I've been thinking about a study of LSD using supply shocks from various events that I *think* could've restricted supply. One of those is an early 2000s arrest in Kansas involving Leonard Pickard. DEA reported LSD supply fell 99% after it. So that sent me on a rabbithole 1/n

Here's the basic gist of it. Leonard Pickard was a talented amateur chemist who ran in those early Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia underworld of psychedelics. Reading this literature, I'm coming to recognize guys like him. He's like Alexander Shulgin, though likely not as talented

Which is to say he was an LSD cook, which is not trivial work. It requires real chemistry, and is dangerous. For one, it's essentially impossible not to be exposed to LSD through the skin or mouth when making it, and as it's a several week affair, it's incredibly stressful 3/n

On top of that, LSD has penalties that far far outstrip its actual social costs, if there even are any social costs. Leonard was interesting because he got his masters at Harvard Kennedy school and became an expert in drug policy. 4/n

He actually predicted the opiate epidemic about five years to a decade before it happened. He had a real grasp of broad trends, and being a chemist himself, he understood supply at an unusually nuanced level. 5/n

For instance, check out this article he wrote FROM PRISON about LSD markets. It's unbelievably well written and well documented for a guy who is going off memory at times. He's analyzing the DAWN and MTF datasets from prison for pete's sake. 6/n http://www.freeleonardpickard.org/LSD-Prevelance.html

So, how'd he end up in prison? This is where the story gets extremely BREAKING BAD level. The facts are disputed, but this article is the best I've found because it presents all the facts, including disputed ones, and doesn't pick a side. 7/n https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut/

There's actually two chemists in this story. There's Leonard Pickard, and there's another guy named Gordon Todd Skinner. Skinner and Pickard allegedly met at either a conference held by the chemist Alexander Shulgin, or they met at Jerry Garcia's house. I've read both ways. 8n

They both were like sommeliers when it came to chemical psychedelics. They didn't seem to do hard drugs, but they knew the full cornucopia of the chemical compounds that were showing up due to Shulgin's rational drug design approach to psychedelic discovery. 9/n

Skinner buys a MISSILE SILO for his mom's company and lives there. It's an actual bona fide Cold War missile silo. Lots of sprawling buildings with either horizontal or vertically stored missile silos. Can't remember which because he owned two silos. The rich get richer! 10/n

Skinner and Pickard may or may not have collaborated to construct a lab which would produce large quantities of LSD at scale on the missile silo, but we do know that it was there. What Pickard didn't know was that Skinner was a paid confidential informant for the DEA. 11/n

Paranoid he was being followed all the time, Skinner allegedly contacted the DEA directly and spilled the beans on the lab in exchange for immunity. The DEA comes to the silo, sees the lab, and sets up a trap for Pickard who may not have even been at the lab before. 12/n

Pickard and another guy come. Reports say Pickard is paid $150,000 to dismantle and transport the LSD lab somewhere else. In his article I posted earlier, Pickard said this is actually quite common for LSD production -- the labs in his time moved around a lot. 13/n

So they put the lab in a Ryder truck and leave, and immediately they're pulled over by the state troopers. Leonard takes off for the woods -- he's a marathon runner so he's gone. But they catch him the next day. Pickard has the book thrown at him -- two life sentences! 14/n

Interestingly, Leonard was released from his 20 year stint for "compassion" reasons only a month ago. He's out and I think in a halfway house. But what about Skinner? Well that's where the story becomes positively dark and evil. 15/n

Skinner is spending the rest of his life in prison for torturing and kidnapping his ecstasy dealer over a several day affair. The victim's account is almost too hard to read, but I recommend reading it as that's important with injustices. 16/n https://thislandpress.com/2013/07/28/subterranean-psychonaut/

So, what did I learn? Well, for one thing, Leonard from prison in that LSD market trends paper challenges the DEA claim -- which is actually treated as fact if you read wikipedia -- that this arrest impacted the LSD market. 17/n

Leonard claims the market for LSD had already been declining (pre-treatment trends) prior to the bust, and furthermore, LSD was produced in a decentralized relatively competitive market because I don't think there were true economies of scale to keep chemists out. 18/n

But, the DEA likes its theatrics as theatrical arrests and inflated statistics justify their existence. Thus, in following this story into the long, dark, rabbit hole of the Internet, I learned that in fact the Kansas bust likely isn't a supply shock. 19/n

But -- maybe when the Grateful Dead quit touring, that was a supply shock, as that network apparently was very important for distribution purposes. One could use STRIDE, TEDS, MTF and DAWN to update Leonard's paper in fact examining in more detail an event like that. 20/n

So, that's what I'm thinking about -- using the Dead as a shock to identify the effect on LSD markets, including prices. The problem is I counted only ~90 LSD observations in STRIDE. And in DAWN, there's something like 1500 ER visits from LSD vs. 800,000 from cocaine. 21/n

So, it's probable I can't find a true first stage 1) if there really aren't any substantive precursor controls or network events that disrupted production and distribution or 2) finding a quality panel of LSD mentions and prices is unlikely given the sparseness of the data 22/n

But see, it's actually *THE FACT* that there is no good data that should make us question the degree to which LSD has high social costs, as we don't have that problem with cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine. There's plenty of data for quasi-experimental designs on those. 23/n

But LSD is scant, and that's bc it is not addictive, there is no known lethal dose, and with proper management of "set and setting", hospitalization becomes rare. Still, I like the Dead angle and will keep angling for a paper. 24/n