“After an Easter gathering on Mount Diablo, they invited me to my first Friday night dinner,” he said. “It was a life-changing encounter socially, to be received honorably and knowingly into the larger academic community.”
Each Friday for as far back as most could remember, the Shulgins staged an informal dinner party where Sasha held forth on his latest discoveries. Hosted by Ann and her daughter Wendy, the relaxed, invite-only suppers became famous among the psychonaut cognoscenti.
“Leonard always showed up in formal dinner dress,” recalled one of the regulars. “Nobody else did. It was odd.”
Sasha and Ann hosted even smaller klatches among their most trusted friends. It was with these half-dozen loyalists that Sasha tested his newest potions. After trying an analogue out on themselves, the Shulgins shared among their fellow guinea pigs while Sasha carefully noted the results. He and Ann included their findings in PiHKAL and its successor volume, TiHKAL.
But Pickard was not invited. Ann empathized with their new acolyte, but did not fully trust him. Talking drugs was one thing; taking them was another. The War on Drugs was now in full swing and the stakes too high to take chances.
Too much a wild card to secure invitation into the Shulgins’ super-secret inner circle, Pickard did manage to get his name on John Weir Perry’s potluck list. A Harvard-trained psychonaut who’d once studied with Carl Jung, Weir also staged potlucks at his Marin home. As Perry’s ex-wife, Ann Shulgin vouched for Pickard. He became a regular.
As with the Shulgins’ Friday night dinners, conversation at Perry’s potlucks dwelt on the nature of consciousness, narco politics, and recent shifts in drug policy, though drug use itself was tacitly forbidden. Always the threat of DEA infiltration loomed. No one was keen on sacrificing personal freedom for principle. Even Sasha had lost some of his fearlessness.
His legendary DEA invincibility ended the year Pickard left Terminal Island. PiHKAL became an instant underground bestseller, but amateur psychonauts everywhere were now cooking up a storm.
“It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs,” said DEA spokesman Richard Meyer. “Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies. . . .”
In 1993, agents descended on Shulgin’s farm, combed through the house and lab and carted off anything that looked suspicious. Sasha was fined $25,000 for violating the terms of his Schedule One license and was asked to turn the license in. He reached a compromise, but it wouldn’t last.
“Once and only once did the local Contra Costa County sheriff bust Sasha for growing peyote,” said Pickard. “He and Ann had a bucolic setting, with quite a variety of Lophophora williamsii7 and the license to possess it. But during the raid, the cops crushed the cacti beneath their heels. Even as they served the warrant, rather than seizing the plants as samples, they destroyed them. Sasha was heartbroken.”
Both the sheriff and the DEA apologized, but thereafter, Shulgin posted a sign on the door of his lab:
This is a research facility that is known to and authorized by the Contra Costa County Sheriff ’s Office, all San Francisco DEA Personnel, and the State and Federal EPA Authorities.
Underneath were contact numbers and names of representatives for each agency.
Leonard paid his first post-prison visit to Esalen Institute the same year the DEA trampled Sasha’s cactus garden.
“It was a real convocation—luminaries flying in from all over,” Pickard remembered. “As the only member of the group usually awake at four a.m., I was designated to drive down from Hoshin-ji to pick up a Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience. He’d flown in on the redeye from Boston. Some years later, he became provost. We drove into Big Sur just as the sun was rising. Glorious!”
The brainchild of a pair of sixties college dropouts, Esalen Institute occupied fifty-three breathtaking acres on a terraced cliff overlooking the Pacific. Birthplace of California’s human-potential movement, Esalen attracted psychonauts the way compost attracts earthworms. Before it inspired a multitude of New Age motivational road shows, Esalen famously equated self-actualization with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ Rolfing. When East Coast media wanted to depict California at its looniest, they dispatched correspondents to soak in Esalen’s hot springs for a week.
The very first Esalen catalogue offered an introductory course in “Drug-Induced Mysticism;” the inaugural seminar in 1962 was based on Huxley’s “Human Potentiality” lecture. Even after acid was outlawed, the Institute’s trappings remained indelibly psychedelic.
Pickard felt right at home.
Over the years, Esalen’s founding dropouts Dick Price (Harvard, psychology) and Michael Murphy (Stanford, philosophy) invited every aging Aquarian luminary from Tim Leary to Allen Ginsberg to lecture nostalgic Boomers about holistic yoga, improved karma, psychoneuroimmunology, and a host of other enlightened topics. Joseph Campbell spoke there about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls publicly spanked Natalie Wood during a role play. Altered states abounded.
At the end of each day, most everyone wound up in a hot tub clutching an apple-chard smoothie or a chardonnay. Quizzed about the rampant nudity among its patrons, Esalen CEO Sharon Thom rationalized, “Being naked is a leveler.”
Leonard was all about leveling. He seized the opportunity to chauffeur a future provost as one way to put himself closer to medical school. It didn’t work, but schmoozing a Harvard don did indirectly help pave his way back into the Ivy League. First lesson: drop the proper names.
“Sasha and Ann were central to our small gathering that weekend,” he recalled. “Our group included Nobelist Tom Schelling,8 Lew Seiden,9 Stan Grof, Mark Kleiman and Rick Doblin, among others. Rick had just started MAPS.10 Brother David may have come down from Carmel to open with a prayer.”
A fan since Terminal Island, Pickard hadn’t met Kleiman face to face until a San Francisco psychedelic conference in April of ’93. After his prison pen pal had quizzed Pickard on his academic background, Kleiman suggested that Harvard’s Kennedy School
