Background
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. At some point he earned a degree from Purdue University in Indiana. 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.
In December 1988, a neighbor reported a strange chemical odor coming from an architectural shop at a Mountain View, California industrial park. Federal agents arrived to find 200,000 doses of LSD and found William Pickard inside. Pickard was charged with manufacturing LSD and served five years in prison.
By 1994, Pickard had enrolled at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Here he focused on drug abuse in the former Soviet Union, where he theorized the booming black market and many unemployed chemists could lead to a flood of the drug market.
Read more about this topic: William Leonard Pickard
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