KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced he was commuting the sentences of 1,500 Americans.
One of them was Clyde Apperson.
Apperson, along with accomplice William Leonard Pickard, was charged in 2000 for their role in running the largest LSD lab ever discovered at the time by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The pair operated the lab in an abandoned Atlas nuclear missile silo outside of Wamego, Kansas, a small town north of Interstate 70 between Topeka and Salina.
By November 2003, a federal jury found the pair guilty after an 11-week trial covered extensively by the Topeka Capital-Journal.
When agents busted the pair’s operation, they recovered nearly 91 pounds of LSD, more than 214 pounds of lysergic acid, a precursor to LSD, nearly 52 pounds of iso-LSD, a byproduct of making LSD and nearly 42 pounds of ergocristine, also a precursor to LSD.
Apperson, now 69, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison without the possibility of parole for two counts of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute LSD.
Biden's commutation of Apperson's sentence is set to take effect on Dec. 22, 2024. Apperson, originally from Sunnyvale, California, had previously been released from federal prison in 2020.
At the time of the seizure of the LSD lab in the Kansas missile silo, the DEA said it had only ever seized four such facilities, and three of them had ties to Pickard and Apperson. In addition to the Kansas seizure, the pair were connected to labs in Mountainview, California, in 1998 and a lab in Oregon in 1996.
“The sentencing of William Pickard and Clyde Apperson brings to conclusion their significant role in the international production and distribution of LSD,” DEA Special Agent in Charge William J. Renton said in a November 2003 press release. “These defendants were proven, by overwhelming evidence, to be responsible for the illicit manufacture of the majority of the LSD sold in this nation.”
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