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Agony And Ecstasy Of Alexander Shulgin
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Jared replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 1:01pm |
 Coolness: 37270 | Someone on another message board I frequent scanned this in from the march issue of playboy. I think its a good read for anyone who cares about the origin of their favorite drug.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Alexander Shulgin By Mark Boal Blood, Sweat and Seratonin: The Master Chemist of the Psychedelic Movement and his 40-year Battle with the Government. PROLOGUE: THE INVASION Our story of the professor who gave the world ecstasy begins on the morning of June 2, 1994, in the hills above Berkeley, California, where Alexander Shulgin and his wife, Ann, were relaxing at home. At three minutes past nine, their tranquility was shattered by the roar of several police cars and a fire engine racing up their winding dirt driveway. Dozens of armed men and women jumped from the vehicles, their jackets marked SHERIFF´S DEPARTMENT, STATE NARCOTICS, DEA. The officers proceeded to tear through the Shulgins´ closets and drawers and then dug up the sump. Finally, in a backyard shed, behind a rusty padlock, they found what they were looking for: Inside the dim, musty interior they saw rows and rows of glass vials containing pristine white powders and faintly yellow liquids. It was a trove of illegal drugs—nearly all the psychedelics in the pharmacopoeia—more than enough to send the average dealer to prison on multiple life sentences. But Dr. Shulgin was not arrested, nor was he charged with any crime. Instead, after an interrogation that lasted eight hours one of the federal agents pulled from his jacket a worn copy of one of Shulgin´s books and sheepishly asked for his autograph. Shulgin signed it, "Sasha—good luck." The invasion ended, Shulgin, the man who synthesized the compound known as MDMA and introduced it to a select group of medical professionals in the late 1970s, went back to work. "The government has what it wants," he told a conference o] chemists soon after. "My laboratory will remain open." Shulgin may be a stealth revolutionary, but he is not a raver (he hasn´t, it is safe to say, had a pacifier in his mouth since infancy). Nor is he a hippie or a New Age guru. In fact, Shulgin is a brilliant academic with a fistful of patents and papers to his name, a former instructor at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant for the National Institutes of Health, NASA and the Drug Enforcement Agency. He is a genial, cultured grandfather who adores Mozart and psychedelics—and has devoted his life to proving that that´s not as loopy as it sounds. So talented a chemist is Shulgin, and so desperate was the government for his knowledge, that for 20 years he possessed a rare license to manufacture any illegal drug. But while working for the DEA and presenting himself as a friend of law enforcement, he quietly carried on a double life, leading a tiny underground movement that continued the radical psychedelic research of the 1960s. After nearly achieving the movement´s goal of establishing MDMA as a psychotherapeutic medicine, Shulgin suffered a crushing defeat in the mid-1980s when MDMA, by then known as ecstasy, became an illegal street drug. His reputation destroyed, he was exiled to the margins of his field, where he labored on in private, inventing a dazzling variety of psychedelic drugs. By now Shulgin has created more than 100 molecules that produce altered states of consciousness, new ways of thinking, feeling and seeing—making him a kind of Einstein of pharmacology, if not one of the most influential scientists of his time. But even today his work is virtually unknown outside a select West Coast circle. At the age of 78 Shulgin is a ghost to history, mentioned only in passing in a few articles and missing from the scholarly drug books, the result of a careful, lifelong avoidance of the mainstream press as well as a dose of government suppression. But in an era when psychopharmacology is reassessing its past and future, Shulgin´s legacy is far from decided. In fact, his influence is growing. THE TRUE BELIEVERS There is no university lab, no corner office in a glass hospital tower. The world´s leading psychedelic chemist lives on a tumbledown property in the hills of Contra Costa County, in a ranch house sewn together from a patchwork of materials and sinking into the sandy soil. Nearby, a rickety red barn collapses in on itself by a pile of bricks and a sun-bleached pickup. The air is dry and hot, but the plantings that border the house bloom in intense, vivid reds and lush, bursting greens. Mount Diablo, brown under a cloudless sky, rises in the distance. Shulgin is a mammoth old man, standing six-foot-four. Dressed in a faded Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and sandals, with a gray beard coiled around a broad jaw and silken white hair shooting off his head in every direction, he looks like a hippie Santa Claus. His blue-green eyes appear youthful; they shine with pleasure at our meeting on this Fourth of July, 2003. Grasping my outstretched hand in both of his, he greets me warmly with a broad smile. "Welcome, friend," he says. Shulgin has thrown together a barbecue on the crumbling stone patio behind the house, and he introduces me to his friends, who are clustered in groups under a stand of trees and a patio umbrella, away from the brutal sun. He finds Ann, who is short, plump, gray-haired, obviously once gorgeous, draped in beads and Indian cloth, holding a pack of Capri Slims. She hugs me with motherly tenderness. Then Shulgin bends down to whisper in her ear, and she bursts out laughing like a little girl. "Oh my, Sasha, you´d better not." Twenty-four years ago on this day and on this very spot, he married her while his best friend, a high-ranking DEA official in charge of the agency´s West Coast laboratories, served as minister. Ann and Sasha have one of the most unusual marriages on record, a union devoted to sex, drugs and the pursuit of advanced neurochemistry, which they´ve chronicled in two strange and enchanting books, PIHKAL A Chemical Love Story and TIHKAL: The Continuation. (The titles are acronyms: "Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved" and "Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.") These volumes not only contain the tales of two lifetimes´ worth of psychedelic experiences but also include the recipes so that any good chemist can make Shulgin´s drugs. On their kitchen table the Shulgins keep an index card inscribed with a quip from their old colleague Timothy Leary: "Psychedelic drugs inspire fear and panic in people who have never tried them." Today´s party is a typical Shulgin Fourth of July barbecue, the kind he has been throwing for decades. Freshly slaughtered lamb is being grilled over coals, and a handpicked dandelion-and-boysenberry salad is on the table. His guests are the usual crowd of Marin County progressives, upper-middle-class folkies with trimmed beards and Gore-Tex hiking shoes. They drive Subaru station wagons and eat organic food. Yet they are also fellow travelers in Shulgin´s psychedelic revolution. That gentleman over there, flying high on peyote tea, his pupils reduced to pins, says he once supplied most of the West Coast´s LSD. That bearded businessman covertly finances California´s marijuana-buy-ing clubs. The medical executive in shorts and a T-shirt has smuggled precursor chemicals for Shulgin. The state legislator, his face shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, has fought to keep Shulgin free. “Sasha and Ann became the core around which the psychedelic community really cohered,” says Rick Doblin, who has a doctorate from Harvard and is the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a leading ecstasy advocate group. “The Shulgins created the context for this whole community of people who really felt under attack in the wider culture. This elite community includes chairs of university departments, leading research scientists, an anthropologist, writers, M.D.´s, a research chemist and a wealthy entrepreneur. The most trusted among them are also members of Shulgin´s "research group," a dozen or so volunteers who have met regularly for the past 30 years to be the first to road test hundreds of Shulgin´s potent new drugs. Whenever he emerged from the lab clutching a promising variation of mescaline or LSD, Shulgin would gather the group and explain the basic chemistry and effects of his new molecule (for example, short, mild and emotional); then everyone would drink it down with a glass of juice and a notebook on hand to record the results while relaxing in some forest cabin, with a fire in the hearth and Bach on the five-channel home theater system. These were effectively the drugs´ first human trials, conducted outside the system of big science, without the red tape of a protocol from the Food and Drug Administration. Self-testing gave Shulgin the freedom to work without restriction but at some cost to himself. Over the years he has become violently ill, blacked out, lain shaking on the floor and felt his limbs freeze and his bones disintegrate. Still, he believes he is under an ethical imperative to sample his drugs before he gives them to anyone else—human or animal. He invents new combinations routinely and names them as if they were children. Each inspires high hopes at birth, and though some have gone on to fulfill his dreams, several notable ones—such as ecstasy, STF; 2CT7, 2CB and foxy methoxy— have slipped from his grasp and out to the street, where they´ve thrived as party drugs. Shulgin has many other babies with startling effects, which remain known only to connoisseurs. Their ultimate fate—as outlawed party favors or the radiant centers of a new age—lies beyond the master chemist´s reach. For now it is easy to see that the party guests revere the man they call Sasha as they take turns approaching him for an audience. (He responds with deft one-liners: "I think you mean the methylated tryptamine"; "Oscar Wilde once said....") Some of them are not afraid to share their respect with a reporter, like the man I meet by the buffet, a slim, bearded 50-something anesthesiologist in a black T-shirt. "I have so many questions for Sasha," he says, between forkfuls of salad. "This year I wrote them all down." A few minutes later another bourgeois bohemian, wearing a faded tie-dyed shirt and a Breitling watch, asks for permission to videotape Shulgin working in the lab: "It would be so great just to get a few minutes, you know, of you working, because it´s so incredible what you do." Shulgin nods. "Oh, yes," he says, "wonderful things happen in there." Then he touches the man fondly on the shoulder and waltzes away. THE ART OF CHEMISTRY Psychedelics are the most pharmacologically complex compounds known, and in the 20th century the labs that have turned out new versions of them are few. They include the Sandoz Pharmaceutical laboratory in Vienna (LSD) and the lab in Alexander Shulgin´s home. Shulgin has been working from home since 1967, when he walked away from corporate America after quitting a lucrative job at Dow Chemical to begin practicing his brand of alchemy. After nearly 40 years of combining his life with his chemistry, it is hard to tell where Shulgin´s home ends and his lab begins. The dining room is a nook stuffed with photographs of the Shulgins with counterculture icons, along with psychedelic knickknacks such as a ceramic toadstool and drug posters from Amsterdam. This is where Shulgin brainstorms new molecular structures on a yellow legal pad, usually after a bottle or more of a syrah crafted to his taste by a true believer who owns a boutique winery (the bottle is labeled SHULGIN; WILD AND SASSY). Then Shulgin will take a few steps, duck his enormous head under the door frame and enter a book-lined study to check his chemistry reference texts. If all goes well there, he heads outside and down a winding dirt path, overgrown with psychoactive plants and vines, that leads to the backyard shed, the "wet lab," where he can lose himself for hours art where the real work gets done. It is a dark, loamy place, one step removed from a state of nature, with a dirt floor strewn with leaves. Ropy cobwebs hang from the ceiling to the floor (Shulgin believes it is immoral to kill spiders). The thick wooden tables, grooved and burned by acids, hold a few feet of plastic tubing, some vials and a Bunsen burner. Shulgin closes the door and sinks down onto a stool. "This is all I need," he says expansively, gesturing to the low-tech equipment. "Everything I need." He slides open a drawer full of shiny glass beakers and to runs his fingers lightly across them, as if he were touching collection of the finest sterling silver. In a light, airy tone tie explains that he has recently been working on cactus compounds, which he extracts by cutting the thorns with a nail clipper and pulping the plant in a blender. He talks about his process. He orders pure serotonin, the chemical that many antidepressants boost to improve mood, from a chemistry supplier in Japan for about $8 a gram. Speaking as if we were ensconced (continued on page 88) in a university lecture hall and not in a dank, cavelike shed, Shulgin explains that after honing the serotonin into a precursor to a psychedelic, he drives to a supply house where he loads 50 pounds of dry ice into the trunk of his Geo. Then he works for weeks, freezing and boiling the molecule, adding acids and bases and then applying a myriad of intricate techniques until he finally brings the atoms to life. On most days Shulgin communes with his reagents and test tubes while the radio plays loudly. Like a jazz musician, he prizes spontaneity; in fact, his willingness to embrace the unexpected is undoubtedly the reason he has been so prolific. "I wonder what will happen if I put a thingamajig on this, take the doohickey down from there," he says, pointing in the air, "and stick it here and make the molecule just a teensy bit heavier and larger. How will it fit in the receptor? Will it be too big? You don´t know." Shulgin´s sentences move in unpredictable directions; you just try to follow the flight path and wait for one to land. "Chemistry is an art form," he continues, his tone growing urgent and excited. "It has nothing to do with split atoms and molecules and mathematics and kinetics and all that nonsense. It´s an art form. It´s like writing a piece of music. It is pure imagination." When Shulgin is alone in his lab, immersed in the rhythms of his work, his imagination always returns to the same mystery. It is the great unknown of biochemistry: the relationship between the shape and weight of a molecule and its effect on the mind, the so-called structure-activity relationship. "I was always interested in how, if you move one carbon atom, for example, on amphetamine, you can change it from being a strong stimulant to a psychedelic," he says. "How is it that the difference of one atom produces such a dramatically different result in the human? The answer is, nobody knows." If the atoms are tweaked again, the psychedelic can go from being a sparkling hallucinogen to a terrifying mindblower. At the moment, Shulgin is working on a new psychedelic inspired by a compound he found in a cactus. He had seen a peculiar molecular structure in the cactus´s juice and had the idea to replicate the pattern and glue it onto an existing tryptamine (a class of molecules that includes many psychedelics and melatonin), thus combining a natural molecule with a synthetic one. Shulgin believes the result will be a dazzling new compound. "Nature didn´t know how to make it," he says, smiling, "but I do." Like many members of the movement, Shulgin believes the psychedelic class of molecules holds promise as "insight" medicines that can catalyze the process of psychotherapy. On a neuro-chemical level, psychedelics release the same mood modifiers—such as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine— as many antidepressants. But in ways that are still not fully understood, they also evoke a response that is far more complex than that elicited by Prozac or Wellbutrin. They stimulate areas of the brain associated with ego modulation, spiritual experiences and detecting novelty, as well as hearing, smell and sight. At lower doses, one´s self-identity is retained, allowing for fresh, nonlinear thinking to trigger possibly important insights of self and of forgotten memories—or so the theory goes. The American medical-pharmaceutical complex has embraced neither this idea nor Shulgin (in Europe his work has somewhat wider recognition). A few years ago, on an invitation from Dr. John Halpern, an associate director of Harvard´s Biological Psychiatry Laboratory and one of a handful of doctors who believe that psychedelic medicine has a promising future, Shulgin gave a lecture to the psychiatry faculty. "It was a disaster," Halpern recalls. "He told this droll story about some doctor he gave psychedelics to, and you saw the residents in the audience turn white. But the older doctors in the front row, the dinosaurs of psychiatry who remember the 1950s, they were on the edge of their seats, lapping it up." Almost as fast as he can create them, Shulgin´s inventions have been declared illegal in America and around the world. Still, he takes the long view of history and believes that, in the end, the plasticity and variety of psychedelics will spark a new science of the mind. "I don´t think it will be from one of the current drugs," he says. "Twenty, 50 years from now some kid will look at all of them and see an interesting thread in the pattern, and something will come from that. It´s like the invention of the wheel; you need the wheels and the axle to make a horse and buggy, and then down the line someone makes a sports car." "The idea of developing Sasha´s stuff into medicines is a daunting task," says Dr. Halpern. "It would take years and about a hundred million dollars to do the clinical studies on just one of his drugs, and he has hundreds of them. We don´t even have all the answers for LSD, let alone his stuff. So I think it will be decades before his work is really even looked at, maybe longer." The tour is over. There is nothing left to show me, because Shulgin will not work in the company of people he does not know. He doesn´t even want a staff. "If I had junior chemists, it would be nice if they washed the dishes for me," he says, "but they´d really just be a kind of distraction." He opens the door and ushers me out into the sunlight with a ceremonious wave of his hand. Then he bolts the lock and charges with long strides down the overgrown path, leaving me to follow behind. I think I am beginning to get a feel for when he´s interested in talking, but as we near the house he looks back over his shoulder and quietly says, "It´s a little bit sad, because I am not permitted to keep mementos of the things I make that become illegal." Then we´re inside, and lunch is served. ALL THE DARK PLACES Euphoria did not come naturally to Sasha Shulgin. Born in 1925 in Berkeley, he grew up in a somber household ruled by his father, Theodore, a Russian immigrant, and managed by his Midwestern mother, Henrietta, both of whom were high school teachers and strict disciplinarians. The Shulgins slept in separate bedrooms and would never hug or kiss in public. They forbade Sasha to visit girls; instead they taught him grim lessons in reality. Theodore Shulgin once left the carcass of the family dog to rot on the front porch so Sasha could observe the flesh as it slowly decayed and fell from the bone. Shulgin took refuge in the basement. He would disappear down there for hours, thrilling to the dimness and the cobwebs, and go through all the fantastic junk that adults ignored. After exploring the sublevel in his own house, he proceeded to knock on neighbors´ doors and ask to see their cellars, and then he branched out to tunnels and underground lairs of all kinds, becoming, he says, a "lover of dark places"—a lonely, introverted boy, wildly intelligent, searching for unbreakable solitude. "A psychologist with nothing better to do," he writes jauntily in PIHKAL, "could have a bit of fun with why, when I was older, I built three basements in my house." His first basement chemistry set had only bicarbonate of soda and dilute acetic acid. He accumulated more powders and liquids and mixed them into messes that fizzed and changed colors. Chemistry became his thing, his outlet, and by the time he went to Harvard—on a full scholarship at 16—he was sufficiently advanced in it to use it to express himself. Intimidated by Ivy League regality, Shulgin conveyed his discomfort by allowing a gooey batch of mercuric acetelite to dry on his dorm windowsills. When it hardened, it exploded, sending shattered glass into the yard. "It was an accident," he says now, with an amused smile. "Just an experiment." Then he adds, as if to reassure me, "I replaced the windows." When America entered World War II, Shulgin happily dropped |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» beercrack replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 1:06pm |
| Coolness: 71640 | umm yeah didn't pcandy post this before |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» Jared replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 2:06pm |
| Coolness: 37270 | He might of.. I just found these boards, so I didn't realize it had already been posted. Whoops. :P |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» ufot replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 4:11pm |
 Coolness: 93305 | hmmm.... I'd heard that MDMA had been arround much longer then that, I heard that it was discovered in the early 1900's, I think 1908, by chemists in the states, trying to perfect a weight loss pill...but I guess like most drugs, their origins are clouded with....CLOUDS?
Ufot-being an average joe, instead of that ol' rockstar guy, without the guitar, ofcourse... |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» PoiSoNeD_CaNdY replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 4:24pm |
 Coolness: 91895 | ^^ Thats true, but Shulgin was the first that discovered its psychoactive properties (presumably at a higher dose than was used for weight loss) |
| Good [+1]Toggle ReplyLink» ufot replied on Thu Mar 18, 2004 @ 7:34pm |
| Coolness: 93305 | kool, I wish I could remember where I read that, but alas, I cannot, I believe that it was on some medical history website, under substances... I remember that it was tested for a while, but that it was deemed to drive patience into "frenzies" where they became unexplicably happy and friendly, but did not consistantly lose weight, so the plug was pulled....also, there are many referrances in the early parts of the jazz age (circa 1920's) to the use of "exstacy" for recreational purposes...
Ufot-not paying attention to spelling issues... |
Agony And Ecstasy Of Alexander Shulgin
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