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Four

One consequence of the Federal Analogue Act of 1986 , which regulated drugs that hadn’t yet been created, was its effect on science and medicine. Some believed the law derailed development of potentially beneficial treatments and medical drugs by making it difficult for researchers to study new chemicals on human subjects. “The placement of medical research approval within law enforcement, the DEA, is unthinkably stupid and inappropriate, and cannot be tolerated,” wrote Sasha Shulgin in 1993. “We, as the research community . . . have quietly acceded to a non-scientific authority that can oversee and, to an increasing degree, influence the direction of our inquiry.”

Shulgin was easy to dismiss, by some. He wasn’t a medical doctor but rather a psychedelics chemist, who manipulated the structures of chemicals to try to create new drugs. He had a record of pushing the bounds of legality in his studies, and the passage of the Federal Analogue Act meant that most of his new creations would likely be a priori illegal. But those who understood Shulgin’s research knew that he wasn’t just looking for new ways to get people high. He was on a lifelong journey of exploring the relationship between drugs and the human mind. He knew that some new psychoactive substances could have terrible effects, but he also believed many could be lifesaving medicines.

Astronauts take voyages into outer space; psychonauts, by contrast, take voyages into their own psyches, testing new, just-created recreational chemicals that might make them incredibly high—or might make them lose their minds. Many brag about their exploits. Some have done themselves irreparable harm.

Alexander Shulgin, better known as Sasha, who lived to eighty-eight, stood above them all. He took thousands of psychedelic trips, on hundreds of drugs that were never before consumed by humans. Many he invented himself. He spread their gospel to the masses, publishing his recipes in books that became underground best sellers. More than anyone else, he helped create the world of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) we live in today. Some believe Shulgin deserved a Nobel Prize. Others wanted him locked away.

Shulgin first began thinking deeply about drugs as a young man while serving in the Navy during World War II. Aboard a destroyer escort in the Atlantic, he faced terrifying spurts of conflict followed by long periods adrift. To pass the time he read through a giant chemistry textbook, memorizing its contents. In 1944, off the coast of England, his thumb got infected. When his ship arrived in Liverpool, Shulgin was prepared for surgery at a military hospital and given a glass of orange juice he believed contained a powerful sedative. He promptly passed out and slept through the procedure. Only later did he learn there had been no sedative at all. The incident inspired a profound belief that, more than anything, one’s mind determines what happens when one takes a drug.

This lesson stayed with Shulgin when he was a biochemistry PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in 1955. He tried mescaline for the first time and experienced seeing the world around him as if he were a child. The psychedelic, originally derived from cactus plants and still at that time legal, evoked awesome sense memories. Again he wondered: Was this the drug, or was this his mind?

“This awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid,” he wrote, “but . . . in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.”

Shulgin soon realized his calling: to explore psychedelic drugs from a scientific perspective, which he began doing during his employment, in the late 1950s and 1960s, at Dow Chemical, the industrial giant that manufactured the crippling herbicide Agent Orange, which was sprayed in the Vietnam war. While under the company’s employ, Shulgin synthesized a biodegradable insecticide branded “Snail Slug ’n Bug Killer” (“This one really works,” read the packaging), which was enormously profitable. After that, he was given carte blanche and began experimenting with psychoactive drug structures. He tweaked chemicals like mescaline—which, after being consumed for thousands of years in its natural form by Native peoples in the Western Hemisphere, had been the first psychedelic synthesized in a lab, in 1918.

Shulgin believed drugs were the most efficient way to tap the powers of the world’s greatest resource—the human brain. He hoped, by studying how psychedelics affected people, to benefit science, medicine, psychiatry, the arts, and even religion. “He argued to his superiors that this could be therapeutically important, at doses at which there was no risk of psychotic effects,” said Shulgin’s Dow colleague Solomon Snyder.

Once he had created a new compound, Shulgin tested it on himself, starting at very low dosages, and occasionally would get a reaction he had never experienced before. This wasn’t standard scientific protocol; human clinical trials would have been untenable and unethical, and no animal could usefully describe a psychedelic’s effects. Shulgin’s drug testing often began on his morning hike from his Bay Area home in Lafayette, California, along a canal to Dow’s Walnut Creek facility a few miles away. Dow went along with his ideas and even patented some of his creations. One was a psychedelic known as DOM, which Shulgin found to be even more intense than LSD.

“The body tremor feels like poisoning, there is no escaping the feeling of being disabilitated, but at least there is no nausea,” he wrote, after sampling a particularly strong dose. “The music was exceptional, the erotic was exceptional, the fantasy was exceptional. . . . This may be a bit much for me.” Shulgin never distributed the drug, but according to his protégé Paul Daley, he coached the famous psychedelic chemist Nick Sand on how to make it in the mid-1960s. Hoping to fund the production of his famous Orange Sunshine brand of LSD, Sand sold quantities of DOM to the Hell’s Angels. At some point along the way, DOM was renamed STP—Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace—and the Hell’s Angels began disseminating tablets of it.

Provoked by California’s banning of LSD, thousands of people gathered not long afterward, on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for an event called the Human Be-In, its name inspired by civil rights sit-ins. The event would set the tone for that year’s upcoming Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performed, while the psychedelic thought leader Timothy Leary advised the crowd to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Unfortunately, many who took STP landed in the emergency room, for the tablets the Hell’s Angels distributed were of a much higher dosage than Shulgin recommended.

Spooked by Shulgin’s forays into a realm increasingly associated with lawless youth culture, Dow Chemical asked him to cease using its name on his publications. He took the hint, left the company entirely, and began working exclusively out of a lab next to his house, on a twenty-acre plot near Berkeley called the Farm. Here, he would continue to hone his research and build his reputation, eventually becoming known as the “Godfather of Ecstasy.”

Ecstasy is not a narcotic that sets users floating on a cloud, like the opioids; it’s not a traditional amphetamine that seems to instill one with superpowers, like meth; and it’s not a psychedelic that lets users see the world as if for the first time, like LSD. Instead, it’s something of a combination of the three, fusing the cerebral and the sensual to instill a sense of profound happiness. It has become one of earth’s most popular illicit substances in recent decades, emerging from the electronic dance music scene and gradually infiltrating the mainstream while transcending geography and culture. Sasha Shulgin didn’t invent the drug known as ecstasy, MDMA—which is also sometimes called Molly—but he earned the title “Godfather of Ecstasy” for popularizing it.

MDMA was created by the German pharmaceutical company Merck when it was trying to develop a blood-clotting drug. Another local company was also doing work in this area, so Merck patented MDMA late in 1912. Merck had no idea of its psychoactive effects. Very little was done with MDMA in the ensuing decades, until the US Army began using it and similar drugs for studies on animals in 1953. What inspired the program or what the army was looking for is not clear—possibly a truth serum, possibly a “happy bomb” (a chemical weapon that incapacitated but didn’t kill an enemy). In 1960 MDMA’s synthesis was described in a scientific paper written by a pair of Polish scientists, and Sasha Shulgin first synthesized MDMA in 1965 while working at Dow. Shulgin’s approach was to take the structure of a known drug and use it as scaffolding—a skeleton structure to which he would add or subtract other chemical elements or groups, to see if anything interesting was formed. His work with MMDA, which is more psychedelic than MDMA, may have led Shulgin to first synthesize that structurally similar drug in 1965. Shulgin did not, however, immediately realize ecstasy’s effects, possibly because he took too small a dose.

The formula leaked out, and MDMA began to be used recreationally; in 1972 police discovered it on the streets of Chicago. Shulgin was alerted to its effects by a University of California, San Francisco, graduate student. Shulgin then resynthesized the material, began documenting his experiences, and was astonished. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible,” he wrote. “The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day, and evening, and through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience, and how much more powerful it was than previous experiences, for no apparent reason, other than a continually improving state of being.”

Shulgin didn’t extol MDMA for it to be a party drug, but as a tool for psychotherapy. He believed it had the strong potential to benefit people’s psyches. In 1978 he coauthored, with Purdue University professor David Nichols, the first scientific paper describing MDMA’s effects. “Qualitatively, the drug appears to evoke an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones,” they wrote. Nichols, another towering figure in the realm of psychedelics studies, went on to coin the term entactogen (meaning, roughly, “to produce a touching within”) to distinguish MDMA from stimulants and psychedelics.

MDMA works by subduing a part of the brain, the amygdala, which controls our response to fear, and thus the drug can have a therapeutic effect, helping users work through painful experiences. Shulgin introduced MDMA to key figures in the psychotherapeutic community, including his friend Leo Zeff, a retired psychologist, who was initially skeptical but tried it and was immediately sold. Zeff promptly un-retired and introduced MDMA to “countless other therapists, teaching them how to use it in their therapy.”

The love drug couldn’t be contained. In the 1980s MDMA became a dance-club favorite from New York and San Francisco to Ibiza, initially going by names like Empathy and Adam, the latter implying a Garden of Eden–type innocence. The name ecstasy took hold in the early 1980s. The new “yuppie psychedelic” appealed because, unlike LSD, it wasn’t “supposed to teach you anything or take you anywhere,” according to a 1984 San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle column. “It was designed to simply stimulate the pleasure centers of the cerebral cortex. Its partisans compare Adam to Aldous Huxley’s Soma, the blissful, all-obliterating drug of Brave New World.”

Ecstasy was available at such hot spots as Dallas’s Starck Club, where patrons could buy the drug at the bar. A receipt at the end of the night might read: “2 gin and tonics, 1 ecstasy tablet.”

The DEA banned ecstasy on July 1, 1985, reasoning that a University of Chicago study of a similar chemical, MDA, showed it to cause brain damage in rats. Even the study’s authors seemed to acknowledge this was a leap of logic: “It would be premature to extrapolate the present findings to humans,” it read. Shulgin was entirely unimpressed. This new law, he argued, would impede psychotherapy. Indeed, it is hard to make the case that the ban saved lives, especially considering that today’s ecstasy is chock-full of impurities. “If you look at the period where MDMA was sold legally in nightclubs, where you could buy it with your credit card at the bar, there were no fatalities,” said DanceSafe founder Emanuel Sferios. “Zero fatalities!”

Ironically, Sasha Shulgin for years maintained a unique relationship with the DEA, which was more tolerant of his work than might be expected. The DEA even granted him a rare license to handle schedule I drugs, which he maintained for more than two decades. The agency enlisted his help in understanding recreational chemicals, consulted his 1988 book Controlled Substances: Chemical and Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, and gave him awards for his service.

The relationship with the agency broke, however, after the publication, in 1991, of Shulgin’s psychedelic instruction manual for amateur chemists, PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, cowritten with his wife, Ann Shulgin. With its title acronym, for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, no publisher would take it on, so he and Ann published it themselves, along with a 1997 follow-up, TiHKAL—Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved. Phenethylamines and tryptamines are the two main families of psychedelics. Together the two books contain formulas for more than 230 drugs, including many substances Shulgin didn’t invent, like LSD; some psychedelics Shulgin did discover, like 2C-B, which would become popular; and others, like GANESHA (2,5-dimethoxy-3,4-dimethylamphetamine) and 4-HO-MET (4-Hydroxy-N-methyl-N-ethyltryptamine), that remain obscure. “It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs,” Richard Meyer, spokesman for the DEA’s San Francisco field division, told the New York Times Magazine. “Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books.”

On October 27, 1994, a phalanx of DEA official vehicles raided Shulgin’s property—a hillside expanse dotted with psychedelic cacti—combing the grounds in search of violations of Shulgin’s DEA license. They found some small infractions, packages from senders who hoped he would test their ecstasy to see whether it was actually ecstasy, and while he hadn’t tested the materials, he hadn’t disposed of them either, which was the problem. Ultimately, Shulgin was fined $25,000 and lost his DEA license.

Authorities around the world also began regarding Shulgin as a menace. Britain took the unprecedented step of blanket banning every compound that appeared in PiHKAL. This, of course, has not stopped Shulgin’s work from having seismic influence. Just as he had hoped, his formulas were distributed widely, and with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, a new community of tech-savvy psychonauts sampled his ouevre as if from a menu. Shulgin’s influence is felt in every corner of the psychedelic Internet, from Bluelight, an informational message board focused on illegal chemicals and harm reduction, to Erowid, a comprehensive encyclopedia of recreational substances, new and old, and their effects.

How many overdoses and deaths Shulgin’s drugs have caused is hard to know. According to Erowid, three people died from a phenethylamine named 2C-T-7, and two others from a tryptamine called 5-MeO-DIPT. There are surely others, but the number of fatalities is likely small, even though Shulgin brought well over one hundred new drugs into the world. Generally, with some notable exceptions, psychedelics don’t tend to be especially toxic, and they cause death at a tiny fraction of the rate of opioids, cocaine, meth, and benzodiazepines, which include Xanax and Valium.

Shulgin’s playbooks inspired chemists around the world to go into business, and many have used his scaffolding technique to invent numerous drugs much more dangerous than Shulgin ever made. Chinese laboratories selling his chemicals have profited in untold millions, and the same channels that help spread his psychedelics—including Internet message boards and Dark Web emporiums—are also used by people advocating and selling much darker drugs. Meanwhile, armed criminal gangs have also gotten in on the action. The mescaline derivative 2C-B, Shulgin’s favorite of all the chemicals he invented, in recent years has come to be heavily trafficked by drug organizations in Colombia and is a favored club drug in places like Medellín. Known as cocaína rosada (pink cocaine) for its color, or simply tusi (the Spanglish pronunciation of “2C”), it’s snorted like cocaine and, due to its psychedelic qualities, has displaced cocaine in popularity among some sets.

Shulgin anticipated that lab-made drugs like fentanyl could displace plant-based substances like heroin, and he lived long enough to see the adulteration of MDMA. “He was saddened seeing it escape from the relative control of the psychoanalytic community into the rave scene,” Paul Daley said. “In particular, he didn’t like being called the Godfather of Ecstasy. What was being sold as ecstasy on the street was often not. The folks who could really benefit from the MDMA experience all of a sudden had access only to impure materials, of unknown quality and dosage.”

The heavily cut “ecstasy” tablets now common on the rave scene stand in contrast to pure MDMA’s acceptance in the medical community in recent years. One of the pure drug’s leading advocates is Ann Shulgin, who said MDMA’s banning effectively shut down significant medical research on the drug for years. “If MDMA hadn’t been scheduled, it would have probably almost wiped out PTSD,” she said. “It is the most perfect drug for PTSD. Instead, they have millions of veterans all over the world suffering.”

Approximately one of every thirteen Americans suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, and veterans are twice as likely to be afflicted, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. However, in August 2017 the FDA granted MDMA a “breakthrough therapy” designation, helping to accelerate a third and final phase of medical trials to test its efficacy in treating victims of PTSD. If the trials are successful and approval is granted, certified psychotherapists will be allowed to treat patients with 125 milligram ecstasy pills in their offices, effectively legalizing MDMA for medical use, perhaps as early as 2021.

“They take the MDMA and have this expansiveness,” said therapist Julane Andries, who treated PTSD patients during phase two of the trials. “They’re not feeling fear. They’re not feeling shame. They’re not feeling anger. They can look at themselves and have compassion.” As reported by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has been spearheading this movement, one year after the phase two trials, 68 percent of the patients no longer met the criteria for PTSD.

But while ecstasy gained credibility among therapists, in the 2000s it became increasingly difficult to find—in its pure form—on the street.