It’s 1998. Gordon Todd Skinner has already been involved in numerous clandestine drug operations and networked with dozens in the underground psychedelic community. He’s ended his first marriage, has two children, and is about to entire into another marriage. And he’s been working with William Leonard Pickard, an LSD chemist who he hasn’t quite figured out.
Todd Skinner stared into the sunset. Gales whipped and buffeted him as he clung to a handrail atop the 39th floor balcony of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in San Francisco. An icy wet t-shirt clung to his torso, his only piece of clothing. Ocean waves shimmered along the horizon.
Whatever was in that pipette—a drug of unknown origin— obliterated him and everyone else in the penthouse. The swift, sweaty-palmed onset forewarned a rough trip, so Skinner downed two Valiums and managed to change the combination on the hotel safe before losing his mind. He wasn’t about to let $175,000 in cash go missing.
“I wasn’t driving that trip; that trip was so powerful it was driving me through the cement, through the floor, through the wall, through the sky,” Skinner recalls.
Although he had been told it was 2-CB made by his friend Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, DEA records indicate that Skinner guessed it was LSD–but Skinner believes this is one among many errors that exist in DEA records. LSD, he says, would have lasted much longer, and would be unlikely to cause the overdose when smoked. Later, Shulgin denied having made it. To this day, Skinner still doesn’t know what was in that vial.
Founding members, continue below to hear Skinner’s personal account of his overdose at the Mandarin, see photos & receipts from the hotel, and read the DEA’s begrudgingly-released records about the incident at the Mandarin.