by Burl Barer

Author Dennis McDougal, 77, and his wife, Sharon,76, died after a four-vehicle crash last Friday on the Interstate 10 Freeway in Desert Center, California.  Dennis was not only my dear friend;  he was also a brilliant award-winning, best selling author and documentarian.

At the time of his death, Dennis was working on The Acid Chronicles, a documentary history of the evolution of psychedelics, from CIA abuse and party drugs to ongoing breakthroughs in treatment of mental illness in the 21st Century.

Readers of the A/R e-Bulletin will especially find value in McDougal’s  Operation White Rabbit – a book thattraces the rise and fall—and rise and fall again—of the psychedelic community through the life of the man known as the “Acid King:” William Leonard Pickard.

Pickard was a legitimate genius, a follower of Timothy Leary, a con artist, a womanizer, and a believer that LSD would save lives. He was a foreign diplomat, a Harvard fellow, and the biggest producer of LSD on the planet.

Arrested by the DEA, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. 20 years into his first life sentence, he was set free. Why? The number one reason was: Pickard’s 1996 thesis at the Kennedy School of Government — The first research to conclude that a Fentanyl epidemic was inevitable and provided methods to monitor and prevent an imminent crisis. 

Fascinating and compelling, McDougal not only validated his international reputation as a brilliant investigative journalist but given us invaluable insights into the early history of the passion, struggle, spirituality, and the hyperbolic, oppositional, and punitive methods used against psychedelics and those who perceived their enormous, positive potential, and advocated for clinical research and personal utilization.

While I will miss Dennis here, in this life, I trust he is having a true out of body experience, and that it is filled with light, laughter, wonder and reunion.