The Strange Case of Doctor Ecstasy
May 22nd, 2009 by ErinAlthough I’d never heard of Dr. Alexander Shulgin until now, I really wish I had. We can thank Shulgin for creating over 200 psychedelic compounds, a pair of memoir/cookbooks called PHiKAL and TiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved), and for reintroducing us all to ecstasy in 1976; a drug that had been considered useless when it was patented in 1914.
So how many times has Shulgin been arrested? Surprisingly, never. The compounds were not illegal when he created them — the DEA hadn’t heard of them yet. From the 50s through the 80s, he actually had the DEA’s full support and a DEA-issued Schedule I research license until PHiKAL was published in 1993. They weren’t too stoked on that; his lab was raided and his license revoked.
An experience with mescaline in 1960 attributed to his unconventional field of research.
He described that everything he saw and thought:
Had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid… I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.
Dr. Shulgin still views himself as a scientist; just maybe a little more exploratory and unafraid to test on himself. He prides himself on the identification and classification of a slew of psychedelic compounds previously unbeknownst to mankind.
