William Leonard Pickard

William Leonard Pickard
Image of William Leonard Pickard
Born	(1945-10-21) October 21, 1945 (age 71) DeKalb County, Georgia
Education	Harvard University
Occupation	researcher, poet, writer
Criminal status	Serving two life sentences

William Leonard Pickard (born October 21, 1945 in DeKalb County, Georgia) is one of two people convicted in the largest lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) manufacturing case in history. In 1999, while moving their LSD laboratory across Kansas, Pickard and Clyde Apperson were pulled over while driving a Ryder rental truck and a follow car. The laboratory had been stored near a renovated Atlas-E missile silo near Wamego, Kansas but the two men had never actually produced LSD there. One of the men intimately involved in the case but not charged due to his cooperation, Gordon Todd Skinner, owned the property where the laboratory equipment was stored.

The DEA has claimed that Pickard's arrest led to a 95% drop in the availability of LSD in the US in the two years following the arrest, although this claim is refuted by Pickard and others.

Prior to his arrest, Pickard was deputy director of University of California, Los Angeles' Drug Policy Research Program. He came from a well-to-do family; his father was a lawyer and his mother was a fungal disease expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In high school, he was an honors student, played basketball, and was named "most intellectual". He earned a scholarship to Princeton University, but dropped out after one term, instead preferring to hang out at Greenwich Village jazz clubs. In 1971, he got a job as a research manager at University of California, Berkeley, Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, a job he held until 1974. From this year, his academic resume begins a 20-year gap.

It is reported by acid historian Mark McCloud that Pickard worked with a group of LSD traffickers, known as the Clear Light System, in the 1960s. Pickard is said to have contributed to LSD chemist Nicholas Sand's legal fund following Sand's arrest in 1972. Pickard also reportedly had a background manufacturing the drug MDA.