Dr. Ecstasy – The New York Times
In the small subculture that truly believes in better living through chemistry, Shulgin’s oeuvre has made him an icon and a hero: part pioneer, part holy man, part connoisseur. As his supporters point out, his work places him in an old, and in many cultures venerable, tradition. Whether it’s West African iboga ceremonies or Navajo peyote rituals, 60’s LSD culture or the age-old cultivation of cannabis nearly everywhere on the planet it can grow, the pursuit and celebration of chemically-induced alternate realms of consciousness goes back beyond the dawn of recorded history and has proved impossible to fully suppress. Shulgin sees nothing strange about devoting his life to it. What’s strange to him is that so few others see fit to do the same thing.
Most of the scientific community considers Shulgin at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vindication. A little more than a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Harvard Medical School study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of terminal cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., started his study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, with somewhat less attention, studies at the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and the University of Arizona, Tucson, have focused on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”). It’s far from a revolution, but it is an opening, and as both scientist and advocate, Shulgin has helped create it. If — and it’s a big “if” — the results of the studies are promising enough, it might bring something like legitimacy to the Shulgin pharmacopoeia.
“I’ve always been interested in the machinery of the mental process,” Shulgin told me not long ago. He has also, from a very young age, loved playing with chemicals. As a lonely 16-year-old Harvard scholarship student soon to drop out and join the Navy, he studied organic chemistry. His interest in pharmacology dates to 1944, when a military nurse gave him some orange juice just before his surgery for a thumb infection. Convinced that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of the glass were a sedative, Shulgin fell unconscious, only to find upon waking that the substance had been sugar. It was a revelatory, tantalizing hint of the mind’s odd strength.
When Shulgin had his first psychedelic experience in 1960, he was a young U.C. Berkeley biochemistry Ph.D. working at Dow Chemical. He had already been interested for several years in the chemistry of mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote, when one spring day a few friends offered to keep an eye on him while he tried it himself. He spent the afternoon enraptured by his surroundings. Most important, he later wrote, he realized 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.”
Epiphanies don’t come much grander than that, and Shulgin’s interest in psychoactive drugs bloomed into an obsession. “There was,” he remembers thinking, “this remarkably rich and unexplored area that I had to explore.” Two years later, he was given his chance when he created Zectran, one of the world’s first biodegradable insecticides. In return, Dow gave him its customary dollar for the patent and unlimited freedom to pursue his interests.
