Operation White Rabbit, page 13
“He could be an arrogant son of a bitch with other people, and he always kept a .45 stuck in his britches, but with me he was real sweet,” she recalled. “He was real good to my daughter, paid for all her schooling. He loves animals. We had seventeen dogs at one time, and a bunch of cats too.”
During his longest stint outside of prison, he befriended his pursuers. Much like the mighty mouse who chased the cat in that long-forgotten sixties LSD film, Marquardt toyed with and talked to narcs more often than his fellow felons.
“He says that he solves chemical problems by envisioning himself as a nucleus within an atom and picturing what reactions might take place around him,” said John Duncan of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. The Marquardt he came to know was a joker and rough-hewn mystic.
Marquardt saw himself as a pioneer hero lifted from legend. He described his life to the Tulsa World in 1978 as “the last American folk adventure: The light in the moon . . . narcotics agents chasing you all over the land. It’s a fantasy made real.”
The occasion of his newspaper interview, however, was his latest bust for cooking. This time, he’d set up a three-room lab in his Muskogee home to manufacture LSD, but with a twist.
“It was going to be the hallucinogen of the future,” he said. “It combined the best features of amphetamines, but acted more like LSD. The results were spectacular, beyond the realm of anything I ever experienced on LSD.”3
Once more, Marquardt did his time then vowed to go straight. He walked out of prison a changed man. He set up a used lab equipment warehouse outside of Wichita he called Prairielabs. It attracted scant attention until a traveling salesman called 911 in August of 1992, gasping for breath.
Joseph Martier4 stumped the ER physicians. The forty-two-year-old Pittsburgh solar heating salesman who called the EMTs to Prairielabs nearly died from fentanyl poisoning, which made no sense because nobody outside anesthesiology even knew what fentanyl was. A hundred times stronger than heroin, a speck the size of a salt crystal could provoke instant respiratory arrest. The DEA came to know fentanyl as “serial killer of the drug world.” Some junkies died so quickly the hypodermics were still stuck in their veins.
“They died before they could get high,” said a representative of the Philadelphia Health Department.
It took the DEA six months to link the dots which ran from Baltimore to Boston, Pittsburgh to Prairielabs. The final dot landed in George Marquardt’s home laboratory. As Leonard did during his 1988 arrest, Marquardt stood by during the raid and offered fair warning to the task force that swept past him in HazMat suits. Breathe the fumes or touch the dust at your peril; this shit could body slam a whale.
Fentanyl was George Marquardt’s Waterloo. While the Russian variety measured roughly eighty times stronger than China white, Marquardt’s was closer to four hundred times as potent. The DEA priced a kilogram at between $240,000 and $640,000. By comparison, heroin went for $100,000 to $200,000 a kilogram and cocaine, a mere $20,000 to $25,000.
In court, he did not deny he made it, but took no responsibility for the dozens who OD’ed. They knew the risks every time they stuck a needle in their arms. Marquardt had no pity. He fascinated Leonard Pickard.
With Mark Kleiman’s approval, and awareness of the Harvard Human Subjects Committee, Leonard located Marquardt in March of 1995. At fifty-one, he was beginning a thirty-year prison term in Oregon. Explaining in a letter that he wanted to more clearly understand fentanyl’s effects, Pickard flattered Marquardt as the expert that he was. He enclosed a research questionnaire.
Was fentanyl pleasant? Would its use spread? Was Marquardt familiar with an ultrapotent form of the drug strong enough to flatten an elephant? What precursors did he use? How might the chemicals be monitored on a global scale?
After folding Marquardt’s responses into his ongoing Russia project, and with Marquardt’s permission, Pickard forwarded his findings to the UN Drug Control Program in Vienna.
“The gem of his reply,” Pickard said later, was that the DEA hadn’t confiscated his lab after he was arrested. It was still out there, somewhere in Kansas—a fact Pickard salted away for future reference.
1. Dead center in the human brain, the pea-sized gland produces sleep-inducing melatonin, but also has an ancient reputation as a mysterious “third eye,” connecting the individual to the cosmos. Strassman set out to see whether DMT triggers spirituality and whether the pineal gland plays a physiological role in the human quest for heavenly connection. Both pro and anti-abortion activists have challenged his contention that DMT release from the pineal gland forty-nine days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus.
2. Emil Fischer (1852–1919), 1902 winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry and Justus Liebig (1803–1873), the father of modern organic chemistry.
3. 2,4,5 trimethoxyamphetamine was synthesized just once on American soil, and never again.
4. A law school dropout, Martier teamed with a former Exxon chemist to corner the market on PCP in western Pennsylvania. Arrested along with members of the Pittsburgh biker gang that distributed their product, Martier and his codefendant were convicted in 1979 and sentenced to fifteen years each.
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 maintained that he never knew when he might happen upon one of the Six, each designated by a color straight out of a box of Crayolas: Crimson, Vermillion, Indigo, Magenta, and Cobalt. The Rose never names the sixth chemist nor does he ever meet Pickard, leaving readers to surmise that Pickard himself might be the missing crayon.
With each encounter, his colorful cabal delivers a new instruction or “mythopoeic” insight from yet another exotic locale. They are identified only as “nameless numbered files lost in the massive databases of the UN Precursor Control Program.”
In The Rose, Pickard questions each of the Six in much the same way David Carradine questioned Master Po in the seventies TV series Kung Fu:
Pickard: He mentioned experiencing the breadth of the human condition?
Magenta: So that he remains humble and focused, even with his consorts, and not distracted by the trappings of global mobility, the odd castle bedroom, and unabated sexuality. . . .
Pickard: And Indigo? We met in Salzburg and Vienna.
Magenta: Indigo considers ritual preparation of sacraments, the spiritual practices necessary to function while exposed to millions of doses.
The Rose opens in 1994 when Leonard, the forty-nine-year-old Buddhist trainee, trips through San Francisco at daybreak accompanied by the wise and enigmatic Crimson, just before Pickard is about to depart for his new life at Harvard’s Kennedy School. According to The Rose, by the time Pickard arrived in Kathmandu a year later, he had already chanced upon Indigo (during a break in a UN Drug Control conference in Vienna) and Vermillion (during a stopover in Berlin). His assignations among the Six usually happened abroad because none dared cook LSD in the US.
One close associate from that time said that Leonard later claimed a Nepalese drug lord threatened to hold him captive as his personal biochemist. Not so, countered Pickard.
“No problems in Nepal whatsoever,” he said. “I very much enjoyed Kathmandu and parts north. Many memories, some of which I described in The Rose.”
He did run into a British expatriate on that trip known only as Magenta. As with each of the other Six, Magenta whipped Pickard into an allusive froth that left many if not most Rose readers scratching their skulls and asking, “Huh?”
The inevitable contact high from one of the Six seemed amplified by the devotional resonance of Bodhinath. Magenta’s walking stick tapped unceasingly like some secret code. We circled the mesmerizing ancient clockwork, telegraphing peace throughout the ten directions and untold realms. We became trekkers on the sacred mountain Meru with its rubies and amethysts and harlots and sanctified streams holding up the skies. The spinning became a spiral of reveries until we soon nodded at the wailing wall of Jerusalem, prostrated ourselves before the golden crucifixes of Florence, and ceaselessly recited a thousand sutras in Dharamsala. We whirled with our arms out and faces upwards like dervishes, and cycled among unknown lovers in the holy orgies of the Epidaurians.
Pickard’s peculiar memoir drowns the reader in florid prose while making no reference to Deborah Harlow, their daughter Melissa3, or the daily routine of domestic existence in Cambridge. Neither does The Rose acknowledge his fast-evolving camaraderie with John Halpern and Alfred Savinelli.
Instead, the overstuffed roman a clef features four far younger Kennedy School companions—two women, two men—who idolize Leonard as “Captain Pickard,” their older, wiser classmate. He nicknames them Surf, Hagendas, Hulk, and Hammer, and spies on their respective sex lives, vamping like a coy ‘tween diarist who constantly fears that his elders are eavesdropping. All four students are as real as the Six chemists, Pickard maintained, but remain anonymous to spare them the stigma of having befriended a felon.
Naysayers may scoff, but The Rose of Paracelsus is absolutely true, according to Pickard. Like Leonard himself, his memoir tiptoes through minefields of fact and fantasy, trusting that some misstep won’t trigger ruin.
The question of money arose during the summer of ’95 and persisted over the remainder of the decade. Pickard’s adjusted gross income that year was less than $8,000. He didn’t bother to file a tax return. Nonetheless, he was able to trot the globe on a whim. He possessed a couple of Visa cards, managing minimum payments that totaled $1,042 by year’s end.
That he seemed to fly off regularly to Indiana, New Mexico, Moscow, or Kathmandu raised no eyebrows at the time because he was a student, after all, and travel was part of the curriculum. How he got around wasn’t important. How he could afford grand gestures of generosity was more problematic, though not so much to his recipients.
“Leonard was terrible managing money,” said Alfred Savinelli. “Just terrible.”
A California transplant first lured to Taos by the high desert romance of Easy Rider, Savinelli was a latter-day hippie in desperate need of cash himself when Pickard first showed up on his doorstep.
Savinelli opened Native Scents in October of 1989. He advertised himself as a “wildcrafter” who extracted “oils, essence, homeopathic and ceremonial plant products” that Native Scents marketed in twenty-three countries around the world. Savinelli maintained a lab on the premises to mine his oils and essences from local flora and fauna. He regularly ordered test tubes and flasks, compounds and catalysts to facilitate the extraction process.
By 1995, the business was floundering and Savinelli’s two original business partners balked. A bank loan to buy them out was unfeasible: no financial institution saw the upside of essential oils and scented candles.
No problem, said Pickard. When John Halpern needed cash, Pickard promised a cigar box containing $100,000. He could work similar magic for Savinelli.
It never occurred to either Halpern or Savinelli to question the source of the money. Pickard was older, wiser, and besides, he confided to Halpern that he lived a secondary secret life as a CIA operative. Halpern believed him. How else to explain his “sometimes bizarre and secretive behavior?”
With the wolf at his door, Savinelli ignored his instincts. Pickard ponied up an interest-free $300,000 loan. All Leonard asked in exchange was a few supplies now and again ordered through chemical and labware distribution houses with which Native Scents regularly did business. A rotary evaporator here; a three-liter receiving flask there. Nothing that would arouse suspicion.
“I should have known better,” said Savinelli.
At the time, Pickard was renting a house on the outskirts of Aspen—a Colorado resort town with high tolerance for recreational pharmaceuticals.4 He told Savinelli he was experimenting there with mescaline synthesis—nothing illegal, though an overly-curious narc might not see it that way.
Like Savinelli, Leonard had taken a shine to northern New Mexico, with its Rocky Mountain highs, artsy ambiance, and New Age tolerance. Pickard thought he might move his operation from Colorado and become Savinelli’s neighbor. As 1995 wound to a close, Savinelli and Halpern had become two of Leonard’s closest compadres, though neither get a single mention in The Rose of Paracelsus.
When Pickard travelled to Amsterdam on Nov. 26, 1995, Halpern and Savinelli tagged along. They were there for the annual Cannabis Cup, where more than 100 growers competed among 1,500 connoisseurs, who fly in from all over the world to toke the finest weed in Europe.
