the War on Drugs had escalated once again. Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which pumped $1.7 billion into DEA enforcement. Nancy Reagan answered the international narco-politics of Pablo Escobar with “Just Say No” while her husband, the President, signed into law the Controlled Substance Analogue Enforcement Act, slowing underground chemists’ perpetual game of staying one molecule ahead of Schedule One. MDMA was one of the bill’s first casualties. Without flatly announcing his intent, Pickard sought Sasha’s advice on how to keep cooking.
Shulgin bushed his brows. He grokked Leonard and suggested they continue their conversation in private, beyond eyes and ears that might eavesdrop inside the lecture hall.
An icon who lived every psychonaut’s dream, Shulgin struck an early understanding with the DEA. He exchanged his chemical expertise for the freedom to pursue psychoactives without government interference. Bob Sager, chief of the DEA’s West Coast laboratory, became so close to Sasha that he officiated at the Shulgins’ 1981 marriage ceremony.
Through Sager, Sasha was granted a rare Schedule One license exempting him from the heavy penalties paid by the Brotherhood and other underground chemists. Shulgin reciprocated by sharing his knowledge with Congress and the courts.
He wrote a booklet on psychedelics that became a primer for every new DEA agent: Controlled Substances: Chemical and Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws (Ronin Publishing, 1988).
“That was his Faustian bargain,” said Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and a close Shulgin ally. “In order to do his work, he had to be useful to the DEA.”
The Shulgins’ hillside ranch in the East Bay community of Lafayette became a psychedelic oasis. Shulgin created a legal nether land where he openly tinkered with psychoactives in a brick shed he built fifty yards away from his kitchen door.
Leonard revered Sasha. To teach and tinker, free of fear was . . . ecstasy.
“Sasha and Ann invited me to the house on several occasions,” he recalled. “He showed me his lab and the notebooks he’d kept for thirty years. I joined a class he taught at Berkeley. I was just so honored.”
But Shulgin survived the War on Drugs through discretion. He understood and appreciated better than anyone his singular role. At any moment, some politician could yank his license, making him as vulnerable to draconian drug laws as Leonard or Nick or Owsley the Bear. Caution was paramount. He did not advertise nor flaunt his license and he selected his confidants with care.
Thus, he let Leonard into his life, but only time and trust would gain his young apprentice access to Sasha’s inner circle.
Leonard regarded pure science a noble calling, but not a career. Men like Sasha Shulgin and Nobel laureate Paul Berg, who taught Pickard biochemistry at Stanford, were exceptional, but Leonard despaired of ever reaching their level. The deeper he dove into the fast-evolving science of neuropharmacology, the clearer it became that he would need a medical degree if he hoped to fulfill his psychedelic destiny.
Pickard began volunteering weekends in the ER at San Francisco General. There he witnessed a world far removed from textbooks and white privilege.
“I worked until four a.m. as a volunteer: blue coat, scrubs, latex gloves,” he recalled. “Saw everything: ODs, mass casualties, cops, junkies, birthing mothers, strokes, PCP convulsions, baseball bat victims. Cooling down at some twenty-four-hour café, I’d watch the sunrise in my blood-speckled uniform. I have never felt so alive as on those nights.”
Yet med school seemed out of reach. Dropping out of Princeton, then hopscotching from college to college did not look good on a résumé. He befriended a young resident who heard his frustrations.
“He suggested an offshore school like Guadalajara for breadth of experience,” said Pickard. “That’s where he’d gone and it hadn’t hurt his career. He told me, ‘I started at the bottom and now I’m at the top.’ That cinched it. I fully applied. He even wrote me a letter of recommendation.”
Despite his ER epiphany, misfortune continued to stalk Pickard. The dual life of grad student/volunteer and underground chemist caught up with him again. In October of 1987, he offered a passport to police when stopped and asked for ID. The passport turned out to be under an assumed name and earned him two days in the San Mateo County jail.
When US Customs was notified, officials took the incident far more seriously. He was charged with making a false statement on his passport application—a federal crime that got him a suspended sentence of six months plus five years’ probation.
Even now, over thirty years later, Pickard has no ready explanation for his recklessness. He falls silent when reminded of the many times he got caught.
A fellow psychonaut who came to know him well in later years suggests Leonard had a fatal flaw. He refers back to the admitting shrink’s notes10 during his extended stay at Connecticut’s Institute of Living in the mid-sixties:
“He was labeled a toxic narcissist with no core value. He therefore feels justified to psychopathic tendencies.”
Indeed, Sasha warned him to be careful. Through his own back channels, the paterfamilias of West Coast psychonauts learned law enforcement was closing in.
Leonard knew better. He was careful. He was clever. He was untouchable.
Three days after Christmas in 1988, a neighbor smelled something funky seeping from inside a cinder block unit on the industrial outskirts of Mountain View in the beating heart of Silicon Valley. When police arrived, Leonard Pickard greeted them at the door carrying a box of blotter paper. He warned them not to enter.
“What’s that in the warehouse?” asked one of the officers.
“An LSD lab,” Leonard recalled answering. “But let me caution you. You must advise the
