As he later attempted to explain in The Rose of Paracelsus, Leonard went full-throttle Ivy Mike:
“Actual informants send psychedelic people to prison, a matter of public record. Ivies by contrast claim complex relationships with DEA for their defense at hearings and trials, and DEA thereafter issues denials and confuses juries on the issue.”
The Mountain View bust was Exhibit A. Leonard talked, but revealed nothing. He alone pled innocent to three counts of manufacturing LSD.
“How unusual then (or not), that the ’88 seizure led nowhere,” he said. “No houses, no apartments, no third parties, no additional warrants, no phones, no cars, no bank accounts, no lists of addresses or phone numbers or any threads whatsoever to exploit. Zero.”
Ron Brooks and his entire BNE detail eventually had to admit defeat.
“We followed up leads in Daly City and in San Francisco, also out in the southern East Bay, but never had anything solid,” he said. “He was very good about covering his tracks, and he and his circle of friends were all masters of using multiple identities and blind mail drops and phones forwarded to other phones.”
Leonard reacted with a smirk.
“During a hearing in the ’88 proceedings, the prosecutor brought forth a huge mass of interlocking rings of keys,12” he said. “They found hundreds of them in the trailer. He showed them to the judge and said: ‘Judge, we don’t know much about Mr. Pickard, but from what you can see, there must be something going on.’”
Indeed, the mystery deepened after investigators discovered a tantalizing memo tucked inside a brown vial that had also been found in the trailer laboratory:
As I prepare my third kilogram of LSD, I think with amusement of our last conversation three weeks ago, when you called me a liar, and I had to walk you down the hall to get you the very first gram that was supposed to be offered to you preferentially. Since July of 1984, our friend has taken thirty grams in that year, thirty grams in the second year and seventy-five grams in the last six to eight weeks. The recent change indicates that someone close to you has accessed an existing system as well as its potential problems. I hope you can monitor these proceedings in some way, since you come from the finest psychedelic heritage, prior to being seduced by some sleazy cocaine and qualude [sic] nightmare.
Seemingly meant for a distributor or client, the note nagged at Brooks. Whether Pickard wrote it and for whom it was intended, never was determined. A lawyer’s son, Leonard knew his rights, especially the one that guaranteed him silence in the face of questioning.
Following the code of Ivy Mike, he revealed nothing.
10. In a June 21, 2019, letter, Hartford Hospital wrote Pickard that no such records exist of his stay at the Institute of Living; all files are routinely destroyed after ten years.
11. Along with analogues, precursors, and other chemicals, the DEA began monitoring sales of specialized lab equipment in the late seventies, making it increasingly difficult to experiment with anything remotely psychedelic.
12. Variously known as MIMA (mechanically interlocked molecular architectures) or olympiadane, the diagrams resemble interlocked Olympic rings (hence the name) and are chemical shorthand for complex compounds, equations, and/or reactions.
VII.
SHORTLY AFTER THE MOUNTAIN VIEW bust, Leonard overcame his sketchy academic record. Following twenty years of on-again, off-again classes, he finally made it into med school.
“I’d done all my required interviews with MDs in Los Angeles and was accepted at UAG in Guadalajara a few days after my ’88 detention,” he said.
Alas, there would be no enrollment. Under the recently fortified War on Drugs, his state offense escalated to a federal violation. Within days of his arrest, he found himself facing a federal judge. Even if he got lucky, Pickard was looking at years in prison. Medical school was over before it began.
At his sentencing, US District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel showed little sympathy. After reviewing his extensive arrest record, she admonished the forty-four-year-old convict: “I hope that the years in the federal penitentiary will be spent wisely. You don’t have much time left to straighten out your life.”
Pickard did nearly four years of an eight-year sentence at Terminal Island, a mid-level LA prison that overlooks San Pedro harbor. TI had run-down tennis courts and a Native American sweat lodge, but hardly qualified as a country club. Pickard tried meditating in the law library, but ultimately had to count on fellow psychonauts to keep him sane.
“Ann (Shulgin) wrote me often, and told me that she and Sasha were working on PiHKAL,” he said. “That was exciting. I got one of the first copies.”
Shorthand for “Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved,” PiHKAL1 was the Shulgins’ 978-page self-published hybrid: part autobiography, part cookbook. The first half recounted the love story of Sasha and Ann—where they grew up, how they met, and their many drug experiences before and after marriage.
The second part, titled “The Chemical Story,” explained in detail how to synthesize 179 phenethylamines, an especially potent family of psychotropic drugs. Each recipe included recommended dosages, trance length, and what to expect along the way, to wit:
There was a strange devil-angel pairing. As I was being told of the ecstatic white-light ascent of my partner into the God-space of an out-of-body experience, I was fighting my way out of a brown ooze. She saw the young Jesus at the bottom of a ladder drifting upwards step by step to some taking-off place, and I saw all the funny gargoyles around the base of the ladder surrounded by picnic bunting. For me it was the 4th of July rather than Easter!2
PiHKAL and Ann’s letters were as close as Leonard got to altered states during his stay at Terminal
