“One can only honor the mothers,” said Leonard.
He and Natalya have had no contact since 2008; wife and child moved on. Pickard hears of them through others, but the best he can do is get a general impression.
“I know they are comfortable and doing well in school and career, and that Little Natasha is being brought up in the best way. They have a good life, so that is some solace.
“But the loss of Natasha and Little Natasha was and strongly remains, the greatest pain my heart has ever known. It began with the loss of hope then her assumption I would never return. There were years in which I could hardly send a Christmas card. Letters and gifts do seem to get through somewhere, but never any return mail. Not many have been made captive forever, in the flower of love, and watched it die.”
1. Originally free and open to all, Burning Man evolved into a five-day hippie bazaar capped at 70,000 participants by the Bureau of Land Management. Operated by a non-profit, it charged $425 admission and a $100 per vehicle entry fee in 2019, but effigies grew to over one hundred feet high.
XXIII.
IN 2005, PICKARD AND APPERSON transferred to a new home. Recently built near Victorville in California’s Mojave Desert, the modern penitentiary did not look nearly as menacing as Lompoc. Nonetheless, gangs ran the place.
“With violent tribes and fear everywhere, it’s a world most cannot imagine outside of war zones,” said Pickard. “Blood clean-up crews on call; ‘stars’ carved into walls from the sharpening of homemade knives.”
Leonard managed to survive, even thrive, until he could take no more and asked for a transfer.
“Due to the homicides and assaults at Victorville, I requested a gang-free environment.”
Under Bureau of Prisons rules, an inmate can request a move once every eighteen months, but the system does not make relocation easy. His transfer began in solitary.
“The hole is a wall of sound,” Pickard explained. “Screaming twenty-four hours a day. Four-point tie downs immobilizing arms and legs of recalcitrant inmates. Strapped to a cement block with little rings to attach appendages.
“For sunlight, you spend one hour a day in an actual cage. You can walk about two feet. People flood their cells and throw excrement. All the joys of home. Hole time tends to discourage people from blithely requesting transfers.”
His transfer, he maintained, was voluntary. The hole, however, was not.
“You’re allowed one phone call a month, squatting by a cuff port,1” said Pickard. “Actually, I found the solitude refreshing in a way, just writing all day, planning. Six months of it. While newspaper op-eds argue the destabilizing effects of such treatment—and for many isolation is disorienting—as a devoted reader and writer it was a transient blessing from the usual chaos above ground. The hole is literally beneath the institution, a prison within a prison.”
But it can get cold down there.
Leonard remembers shivering through one December, pacing to stay warm while writing a paper for presentation at a Swiss psychonaut symposium. He used a four-inch pencil stub on scraps of paper in the dark. Titled “International Prevalence,” his essay was to be part of a three-day birthday celebration in Basel where LSD was first discovered two years before Leonard was born.
Dr. Albert Hofmann was turning one hundred years old. Leonard sent his paper, along with his regrets.
Dr. Hofmann’s birthday was the ultimate trip for hundreds of psychonauts who flew in to pay homage from around the globe.
Dr. Tom Roberts, a psychology professor at North Illinois University, staged a reenactment of Bicycle Day, the April 19, 1943, ride that Hofmann made from Sandoz through the cobblestone streets of Basel while loaded on LSD. Dr. Charles Grob described his new UCLA clinical study of psilocybin as a palliative for the terminally ill. And Ralph Metzner, the Harvard grad student who acted as Leary and Alpert’s junior partner in the sixties, taught the entire assemblage a new dance he called the Bardo2 shuffle—a kind of hokey pokey for heads. Among the youngest was a four-foot tall blue-eyed blond. Leonard’s daughter, Little Natasha, giggled for the camera while hugging hard on to Ann and Sasha Shulgin.
Dr. Rick Doblin teamed with Dr. John Halpern at the MAPS3 booth, handing out literature in furtherance of studies like Dr. Grob’s. A general excitement seemed to grip old hippies and enlightened newbies alike: a new day was at hand where science could once more dabble in brain chemistry without fear of running afoul of the law.
But there were cautionary moments. During a panel discussion on the future of psychedelic study at the Basel summit, San Francisco acid artist Mark McCloud interrupted Halpern mid-pontification.
“Are you a DEA agent?” McCloud demanded.
“No,” Halpern stammered. “No DEA.”
As later commemorated in the Entheogen Review exposé “Halperngate,” the Harvard psychiatrist protested his innocence. In the matter of Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson, Halpern was not a snitch.
“I’m doing work,” he said, referring to his ongoing study of peyote among the Navajo and psilocybin therapy at Harvard.
“They’re doing life!” quipped someone in the audience.
Halpern found no quarter among his peers that day, or for many days thereafter. His outing as a government turncoat made him a pariah among the hardcore. Sasha and Anne Shulgin both had their problems with Leonard’s recklessness, but found bigger ones with Halpern. So did Dave Nichols, Rick Strassman, Stan Grof, Myron Stolaroff, and a host of other leading psychonauts. Nick Sand, who was seen at the Hofmann birthday bash carrying Little Natasha on his shoulders, turned and walked the other way when he saw Halpern approach.
Gary Walter “Doc” Dash, who was doing thirty years himself in a federal prison for LSD manufacture, came to Halpern’s defense: “I myself have on more than one occasion instructed friends to tell the DEA whatever they wanted to hear because they already had more than enough to get me. I never allowed any of my friends to jeopardize their lives, careers, or
