The Ecstasy Chemist Who Deserved a Nobel Peace Prize
Alexander Shulgin — leading psychedelics chemist, pharmacologist and psychopharmacologist — should be more widely acknowledged
Dr Alexander Shulgin was an extraordinarily influential American chemist, psychopharmacologist and author. You probably won’t have been taught much about him during chemistry lessons at school or in your psychology undergrad — due to his association with the party drug MDMA — but he was one of the biggest driving forces in psychotherapy that the world has ever seen; an intrepid and groundbreaking scientist.
He passed away in 2014, aged 88, but before that he invented and tested (on himself, his wife Ann and their extended group of friends) hundreds of new psychedelic drugs.
The whole journey and all of his findings are documented in two bestselling books: Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story (1991) and Tihkal: the Continuation (1997), leading to the global psychonaut movement.
Contrary to popular belief, Shulgin should not really be known as ‘The Godfather of Ecstasy’ as he widely is. He didn’t invent the phenomenally popular drug 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA); pharmaceutical giant Merck is credited with the first ever synthesisation. They used it in 1912 as a…
