It is not publicly known where Pickard initially produced LSD. His first arrest for manufacturing LSD came on December 28, 1988, in Mountain View, California. The laboratory was contained inside a trailer that had been moved into a warehouse. It contained state-of-the-art equipment, including a
roto-evaporator,
heating mantles and a
pill press. He was producing kilogram quantities of LSD and putting them onto
windowpane (gel), microdot (tablet), and blotter forms (blotter paper). He spent time in prison for this and became a Buddhist while inside. Pickard had laboratories in a number of different locations. Pickard never liked to stay at one location more than two years so as not to draw attention to himself. In early 1996, the lab was located in
Oregon; it was subsequently moved to
Aspen, Colorado, in late 1996. From September 1997 to September 1999, the laboratory was located in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. He liked the Santa Fe location for a number of reasons; his overhead costs were lower and the precursor source was closer. He also liked the fact that there was virtually no humidity, which can affect the production of LSD. All of the laboratories are alleged to have produced a kilogram of LSD approximately every five weeks.
Gordon Todd Skinner became involved with Pickard and his partner Clyde Apperson in February 1998. Both Pickard and Apperson were eventually found guilty at trial of conspiring to manufacture, distribute, and dispense ten grams or more of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD); Pickard received two life sentences, while Apperson received 30 years' imprisonment.
Scale of production According to court testimony, Pickard's lab produced up to a kilogram of LSD approximately every five weeks for short periods. Despite criticism for their methodology, the DEA contends that there was a 99.5% drop in the availability of LSD in the US in the two years following the arrest. Pickard himself has long denied these claims. In his 2008 paper "International LSD Prevalence – Factors Affecting Proliferation and Control", Pickard suggests that since the 1960s, LSD production has always been de-centralized. As to a turn-of-the-century decline in availability due to his own arrest, Pickard highlights the fact that LSD availability had been on the decline since 1996, a fact which he correlates in part with the exponential growth of availability and demand for
MDMA and other hallucinogenic drugs. The actual quantity of LSD seized by the DEA remains unclear, with figures ranging from 198.9 grams to 41.3 kilograms (410 million 100 μg hits of LSD). The turn-of-the-century "acid drought" was likely due to a number of factors, perhaps including but not limited to the arrest of Pickard. According to
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, additional factors included the 1996 arrest of longtime LSD chemist
Nicholas Sand and the death of a man involved in the illicit sale of LSD precursor materials.
Grateful Dead concerts provided a primary distribution network for LSD, and this network dissolved when the Grateful Dead stopped touring in 1995. ==Imprisonment==