“Not my first choice,” he said, “but I thought a few years in Cambridge would help with med school admissions.”
He didn’t sleep alone at Esalen that weekend. After years of free love and casual relationships, Pickard had finally met The One at a Shulgin Friday night dinner. It was October, and Halloween was in the air.
“She had a peaked cap, as a witch,” he recalled. “I was in my monk’s robe.”
Deborah Harlow was a honey-haired vixen with sober predisposition. An MDMA fan, she gravitated early to the Shulgins, who approved of her all-consuming advocacy.
“Debbie really loved brilliant, eccentric men,” said Dr. Rick Strassman, an Esalen attendee. “She was really drawn to them, and could really turn on the charm. If they needed narcissistic replenishment, she’d deliver.”
Dave Nichols, Strassman’s contemporary and a leading neuro-pharmacist in his own right, remembered Harlow and her peers lobbying for MDMA under the tongue-in-cheek banner, “Madams for Adam.”11
Though eight years Pickard’s junior, Harlow was far more sophisticated. Before MDMA was outlawed, she had already administered the drug to more than two hundred patients, surveyed twenty psychoanalysts who used MDMA in therapy, and addressed Congress in an impassioned, if ultimately failed, effort to keep Ecstasy (a.k.a. XTC) off of Schedule One.
As leaders among the second-generation psychonauts, Harlow and her first husband Robert Forte vowed to bring psychedelics back into the mainstream. Her second husband carried the acid torch even further when she first met Leonard.
“By that time, Deb was in the middle of a difficult divorce from Jaron Lanier, the computer maven who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’” he said.
Leonard convinced her that the third time would be the charm. Her intellect was icing on the cake. Enlightened and bright she might be (she had her MA; Leonard still had only his high school diploma), but quirk and winsome smile counted as highly as academic credentials. She cocked her head just like Veronica Lake. Leonard held the door for her just like Cary Grant.
They had chemistry.
Leonard sought references from the Shulgins, David Presti, and the Esalen psychonauts in his bid for med school, but Mark Kleiman talked him into drug diplomacy instead. As an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Kleiman had an inside track with admissions. It helped Leonard’s case that he had hooked up with Deborah Harlow.
“Mark Kleiman had a crush on Deb,” said a friend of all three. “Leonard wanted into the Kennedy School; Kleiman had a lot of influence. By helping Leonard, Mark got closer to Debbie.”
Before falling under Harlow’s thrall, Kleiman earned his reputation the hard way, combining humble roots with academic excellence. A Jewish kid from Arizona, he’d paid his dues. After attending prestigious Haverford College, he systematically climbed the ladder to the top of government service. He took his Master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School, then served as aide to Congressman Les Aspin and Polaroid founder Edwin Land before being tapped to head the Office of Policy and Management with the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. He carved out a specialty as a drug policy expert, earned his PhD in 1983, then began making noise nationally about Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.
Kleiman saw Pickard as apprentice. With his support, Leonard bypassed the normal hurdles and entered the Kennedy School in September 1994, Deborah at his side.
One year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Pickard had finally returned to the Ivy League. Simultaneously, he won a neurobiology research fellowship in the addictions division of Harvard Medical School—one step closer to his ultimate dream of becoming a physician.
With Harlow as his partner, Pickard seemed finally to have found his groove. They set up housekeeping in Cambridge and co-authored a series of academic briefs about social drug use, including a finding that New Yorkers liked LSD at their raves while Californians seemed to prefer Ecstasy.
But Leonard made his mark with heroin, not psychedelics. For his second-year project, he focused on the former Soviet Union. Theorizing that a growing global black market in opioids could be traced to unemployed Russian chemists following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he set out to see whether a free-market economy had had the unintended consequence of unleashing a new synthetic heroin in the West.
First synthesized in 1959 by Belgian chemist Paul Janssen, fentanyl was a hundred times stronger than morphine. A rarity in the US, the drug had pandemic potential should unscrupulous chemists produce it in bulk. As a reformed underground cooker himself, Leonard felt uniquely poised to predict and prevent fentanyl’s spread.
Kleiman signed on as his faculty adviser. He encouraged Pickard to turn a routine grad school Policy Analysis Exercise into a full-blown fentanyl inquiry. Leonard tested the waters in an eight-stu-dent seminar and again during a presentation at the Faculty Club. Then he took his study a step further, seeking support from the CIA’s Counter Narcotics Center and the State Department.
“Now, as it happens, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs came to speak to our seminar,” said Pickard. “I pitched him as a sponsor. He knew my background, and accepted on the basis of fentanyl’s appearance in Moscow.”
Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters Robert Gelbard had visited Russia often and saw first-hand what Pickard was suggesting. He became a fan. When Pickard submitted an expanded fifty-page proposal that asked, “What Can State (Department) Do About Drug Problems in Russia?” Gelbard answered with approval of his project. Leonard’s “Design of a System for Monitoring Trafficking and Use” got the green light.
Using Gelbard’s State Department connections, Pickard began hob-nobbing with ranking Russian drug officials, gaining insight into fentanyl’s alarming growth.
“I took the risk, career-wise, for it seemed like science fiction at the time,” he said. “I asserted it would become fact and exactly why.”
“Leonard talked to Russians,” reported one of his Harvard associates. “He was obviously very good at that. He contacted various law enforcement
