Dark_Star said:

They have. There's a lot of high quality LSD on the market.

---

nicechrisman said:

I think it's funny how people like to come into a thread like this and trash on someone they have never known based on hearsay they read on the interwebs. Funny and kinda sad.

---

The Doobie Dude said:

I'm not saying narcing is good but for "drugs with blood on them" I can kinda see why he did like violence with that type of drug goes against everything

---

Dark_Star said:

The Doobie Dude said:

I'm not saying narcing is good but for "drugs with blood on them" I can kinda see why he did like violence with that type of drug goes against everything

---

There was no violence. That had nothing to do with it. The folks he narced on were old school dead family, and loving individuals. These folks had been fucking around with cocaine & meth. Pickard's justification was that those drugs kill, not that any violence was perpetrated by the individuals in question. Meanwhile Pickard himself had synth'd meth back in the day to gain capital to fund his other activities, as had Owsely, Sand, etc.... Lot of people did. Pickard was a hypocrite, and he sent good, non-violent people to prison for decades to get himself off his own rap, and then tried to play it off cause there was coke involved. That's horse shit.

---

Quote:

Pickard himself told the Kansas court he had been a DEA informant since 1973 and had had periodic contact with senior DEA officials on "international cases" since 1992.

If released on bail, Pickard promised, "I would immediately proceed to report to the federal building, (and) cooperate even aggressively with DEA in any matters that they wish."


(http://www.sfgate.com)

---

^I have yet to see evidence that Pickard admitted in Kansas court that he had been a narc since 1973.  But I read the court transcripts and he definitely said the line about cooperating.  It's sad.  I really wanted to support this guy. 

Quote:

In December 1988, a neighbor noticed an odd chemical odor emanating from the architectural shop at a Mountain View industrial park and phoned police.
Agents found a lab and seized more than 200,000 doses of LSD, including blotter paper featuring Grateful Dead album covers.

When officers shined a black light around the lab, the surfaces glowed eerily with LSD dust. While taking the lab apart, one agent became so heavily dosed he collapsed in convulsions.

Pickard was charged with making LSD, pleaded guilty and served about five years. Later, officials revealed that Pickard "had been an informant" for state and federal drug agents.

Pickard said he helped police investigate people supplying equipment to make methamphetamine, which like heroin and cocaine is addictive. He seemed to see psychedelic drugs as beneficial, but eyed addictive drugs as a blight: "I agree with (hippie leader) Wavy Gravy. There's blood on heroin and cocaine."

At a hearing related to his LSD bust, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel warned the then-44-year-old Pickard:

"I hope that the . . . years in the federal penitentiary will be spent wisely. You don't have much time left to straighten out your life"

---

GangBol819 said:

Pickard is a documented rat...and yeah sometimes rats get life or otherwise huge sentences, him having one does not mean he is not a rat.

---

Learyfan said:

And Kman and Darkstar, could you guys please post a reliable source/sources on the claims that Pickard has been a narc since the early 70's, that he narced on meth dealers, the Clearlight group and Dead family? 

---

Quote:

kman1898 said
Based on my research, William Leonard Pickard was arrested for manufacturing MDA in 1977 but some of the facts don't quite add up.
The San Mateo County Sheriff's deputies who knocked on the door on October 10th, 1977, discovered a functioning MDA lab in the basement. According to Pickard, in 1978 he was not convicted by trial but pled nolo contendere to attempting to manufacture a controlled substance, a felony, and served eighteen months of his three-year sentence. In February 1980, police in Gainesville, Georgia, arrested Leonard Pickard for making amphetamines. In 1989, Pickard pled no contest to the manufacture of LSD, possession for sale of LSD and possession for sale of mescaline and was sentenced to eight years in California's Terminal Island Prison. Now according to the Wamego transcripts they only mention 2 previous manufacturing arrests plus the Wamego bust to qualify Pickard for maximum sentencing when it was clearly 3 previous manufacturing busts. Obviously this changes nothing just something to point out.

Now back to the '77 MDA bust, (from The Rolling Stone article The Acid King) Besides chemistry, he knew the law, and rather than brazenly break it, Pickard tried to skirt it. The first compound he experimented with was MDMA, a drug few had even heard of at the time but now known as Ecstacy. To get around the fact that it was illegal, Pickard fiddled with the formula and came up with a chemical cousin, MDA, a somewhat trippier version of the drug. In time, Pickard's neighbors in Redwood City complained about chemical odors wafting from his apartment. Sheriff's deputies who knocked on the door on October 10th, 1977, discovered a functioning drug lab in the basement. Alan Johnson, chief inspector at the Santa Cruz, district attorneys office, interviewed the young chemist. "I had a delightful conversation with Leonard," Johnson says. "He struck me as a really bright kid. He was dressed in a little V-neck sweater. He was a little Preppy. We're talking about a whole different culture back then," Johnson recalls. "Todays Cookers just get a recipe from some criminal. They mix a little of this and a little of that. They don't really know what they're doing. This fellow was trying to change the MDMA to make it legal. He was making the argument, and it was a new argument, that he's manufacturing an analogue." Ultimately, Leonard's analogue argument failed. In 1978, while taking chemistry classes at Stanford, he was found guilty of attempting to manufacture a controlled substance, a felony, and served eighteen months of a three-year sentence. In a letter from prison, Pickard offered up an elaborate excuse, denying that he had been brewing illegal drugs. He claims that he was busted after he was trying to sell some lab gear that once belonged to a Brotherhood of Eternal Love chemist, gear that contained traces of MDA.

What strikes me as peculiar is that MDA was classified Schedule I in 1970, and MDMA wasn't added to emergency scheduling until '85-'86. So why would Alan Johnson, chief inspector at the Santa Cruz district attorneys office tell Rolling Stone that Pickard was changing MDMA to the legal MDA when MDA was illegal and MDMA legal? I mean Shulgin didn't even try MDMA until October 1976, I believe. And the first clandestine labs began producing MDMA in 1967 but I suspect it was to be passed off as a legal MDA substitute and most didn't know they were taking MDMA. The first time documented that MDMA was found on the street was 1970. My thought was that Pickard was trying to make MDMA instead of MDA and that maybe he had heard about it by being in similar circles to Shulgin or his brotherhood circles. This is the only thing that makes sense to me. Since 99.9% of people knew nothing of MDMA until Shulgin published his paper with Dr. Nichols.

Was he was making legal MDMA instead of the illegal MDA and if I'm not mistaken then this may actually be the first MDMA bust in history.
Acid King

---