The Acid King (2001)
22 comments
·May 9, 2025dang
udit99
Hey dang, unrelated question but.... I posted this a couple days ago and it seemed to have resurfaced somehow. Never seen that happen in any past submissions. Is this a new HN feature? Slow news day bumps up some potentially overlooked posts?
leesalminen
I had the pleasure of recently meeting Leonard and spending a couple weeks together. What a unique and interesting person. I think he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. His stories are captivating. Could spend a very long time chatting with him.
cypherpunks01
Has he been doing well?
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.
leesalminen
Yes, he’s living life to the fullest!
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.
cypherpunks01
That's so cool to hear! Thanks for sharing
richrichardsson
I'm not sure where they get the idea that 20mics is a "dose". Microdose perhaps, but I've always been under the impression a modern "dose" of acid is 100mics, so the premise that they're less than in the 60s etc. still holds.
standardUser
I used to sell acid in the 90's and I couldn't even guess at the actual content of LSD per hit we were selling. Every sheet or vial was different, and if my dealer was ever telling me "X micrograms" I probably ignored it the same way I ignored every drug dealer's marketing pitch. For us, it came down to understanding the amount of this particular acid needed for a trip. I've taken 5+ hits at a time that were weaker than single hits from different origins.
psyclobe
He was released in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
KingFelix
yeah wild story, surprised Netflix hasn't done it yet. I've got his book on my shelf too I will start one day, The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments
leesalminen
It’s a very, very hard read. His vocabulary is insane. I had to look up so many words. Very rewarding to make it to the end though.
vik0
What kind of a book is it, genre-wise? Was it interesting? I'm deciding if I should read it someday or not
lukasb
According to this he predicted the the fentanyl epidemic in the 90s: https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/people/affiliated-researc...
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empath75
I think people might under appreciate how easy LSD was to get in the US in the 90s and early 2000s.
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.
psyclobe
Indeed, I did a lot of it during those years as well; introduced so many friends to it. What a time to be alive.
GuinansEyebrows
Strychnine will do that :(
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.
Related:
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)