The Acid King (2001)
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947157 - July 2020 (375 comments)
The "Acid King," Serving Life Without Parole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211097 - Aug 2016 (25 comments)
Other (more loosely) related threads:
The LSD Museum (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673288 - July 2023 (25 comments)
Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651502 - Aug 2022 (57 comments)
Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14207957 - April 2017 (82 comments)
Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12395737 - Aug 2016 (211 comments)
A tool which creates this post for you (probably shouldn't post it because slop, but just making the draft) could be a fun project!
I'd read he met Ross Ulbricht in USP Tucson when they were both serving life without the possibility of parole. I hope they can reconnect now that they're both free.
The most active 80 year old I’ve seen. Lots of travel, speaking at conferencing, networking in his professional circles.
Believe it or not, he’s a fairly conservative person. He’d never done yoga, breath work, sauna, cold plunge, saline IVs. I had the honor of pushing him out of his comfort zone a bit with the hippy health stuff.
He’s speed run learning how to use a smartphone and loves using it to connect all the people he meets together.
I think that was the most intriguing part of Leonard- his ability to pick up a new concept in minutes and apply it expertly. We were discussing modern cryptography and he was able to grok it in < 5 minutes.
Yes, he and Ross are still friends today. If I understand correctly they recently met up for the first time outside of prison.
Huh, the article says he did Yoga.
It’s a strange internet phenomenon where people seem to want him to be a folk hero and they’re willing to ignore or use mental gymnastics to wash away the fact that he was spending a lot of money to murder several people.
The 'preponderance' was found by a judge, not a jury, so it's a different threshold than say demanding a jury in a civil suit where the jury would make a finding on preponderance. You effectively have a jury of one, where that jury member is highly intertwined with the same federal government that is prosecuting the crime, in a way that would surely eliminate them in voire dire for an impartial jury.
Yet there’s this desire to downplay it or wish it all away as a conspiracy against him. You have to suspend belief and assume that someone else sent the messages or that they were fabricated. It’s all really hard to believe unless you’re in the mindset that he’s a hero and you need to explain away the inconvenient parts of his history that detract from the person people wish he was.
However, using a voice dictation program combined with a usb foot pedal and cursor, I have overcome this impasse in an interesting way.
What was once the Ballmer peak, I should perhaps rename the Pickard Pinnacle. What a time 2B alive.
Personally I feel I save the experience for when I have a question of life and would benefit from a perspective shift. Or might enjoy a different experience of being in nature.
> I tried to code on shrooms once.
> I ended up writing a C++ program that just made the internal speaker beep in an infinite loop, and tried to compile it with a C compiler.
> I started laughing hysterically and I became quite scared that the C compiler was going to get angry with me, so I went outside and stayed away from my computer in fear.
My advice is to write/draw your ideas while tripping and save the digital stuff for later.
Trees and flowers is a much better focus, animals; as analog, natural and physical as possible. Playing instruments is nice if that's your thing.
Take or leave.
I was living in a fairly boring suburb, and was a complete nerd and had access to as much LSD as I wanted at less than $5 a hit when I was in high school in the mid 90s, and it continued to be easy to find well into the early 2000s.
Edit to add: i'm just talking about the rash of strychnine poisonings related to LSD usage in the early 2000s. it put a real damper on the party for a long time and for a lot of people.
There is no avenue in synthesis or purification in which LSD and strychnine would come into contact. There is no benefit to cut LSD with strychnine. The amount of strychnine necessary to have any effects on humans is too close to the lower end of lethality to be a useful cutting agent.
That being said, there are side-products in LSD synthesis or purification from natural substances (e.g. ergot fungus cultures) can leave related substances as impurities. These can cause vasoconstriction, which is unpleasant. This isn't strychnine, and it's unlikely to be dangerous as small amounts of impurity. It doesn't feel very nice, and it can cause bruising. Or, people tripping can just bump into things and be clumsy. Either way, the explanation that this comes from strychnine is and has always been bunk.
It should be obvious, but please don't confuse any of this with an endorsement of the drug. That's a separate topic. The most I'll say here is that I don't recommend it.
Here in Florida, back in the eighties and nineties, an old timer with a background in organic chemistry used to make it. He was a fascinating fellow. He didn't make it for the money, and allegedly if you were introduced to the guy, he'd practically give it away. By the mid-2000s, he was no longer gifting folks his "samples" or even talking about his hobby. I'm sure he has long since passed on.
I read through two thirds of it during Covid. I think it’s has an unfair reputation of being a challenging read; yes you’ll encounter new vocabulary, but the narrative itself is really interesting and clear.