DEA agents in HazMat suits raid the Atlas Missile silo outside Wamego, Kansas, on Election Day, 2000, in what was incorrectly called the biggest LSD haul in history.
Federal Judge Richard Rogers who sentenced Pickard to two life sentences for manufacturing LSD.
“Petaluma” Al Reid, alleged distributor of the Skinner/Pickard LSD.
Clyde Apperson, Pickard’s codefendant.
Gordon Todd Skinner in Oklahoma state prison after his conviction for the kidnapping, drugging, and maiming of his wife’s boyfriend.
Leonard Pickard and author Dennis McDougal at Tucson Federal Prison.
PART TWO
If You Go Chasing Rabbits
VIII.
ONE MORNING IN THE SUMMER of 1995, Leonard Pickard showed up on Alfred Savinelli’s doorstep. The owner of the Taos, New Mexico, aromatherapy emporium “Natural Scents” had been expecting Pickard. They’d met briefly some months earlier after Pickard made a heroic effort to search him out.
“All these years later, I still don’t know how he got my name,” said Savinelli. “The volunteer list was supposed to be confidential.”
In the first FDA-authorized psychedelic study with human subjects since the seventies, Savinelli had been selected as one of five-dozen volunteers at the University of New Mexico medical school. Dr. Rick Strassman sparked new hope among psychonauts with his five-year pilot study. He’d begun testing in 1990, looking for a connection between DMT and the pineal body,1 located at the very top of the spinal column. Somehow, Pickard learned Savinelli was subject number forty-seven among Strassman’s first guinea pigs.
A rising psychonaut star, Strassman bucked the freeze against psychedelic research that started with Schedule One in 1970. From Esalen to Cambridge, scientists hamstrung for more than twenty years by the War on Drugs followed Strassman’s progress closely. The young researcher chose DMT because it provoked hallucination and instant disorientation, but unlike LSD, the trips lasted only thirty minutes.
“DMT is ubiquitous in nature, if one knows where to look,” said Leonard. “Common grasses, even the acacia tree. Heated in a tea with Syrian Rue from any health food store, you have a between-your-eyes psychedelic.”
Strassman dubbed DMT “the Spirit Molecule.” A veteran connoisseur of altered states, Savinelli knew the drug well.
“It’s found in everything,” he said. “Plants, animals. Human beings manufacture it in the lungs. It’s everywhere. It just has to be activated.”
A professional chemist himself, Savinelli had been in and out of trances often, just never before under such close medical scrutiny.
Among other things, Strassman hoped to fix a safe dosage level. He developed a sliding measure for severity and type of delusion—a gauge he called the Hallucinogen Rating Scale. He used Magnetic Resonance Imaging before and after to see how DMT affected his subjects’ brains. Strassman made the entire process sound eminently clinical. Savinelli had a different take.
“He turned me into his Frankenstein,” he said. “He wanted to see how much it took to get you to do the funky chicken.”
In subsequent findings published in the Journal of General Psychiatry, Strassman stressed the serious nature of his study.
“I think hallucinogenic drugs are potentially quite dangerous and should remain tightly restricted,” he said. His work, Strassman argued, might “lead to possibly developing drugs that could treat bad trips in emergency rooms.”
That did not happen. As it turned out, however, the study did lead Leonard Pickard to Alfred Savinelli, a.k.a. “DMT 47.” Leonard was not just another psychonaut looking to get high; he was a Harvard grad student studying the effects of social drugs on international relations, or so he told Alfred. That was why they needed to talk.
Pickard repeatedly rang Savinelli’s bell that morning. He nearly gave up before Savinelli finally answered his door. Ashen, bug-eyed and breathless, Alfred looked like he hadn’t slept. In fact, he had not. A short, sinewy man with shoulder-length hair and faint mustache, Savinelli resembled a hungover Jesus.
He stammered that Pickard wasn’t his only guest visiting from Harvard that weekend. He let the door swing wide and Pickard saw a man balled up in a corner of the living room.
John Halpern was a young Harvard psych resident Pickard had met briefly three months earlier in Cambridge. He’d shown up the previous evening, said Savinelli. Son of a prominent New York psychiatrist and—like Savinelli—a Strassman volunteer, Halpern was observing the DMT experiment, but was not above tripping himself. When Savinelli told him about ayahuasca, a potent new source of Spirit molecule he’d just imported from South America, Halpern had to try it out.
Halpern was twenty years younger than Pickard, but already making a name for himself. He’d recently published an essay titled “The illicit use of hallucinogenic drugs is a re-emerging public health problem, especially among well-educated adults and teenagers.” At the moment, Halpern qualified as a living example of just such an adult. Covering his face with his hands, he howled through his finger mask. He struck Pickard as less a shrink than an ER walk-in.
John Halpern had a fascination with psychedelics that dated back to high school. He’d dropped acid, smoked hash, and eaten peyote with Navajo tribesmen, never with ill effect. Ayahuasca was different.
A hallucinogenic tea made from Brazilian rain forest plants, ayahuasca was the latest psychonaut rage during the mid-nineties. The foul brew was supposed to induce nausea followed by intense otherworldly spirituality, but all it did for Halpern was conjure demons and make him puke.
Pickard found Halpern keening like a tormented rag doll. His balding head was beet red; his horn rims magnified his horrified pupils to exclamation points. While he whimpered, Pickard administered psychic first aid. He’d taken “more LSD than anyone on the planet,” he told Halpern. Not to worry: ayahuasca was aspirin compared to acid.
“Leonard starts massaging my feet, telling me everything is fine,” said Halpern. “He was treating me in a way like a baby. If I burped, he would go, ‘Mmm, yeah. Oh yeah.’ Just to try to make it humorous.”
From that moment forward, Pickard became “a
