Operation White Rabbit, стр. 37

IX.

DR. DAVE NICHOLS COUNTED AMONG the world’s leading neuropharmacologists. In 1993, with seed money from Laurence S. Rockefeller, he cofounded the Alfred Heffter Research Institute—a Santa Fe nonprofit meant to fill the vacuum after government grants dried up for psychedelic study.

“I’d like to think it’s the beginning of a renaissance,” he proclaimed. “LSD and other hallucinogens are very important tools in helping us answer a very old and important question: what is man, why are we here, and who are we?”

Every academic psychonaut worth his or her salt sat on Heffter’s board. Microsoft pioneer Bob Wallace¹ was an early benefactor and both Sasha Shulgin and John Halpern hired on as consultants. Named for the nineteenth century German biochemist who first extracted mescaline from peyote, the Heffter Institute funded clinical studies for federally-approved human experiments with psychedelics at the University of Arizona, Harvard, and universities in Switzerland and Russia.

A jolly academic who devoted his career to resurrecting psychedelic medicine, Nichols attracted grad students by the score to his medicinal chemistry classes at Purdue University—among them, Leonard Pickard.

During his first three months after settling in at the Kennedy School, Leonard gravitated to Purdue. At Shulgin’s urging, Nichols spoke with him about his plan to spin his Kennedy School master’s thesis into a serious, long-term study of the abuse of emerging drugs.

“He was real enthusiastic,” said Nichols.

Pickard regaled both Nichols and his longtime lab assistant with his tales of visiting faraway places for his thesis. Pakistan. Russia. Amsterdam. He also hinted that the government—perhaps the CIA—might have a hidden hand in subsidizing Leonard’s travels.

Unlike Nichols’s other much younger grad students, Pickard was a contemporary. They were born a year apart. It didn’t take much conversation for Nichols to recognize a fellow psychonaut. Thus, when Leonard proposed to visit his lab, Nichols was both flattered and in instant agreement.

“My assistant, Stewart, made the LSD we used for our rats,” said Nichols, “so I introduced them. Leonard got to know Stewart pretty well.”

Pickard’s subject was among Dr. Dave’s favorites: the alchemy of LSD. Like Sasha Shulgin and Rick Strassman, Nichols held one of the DEA’s precious Schedule One licenses. Pickard planned to explore methods for detecting and controlling drug synthesis, he explained, and wanted to see first-hand how it was done in the lab.

“In the run-up to ’96, I studied a wide range of substances in an effort to predict the next major drug of abuse,” said Pickard. “To do so, I looked at things from different angles: the ease of synthesis, the availability of precursors, the number of synthetic approaches, the potencies, the ‘pharmacokinetics’ of each (how the body metabolizes the material).”

Leonard arrived in Indiana the following July with exciting news. He’d been writing to a Norwegian chemist who, quite by accident, came up with a whole new method of improving lysergic analogues, as well as fentanyls, but with potentially dire results.

“I did correspond with (Dr. Paul) Froyen on some esoteric aspect of chemistry, then unrelated to LSD,” he recalled years later. “Very interesting mechanism. Subtle, effectively unknown.”²

Pickard reasoned that the more known about LSD architecture and fentanyl, the better. He later denied he was merely swapping recipes with Froyen.

Since moving to Harvard, Pickard had been building his library and expanding his database. His focus might be drug abuse prevention, but curbing Russian fentanyl was just the tip of his ambitions. He also focused on future designer drugs—addictive mind benders as yet unimagined.

In addition to his research fellowship and frequent travel, he busied himself deciphering foreign treatises on addictive and psychoactive drugs. Before summer session began at Purdue, he’d translated Czech, German, and Hungarian lysergic patents into English. He tracked down precursor chemical suppliers in a half-dozen European nations. He showed all the poise and dexterity of Victor Frankenstein stocking his basement laboratory.

Despite this feverish activity, some of his Harvard professors remained unimpressed. One said Pickard was more talk than action. Another grew wary of his Russian connections.

“I didn’t know their reputations,” said Mark Moore, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management. “They were unfamiliar to me then and have remained unfamiliar with me now.”

Dave Nichols disagreed. Seldom had he met a more dedicated student. Under his longtime assistant’s supervision, he gave Pickard full run of his laboratory. Clearly here was a biochemist destined to leave his mark on the science of psychedelics—perhaps a future fellow of the Heffter Institute.

After finishing his work at Purdue, Pickard went on vacation.

“I came up from Delhi to Kathmandu in the summer of ‘95, between semesters at the Kennedy school,” he recalled. “My itinerary that summer was Boston to London to Delhi to Kathmandu, then Delhi to Tashkent/Mazar to Moscow to Washington, DC, and then back to Boston.”

It was a working vacation that he lavishly described two decades later in The Rose of Paracelsus. Replete with mysticism and outof-body experience, Pickard spun an encyclopedic yarn of chance encounters with a handful of outlaw chemists who—like himself—led multiple lives in service to the sacred, secret production of LSD. In the logic of The Rose, it made perfect sense that he might run into one of them during a morning ramble through the Himalayas.

Pickard