Despite his stand-out success, Leonard had his detractors who characterized him as a dilettante who talked a good game, but failed to carry through.
“He presented himself as a person who was well-connected and could see what was happening in the drug scene, but he was never able to make much out of that or demonstrate the truth of what he was observing,” one of his professors later told Rolling Stone. “I ended up regarding him with a great deal of skepticism.”
Indeed, Debbie Harlow’s old friend and fellow MDMA advocate Rick Doblin12 had a similar take. He visited the Pickards on occasion in their off-campus apartment, before and after Debbie became pregnant. She bore Leonard a daughter, whom the couple named Melissa.
“Melissa was born at Brigham and Women’s,13 and of course I was there,” said Leonard. “Harvard paid for it, thankfully.”
They appeared to be the quintessential Yuppie family, but Doblin had his doubts. A Kennedy School graduate himself, he watched Pickard operate more as skilled poseur than late-blooming academic:
“What can you say about somebody who always wears a suit and tie to meetings that are usually more relaxed? He wanted to pass in a lot of professional circles or responsible circles, even anti-drug-abuse circles. It felt like he was playing the role.
“He’d tell these shadowy stories that were somehow connected to Russians who had made out in privatization in perhaps less than completely ethical ways and who wanted to help out their country by studying drug abuse issues. I didn’t know what to believe. I always felt there was more going on than he was saying. There were some major missing pieces in what he was sharing.”
1. Published in 1991, the underground bestseller was followed in 1997 with its sequel, TiHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved)
2. A trance induced with sixteen milligrams of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylphenethylamine.
3. A form of hyperventilation developed by psychonaut pioneer Stanislav Grof to approximate LSD’s surreal state of consciousness.
4. The British-born philosopher/theologian wrote more than twenty-five books on religion and popularized Zen among the Beats during the early sixties. A proponent of mescaline, Watt experimented with LSD as early as 1958, agreeing with Aldous Huxley about the drug’s mind-expanding potential or kenshō. “Some people get there from psychedelics, some from meditation, some from study, some from lineage.”
5. Translates as “Beginner’s Mind,” also the title of Chapter Two in The Rose of Paracelsus.
6. A celebrated Benedictine monk credited with melding spirituality and science, Brother David Steindl-Rast devoted his life and career to inter-faith dialogue on a global scale.
7. Mescaline cacti
8. UC Berkeley economist credited with inventing Game Theory.
9. University of Chicago neuropharmacologist and Ecstasy psychotherapy pioneer.
10. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the leading lobbyist for legalizing psychedelics, was founded in 1986.
11. Before “ecstasy” caught on, MDMA’s street name was the anagram ADAM.
12. Harlow, psychologist Alise Agar, and Doblin formed the Earth Metabolic Society in the early eighties to solicit private funds for psychedelic research. EAS reorganized as MAPS after Harlow and Agar quit.
13. Adjacent to Harvard Medical School, “The Brigham” is one of the nation’s oldest maternity hospitals.
Dr. Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD and, later, psilocybin in his Swiss laboratory, launching the psychedelic age at the end of World War II.
During the 1950s, con man Al Hubbard, a.k.a. “Captain Trips,” carried his briefcase pharmacy all over the world, turning on celebrities and civilians alike everywhere he traveled.
Author Aldous Huxley became acid’s first well-known advocate.
Growing up in Georgia, William Leonard Pickard learned about psychedelics through pop culture and scientific study, in which he excelled.
Headed for success, he was selected “most intellectual” by his peers at Daniel O’Keefe High and played varsity basketball.
Winner of the prestigious Westinghouse Science award as a senior, he went to Princeton on scholarship in 1963, but flunked out the first semester after stealing a car and winding up in a Connecticut psychiatric hospital.
Around the same time, Dr. Timothy Leary launched his acid revolution, urging America’s best and brightest to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”
For the remainder of the 1960s, scare headlines and draconian legislation outlawed LSD and drove psychedelics underground.
Chemist entrepreneurs like August Owsley Stanley III became outlaws, manufacturing psychedelics in back rooms and basements.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love became the first and best-known distribution network for LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics, along with hashish and marijuana.
After he went to jail, Owsley’s two chief assistants, Nick Sand and Tim Scully, carried on without him, creating Orange Sunshine, the best-known and purest version of LSD ever to hit the acid underground.
Pickard entered the acid underground during the trials of Scully and Sand in the early 1970s, carrying on their legacy after they were convicted for manufacturing psychedelics.
Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, at right, was the premiere psychedelic chemist of the last half of the 20th Century. Pickard tried stepping into his shoes, but with catastrophic results.
MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) founder Rick Doblin and Deborah Harlow, the first Mrs. Leonard Pickard, during a psychedelic conference in the early 1990s.
Dr. John Halpern, Pickard’s junior partner from Harvard in the psychedelic manufacturing venture.
Alfred Savinelli, Gordon Todd Skinner and Skinner’s second wife, Kelly Roth, during the days leading up to the Wamego LSD bust.
Trais Kliphius, New Mexican artist/ environmentalist who bore Pickard’s son Duncan weeks before the Wamego LSD bust.
Krystle Cole, Skinner’s girlfriend and third wife.
Pickard during the late 1990s, after his graduation from Harvard’s Kennedy School but prior to the Wamego LSD bust.
