When someone refers to “acid,” they usually mean LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychedelic first popularized in the 1960s. For all the controversy associated with that drug, it has never caused someone to fatally overdose, but that’s not the case with newer, knockoff novel psychoactive substances (NPS) also sometimes referred to as “acid.” These new types of “acid” have little in common, chemically, with LSD. But not long after LSD became scarce in the early 2000s, these new synthetics began to appear—with devastating consequences.
The story of LSD and the knockoff NPS begins with a six-foot-five-inch-tall man who carried a metal briefcase. He was hard to miss. When he entered the Kansas strip club, strippers and patrons alike noticed the tall man in tattered clothes who wore a beard with no mustache, Amish-style.
Krystle Cole noticed him too. From a modest family, Cole grew up outside of Topeka, Kansas—“a spiritual black hole” full of “white trash,” she called it in her self-published memoir, Lysergic. She detested her classmates so strongly that she dropped out of high school at age fifteen and attended community college. To support herself she worked as a carhop at a Sonic Drive-in and then, later, a stripper. Patrons loved her tall, blond look, but she threw some of them off with her stage show. “I’d dress in black leather and lead myself around the stage with a dog collar and leash,” she wrote. She was desperately lonely. When the Amish-looking man paid her attention, it seemed that her prayers for companionship were answered.
Gordon “Todd” Skinner was twice Cole’s age. Despite his strange facial hair, he wasn’t Amish, and Cole was not sure what he did for a living. But the two hit it off. They spoke for hours at the club that day, and she later accepted his invitation to go back to his place. Cole reeled when she saw Skinner’s home—a decommissioned, Atlas E missile base. Why would a person want to live in a missile base? she wondered. How did a person get a missile base? From the government? Who was this strange man?
Soon afterward, he gave her MDMA. It was her first time using the drug. “I felt like we were better friends already than I usually ever was with any of the people in Kansas,” she wrote, adding that the drug experience made her soul feel “reborn.”
Skinner acted cagey when she asked what he did for a living, and he frequently left the state on business. But that didn’t stop Cole from being drawn into his playground of mind-altering substances. He entertained Cole and other guests—including beautiful young women and older men—by serving up batches of drugs, many of them obscure. They spent days and nights romping on mind-altering trips in the silo and indulged in expensive luxuries like his cutting-edge music system, which they blasted at full volume. The particularly intrepid psychedelic cowboys in the group hooked themselves up to IVs so they could control their dosages. “The parties could get really wild,” Cole told Vice.
With Skinner assuring her that money was not an issue, she quit her job as a stripper, and he began supporting her financially. Skinner was involved with other women, but he bought Cole fancy clothes, took her on trips around the country, and let her drive his Porsche. They went deep together on his substances. “We experienced God, if you want to call it that,” she said.
The neighbors in Wamego, Kansas, had long been suspicious of the goings-on at the missile silo. Built into the landscape on property totaling more than twenty-five acres, the silo—one of many built by the government to withstand nuclear attack, for millions of dollars each, in the early 1960s—was horizontal and underground, some fifteen thousand square feet of tunnels, cylindrical passageways, and vast, high-ceilinged rooms. “It was like a fortress, surrounded by chain-link fence and barbed wire,” Cole wrote. Sites like this are all over Kansas, many of them deemed obsolete and decommissioned only a few years after being built, and since purchased by eccentrics. Aboveground, Clydesdale horses and llamas had the run of the property. Skinner told Cole that the facility was home base for a metal-spring factory, which seemed plausible, considering Skinner’s mother did in fact own a multimillion-dollar enterprise called Gardner Spring in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Skinner had been raised.
People in the community found it strange that the building was closely monitored by video cameras, and that off-duty police officers guarded the premises. “Over time, there was lots of money being spent and not much happening, and the officers got suspicious,” Wamego police chief Ken Seager said. “Our feeling was it was a money-laundering operation, so the Wamego detective contacted the DEA and recommended getting the IRS involved.” But nothing came of it. And the DEA took no action in the late 1990s when Wamego police uncovered LSD in town that they believed was perhaps tied to the silo. “We couldn’t prove there was anything going on, but we suspected it,” Seager said.
Eventually, Skinner came clean to Cole. “I have to tell you who I really am,” he said, explaining that he was the “head of security” for the most famous group of LSD dealers in history—the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
Founded in the mid-1960s, the brotherhood hailed from Orange County, California. Its early members included crew-cut-wearing roughnecks who had seen the light. Their goal was to use LSD to get street toughs turned on to God and transcendental meditation.
The youths teamed up with chemist Nick Sand, an affiliate of Sasha Shulgin, who made more than three million doses of LSD that he called Orange Sunshine. Selling for as little as ten cents per dose—and often given away for free—Orange Sunshine would be consumed by a who’s who of infamous hippie-era counterculture figures, including Charles Manson, the Hell’s Angels, and Timothy Leary, who became the brotherhood’s close confidant. An author and Harvard psychologist who was fired in 1963 after his psychedelics studies got out of hand, Leary championed LSD for therapeutic purposes. He helped both popularize and demonize LSD in the public consciousness, and many pharmacologists believed his actions set back potential medical research on the drug for decades. After Leary was arrested for marijuana possession and imprisoned in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1970, the brotherhood conspired with the radical group Weather Underground to bust him out. Traversing a telephone pole and a barbed wire fence, Leary escaped the prison’s confines and was driven to Canada. There he received a fake passport and was transported to Algiers, where he was taken in by the Black Panthers. He was finally arrested in Afghanistan in 1973.
Skinner’s precise relationship to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love is hard to determine, but by 2000, he had a lab at the silo that was enormous in scope. DEA officials would later estimate it had enough chemical components to make at least thirty-six million doses of LSD. Krystle Cole had no way of knowing it, but she had stumbled onto one of the largest LSD operations in history.
Not long after they met, Skinner and Cole flew to Oakland. There, he introduced her to a man he described as his business partner, William Leonard Pickard, who was in his fifties, and his much-younger fiancée, a Russian émigré named Natasha.
Like Skinner, Pickard was a tall, imposing figure, and Cole was immediately mesmerized by “his wavy, shoulder-length, silver hair,” which “helped his face to radiate a grandfather’s loving warmth.”
She wouldn’t learn it until later, but Pickard was also an LSD chemist and believed to be a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Pickard was a student and friend of Sasha Shulgin, and his story was full of twists and turns. He had once trained as a monk and had been imprisoned for making LSD. He had earned a master’s degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (Shulgin wrote him a letter of recommendation), where he studied fentanyl abuse in Boston and Moscow, anticipating the current fentanyl epidemic in a presentation to the Harvard Faculty Club in 1996, one of the few to do so. He also served as deputy director of UCLA’s Drug Policy Analysis Program.
Pickard and Skinner first encountered each other, Skinner said, in 1997 at a San Francisco conference on ethnobotany. They met again at another conference a year later and got to talking about their backgrounds and interests. Skinner said he could help Pickard raise money for drug research, Pickard claimed, including from Warren Buffet—whom Skinner claimed to know. Skinner portrayed himself as fabulously wealthy. “He was incredibly generous. I’d never seen anything like it,” Pickard later testified. “I assumed his funding was legitimate.”
Skinner soon invited Pickard out to Kansas to see the missile silo. Though Pickard denied it, according to reports he and Skinner became partners. Pickard’s alleged role was to manufacture LSD, while Skinner was said to provide security and launder their money. By the turn of the millennium, their new operation was responsible for a tremendous portion of the world’s LSD supply, according to the DEA.
Lysergic acid diethylamide was discovered, almost accidentally, in 1938 by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hofmann. In the employ of the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, Hofmann was experimenting with variations of an unpredictable, poorly understood fungus called ergot, which grows on rye and throughout history has caused mass outbreaks of gangrene and convulsions. But it also seemed to have great potential as a medicine, and from the fungus Hofmann created a series of synthetic compounds, some of which became successful drugs, including one called Methergine, that stems post-childbirth hemorrhaging, and remains in use today. The twenty-fifth in the series was called LSD-25, and nothing about it at first seemed particularly notable. When tested on animals it caused them to become “restless during the narcosis” (or drugged stupor), but otherwise was considered a bust, and so Hofmann set it aside.
Hofmann moved on to other projects, but five years later, in 1943, he was compelled to revisit LSD-25 by a “peculiar presentiment—the feeling that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations,” he wrote. He remade it and then—in another cosmic twist of fate—dosed himself, perhaps by accidentally touching a bit of the mixture, and became dizzy and restless. “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors,” he famously wrote of that first experience.
Unsure exactly what had happened, three days later at his Basel lab he deliberately drank 250 micrograms of the compound, dissolved in a glass of water. He believed this to be a tiny amount, though it constituted what we now think of as about twice a normal LSD dose. Soon he was tripping, hard. Unable to continue taking notes—or even to coherently form sentences—he asked his lab assistant to help him home. Because cars were restricted during wartime, they took bikes through Basel, back to his home. A neighbor woman brought him some milk. Believing it could cure his “poisoning,” he gulped down two liters of it—but even she appeared as a “malevolent, insidious witch,” and he began to believe his body had been invaded by a demon. Hofmann called for his family doctor, who could find nothing abnormal—other than dilated pupils—and helped calm him down. Soon Hofmann settled into the experience and began perceiving everyday things as profound and transcendent. “It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions,” he wrote.
Hofmann would have a complicated relationship with his invention, which he referred to as his “problem child.” Still, he believed LSD could be of strong benefit to medical science, and many concurred, with some academics speculating it could help cure mental illness. Stanislav Grof, an influential Czech psychiatrist who has conducted thousands of psychedelic sessions with patients, compared LSD’s potential benefits for psychiatry and psychology to “the value the microscope has for biology and medicine or the telescope has for astronomy.” The CIA, however, thought it might be better suited for mind control, running covert, wide-ranging experiments with the drug beginning in the early 1950s as part of a project called MKUltra, secretly dosing people and following them around to see how they reacted. (A San Francisco–based subset of the program called Midnight Climax enlisted prostitutes to entice unknowing johns into taking drinks containing LSD; CIA operatives would then secretly watch them having sex.)
Separately, in the 1960s, the US Army tested LSD and other drugs on volunteers, hoping to develop techniques to incapacitate enemies. Much later in life, the volunteers’ medical and psychiatric histories were studied. “There were no aftereffects that could be discerned,” said Sasha Shulgin’s protégé Paul Daley. “The only thing statistically significant in the LSD volunteers was that they lived longer.”
During the 1950s a psychiatrist named Humphrey Fortescue Osmond legally treated alcoholics with LSD and coined the term psychedelic in letters with fellow mind-expander Aldous Huxley. Hofmann’s company, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, distributed an estimated quarter-million doses of the drug, which was widely used in psychiatry research in the 1950s and 1960s. But as LSD made the leap from the medical realm to the recreational, it developed a bad reputation in the mainstream, and Sandoz began curtailing its production. In its place, illicit chemists began manufacturing LSD, and the drug was at the center of the counterculture movement.
Getting banned in the United States in 1967 did little to dent LSD’s popularity, and since then the drug has risen and fallen in the public’s consciousness, with varying degrees of acceptance. Though its potential medical use was never entirely established, LSD maintains a reputation as a wonder drug of sorts, one that elicits profound reactions in people while maintaining a remarkable safety record. In fact, some users have taken hundreds or even thousands of doses and lived to tell the tale, though they became extremely sick in the process.
In 1972, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was caught in a massive sting operation, which disrupted—but did not end—the group’s operations. In the following decades most other LSD manufacturers, and the Brotherhood, managed to stay under the radar of law enforcement. There were relatively few LSD labs to find, and those were hard to track; they didn’t emit strong odors and weren’t prone to exploding, like meth labs, so police struggled to locate them. LSD is notoriously difficult to make, in part because the precursor agent needed for its synthesis, ergotamine tartrate, is hard to obtain. In Skinner and Pickard’s time, US chemists often received it clandestinely from Eastern Europe.
In 2000, with the meth crisis ramping up, LSD was low on the DEA’s list of priorities. In fact, by the time Krystle Cole arrived at Skinner’s lab in 2000, the DEA hadn’t busted an acid lab since 1991.
Shortly after introducing her to Pickard in Oakland, Skinner announced to Cole that they needed to go to Las Vegas. They hopped into his Porsche Boxster—his “West Coast car”—and Skinner revved the engine and took off. “At one point, I looked over at the speedometer and it read 136 mph,” Cole remembered. The car fishtailed, and they smashed into a light pole. They weren’t wearing seat belts, and Cole injured her neck, but Skinner immediately hopped out of the car, “digging his clothes and what looked like wads of hundred dollar bills out of the smashed trunk while I lay down on the ground.”
Cole was taken to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with whiplash and a concussion, but that didn’t stop them from flying to Vegas the next morning. There they met Pickard and Natasha. Cole relaxed in their luxury suite at the Mirage casino with Natasha, while Skinner, according to Pickard, engaged in “‘smurfing,’ or money laundering, buying $200,000 worth of chips, gambling a bit and then redeeming the chips for the casino’s cash.”
Skinner’s busted-up Porsche, meanwhile, would come back to haunt him. The bills for the car joined a long list of alleged debts he had incurred—hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. Some of the jilted contractors and vendors sued, including the store from which he had purchased his expensive stereo, claiming he owed $120,000. Skinner also failed to produce the funds for Pickard’s drug research. “I was taken for an enormous ride,” Pickard told Rolling Stone. “I’d been lied to. Once I realized it was all a charade, I felt very used and started backing away.”
Skinner had problems of his own with Pickard. He believed Pickard took issue with a man who had outed another man who was supplying their operation with ergotamine tartrate. “Skinner said Pickard had tried unsuccessfully for three years to convince him to kidnap or drug the person and then take the victim to Guatemala,” wrote the Topeka Capital-Journal. According to Cole, Skinner believed Pickard was responsible for having this man killed. (Pickard was never charged with or convicted of murder.)
Skinner’s distrust of Pickard grew. He began secretly plotting with the DEA and meeting with federal prosecutors. “I have what I believe is the world’s largest LSD laboratory,” he told them. Though initially dubious, the Department of Justice granted Skinner immunity for agreeing to turn over the lab and testify against Pickard. Skinner soon invited Pickard for a meeting, and—though Pickard remained angry at Skinner for not producing the money he had promised—they got together on October 23, 2000, at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel in San Rafael, California. Natasha, who was now Pickard’s wife and pregnant, sat at the bar while the men met upstairs and spoke for about a half hour about their future LSD plans, agreeing to reunite in Kansas in the coming weeks. Listening in from an adjacent room, the DEA picked up every word.
On November 4, Pickard and a friend from California named Clyde Apperson arrived at the Wamego missile silo, driving a moving truck and a Buick. Skinner made an excuse and departed the premises, while Pickard and Apperson began loading up the chemistry glassware and ergotamine tartrate, which took about two days. The two men then got back into their vehicles and departed. Prosecutors believe they were headed to a new lab in Colorado, though Pickard later claimed they were actually planning to destroy the materials.
The Kansas Highway Patrol made its move and stopped the mini-convoy. The officers apprehended Apperson, but Pickard fled on foot, “sprinting across snowy ground into the woods, two highway patrolmen half his age in hot pursuit, a chase that was eventually joined by DEA agents, helicopters with infrared scanners and tracking dogs,” Rolling Stone reported. The next day Pickard was turned in by a local farmer, who said he was hiding out in his truck and his shed.
Back at the missile silo, a crew of men in hazmat suits turned up chemicals capable of producing between thirty-six million and sixty million doses of LSD, according to DEA spokeswoman Shirley Armstead. The final tally wasn’t in yet, but investigators were predicting that the lab “could have been supplying a third of the LSD in the United States and maybe the world,” she noted. The government agents patted themselves on the back. With this one bust, they had dealt a perhaps unrecoverable blow to America’s LSD production, it seemed.
Skinner testified against his former partner Pickard. An acquaintance of Sasha Shulgin named Roger Ely also testified at the trial. Ely, who has worked as a chemist with the DEA since 1987, said Shulgin had introduced him to Pickard. Ely added that he and Pickard had discussed “the use of the Internet to get illicit drugs; the use of encrypted messages to elude law enforcement investigators; Russian drug trafficking; and synthetic illicit substances.”
Pickard received two concurrent life sentences without parole. He remains incarcerated in federal prison, in Tucson, Arizona, relying on his monk’s training to maintain inner peace, jogging loops around a quarter-mile asphalt track and writing a now-published, six-hundred-page, semiautobiographical book about LSD chemists called The Rose of Paracelsus. He maintains a cult following of fans, who cite him as an example of federal drug sentencing gone haywire.
Because of his cooperation, Skinner was free to go. He and Cole traveled around the country, living for short stretches in Seattle, Mendocino, Tucson, and Tulsa. They sold drugs, including MDMA, and lived “like psychedelic royalty,” Cole said.
Along the way their relationship withered, and Skinner began to get abusive, Cole claimed, displaying “hints of a violent side to him that I’d never seen before.” She said that he “dosed my house with some sort of mystery psychedelic that made me trip for three days.” Cole said she wanted to stop selling drugs, and began seeing a man closer to her age, Brandon Andres Green. At this point, according to Cole, Skinner became unhinged and jealous. Green was beaten, tortured, and drugged at a Tulsa hotel. Skinner, Cole, and a man named William Ernest Hauck were charged with kidnapping. Hauck testified against Skinner, and Hauck and Cole both pled no contest to the charge of being an accessory after the fact. The details of who did what exactly are murky, but neither Skinner nor Cole came out looking good. In the end, Cole was ordered to pay $52,000 in restitution to Green and walked away free, though Green said she actually paid only a small fraction of her debt. She now owns an art gallery in a Wichita, Kansas, mall, which features her psychedelic paintings of animals and nature.
Convicted on kidnapping and assault charges, Skinner received a life sentence plus ninety years; there is speculation that Skinner was also unofficially being punished for his drug crimes.
It was a story with life-changing consequences for everyone involved, and also likely altered the national recreational-drug landscape. In the aftermath of the Kansas missile silo saga, LSD became increasingly difficult to find. According to the DEA, LSD-related arrests dropped from 154 in 2000 to 100 in 2001 to 22 in 2002. The agency claimed that this war-on-drugs success story was owing to the “90.86 pounds” of LSD they had seized.
“These defendants,” read a DEA press release, “were proven, by overwhelming evidence, to be responsible for the illicit manufacture of the majority of the LSD sold in this nation. The proof of the significance of these prosecutions and convictions lies in the fact that LSD availability in the United States was reduced by 95% in the two years following their arrest.”
Many take issue with the DEA’s numbers and methodology. For starters, the amount of actual LSD they seized was dramatically overstated; what they actually found was about ninety-one pounds of materials containing trace amounts of LSD. The total weight of the drug was perhaps less than one pound. An analysis by Slate estimated that the lab had about ten million LSD hits—a lot, but less than claimed. Further, even by the DEA’s own estimations, the LSD supply had already begun to fall in the years before the bust, perhaps due to factors including the takedown of Nick Sand’s LSD lab in Canada in 1996 and the growing popularity of MDMA. So it’s far from clear that the Kansas sting alone was responsible for the drug’s steep decline.
Ultimately, the closure of the lab may have been less impactful than the headlines it generated. “I don’t think Pickard was necessarily producing 95 percent of the supply, but it seemed really clear that as soon as that bust happened, other LSD manufacturers shut down,” said Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of DanceSafe, who is knowledgeable about the case and LSD manufacturing of this era. “As soon as they got busted, everybody just freaked out.”
After the Kansas bust, LSD became very difficult to find. The psychedelic drug landscape began to shift, and a new drug began to gain traction. This chemical was often sold as acid or LSD, but it was completely different. Some enjoyed its trippy effects, but it was poorly understood and extremely difficult to dose properly. Unlike LSD, it could be fatal.