He appeared to have taken Judge Patel seriously. Middle age and multiple run-ins with the law seemed finally to have mellowed his inner rebel. While inside, Leonard turned vegetarian, shunned anything addictive including caffeine, and became a Buddhist disciple of Alan Watts.4
He picked his prison peers carefully. Among other nonviolent career criminals, he befriended an affable Afghan rug dealer named Mohammed Akbar Bey. Akbar, who was doing fourteen years for narcotics trafficking, regaled Pickard with stories about embedding Kabul heroin inside carpet fibers then weaving them into rugs suitable for export.
Pickard applauded the ingenuity, if not the drug.
“I agree with Wavy Gravy,” he said. “There’s blood on heroin and cocaine.”
It galled him that the DEA lumped his crimes together with those of Middle Eastern opium dealers and the Medellín coke cartel. Schedule One did not differentiate between psychedelics and bona fide killers like heroin. Under federal guidelines, none were acceptable for medicinal use, yet all allegedly had high potential for abuse.
Ironically, the street drug du jour then sending hundreds to jail and thousands more to the ER was classified as Schedule Two. Crack cocaine had the same high abuse potential as Schedule One, but with medicinal saving grace, or so said the government. In Leonard’s experience, both as a San Francisco General volunteer and based on prison-yard scuttlebutt, crack killed more in a week than LSD had in half a century.
Two years into his sentence, Pickard paused one afternoon as he passed through the rec room. A chubby middle-aged talking head pontificated over the TV. With receding hairline and full Shulgin-style beard, the fellow might have been just another C-SPAN policy wonk, but there was urgency in his argument. He spoke more like psychonaut than bureaucrat. Leonard settled into a chair and listened to the entire interview.
Author Mark Kleiman was hyping a book about the failures of the War on Drugs. Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control slammed DEA enforcement, stiff sentencing guidelines, and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.
“We’ve spent a lot of resources and not got the problem under control,” he said. The better policy, he argued, was “grudging toleration”: slacking off “punishment bankruptcy” and substituting rehab, education, and decriminalization instead. Junkies were addicts, not criminals. Discourage their habit, but don’t lock ‘em up and toss away the key.
Pickard recognized a comrade-in-arms. Kleiman might resemble Sydney Greenstreet, but he spoke like the Harvard-educated progressive that he was. That night, Leonard wrote to Kleiman, requesting his curriculum vitae and published papers.
Kleiman wrote back, according to Pickard. In the years ahead, grudging toleration would be Leonard’s anthem, and his new pen pal would become another mentor.
After Pickard walked out of prison in November of 1992, he caught a Greyhound to San Francisco.
“I arrived at the Zen Center directly on the day of release carrying only a cardboard box,” he recalled.
Pickard joined the Hoshin-ji5 Urban Temple on Page Street in the Lower Haight, where he paid $350 a month for one of the forty small cubicles that apprentices rent when preparing for the priesthood. For the next two years, he was up at four daily, rang the temple bell at five a.m., meditated for an hour and a half, chanted, swept the sidewalk, then ate breakfast.
“Monastic practice involves twenty-four hours a day,” said Blanche Hartmann, better known at the Zen Center as The Abbess. “The bulk of the day he did whatever he was doing, and I have no idea what it was. I never felt fully invited into his personal life. There was always an air of mystery about him.”
When he wasn’t at the Center, Pickard studied neurobiology at Berkeley. Dr. David Presti, an authority on addiction, steered him away from psychedelics and focused him more on general drug abuse prevention. Pickard claimed to have turned his life around. He credited Presti, Zen, and Hartmann with helping him do so.
“She took my hand when I left prison,” he said. “I lived there for two years as a monk. I also trained at the Tassajara near Carmel.”
The first Zen monastery established outside of Asia, Tassajara is 126 acres of remote coastal wilderness located two hours south of San Francisco. The only way in and out is a dirt road sixteen miles from the nearest pavement. The place had a clandestine aura that appealed to Leonard: a secret training ground for sacred spies. Since it opened in 1967, Tassajara had fostered hundreds of apprentices seeking solitude, ranging from songwriter Leonard Cohen to Apple’s Steve Jobs, and an ex-con named William Leonard Pickard.
“I lost contact with a large early portion of my life after the prison years,” he said.
His new role models were holy men, like Brother David.6 “When the Vatican instructed him to inquire into Buddhism, he left his hermitage to learn our practice at Tassajara.”
Pickard did appear to reinvent himself. To hear him tell it, he entered the monastery an unfocused felon but emerged a penitent advocate of clean living.
“He seemed set on his science and doing something with his life,” recalled Mark Dowie, who reconnected with Leonard after prison.
Blanche Hartmann was less sanguine.
“I assumed he had some money left over from his earlier days dealing, but I have no idea,” she said.
According to Pickard, his mother left him “quite a sum” upon her death in 1991. A retired legal secretary who finished where she started in Atlanta, Audrey Johnson Hammond was 71 and had survived all four of her husbands, but hadn’t seen her only son since the sixties.
“He was trying to change,” said Hartmann. “I don’t know how he felt about his manufacturing LSD, whether he thought it was good or bad. I never asked him about it. My guess is, even though its illegal, he didn’t think it was wrong to make LSD, because he thinks there’s something beneficial about making it, or he wouldn’t have done it.”
Pickard did not completely turn his back on psychedelics. He resumed relations
