Rick Doblin alone stood by Halpern at the Basel conference. The MAPS founder funded several Halpern projects and refused to throw him beneath the DEA bus. He correctly pointed out that virtually everyone associated with Todd Skinner’s missile silo made deals with the government, from Alfred Savinelli to Deborah Harlow. No one was immune from Justice Department blackmail.
But Halpern lost more than reputation. After Dr. Hofmann’s birthday celebration, he testified before a San Francisco grand jury that indicted his onetime childhood friend Stefan Wathne. Karl Nichols initiated a “Red Notice” to all 190 Interpol member nations asking them to be on the lookout for him. Using the alias Gunner S. Moller, Wathne was arrested in New Delhi on Sept. 24, 2007. The US Attorney’s office in San Francisco started extradition, but he agreed to return voluntarily.
“The attorneys all trooped down to visit me in the hole after Wathne was detained,” said Pickard. “I explained he was innocent and I told them I would testify to that if it went to trial.”
But it never did. On Jan. 10, 2008, Wathne pled not guilty to money laundering, surrendered his passport. The wealthy Wathne sisters posted a $5 million bond. The family put up six apartments on Central Park South as collateral. If convicted, Wathne faced twenty years. Halpern watched the proceedings from afar.
“He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a $100,000 fine,” he said. “He didn’t lose his green card, didn’t cop to a felony, wasn’t guilty of money laundering or anything, so I would say that’s as good an outcome as you’re gonna get.”
Wathne and Halpern never spoke again.
Chris Malone sold his missile silo in 2006 to a military history buff who wanted a safe place to store his armaments. Prior to the close of escrow, Malone got a call from his property manager about a break in.
“I knew exactly what they were doing,” Malone recalled. “Once they got through the doors, they went thirty feet down one tunnel, a hundred feet down another, right to the bathroom. Apparently they had a sledgehammer and broke through the wall. We found two holes with a pile of sand in front of each cavity. Each hole was about the right size to fit one of those metal briefcases that Skinner used to carry around, full of cash.
“We did the math. I think each suitcase could hold about $600,000. So basically I had $1,000,000 in cash hidden in my building for four years and didn’t know it. Which kind of makes you sick after a while. You go, ‘Hmmm, unmarked bills.’”
There were other hidden treasures in the silo. Mike Bauer once paid a visit with his grandfather, also a military history buff. While they were there, Bauer accessed a secret computer and removed its hard drive.
He never revealed what was on it.
Following Dr. Hofmann’s birthday gala, Dave Nichols had a crisis of conscience.
“I have never considered my research to be dangerous, and in fact hoped one day to develop medicines to help people,” he said. “I was stunned by this revelation, and it left me with a hollow and depressed feeling for some time.”
Nichols’ revelation was that, in the Internet era, secrets like highly simplified recipes for LSD, fentanyl, and hundreds of equally potent brews had become available to anyone, anytime, anywhere. To Nichols’ horror, that meant any nut with a test tube and a credit card could cook up the most exotic mind benders and mete them out with impunity to friends, blind dates, or the family dog.
On one hand, Nichols reveled in the early twenty-first century psychedelic renaissance.
Following in Sasha Shulgin’s footsteps, dozens of researchers had picked up the torch, calling for renewal of over five thousand studies from the 1950s and ’60s. Before the War on Drugs, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin showed promise as therapy for everything from alcohol abuse to hospice care. Tentatively, and then in increasing numbers, psychedelic clinicians were again investigating PTSD, OCD, migraines, terminal patient care, addiction, and even spirituality. Nichols himself discovered breakthroughs that helped schizophrenics and Parkinson’s victims.
On the other hand, he recoiled from the unprecedented misuse of designer drugs.
In a mea culpa in the journal Nature, the Purdue professor publicly agonized over synthetics which he’d had a hand in developing. In an article titled, “Legal Highs: The Dark Side of Medicinal Chemistry,” he acknowledged that unleashing untested drugs in the digital age carried a risk far greater than anything Dr. Hofmann ever could have imagined.
A few weeks ago, a colleague sent me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal. It described a “laboratory-adept European entrepreneur” and his chief chemist, who were mining the scientific literature to find ideas for new designer drugs—dubbed legal highs. I was particularly disturbed to see my name in the article, and that I had “been especially valuable” to their cause. I subsequently received e-mails saying I should stop my research, and that I was an embarrassment to my university.
Along with Sasha’s PiHKAL and TiHKAL, Nichols’s formulae had become staples of the Internet’s “grey market”—drugs that were not exactly forbidden, but not exactly kosher either. One of them that Nichols developed had been sold on the street in Europe as ecstasy and killed six people.
“I had published information that ultimately led to human death,” Nichols lamented, adding: “This question, which was never part of my research focus, now haunts me.”
From inside his cell, Leonard sympathized. He recalled a botched black-market opioid that once caused San Jose addicts to freeze up at raves. The toxic drug eventually tested out as a Parkinson’s treatment similar to the one Dave Nichols invented, but that was small comfort to the paralyzed dancers of San Jose.
“Without actual animal and human studies, the risk is significant,” he said. “Amateurs distributing laboratory oddities? I agree with Dr. Nichols. I am very concerned with the increasing
