The Rose of Paracelsus

by William Leonard Pickard

A Harvard graduate student and researcher explores a global entheogen system, discovering their practices leading to cognitive enhancement and, arguably, the next human form.From Cambridge to Moscow, Oxford to Zürich, Princeton to Mazar-i-Sharif and Bangkok, this journal of research interviews records the lifestyles within a most rare and elusive organization,one that has evolved special gifts: advanced capacities of thought, memory and perception.

William Leonard Pickard is a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, with degrees in chemistry and public policy. He was formerly a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow of the Interfaculty Initiative on Drugs and Addictions at Harvard, and Deputy Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA. His interests include Victorian literature, deincarceration technologies, the neuropolicy of cognitive enhancement, and the future of novel drugs. He encourages correspondence from the thoughtful reader.

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy

654 pages, Paperback

Published August 30, 2022

About the author

William Leonard Pickard, M.A. (Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, 1995) is a chemist and ordained Zen Buddhist priest who was deputy director of University of California, Los Angeles' Drug Policy Research Program prior to his third arrest on controlled-substance charges.

Pickard was sentenced to life without parole in 2003 for manufacturing large quantities of LSD. (He was granted "compassionate release" from federal prison in July 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, after serving 20 years of his sentence.) While incarcerated, Pickard turned to writing, producing the entirety of his first book, The Rose of Paracelsus, with pencil and paper.