William Leonard Pickard, once alleged to have produced 90% of the world’s LSD, is a former Harvard Kennedy School drug policy fellow, neurobiology researcher at Harvard Medical School, and deputy director of UCLA's Drug Policy Analysis Program. After being sentenced to two life sentences without parole, Pickard spent 20 years in maximum-security federal prisons before his compassionate release in 2020.
Pickard's book, The Rose of Paracelsus, penned in pencil while imprisoned, has been widely regarded as a powerful work on the intersections of psychedelics, science, and society. His foresight on the fentanyl epidemic, published in 1996, was later validated by the RAND Corporation. Now a senior advisor for JLS Fund II LP and the Fireside Project, he remains a leading voice in the movement for psychedelic research and criminal justice reform. Pickard is also a research affiliate at Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center, specializing in psychedelics law, AI in drug development, and genomic cognitive enhancement.
