The “acid king” prognosticates: 5 Questions for William Leonard Pickard

Pickard discusses his research, and how the psychedelics world has changed over his lifetime.

Once known as the “acid king,” William Leonard Pickard is entering his seventh decade in the psychedelics scene. A gifted high school science student, Pickard earned a scholarship to Princeton in the 1960s, but dropped out after a semester. By some accounts, this was the time period during which Pickard began dabbling in manufacturing drugs like LSD and MDA, an MDMA analog. In the 1970s, Pickard went back to school, studying chemistry at Foothill College and then San Jose State. After a series of arrests for drug manufacturing, Pickard was in and out of prison in the 70s and 80s, but between stints, he lived in a monastery, and conducted drug research at Harvard and in Russia. Along the way, he spent time alongside legendary psychedelics figures like Sasha and Ann Shulgin and Rick Doblin.

Then, in 2000, Pickard was driving a rented Buick LeSabre, allegedly moving components of an LSD lab from an abandoned missile silo in Kansas out of state, when he was pulled over by the Kansas State Highway Patrol. Pickard took off on foot, but he was picked up a day later by the authorities, who arrested, charged and convicted him in the largest LSD manufacturing case in history. In a press release, the Drug Enforcement Administration claimed that Pickard and a partner had manufactured tens of millions of doses, and that after their arrests, availability of LSD in the U.S. decreased by 95%. 

Pickard served 20 years in federal prison, and was released early, in 2020, after mounting a series of appeals. The Microdose talked with Pickard about his research, and how the psychedelics world has changed over his lifetime.

In the years before your 2000 arrest, you were conducting drug policy research at the Harvard Kennedy School. What were you studying, and what’s been the legacy of that work?

In the nineties, I was a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School. At the time, the only drugs available were the legacy compounds — methamphetamine, cocaine, cannabis. You didn't see analogs proliferating, there wasn’t wide availability of these drugs. The difficulty then was to predict the next major drug of abuse.

I started a study called it the Future and Emerging Drugs Study, or FEDS, and I began to review the literature. LSD was still relatively rare, psilocybin grew in the forest. Then I read about fentanyl, which no one had really heard of at the time. It was an exotic rare drug, rarely seen on the street. As part of my thesis, I interviewed the survivors of a small fentanyl outbreak in Boston and gave them a 90 question survey: what was their experience with the duration, onset, and intensity of the drug, and would they use it again? What I determined from my research is that if fentanyl were widely available it could be a problem. It was a substance that could be widely manufactured in labs, it was cheap to produce, and it was incredibly potent. It was the perfect storm, especially if a recipe for it were ever widely disseminated, like via the web, which was new at the time. 

In my trial, they asked me what I did as my day job, and I told them, “I try to predict the next major drug.” I brought out all the overheads from my Cambridge presentations and the government objected saying it wasn’t relevant. But then, in prison, I watched the fentanyl crisis happen — the loss of life has been astounding. It wasn’t until around 2019 that the thinktank RAND Corporation published The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids, which cited my work from 1996, that my predictions were acknowledged. 

You were released in 2020, a year after that was published. Do you think that Rand fentanyl report helped your case?

In my petition for release, the government responded to my fentanyl work, saying that it was “praiseworthy,” which is really unusual for the government to say about a criminal. But they pointed out the irony in attempting to control a fentanyl outbreak and producing LSD. The court agreed it was really ironic. I don’t think it’s really ironic — you could argue that the acid lab was an attempt to head off the fentanyl epidemic. 

Of course, the judge knew about this RAND Corporation mention. In his statement for my release, he cited the potential lethality of the COVID epidemic given my older age. 

Forgive me if this is an overstep, but I’m curious about your motivation for manufacturing these drugs. What was your thinking back then?

My official position to the government and in courts is that I am not responsible, so I can’t provide a personal viewpoint. But I’m familiar with statements from manufacturers like Tim Scully and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, so I can comment on the mind of the manufacturer. 

The early manufacturers felt that this class of compounds are an evolutionary touchstone for human consciousness, a phase we had to go through to overcome highly structured, rigid, linear thinking. It would change our militaristic, materialistic views to give us a sense of the divine and spiritual, to have insight into the unity of all living things. These insights would be helpful for society – it might even stop war, or at least make people more tolerant, loving, or kinder in some small way. So these underground chemists felt it was not only a privilege to work with what they considered sacraments, but also their duty to produce these things, under any opposition. 

What do you make of the recent surge of corporate interest in psychedelics?

It’s been unusual to move from a world where psychedelics were so heavily controlled to one where the same substances are widely trumpeted as a panacea. I’ve been involved in the venture capital space in the psychedelics field, so I’ve talked to corporate start-ups, founders, and CEOs to assess the potential commercial value of their ideas. I see a great deal of enthusiasm right now — we’re in a honeymoon period — and many people report that they had positive experiences in their youth with these substances, or have used them for healing. Some are even coming in with no personal experience whatsoever, proselytizing a drug they’re afraid of, so it’s all very interesting. 

I’m a bit more conservative than many people entering the field right now. It’s like how recent converts to any new faith will be more extreme in their proselytizing; it’s like that right now in the psychedelic world. But having lived in this world for most of my life, mostly underground, now that I’m above ground, I see limitations. 

Your predictions about fentanyl seemed spot on. What do you see in the future of psychedelics?

We’re in a great transition. Founders are just seeing the bottom line numbers, and donors are moving into larger and larger venture capital firms, $100 billion dollar firms. Big pharma is watching this all go down; when they move in, it’s going to be a whole other world. Right now, a big debate is in trying to separate out the hallucinogenic aspects of these substances and whether those are necessary. 

The beauty of this is that we’ve got a lot of eyes on this. We’re going to learn as much in the next eighteen months as has been known throughout history. It’s not just a few analogs being created, it’s tens of thousands of analogs driven by machine learning. And from that we’ll have some beautiful new healing compounds, some fine new medicines. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.