Operation white rabbit, p.11
Operation White Rabbit, page 11
Kleiman wrote back, according to Pickard. In the years ahead, grudging toleration would be Leonard’s anthem, and his new pen pal would become another mentor.
After Pickard walked out of prison in November of 1992, he caught a Greyhound to San Francisco.
“I arrived at the Zen Center directly on the day of release carrying only a cardboard box,” he recalled.
Pickard joined the Hoshin-ji5 Urban Temple on Page Street in the Lower Haight, where he paid $350 a month for one of the forty small cubicles that apprentices rent when preparing for the priesthood. For the next two years, he was up at four daily, rang the temple bell at five a.m., meditated for an hour and a half, chanted, swept the sidewalk, then ate breakfast.
“Monastic practice involves twenty-four hours a day,” said Blanche Hartmann, better known at the Zen Center as The Abbess. “The bulk of the day he did whatever he was doing, and I have no idea what it was. I never felt fully invited into his personal life. There was always an air of mystery about him.”
When he wasn’t at the Center, Pickard studied neurobiology at Berkeley. Dr. David Presti, an authority on addiction, steered him away from psychedelics and focused him more on general drug abuse prevention. Pickard claimed to have turned his life around. He credited Presti, Zen, and Hartmann with helping him do so.
“She took my hand when I left prison,” he said. “I lived there for two years as a monk. I also trained at the Tassajara near Carmel.”
The first Zen monastery established outside of Asia, Tassajara is 126 acres of remote coastal wilderness located two hours south of San Francisco. The only way in and out is a dirt road sixteen miles from the nearest pavement. The place had a clandestine aura that appealed to Leonard: a secret training ground for sacred spies. Since it opened in 1967, Tassajara had fostered hundreds of apprentices seeking solitude, ranging from songwriter Leonard Cohen to Apple’s Steve Jobs, and an ex-con named William Leonard Pickard.
“I lost contact with a large early portion of my life after the prison years,” he said.
His new role models were holy men, like Brother David.6 “When the Vatican instructed him to inquire into Buddhism, he left his hermitage to learn our practice at Tassajara.”
Pickard did appear to reinvent himself. To hear him tell it, he entered the monastery an unfocused felon but emerged a penitent advocate of clean living.
“He seemed set on his science and doing something with his life,” recalled Mark Dowie, who reconnected with Leonard after prison.
Blanche Hartmann was less sanguine.
“I assumed he had some money left over from his earlier days dealing, but I have no idea,” she said.
According to Pickard, his mother left him “quite a sum” upon her death in 1991. A retired legal secretary who finished where she started in Atlanta, Audrey Johnson Hammond was 71 and had survived all four of her husbands, but hadn’t seen her only son since the sixties.
“He was trying to change,” said Hartmann. “I don’t know how he felt about his manufacturing LSD, whether he thought it was good or bad. I never asked him about it. My guess is, even though its illegal, he didn’t think it was wrong to make LSD, because he thinks there’s something beneficial about making it, or he wouldn’t have done it.”
Pickard did not completely turn his back on psychedelics. He resumed relations with the Shulgins, who invited him to participate in a weekly psychonaut tradition.
“After an Easter gathering on Mount Diablo, they invited me to my first Friday night dinner,” he said. “It was a life-changing encounter socially, to be received honorably and knowingly into the larger academic community.”
Each Friday for as far back as most could remember, the Shulgins staged an informal dinner party where Sasha held forth on his latest discoveries. Hosted by Ann and her daughter Wendy, the relaxed, invite-only suppers became famous among the psychonaut cognoscenti.
“Leonard always showed up in formal dinner dress,” recalled one of the regulars. “Nobody else did. It was odd.”
Sasha and Ann hosted even smaller klatches among their most trusted friends. It was with these half-dozen loyalists that Sasha tested his newest potions. After trying an analogue out on themselves, the Shulgins shared among their fellow guinea pigs while Sasha carefully noted the results. He and Ann included their findings in PiHKAL and its successor volume, TiHKAL.
But Pickard was not invited. Ann empathized with their new acolyte, but did not fully trust him. Talking drugs was one thing; taking them was another. The War on Drugs was now in full swing and the stakes too high to take chances.
Too much a wild card to secure invitation into the Shulgins’ super-secret inner circle, Pickard did manage to get his name on John Weir Perry’s potluck list. A Harvard-trained psychonaut who’d once studied with Carl Jung, Weir also staged potlucks at his Marin home. As Perry’s ex-wife, Ann Shulgin vouched for Pickard. He became a regular.
As with the Shulgins’ Friday night dinners, conversation at Perry’s potlucks dwelt on the nature of consciousness, narco politics, and recent shifts in drug policy, though drug use itself was tacitly forbidden. Always the threat of DEA infiltration loomed. No one was keen on sacrificing personal freedom for principle. Even Sasha had lost some of his fearlessness.
His legendary DEA invincibility ended the year Pickard left Terminal Island. PiHKAL became an instant underground bestseller, but amateur psychonauts everywhere were now cooking up a storm.
“It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs,” said DEA spokesman Richard Meyer. “Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies. . . .”
In 1993, agents descended on Shulgin’s farm, combed through the house and lab and carted off anything that looked suspicious. Sasha was fined $25,000 for violating the terms of his Schedule One license and was asked to turn the license in. He reached a compromise, but it wouldn’t last.
“Once and only once did the local Contra Costa County sheriff bust Sasha for growing peyote,” said Pickard. “He and Ann had a bucolic setting, with quite a variety of Lophophora williamsii7 and the license to possess it. But during the raid, the cops crushed the cacti beneath their heels. Even as they served the warrant, rather than seizing the plants as samples, they destroyed them. Sasha was heartbroken.”
Both the sheriff and the DEA apologized, but thereafter, Shulgin posted a sign on the door of his lab:
This is a research facility that is known to and authorized by the Contra Costa County Sheriff ’s Office, all San Francisco DEA Personnel, and the State and Federal EPA Authorities.
Underneath were contact numbers and names of representatives for each agency.
Leonard paid his first post-prison visit to Esalen Institute the same year the DEA trampled Sasha’s cactus garden.
“It was a real convocation—luminaries flying in from all over,” Pickard remembered. “As the only member of the group usually awake at four a.m., I was designated to drive down from Hoshin-ji to pick up a Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience. He’d flown in on the redeye from Boston. Some years later, he became provost. We drove into Big Sur just as the sun was rising. Glorious!”
The brainchild of a pair of sixties college dropouts, Esalen Institute occupied fifty-three breathtaking acres on a terraced cliff overlooking the Pacific. Birthplace of California’s human-potential movement, Esalen attracted psychonauts the way compost attracts earthworms. Before it inspired a multitude of New Age motivational road shows, Esalen famously equated self-actualization with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ Rolfing. When East Coast media wanted to depict California at its looniest, they dispatched correspondents to soak in Esalen’s hot springs for a week.
The very first Esalen catalogue offered an introductory course in “Drug-Induced Mysticism;” the inaugural seminar in 1962 was based on Huxley’s “Human Potentiality” lecture. Even after acid was outlawed, the Institute’s trappings remained indelibly psychedelic.
Pickard felt right at home.
Over the years, Esalen’s founding dropouts Dick Price (Harvard, psychology) and Michael Murphy (Stanford, philosophy) invited every aging Aquarian luminary from Tim Leary to Allen Ginsberg to lecture nostalgic Boomers about holistic yoga, improved karma, psychoneuroimmunology, and a host of other enlightened topics. Joseph Campbell spoke there about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls publicly spanked Natalie Wood during a role play. Altered states abounded.
At the end of each day, most everyone wound up in a hot tub clutching an apple-chard smoothie or a chardonnay. Quizzed about the rampant nudity among its patrons, Esalen CEO Sharon Thom rationalized, “Being naked is a leveler.”
Leonard was all about leveling. He seized the opportunity to chauffeur a future provost as one way to put himself closer to medical school. It didn’t work, but schmoozing a Harvard don did indirectly help pave his way back into the Ivy League. First lesson: drop the proper names.
“Sasha and Ann were central to our small gathering that weekend,” he recalled. “Our group included Nobelist Tom Schelling,8 Lew Seiden,9 Stan Grof, Mark Kleiman and Rick Doblin, among others. Rick had just started MAPS.10 Brother David may have come down from Carmel to open with a prayer.”
A fan since Terminal Island, Pickard hadn’t met Kleiman face to face until a San Francisco psychedelic conference in April of ’93. After his prison pen pal had quizzed Pickard on his academic background, Kleiman suggested that Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government might be a better fit than med school. The suggestion nettled, but also gave Leonard pause.
“Not my first choice,” he said, “but I thought a few years in Cambridge would help with med school admissions.”
He didn’t sleep alone at Esalen that weekend. After years of free love and casual relationships, Pickard had finally met The One at a Shulgin Friday night dinner. It was October, and Halloween was in the air.
“She had a peaked cap, as a witch,” he recalled. “I was in my monk’s robe.”
Deborah Harlow was a honey-haired vixen with sober predisposition. An MDMA fan, she gravitated early to the Shulgins, who approved of her all-consuming advocacy.
“Debbie really loved brilliant, eccentric men,” said Dr. Rick Strassman, an Esalen attendee. “She was really drawn to them, and could really turn on the charm. If they needed narcissistic replenishment, she’d deliver.”
Dave Nichols, Strassman’s contemporary and a leading neuro-pharmacist in his own right, remembered Harlow and her peers lobbying for MDMA under the tongue-in-cheek banner, “Madams for Adam.”11
Though eight years Pickard’s junior, Harlow was far more sophisticated. Before MDMA was outlawed, she had already administered the drug to more than two hundred patients, surveyed twenty psychoanalysts who used MDMA in therapy, and addressed Congress in an impassioned, if ultimately failed, effort to keep Ecstasy (a.k.a. XTC) off of Schedule One.
As leaders among the second-generation psychonauts, Harlow and her first husband Robert Forte vowed to bring psychedelics back into the mainstream. Her second husband carried the acid torch even further when she first met Leonard.
“By that time, Deb was in the middle of a difficult divorce from Jaron Lanier, the computer maven who coined the term ‘virtual reality,’” he said.
Leonard convinced her that the third time would be the charm. Her intellect was icing on the cake. Enlightened and bright she might be (she had her MA; Leonard still had only his high school diploma), but quirk and winsome smile counted as highly as academic credentials. She cocked her head just like Veronica Lake. Leonard held the door for her just like Cary Grant.
They had chemistry.
Leonard sought references from the Shulgins, David Presti, and the Esalen psychonauts in his bid for med school, but Mark Kleiman talked him into drug diplomacy instead. As an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Kleiman had an inside track with admissions. It helped Leonard’s case that he had hooked up with Deborah Harlow.
“Mark Kleiman had a crush on Deb,” said a friend of all three. “Leonard wanted into the Kennedy School; Kleiman had a lot of influence. By helping Leonard, Mark got closer to Debbie.”
Before falling under Harlow’s thrall, Kleiman earned his reputation the hard way, combining humble roots with academic excellence. A Jewish kid from Arizona, he’d paid his dues. After attending prestigious Haverford College, he systematically climbed the ladder to the top of government service. He took his Master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School, then served as aide to Congressman Les Aspin and Polaroid founder Edwin Land before being tapped to head the Office of Policy and Management with the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. He carved out a specialty as a drug policy expert, earned his PhD in 1983, then began making noise nationally about Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.
Kleiman saw Pickard as apprentice. With his support, Leonard bypassed the normal hurdles and entered the Kennedy School in September 1994, Deborah at his side.
One year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Pickard had finally returned to the Ivy League. Simultaneously, he won a neurobiology research fellowship in the addictions division of Harvard Medical School—one step closer to his ultimate dream of becoming a physician.
With Harlow as his partner, Pickard seemed finally to have found his groove. They set up housekeeping in Cambridge and co-authored a series of academic briefs about social drug use, including a finding that New Yorkers liked LSD at their raves while Californians seemed to prefer Ecstasy.
But Leonard made his mark with heroin, not psychedelics. For his second-year project, he focused on the former Soviet Union. Theorizing that a growing global black market in opioids could be traced to unemployed Russian chemists following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he set out to see whether a free-market economy had had the unintended consequence of unleashing a new synthetic heroin in the West.
First synthesized in 1959 by Belgian chemist Paul Janssen, fentanyl was a hundred times stronger than morphine. A rarity in the US, the drug had pandemic potential should unscrupulous chemists produce it in bulk. As a reformed underground cooker himself, Leonard felt uniquely poised to predict and prevent fentanyl’s spread.
Kleiman signed on as his faculty adviser. He encouraged Pickard to turn a routine grad school Policy Analysis Exercise into a full-blown fentanyl inquiry. Leonard tested the waters in an eight-stu-dent seminar and again during a presentation at the Faculty Club. Then he took his study a step further, seeking support from the CIA’s Counter Narcotics Center and the State Department.
“Now, as it happens, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs came to speak to our seminar,” said Pickard. “I pitched him as a sponsor. He knew my background, and accepted on the basis of fentanyl’s appearance in Moscow.”
Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters Robert Gelbard had visited Russia often and saw first-hand what Pickard was suggesting. He became a fan. When Pickard submitted an expanded fifty-page proposal that asked, “What Can State (Department) Do About Drug Problems in Russia?” Gelbard answered with approval of his project. Leonard’s “Design of a System for Monitoring Trafficking and Use” got the green light.
Using Gelbard’s State Department connections, Pickard began hob-nobbing with ranking Russian drug officials, gaining insight into fentanyl’s alarming growth.
“I took the risk, career-wise, for it seemed like science fiction at the time,” he said. “I asserted it would become fact and exactly why.”
“Leonard talked to Russians,” reported one of his Harvard associates. “He was obviously very good at that. He contacted various law enforcement figures, including the FSB, which is the successor to the KGB.”
Despite his stand-out success, Leonard had his detractors who characterized him as a dilettante who talked a good game, but failed to carry through.
“He presented himself as a person who was well-connected and could see what was happening in the drug scene, but he was never able to make much out of that or demonstrate the truth of what he was observing,” one of his professors later told Rolling Stone. “I ended up regarding him with a great deal of skepticism.”
Indeed, Debbie Harlow’s old friend and fellow MDMA advocate Rick Doblin12 had a similar take. He visited the Pickards on occasion in their off-campus apartment, before and after Debbie became pregnant. She bore Leonard a daughter, whom the couple named Melissa.
“Melissa was born at Brigham and Women’s,13 and of course I was there,” said Leonard. “Harvard paid for it, thankfully.”
They appeared to be the quintessential Yuppie family, but Doblin had his doubts. A Kennedy School graduate himself, he watched Pickard operate more as skilled poseur than late-blooming academic:
“What can you say about somebody who always wears a suit and tie to meetings that are usually more relaxed? He wanted to pass in a lot of professional circles or responsible circles, even anti-drug-abuse circles. It felt like he was playing the role.
“He’d tell these shadowy stories that were somehow connected to Russians who had made out in privatization in perhaps less than completely ethical ways and who wanted to help out their country by studying drug abuse issues. I didn’t know what to believe. I always felt there was more going on than he was saying. There were some major missing pieces in what he was sharing.”
1. Published in 1991, the underground bestseller was followed in 1997 with its sequel, TiHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved)
2. A trance induced with sixteen milligrams of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylphenethylamine.
3. A form of hyperventilation developed by psychonaut pioneer Stanislav Grof to approximate LSD’s surreal state of consciousness.
4. The British-born philosopher/theologian wrote more than twenty-five books on religion and popularized Zen among the Beats during the early sixties. A proponent of mescaline, Watt experimented with LSD as early as 1958, agreeing with Aldous Huxley about the drug’s mind-expanding potential or kenshō. “Some people get there from psychedelics, some from meditation, some from study, some from lineage.”
