One disciple later described the experience as sitting in a circle on the floor for about an hour while Skinner played ocean sounds and rainstorm LPs. He’d set up his altar and invite each communicant to step forward and get a hypodermic of his latest mystery serum.
“After the shot,” said the disciple, “everyone was really drugged and would just lay around. Afterward, everyone said they had had very vivid dreams.”
It was in this spirit that Skinner reconnected with Savinelli. DMT had always been on his menu, but his growing neuro-network emboldened his inner entrepreneur. In partnering with Savinelli, he came up with a scheme for synthesizing desert grasses into a domestic ayahuasca. Skinner figured he could sell the noxious brew to members of Santa Fe’s fledgling União do Vegetal Church.
Portuguese for “Union of the Plants,” the UDV Church had been founded in Brazil in 1961 with ayahuasca as its cornerstone. By the late eighties, when the New Age religion had spread to the US, ayahuasca’s two essential ingredients,9 which grew only in the Amazon rain forest, had been banned by the FDA. A twenty-year battle in the courts ensued, ultimately ending the import taboo,10 but during the interim, Skinner tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to fill the demand with his homegrown version.
Since his high school days, Skinner had maintained a lab at Gardner Springs where he tinkered with psychedelics. He searched for years for a synthetic sacrament. With role models like Sasha Shulgin and Owsley Stanley, Skinner concentrated on the chemistry of DMT, which occurred naturally in most plants.
Savinelli pursued a similar alchemy. A self-described “bad” (i.e. mischievous) shaman, Savinelli stalked mind-altering molecules in all living things. Alfred ate ants, milked toads11 and smoked hemp, all in the service of connecting with his higher self.
“DMT is mother’s milk,” he was fond of saying. Like Todd, he’d consume almost anything to become one with the universe. He experimented with ketamine and Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, which contain d-lysergic acid amide, approximating an LSD experience.
But the mother lode remained pure Delysid-grade acid. From Sandoz to Eli Lilly, from the Bernards to the Bear, the modern-day alchemist’s holy grail was perfect triple-set12 LSD-25. Many tried to make it. Few succeeded.
“There are less than ten chemists who manufacture LSD, and they all know each other,” said Skinner.
And the best known, Todd came to understand after years of sniffing around, was an ex-con named William Leonard Pickard. Like Owsley, he’d done his time and appeared to have retired, but Todd believed otherwise.
His instincts weren’t wrong. However well-meaning he’d been in heeding Judge Patel’s advice, Leonard found psychedelics as irresistible as did Skinner or Savinelli. After following Sasha Shulgin’s career and studying Dave Nichols’s lysergic formulae up close and in the lab, Pickard had to dabble.
By the time he met Todd Skinner, he’d fallen into a Jekyll and Hyde routine: Harvard Fellow by day, alchemist whenever he could get away. Following Nick Sand’s example, Dr. Jekyll maintained the appearance of a happily married Boston policy wonk, while Mr. Hyde perpetually kept on the move.
1. Married and divorced twice from Skinner’s chiropractor father Gordon Henry Skinner, the second time after she caught him molesting a child. She then married William Imholf for eighteen months, and finally IRS agent Gary Magrini.
2. Skinner attended Schiller International University. He majored in finance and supplemented his income by exchanging currency at prevailing rates and charging a service fee. He dealt drugs, but rarely went to class.
3. Credited with coining the term “entheogen” as a psychedelic synonym, Ott moved to Mexico where he established a medicinal herb business akin to Savinelli’s Native Scents. He once boasted his LSD was superior to Pickard’s. In 2010, an arsonist burned his business, including rare volumes willed to him by Albert Hofmann.
4. In 1992, a jury found him and his mother guilty of bankruptcy fraud, awarding defendants $1,150,950.50. Skinner’s mother paid $100,000. Skinner filed for bankruptcy.
5. In the mid-1980s, Katherine Magrini sold custom chocolates under the brand name “Okie Power.” After Boris Olarte bought the business, was arrested, and made his deal with the government, his wife flew to Aruba with FBI agents to set up Olarte’s supplier.
6. In 1995, the New Jersey Supreme Court threw out the wiretaps and testimony: “The credibility and character of Skinner was . . . questionable.”
7. James Young, Charles Fletcher, Gerard Terrance Finnegan, P.C. Carroll, and William Good, among others.
8. McKinley pled down to four months in prison and had to pay $4.89 million in restitution. He ran unsuccessfully for the South Dakota House of Representatives as an Independent in 2016 and died two years later on April 20, 2018. He was sixty-four and still a member in good standing of the Open Bible Church.
9. The ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and a shrub called chacruna (Psychotria viridis).
10. On February 21, 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the UDV, allowing ayahuasca to be used as a sacrament by members of the church.
11. Skinner later refuted “the common story of people licking the toad, which is not what you do, that is dangerous, causes foaming of the mouth. But the Sonoran Desert Toad has this excretion that if you excrete it onto a glass slide, you can scrape off this material and you’ll get the main constituent being 5-methoxy and dimethyltryptamine.”
12. Reworked three times to increase purity.
XI.
TIM LEARY SUCCUMBED TO PROSTATE cancer on May 31, 1996. He was seventy-five.
Acid’s original Messiah had abandoned the Witness Protection Program twenty years earlier for a D-list Hollywood existence. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and his rival Hugh
