Leonard adapted to the times. His first prison job was teaching GED night classes where attention spans were short and boredom was the enemy.
“Soon I learned that the class would focus much better if I couched lessons on the metric system in terms of kilograms of crack,” he said. “If I drew a sailboat filled with pot and discussed how many hours and kilometers it took to arrive in San Diego, I got the idea of triangulation across a lot easier than if I just talked about angles and hypotenuses.”
Nowadays, drug allusions don’t carry the same clout with jaded inmates as they once did. Were he still teaching, he’d have to find different references. Times change, fears fade, and new ones take their place.
Leonard waxed sardonic: “How interesting that one can now publicly talk about psychedelics all day long, and socialize at conferences relentlessly, and publish and receive lots of donations, and be a media darling, without ever having any legal exposure. What an excellent idea!”
For himself, he’s past entheogens. Like Tim Scully, he’s on to the next stages of neuropharmacology:
“Biotech and gene editing for enhancement of cognitive traits, and, to a lesser degree, erotogenics. I think about the proliferation of unregulated custom IVF clinics in third-world settings, with selection for eye and skin color, gender, personality, and intelligence. Now that will be a phenomenon, as we consciously select our next species.”
Which is not to say that Leonard has lost all interest in drugs. Take fentanyl, for example.
The National Institute of Drug Abuse couldn’t pinpoint a date, but it was clear by the end of President Barack Obama’s second term that the US was mired in its worst drug crisis since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The culprit wasn’t LSD or any other psychedelic memorialized in Schedule One of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. As Pickard predicted while still at Harvard, America faced an opioid crisis and more specifically, an epidemic of George Marquardt’s deadly synthetic heroin. It took the overdose deaths of celebrities like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Petty, and Prince to set off alarms.
“In 1996, fentanyl procedures weren’t available except in academic journals,” Pickard recalled.
Nonetheless, he began tracking the drug from Harvard as a potential time bomb, especially if the recipe were to fall into the hands of Mexican cartels. “I knew we had a problem when a simplified procedure was discovered scribbled on a piece of paper that was found in the pocket of a Mexican auto accident victim.”
Both its inventor, Paul Janssen, and Sasha Shulgin warned of fentanyl abuse, but Pickard made the first prediction of impending pandemic. In a 1996 slide show at the Harvard Faculty Club, he explained in detail how, why, and when the synthetic would join other overprescribed opioids seeping into the American mainstream, along with Leonard’s preemptive prescription on how to stop it.
Billy Rork resurrected the slide show seven years later for Pickard’s trial. Leonard spent two days on the stand, explaining to the court that an opioid plague was on its way. His words fell on deaf ears. Cassandra had better luck predicting the outcome of the Trojan War.
As his worst fears began to materialize nearly fifteen years later with over forty thousand deaths reported annually, Pickard began a prison email exchange with an old friend on the outside: former Mother Jones publisher Mark Dowie.
Lennie—You know, of course, that the gas pumped into Moscow’s Dubrovka theater during the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege (intended to incapacitate the Chechen terrorists and save the 400 or so hostages trapped inside) was almost certainly Carfentanil, a gaseous form of fentanyl. The gas did end the siege, led to the death of all 40 terrorists, but also killed 204 of the hostages.
They should have listened to you.
Mark
Hi Mark—Yes, my research and concerns about fentanyl date back to my time at the Kennedy School. The fen prediction from my testimony in the trial: “We are going to have a big problem.” I am constructing a package containing all the relevant testimony. It was not simply a prediction, but offered methods to prevent or delay such an epidemic. Note I was first to recommend naloxone be widely-distributed. Of course, in 1996 there were only relatively small outbreaks, dependent on one lab, and the idea of an epidemic was science-fiction.
Len
True to his word, Pickard compiled charts, documents, letters, trial exhibits, and reports from his failed FEDS program at both Harvard and UCLA and sent off an inch-thick “Fentanyl Proposal” to every Senator and Congressional Representative in Washington.
In the cover letter, his attorney wrote, “. . . my client wishes to offer his assistance and analytical expertise to individuals and organizations concerned with the opioid crisis in an effort to reduce the death rate from fentanyl overdoses and to anticipate the future of the current crisis.”
It was also worth noting that the venerable RAND Corporation published a history and analysis of fentanyl abuse in the autumn of 2019: The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids.3
“My work in 1996 was cited six times and featured in the bibliography,” Pickard said triumphantly.
But Congressional ears were as deaf as they had been a quarter-century ealier. There was an inmate registration number in front of Leonard’s name and his return address was USP Tucson.
He got no responses.
Billy Rork was found dead in his apartment May 31, 2017. He was sixty-two. Known around the Topeka courthouse as F. Lee Billy, he was fondly eulogized as a fierce, fiery advocate for the abandoned, dispossessed, and forlorn. He advised his clients to tell police, “No, I do not care if we did go to high school together. I still do not wish to speak to you unless Mr. Rork is present.”
Billy did not live to see the results of his appeal against the government juggernaut that railroaded Leonard Pickard
