“Within the last six months, a schizophrenic inmate who thought people were always talking about him crept up behind another who was peacefully watching TV. After the first stunning blow, the next ten or so (full arm swings) were delivered on the unconscious victim. He’s never been seen again, but the assailant returned to general population after a month or so in the hole.”
Any exaggeration on Pickard’s part about instant unprovoked terror can be forgiven. Tucson remains a somber place where gossip runs rampant. Whether eight or eighty, a blow to the skull or stab to the gut is never acceptable, even among the world’s most notorious, many of whom wound up here for committing their own ghastly murders.
Arguably, William Leonard Pickard should never have been among them. A quick-witted chemist and con man with a passion for the good life, a talent for spinning the truth, and a dubious gift for mixing business, diplomacy, and neurochemistry—but a bloodthirsty criminal capable of gutting a fellow human being? Not in a million years.
Nonetheless, he has learned to adapt. With two life sentences, Leonard, as he prefers to be addressed, ranks high in the Tucson pecking order—an éminence grise among capos and rapists. At seventy-four, he’s one of the oldest inmates. Most agree he is unlikely to ever walk free.
He helps his peers with their appeals when he isn’t busy himself. He meditates, exercises, does some yoga. The rest of the time he plunges into reams of correspondence, reads voraciously, and revises his self-published 654-page fantasy/memoir, The Rose of Paracelsus.
His latest publishing project involves an inch-thick primer on fentanyl which argues that Leonard correctly predicted the current opioid crisis over twenty years ago, while he was still a research fellow at Harvard University. His attorney recently sent bound copies of his “Fentanyl Proposal” to all 535 members of Congress in support of his bid for freedom. He also asked Kim Kardashian to work the same clemency magic on President Trump that she did for convicted drug dealer Alice Marie Johnson3.
To date, his appeals have failed, but Leonard is resilient. His network of friends and admirers on the outside has only mushroomed since his 2003 conviction as the world’s biggest and best supplier of lysergic acid diethylamide-25.
“Just was thinking this week that, even in captivity, I’ve come to know so many more than when free,” he said. “I say a nightly prayer for all the kind people.”
None would know his shadier side if Pickard had his way. He stifles the negatives while maximizing pretensions. The “about the author” paragraph at the close of The Rose of Paracelsus tells all that he cares to share about himself:
William Leonard Pickard is a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, with degrees in chemistry and public policy. He was formerly a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow of the Interfaculty Initiative on Drugs and Addictions at Harvard, and Deputy Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA. His interests include Victorian-Edwardian literature, deincarceration technologies, the neuropolicy of cognitive enhancement, and the future of novel drugs.
He is, of course, so very much more.
Leonard Pickard is a rail-thin stretch of a man who resembles a beardless Gandalf in a khaki jumpsuit and size-twelve bath clogs. He might be mistaken for an underfed Zen monk, which, in fact, is precisely what he is. He accepted his vows in a Taos ashram nearly thirty years ago. Over the ensuing years, his frosty shock of hair has come to match his translucent complexion. Against all odds, laugh lines crinkle the sockets surrounding his eyes.
“I treat this place as a monastery, except that the other monks shout all day and are often violent,” he quips. Even at this late date, there is no hard edge to his voice.
But Zen or no Zen, Leonard yearns for all that he has lost, beginning with family. He has at least three children by three different mothers, two of whom he never sees. Only one son and one of the mothers ever visit.
However eager he might be to leave this desolate concrete and steel oasis in the Arizona desert, at Pickard’s core is ironic stoicism. A practicing Buddhist and vegan, he lays himself down to sleep each night with a Baptist prayer of gratitude that he learned at his Unitarian father’s knee. His mantras are few but binding. The best strategy for survival is to blend in, make few waves, and stay busy. Were it not for the natural human compulsion to scheme, his would be a purely ascetic existence, stripped of pretense, powered by compassion.
And yet, hope does spring eternal. Pickard remains fit, vital, and ambitious—bent but not broken. He no longer fancies himself the lady killer he once was, though it seems he’ll never get past his instinct for seduction. Taking acquaintances into his confidence comes so easily that he falls back into the routine like an aging do-dah man.
William Leonard Pickard remains the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, only more so. He doesn’t lie exactly—at least, not at first—but neither is he a slave to the facts.
Above all, Leonard is a voyager upon the high seas of brain chemistry. What Jason was to the Argo, Leonard is to the Psyche, and the oddball crew of lovers and confidants and chemists that joined him on his long strange trip were and are—like Leonard himself—psychonauts.
1. Kaczynski was one of twenty-two student volunteers in 1958 who participated in a government-sponsored Harvard experiment to see if LSD could be used as a disorienting weapon of war—an experience he later described as “the worst experience of my life.”
2. Not so, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Mitchell suffered no lingering injury from a running feud between him and a rival inmate. Nonetheless, a Bureau spokesman conceded, Mitchell was recently transferred to an Oklahoma penitentiary for his own safety.
3. Sentenced to life in 1996, the sixty-four-year-old Memphis housewife
