October 21, 1945 - William Leonard Pickard
At the center of the largest LSD manufacturing case in recorded history, Pickard's operation was significant enough that its disruption is widely credited with causing a dramatic collapse in the drug's global supply. The 2000 arrest — made during the relocation of a clandestine laboratory hidden in a decommissioned missile silo — revealed the scale of an enterprise that had supplied a substantial portion of the world's LSD for years. He served two decades of a life sentence before compassionate release in 2020.
From Wikipedia
William Leonard Pickard (born October 21, 1945) is one of two people convicted in the largest lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) manufacturing case in history. In 2000, while moving their LSD laboratory across Kansas, Pickard and Clyde Apperson were pulled over while driving a Ryder rental truck and a follow car. The laboratory had been stored near a renovated Atlas-E missile silo near Wamego, Kansas. Gordon Todd Skinner, one of the men intimately involved in the case but not charged due to his cooperation, owned the property where the laboratory equipment was stored.
On July 27, 2020, Pickard was granted compassionate release from federal prison 20 years into his sentence.
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