Ex-UCLA Chemist Guilty in LSD Case

As the deputy director of the UCLA Drug Policy Analysis Program in 1999-2000, William Leonard Pickard conducted research on the illicit drug trade.

But, according to a federal jury in Kansas, his interest in the topic was more than scholarly.

Together with two partners Pickard, 57, ran what authorities say was one of the nation’s biggest LSD-production laboratories out of a former missile silo near Wamego, Kan., while he was employed by UCLA.

Pickard was convicted this week on drug manufacturing and distribution charges. In addition, before his hiring at UCLA, Pickard was convicted of other drug-manufacturing charges, including a 1992 case involving another LSD lab.

He served four years in federal prison.

UCLA officials Thursday refused to discuss how they had decided to hire Pickard, an accomplished chemist, as a contract employee.

They called it a confidential employment issue. Pickard’s lawyer, William K. Rork of Topeka, Kan., said he is sure that UCLA was aware of his previous convictions when he landed his job.

“The government introduced, at trial, his whole UCLA file, and it had that information in it,” Rork explained.

But Rork, who plans to file motions to overturn Pickard’s conviction, said UCLA was justified in hiring his client, noting that he also had been a researcher at Harvard and had cutting-edge expertise on the emergence of new drugs.

Rolling Stone magazine, in a story on Pickard published in July 2001 and headlined “The Acid King,” said he dropped out of Princeton and later earned a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He later worked at Harvard, researching drug trends in Russia, and followed a fellow Harvard researcher, Mark Kleiman, to UCLA.

Kleiman, who was Pickard’s boss at the UCLA Drug Policy Analysis Program, could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

Lynne E. Thompson, UCLA’s manager of employee and labor relations, said she wasn’t familiar with Pickard’s background or whether a criminal background check was conducted before he was hired.

She said UCLA departments make their own hiring decisions but, as a general policy, the university conducts criminal background checks only for certain positions.

She said those typically include employees who handle money or work with hazardous materials, as well as those who have master keys to dormitory buildings.

If someone is found to have a criminal record, Thompson said, university departments generally determine whether that background should be taken into account.

She said it wouldn’t be surprising if there was no background check on Pickard because, even though he “was in a moderately high-level position, there are people in those kinds of positions who don’t handle money, who don’t have keys to the building, who don’t have the kinds of things we categorize as making a job critical.”

The only information provided by UCLA about Pickard was that he was hired as a contract employee on April 1, 1999, and left UCLA when his contract expired on Sept. 30, 2000.

According to federal authorities, he was involved in the conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD around the same time, from August 1999 until November 2000.

Officials with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Pickard and an associate, Clyde Apperson, 47, were arrested in Kansas on Nov. 6, 2000. They said nearly 91 pounds of LSD was confiscated, with a street value of at least $150 million.

Pickard, who has a home in Mill Valley, Calif., and Apperson, of Sunnyvale, Calif., were convicted in federal court in Topeka Monday on one count of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD and one count of possession with the intent to distribute the hallucinogenic drug.

The third partner, Gordon Todd Skinner, has received immunity from prosecution in exchange for giving evidence in the case against Pickard and Apperson.

They each face a maximum of life in federal prison and are to be sentenced Aug. 8.