Hello, everybody. Welcome back to psychedelics today. This is Joe Moore coming at you from

Breckridge, Colorado. This is our Bicycle Day episode. Happy bicycle day, everybody. This is the day of the first

intentional LSD ingestion. And Albert Hoffman rode his bike home, accompanied, and made it home

safely. So first intentional LSD experience in history, as far as we know.

Yeah, so to celebrate this, we were able to pull off a really cool road trip down to Santa Fe,

New Mexico to visit with William Leonard Picard.

For those of you who don't know Leonard, Leonard is the author of a book, a fictional book, called The Rose of Paracelsus,

and kind of byline there on secrets and sacraments. It reads, I've read a few chapters. It reads, like, kind of early 1900s English literature, so like big, beautiful language and yeah, just

incredible. I can't wait to work through it, but just kind of reading from a few websites here

just to describe who Leonard is. So give you a little context and why he's here for Bicycle Day.

I'm just reading here. William is

one of two people convicted in the largest LSD manufacturing case in history in 2000 while moving

their LSD laboratory across Kansas. Picard and Clyde Epperson were pulled over while driving a rider

rental truck and a follow car yeah so um Leonard was just released

after serving 20 years of a two life sentence get that two life sentences for LSD unbelievable

but yeah the the Wikipedia page for for Leonard is unbelievable there's plenty of blogs and podcasts out there kind of going over Leonard's work.

But kind of colloquially, people try to say Leonard was allegedly producing most acid out of any lab anywhere ever.

And fascinating that that's the case.

Interestingly enough, when we get into this in the show,

I started my undergrad in 2001.

Leonard was arrested in 2000.

I no longer saw LSD, or I never saw LSD in my undergrad,

...