Alexander Shulgin, RIP

Alexander Shulgin, who

died
this week at the age of 88, was a remarkable man who
combined an intense curiosity about altered states of consciousness
with amazing chemical creativity and scientific rigor. Over the
years Shulgin synthesized hundreds of psychoactive compounds that
he carefully tested on himself, his wife, Ann, and a small circle
of friends—a process he described in his 1991 book
PIKHAL: A Chemical Love Story
, a 978-page tome that
includes notes on the production and effects of 179 such chemicals
along with a personal and professional memoir. (The title stands
for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved”; the sequel was called

TIKHAL
, for “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.”) Perhaps
best known as a popularizer (though not the creator) of MDMA, which
he said “enabled me to see out, and to see my own insides, without
reservations,” Shulgin embodied an open-minded yet responsible
approach to drugs that should be a model for psychonauts as well as
the politicians who vainly try to control them.

“Every drug, legal or illegal, provides some reward,” Shulgin
wrote in the introduction to PIKHAL. “Every drug presents
some risk. And every drug can be abused. Ultimately, in my opinion,
it is up to each of us to measure the reward against the risk and
decide which outweighs the other.” His great passion was for
psychedelics, the “mind-manifesting” drugs with effects similar to
those of mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, which he saw as
“treasures” that “can provide access to the parts of us that have
answers,” facilitating “exploration of this interior world” and
“insights into its nature.” It amazed him that legislators and
regulators would presume to intrude into this deeply personal
realm, especially in a society that claims to respect privacy,
freedom of inquiry, and freedom of conscience.

“Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for
self-awareness a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or
chemical compounds as the means of opening the psychic doors,”
Shulgin wrote. “How is it…that the leaders of our society have
seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of
learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used,
respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human
culture of which we have a record?”

That remains a bit of a puzzle, even to people who have studied
the series of moral panics that comprise the history of American
drug policy. But by highlighting the profound, life-enhancing
potential of forbidden intoxicants without denying their hazards,
Shulgin boldly pointed the way to a more tolerant alternative.

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