The Second Psychedelic Revolution (part two): Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, the Psychedelic Godfather
by Oroc
I first explored mescaline in the late '50s, three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me.’ — Alexander Shulgin, LA Times, 1995
If there is ever a Psychedelic Hall of Fame, the section on chemists will be small, since there have only really been two giants in this field — Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD-25 and psilocybin (and later isolated that compound from the magic mushroom specimens provided by R. Gordon Wasson), and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, who seems to have invented nearly everything else. (So great are the shadows of these two men that twin statues of them facing each other should be the Hall’s entranceway arch.) However when the remarkable volumePiHKAL; A Chemical Love Story [1] first appeared in 1991, few people outside of the psychedelic community in California knew about Sasha and the quiet existence that he and his wife Ann (the co-author of both PiHKAL and TiHKAL) lived; and those that knew of him knew mostly the fact that he was the ‘popularizer’ of the empathogen MDMA.
MDMA had first been synthesized in 1912; it was later used by in the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA studies in 1953-54; these reports were declassified in 1973; Shulgin then synthesized the compound and tried it himself in 1976 for the first time after hearing accounts of its effects from his students at the University of California, Berkeley. Shulgin liked to call MDMA his ‘low-calorie martini’, and introduced it to numerous friends and colleagues, including the noted psychotherapist Leo Zeff, who was so impressed with the compound that he came out of retirement to train psychotherapists in its use.
MDMA grew in popularity in the early 1980’s amongst psychologists and therapists until it was made illegal in 1985 due to it rising popularity as a recreational drug, most commonly known by its street name Ecstasy. By the late 1980’s MDMA use had become prevalent in England’s rapidly blossoming electronic music or ‘Acid House’ scene, with the ‘smiley face’ logo becoming identified with both the drug and the new ‘youth’ culture. Despite being made illegal more than twenty years earlier (and in another obvious rebuttal of the effectiveness of ‘the War on Drugs’), the UN estimated between 10 and 25 million people took MDMA in 2008.
An entire article could be written about the similarities and differences between empathogens (also called entactogens), and psychedelics (also called entheogens), and while this is an important conversation for our community, it is also territory I do not intend to cover in this article. [2] What is important for the purposes of this article however is that empathogens like MDMA and perhaps the oldest known psychedelic/entheogen, mescaline, are phenethylamines — which is to say they are variations around the same basic phenethylamine-ring shape. Thanks to this simple fact, when the Shulgin’s wrote PiHKAL and released it to the world in 1991, Sasha provided not only the greatest known resource on MDMA and its older cousin MDA (the original 60’s love drug), but he also revealed a catalogue of over 200 previously unknown psychedelic and empathogenic compounds that he had discovered, including the entire 2-C family, which included the psychedelics 2C-B and 2C-I, and the empathogens 2C-E and 2C-T-7 amongst others.
Sasha is a giant of a man, both physically and intellectually, reputedly with an IQ that matches Einstein's. Early in his career he developed the first biodegradable pesticide for DOW Chemicals, a patent that made his employers millions and garnered him a certain degree of independence, allowing him to relocate his laboratory to his home near Lafayette, California in 1965...
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