Armed with a search warrant, they ignored Pickard. Inside, the cops found a small trailer similar to the sort often used at construction sites. Someone had gone to great lengths to mask the odors that gave the lab away.
Pickard’s old nemeses, the San Mateo Sheriff ’s office, called in a contingent from the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. They swarmed the bunker with black lights. Chemical dust glowed everywhere.
“It was a huge lab,” said Ron Brooks, special agent in charge of the BNE’s San Jose office. “He was making windowpane, microdot, and blotter.”
Pickard also had apparently been experimenting with Shulgin analogues and synthesizing mescaline. When Brooks later told drug expert Darryl Inaba that he’d bagged a mescaline maker, Inaba scoffed: “No fucking way. That’s just too hard to make. There are only a few people in the whole world. . . .”
Analysis showed that Leonard was one of those people. The white crystalline needles were indeed mescaline.
“Guys like him do that just as a challenge, just to prove they can do it,” said Brooks. “It probably cost him way more to make than he could ever sell it for.”
What boggled Brooks the most, however, was the scale of the operation: state-of-the-art lab equipment, including a roto-evaporator, heating mantles, and pill press.11
Boxes of blotter paper like the one Pickard was carrying when arrested were scattered around inside the trailer. Some bore designs of samurai shields, some of Grateful Dead album cover art. One box contained sheets of black-and-white kaleidoscopic faces like those featured in the M. C. Escher lithograph that Leonard gave Tim Scully a decade earlier.
In addition to the blotter acid, the haul included 89,802 acid tabs and another 123,278 of the larger acid pills. Estimated street value: $250,000.
“He was an excellent chemist,” said Brooks. “Excellent and prolific, on par almost with Owsley himself in terms of output.”
It turned out Pickard was correct about someone getting hurt. Even in full-body jumpsuit and respirator, BNE investigator Max Houser collapsed in convulsions inside the trailer. He’d nicked his neck shaving that morning and enough vapor filtered through a slit in his protective gear to send him reeling.
Upon his arrival at a nearby hospital, an earsplitting buzz drowned out the voices of the EMTs and nurses shouting at him. Houser had to read their lips through dilated pupils stung by the fluorescent lighting. Only after an IV of Valium brought him down was he able to identify the migraine noise as acid-amplified openings and closings of the ER’s automatic doors.
Once released, Houser began convulsing again hours later while he was in the shower at home. For months thereafter, he suffered terrifying mood swings: anxiety to depression then back again. Interviewed twenty years later by journalist Lisa Winters, he maintained he still bore scars from the episode.
“I regret his difficult moments, although I suffered the same effects without the benefit of protective suits,” Pickard told Brooks.
Had Houser been guided by an experienced psychonaut, suggested Pickard, there would have been no need for Valium.
“Anxiety can spin out of control when taken to the ER with a mind-set expecting psychosis and surrounded by people who are inexperienced,” he said with clinical detachment. “Ideally, a talk-down should suffice. A meadow and friends would be a completely different experience than guns, radio, and fear, I am told.”
In a suspect show of sympathy, Pickard coyly hinted at a worldwide web of acid acolytes who could help OD victims like Houser, were they not deterred by drug laws:
“Even now, it’s almost impossible to study overdose phenomena like these,” he said. “Sustained exposure to unknown but massive dosages of LSD, as experienced by the few unknown individuals worldwide who are responsible for its distribution, has no parallel in clinical settings. I understand various psychiatrists and pharmacologists would like to interview them, but they are, necessarily, unavailable.”
Never admitting guilt or even acknowledging that the lab belonged to him, Pickard spoke at length with BNE investigators. They remained baffled long after the session ended.
“I recall Mr. Pickard back in the interview room,” said BNE agent Dave Tresmontan. “He played a lot of things close to the vest. I remember him sitting there with his legs crossed, very calm, very friendly, somewhat guarded. My thought was, ‘Here’s a very intelligent individual, maybe slightly eccentric.’”
During the subsequent investigation, one of the more curious allegations was that Pickard had a relationship with the DEA dating back to its inception. By one published account, he entered the brand-new San Francisco field office in the autumn of 1973 and offered to inform on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Agents declined his offer, but began building a dossier. Later, they took Pickard up on his offer. He was credited with helping shut down two meth labs and a rival LSD operation. The DEA officially closed out its relationship with him on May 2, 1988.
“Such allegations without reference to the case, name, location, and date are hearsay,” said Pickard, who vehemently denied ever having worked with or for the DEA.
In a legal catch-22, the government is likewise forbidden to reveal whether Pickard ever cooperated with the DEA.
“DEA’s absolute policy is never to reveal any information pertaining to confidential informants or SOIs (sources of information),” said Pickard. Hundreds if not thousands have tried to pry names out of the Department of Justice, including Pickard. None have succeeded.
The reason Pickard’s alleged cooperation was leaked, he said, was retribution: no one likes a snitch. Pickard maintains that the DEA allegations—including the very specific date when his cooperation supposedly came to an end—are meant to do him harm.
“The problem is that just by airing the allegation widely, great personal problems can be created, and they would never go away,” he said. “As they say: ‘Easy to allege, hard to disprove.’”
According to Pickard, the facts ought to speak for themselves. Except for Scully and Sand, he’s never even
