From 1968 through 1988, Leonard Pickard cycled in and out of schools and universities, never actually matriculating, but learning all that he needed to know, then moving on.
“Note that public records and cross-talk are thin on two decades,” he said.
What happened next remains hazy. There are few employment records, addresses, phones, cars, bank accounts, “or any threads whatsoever to exploit. Zero,” he said proudly. “In the decades I went dark, the FBI would appear now and then and ask people ‘Where is he?’ One might argue, given the lack of records, that I labor under some secrecy agreement.”
He insists he isn’t being coy. If his story sounds a little too John le Carré, it isn’t because he’s given over to spy novels. Even now, festering inside a federal prison, he reveals precious little about those years between Princeton and his re-emergence at Harvard Square in 1994. To blab, he contends, would put lives at risk and violate a code of silence he accepted half a century ago, when he first became a psychonaut.
1. Governor Lestor Maddox’s mother taught him and his older sister Sunday school. Later, when his father switched denominations, Leonard became a Unitarian.
2. Science, technology, engineering, and math.
3. Einstein died of an aortic aneurysm April 18, 1955. He was seventy-six.
4. Named for the father of the Atlanta public school system, Daniel O’Keefe High closed in 1973.
5. Pickard: “I got my first kiss on Stone Mountain.”
6. In August 1963, the National Institute of Mental Health flew Leonard and two other Westinghouse winners to its Bethesda headquarters for a study of high IQ students, according to Pickard. “In Atlanta, I once was called to a building with no name, down a corridor with no signs, into a bare room and desk, with a besuited presumed physicist who just asked questions and otherwise disclosed nothing.”
7. Following near collapse in the 1990s, financially-strapped Westinghouse surrendered sponsorship to Scripps Research, then Intel Corporation. Today the competition is called the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
8. Greek for “cell drinking,” pinocytosis tracks the formation of channels from a cell’s surface membrane to its plasmatic center—a process that can only be observed through an electron microscope.
9. Founded in 1765 by Aaron Burr, James Madison, and other Founding Fathers, the American Whig-Cliosophic Society at Princeton is the oldest collegiate debate club in the US
10. The blind “Viking of 6th Avenue,” Lewis Thomas Hardin was an itinerant jazzman and Midtown Manhattan fixture through most of the twentieth century.
11. Landscaped during the 1860s by New York City’s famed Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
12. Actress Gene Tierney underwent twenty-six shock treatments, later claiming they erased significant portions of her memory.
13. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, unofficial Bible of the American Psychiatric Association.
II.
PSYCHONAUTS BELIEVE IN BETTER LIVING through chemistry. They seek spirituality through magic mushrooms, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, DMT and, of course, LSD. Literally Greek for “sailor of the soul,” the term came into broad usage during the 1960s, when Leonard Pickard first came aboard. But the sea upon which psychonauts sail is as old as humankind.
Dr. Albert Hofmann was arguably the first modern-day psychonaut. The Swiss-born biologist launched his revolution in April of 1943, two-and-a-half years before Leonard Pickard was born. Hofmann stumbled upon his most notorious discovery during a routine lab procedure. Now seared into psychonaut legend, Hofmann’s tale has been told and retold thousands of times. Leonard Pickard knows the details by heart:
• How Hofmann synthesized the lysergic molecule from rye fungus in 1938 at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals while looking for a possible cure for post-partum bleeding;
• How he set the compound aside for five years until—quite by accident—he ingested a microdot and watched his lab morph into a wobbly kandy-kolored kaleidoscope;
• How he followed up three days later with an intentional dose, then rode his bicycle home through the drab cobblestone streets of Basel;
• And how the alleyways began to sparkle then twist and roll into incandescent reptilian rivers, and cloud formations billowed into hot-pink cotton candy accompanied by full-blown symphonic orchestrations that ricocheted between Dr. Hofmann’s ears.
Psychonauts commemorate April 19, 1943, as the first Bicycle Day, when acid officially left the lab and took to the streets. Pickard would not learn to commemorate Bicycle Day for another quarter century, but once he did, he too made LSD his life’s work.
Near the turn of the twenty-first century, Pickard got to meet Dr. Hofmann in the flesh, during the 1996 European Conference on Consciousness. Just ten years shy of the legendary Swiss biochemist’s hundredth birthday, Hofmann posed for a selfie with Pickard. The photo remains one of Leonard’s great personal treasures.
“Albert and I spoke of the Harvard work,” he recalls with hushed reverence.
Pickard was deep into his double life by then: studying drugs and diplomacy at Harvard’s Kennedy School was behind him, but he still found time to tinker with theoretical chemistry in New Mexico while holding down a drug policy post at UCLA and schmoozing on the psychonaut circuit. He shared none of these details except on a need-to-know basis. Hofmann didn’t need to know.
Weeks later, Hofmann surprised Leonard by sending him an autographed copy of his memoir. The frontispiece read, “With fond memories of our meeting in Heidelberg.”
Unlike Leonard, Hofmann had never been arrested. By contrast, Pickard’s rap sheet dated back decades. Hofmann would have been neither surprised nor offended that he’d been canoodling with a felon. Despite his spotless record, acid’s premiere elder statesman understood full well the paradox of the Pandora’s box he’d opened that spring day in 1943. He titled the memoir he published on the subject LSD: My Problem Child. It was the very book that he autographed for Leonard.
In My Problem Child, Hofmann detailed that first deliberate encounter with LSD, when he cycled home from his job at Sandoz. Even after he recovered, the strait-laced biochemist was never the same.
