First published by Dan
Glaiser in The Guardian December 24th
2005 under the heading 'Daddy Ecstasy' ...
Let's take the yellow brick road to Oz."
Alexander Shulgin shuffles ahead along the
garden path leading out of his back door. At
the end, about 27m away, a large squirrel is
making its getaway from a ramshackle garden
shed. "The damn squirrel's got in," Sasha
- as he is known - exclaims. "A new hole,
I'll have to patch it up. They just eat
their way through wood."
Shulgin built the shed himself, working up
from the brick foundations of what was once
the cellar of his parents' house on Shulgin
Road, half an hour from San Francisco. Now
the shed contains his laboratory. It looks
almost wilfully disorganised, as if an
enthusiastic child -- or perhaps a squirrel
-- had been left alone to construct a Heath
Robinson vision of a back-garden lab.
Classical music gently plays from a radio, a
stained wineglass sits atop a mound of
papers, evidence of the previous night's
endeavour.
It
all seems thoroughly mundane. An amiably
eccentric elderly gentle-man - Shulgin is
79 - pursuing his hobby in his garden shed.
What could be more innocuous?
A neat laminated note stuck
on the wooden door of the shed gives the lie to this
presumption. It reads: "This is a research facility
that is known to and authorised by the Contra Costa
County Sheriff's Office, all San Francisco DEA [Drug
Enforcement Administration] Personnel and the State
and Federal EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]
Authorities."
Shulgin has good reason to post the note. His lab
has been raided twice, once with intent and a second
time almost by accident.
He is a psychopharmacologist, the creator of about
200 psychedelic compounds. Stimulants, depressants,
aphrodisiacs, hallucinogens: you name it, Shulgin
has made it and, personally, tested it. He thinks he
has probably had more than 4 000 psychedelic
episodes in the course of his work. Assuming each
episode takes up at least a day, that constitutes
almost 12 years of his life.
Perhaps to his chagrin, Shulgin seems destined to be
remembered for one small episode in 1965 when,
tipped off by a student about an interesting but
forgotten compound, he synthesised MDMA. With that
step, ecstasy was eventually born and Shulgin
marginalised. Only now, as the investigation of its
potential is re-examined, is his reputation being
restored. For his appearance at a London conference
on the future of drugs in June, he was billed as a
"living legend".
"I do nothing illegal," he points out readily,
"nothing illegal. There is nothing illegal about
synthesising new compounds. I don't know if they're
going to be psychedelic or not until I taste them.
And there's nothing illegal about my tasting them."
If a compound shows
promise, Shulgin tests it on his wife, Ann. If she
confirms his impression that it may be "active",
they take it to their own research group of eight
friends. "They are personal friends," Shulgin
explains. "We all take off in one of their houses
and we all take the compound."
An encounter with mescalin set Shulgin on his
chemical path, turning the chemist on to the
potential of the psyche. "In 1950 I had the
opportunity to experiment with my first psychedelic
and it caught my attention. I think the best
phrasing now would be: it brought out so many lines
of thought and so many memories from the past and so
many visual distortions and awarenesses of colours I
was totally unaware of."
The Shulgins' adventures and misadventures with
psychedelic compounds are recounted in two
self-published books, PiHKAL (short for
Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,) and its
sequel TiHKAL(Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved).
The books have provoked controversy because they
include what could best be described as
psychopharmacological recipes. The Shulgins'
justification for this is that people are going to
experiment, and they are passing on as much
information as possible in order to avoid harming
themselves and others.
Which is
where ecstasy comes in. Shulgin expresses
frustration and disgust at the way ecstasy has been
used and abused, both by dealers and the scientific
community.
"Analysis has shown that in some cases less than
half the materials sold as ecstasy are MDMA. 'You
want to buy some ecstasy?' 'Yes.' 'Here's some
ground-up plaster.' If a person takes a dose at a
party and falls downstairs and breaks their back,
this is a death associated with MDMA."
"Once you say 'associated with', it gets transformed
into 'due to'. It's a shame that it got so far into
the rave scene and the underground scene that people
began making their income in the scientific area by
getting federal grants and funds for finding out how
it's bad."
But recent research has seen a resurgence of
interest in the therapeutic effects of MDMA.
Successful results have been reported from trials in
the use of MDMA on people suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder, and in the relief of
anxiety in patients with terminal cancer. It is a
return to the spirit of the original use of MDMA:
after its synthesis by Shulgin in the late 1960s,
its first use was in psychotherapy.
Is he pleased that MDMA is returning to a medical
use? Does he even have an idea of practical use when
developing a compound or is he propelled by the pure
pleasure of discovery?
"I do have an idea of the use," he says, "It's
toward the developing of tools for use in the
functioning of the mind, the mechanism of the mind.
A lot of these materials are themselves, or are
related to, materials that could be used in humans
for determining the mysteries of how the mind works.
They're research tools. That is the ultimate value
that I hope to see realised."
There is an air of romance about the Shulgins: they
bumble around in their hillside home, the
shock-haired maverick scientist and his muse, making
discoveries, testing them, and then very probably
settling down to a nice cup of cocoa before bed. Is
this a romantic pursuit, I ask? "Good heavens, it
is," says Ann Shulgin.
Her husband professes ignorance. "Romantic? Pursuit?
It's such a lovely term. I don't understand your
question. It's unbelievably exciting. You're opening
doors that have never been opened before, doors
where they didn't even know there was a door. It can
be frightening."
