Schedule One, preached Leary, ushered in “an inquisition, a moral crusade against individual freedom and choice.” While failing to acknowledge his own significant role in dropping a two-decade shroud over psychedelic study, Leary cried in the wilderness for the rest of his life.
“LSD is obviously a very important tool in understanding the brain and human consciousness,” he said. “The suppression of that search by the government is a political scandal.”
But America was too busy embracing disco in the seventies and neoconservatism in the eighties to hear what he had to say. Psychedelics were passé. Near the end of his life, Leary announced that genetics and space migration would be the next big things. The Internet and virtual reality fascinated him. He called the personal computer “the LSD of the 1990s.” His followers needed to “turn on, boot up, and jack in.”
“Instead of ‘justice,’ he used to say ‘just us,’” recalled his disciple Leonard Pickard.
Dr. Tim never reclaimed the bully pulpit he had during the sixties. “Question authority” was replaced by “Greed is good,” and Drop City became a ghost town. Leary’s personal life suffered as much or more than his public persona.
In 1990, daughter Susan committed suicide, as had the first of his five wives. The last divorced him in 1992. He and son Jack were estranged.
And yet Leary remained the eternal optimist. His final words were “Why not? Why not? Why not?” His ashes were shot beyond the ionosphere, along with those of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry.
It was the human brain, not space travel, that would be “the number one challenge of the twenty-first century,” Leary insisted. “We’re the licensed owners and operators of it, and we should learn how to use it. Psychedelic drugs are the tool to do that.”
For those few still willing to listen, one of his final admonitions contained more than a hint of “tune in, turn on” defiance:
“Scientific study of drugs that expand consciousness and accelerate mental activity is a threat to any authoritarian state because it encourages innovative and creative thinking.”
Leonard heard his swansong, and he agreed.
On September 26, 1996, Tim Leary’s favorite chemist surfaced in a warehouse laboratory in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested David Roy Shepherd and five others with five kilograms of DMT, three kilograms of MDMA, five kilograms of MDA, forty-three grams of LSD, and fifteen kilograms of ergotamine tartrate. Mounties also confiscated a small arsenal, $500,000 in cash, and a pile of gold and silver bullion. It was the largest, most sophisticated psychonaut hub ever busted in the Western hemisphere. Overall value: more than $60 million.
It took authorities two more months to figure out that David Shepherd had been on the lam for nearly twenty years and that his real name was Nicholas Sand. His lab was deemed so extensive and hi-tech that Canadian drug busters turned the crime-scene video into a training film.
As for Sand, he was tried, convicted, and began serving his Canadian sentence before the US extradited him to San Francisco to face bail-jumping charges. Nick’s old nemesis, Judge Samuel Conti, came out of retirement just to nail him, only to find that the extradition terms limited the size and weight of the book he could throw at Sand. The maximum was a disappointing five years to run concurrently with the Canadian sentence. In total, Sand did three and a half years before parole.
Leonard followed press reports about Sand’s legal woes closely, but dared not reach out to his original role model. At the same time that Columbian cocaine was fading from the headlines, the DEA had inexplicably turned up the heat on LSD.
Another case Leonard quietly tracked at the time involved a forty-year-old Oregon entrepreneur with a reckless bent whom Pickard regarded as an existential threat to the whole acid underground.
Following a two-year investigation, DEA and local authorities combined forces to bust Bruce Michael Young on April 15, 1997, in the rural coastal community of Kerby, Oregon. Young and partner Bruce W. Kasten had gotten careless. They stiffed their landlord, who found several footlockers that his tenants left behind, loaded with labware. He also discovered barrels of ethanol, which he subsequently learned from the DEA is a bonding agent used to fix LSD to blotter paper.
“The bottom line is that this is a well-organized group that has produced millions and millions of hits of LSD,” said Dan Durbin, spokesman for a joint DEA/Kerby task force. “This is not some flyby-night afterthought.”
The wayward son of a retired Missouri police chief, Bruce Young had been a self-styled chemist since his pot-smoking youth in the suburbs of St. Louis. Convicted twice on marijuana possession, he moved west in 1984. Giving his occupation as “Product R&D,” he thrived beneath law enforcement’s radar until 1995, when he bought an RV for $35,000 cash, moved to Kerby, and registered his mobile lab to a nearby residence, also purchased for cash: $165,000.
As the saga unraveled, details emerged linking Young1 to Central American money laundering.2 More names surfaced and the investigation grew.
After the bust, Leonard’s interest spiked. He followed Young’s case more closely, taking note of Young’s associates. On the back of a Super 8 motel receipt dated Aug. 15, 1997, he scribbled some of the names: Robert Riep, Ernst Tüting, Ostermann Chemical Company.
Quizzed years later about their connection to Bruce Michael Young, Pickard remained mum. Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.
Pickard paid over $15,000 to American Express, Citibank, and MBNA in 1996, but sent nothing to the IRS. He filed no Form 1040 that year or the next, nor for the remainder of the decade. He later explained that
