This genius chemist spent 50 years creating psychedelic drugs in his home lab…for a good cause
For Alexander Shulgin, MDMA had huge therapeutic potential
I am sitting in the garden of the late godfather of psychedelics, Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin (1925–2014), on a hillside high above Berkeley. I am surrounded by psychoactive plants and psychedelic activists.
“Anyone wanna see the lab?” asks a caretaker of the grounds.
I join two young people as we clomp down a narrow garden path towards the lab of legend where Alexander Shulgin synthesized over 200 psychedelic compounds, among them MDMA (better known as “ecstasy” or “molly”), 2-CB (think ecstasy plus LSD), and DOM, the LSD-like psychedelic said to have driven Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd insane.
Shulgin compounds go in and out of vogue, but MDMA, with its combination of disinhibition, lucid intoxication, and feelings of well-being brought on by serotonin flooding the domes of its users, has remained the undisputed darling of clubs, raves and festivals across the world since it escaped from Shulgin’s lab in the 1970s.
But in recent years, efforts are underway that align more closely with Shulgin’s original vision for MDMA.
“MDMA changed my life,” combat veteran C.J. Hardin told The New York Times. “It allowed me to see my trauma without fear or hesitation and finally process things and move forward.”
Indeed, it turns out that the properties that make MDMA ideal for gyrating with reckless abandon against a reverberating subwoofer at a Burning Man sound camp are the same ones that make it a wonder drug for overcoming PTSD.
There’s just one problem: MDMA is still illegal.
“Curiosity,” Alexander Shulgin was known to say when asked why he spent his life synthesizing mind-altering drugs. “Why have these things been revered for centuries? Why are they seen as being a conduit to contacting the spiritual world?”
It was curiosity that drove Shulgin to try mescaline in 1960 as a young chemist at Dow Pharmaceuticals. He’d been fascinated with its chemical structure for years. He took a fraction of a gram under the watch of friends, and his mind was veritably blown.
“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” he said of his first psychedelic experience. “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.’’
The following year, Shulgin made Dow a fortune by synthesizing the pesticide Zectran. As a token of appreciation, Dow left Shulgin alone to research and create chemicals of his choosing, occasionally reaching out to him to patent compounds of interest.
So, naturally, Shulgin started synthesizing psychedelics. Lots of them.
1963 was the fateful year Shulgin synthesized DOM. DOM’s effects lasted longer than LSD, and took longer to kick in. With LSD being made illegal in California in October 1966, DOM became an alluring substitute for dealers. Unfortunately, some accidentally dosed tabs at several times stronger than Shulgin recommended.
The results were disastrous. DOM hit the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1967, just in time to get thousands of hippies way too high at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park as Allen Ginsberg regaled them with Hari Krishna chants. Newspapers reported on hospitalizations. Hamilton Morris writes that “one user in Manhattan ingested a dose and ritualistically performed seppuku, disemboweling himself with a samurai sword on Mother’s Day.” Dow traced the chemical’s provenance back to Shulgin, and severed ties.
So he came here, to this brick lab in the backyard of his home in the hills west of Berkeley, spending the next half century mapping a myriad of pathways to altered states.
The caretaker opens the door to the lab, which is adorned with a “Caution: Radioactive Materials” sign and a notice to authorities that “this is a research facility that is known to and authorized by the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, all San Francisco DEA personnel, and the state and federal EPA authorities.”
The lab is cramped and dusty and smells of age, but feels very much in use and very much alive — it is as if Shulgin were simply out to lunch. Jars, flasks, beakers and test tubes crowd every counter. Plastic tubing crisscrosses metal pipes that hold all manner of glass implements in midair. My eyes are drawn to a rack of glass test tubes with labels scrawled in Shulgin’s handwriting. Here be dragons, I think to myself.
“Don’t get too excited,” the caretaker says with a smile as I finger one of the tubes. “There’s nothing illegal in here.”
I think about the razor’s edge of the law Shulgin danced on for most of his life, the pirouettes one must spin to be both a hero to drug legalization activists and an essential ally of the D.E.A., to be in a position to synthesize psychedelics in plain sight of the authorities while users of those same drugs end up in jail for years.
Shulgin worked under a Schedule I D.E.A. research license for decades, which allowed him to study drugs that were officially deemed to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. In return, he gave talks to drug agents, supplied drug samples, and provided expert testimony in drug cases.
“That was his Faustian bargain,” recalled Rick Doblin, the psychedelic activist who founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1985. “In order to do his work, he had to be useful to the D.E.A.”
He was, to a point. And then he really, really wasn’t.
In 1991, shortly after authoring the D.E.A.’s definitive guide to federal drug laws, the Shulgins released PiHKAL: Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved. The self-published book was half autobiography of Shulgin and his wife Ann, half account of his decades of research into psychedelic compounds, replete with instructions on the synthesis and dosage of hundreds of psychedelics, as well as vivid trip reports by Shulgin and the small group of friends on whom he’d test his latest creations. The book was a bestseller, the timing impeccable. As more and more people plugged into the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, PiHKAL ended up on the drug resource website Erowid, introducing a new generation to the wonders of psychedelic chemistry.
The D.E.A. was not pleased. Agents raided Shulgin’s property in 1994, and he was asked to give up his Schedule I license.
“I’m not doing anything illegal,” Shulgin would often say. And, in a sense, he was right. As a 2005 New York Times profile pointed out, “Many of the drugs in his lab weren’t illegal because they hadn’t existed until he created them.”
In Shulgin’s study, awards from the D.E.A. line the walls. On his desk is a Dow Chemical Company research notebook opened to the pages that report his first experiences with MDMA in 1976. Shulgin is sometimes erroneously credited as the discoverer of MDMA, but it is more accurate to say he rediscovered its mind-altering effects, over 60 years after it was first synthesized by a Merck chemist and subsequently forgotten.
Shulgin tested all new compounds on himself first, beginning with doses several times lower than ones that would produce threshold effects, and working his way up to an active dose over weeks. With MDMA, his logs note no effect at 16 milligrams, and continue to note no effect at 25, 40, and 60 milligrams. At 81 milligrams, he writes: “53 minutes. Smooth shift into a light intoxication. Distinct, almost early-alcohol like intoxication.”
A 120 milligram dose drove the point home:
“Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this. I feel totally peaceful. I have lived all my life to get here, and I feel I have come home. I am complete. . . . I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible.”
Shulgin’s friends in the therapy scene had been practicing LSD-assisted psychotherapy for years with impressive results, even after they were forced underground. Shulgin thought MDMA could be even more effective. For one, it was legal. For another, it didn’t make you trip balls.
‘’It didn’t have the other visual and auditory imaginative things that you often get from psychedelics,’’ he said. ‘’It opened up a person, both to other people and inner thoughts, but didn’t necessarily color it with pretty colors and strange noises.’’
Bay Area psychedelic therapist Leo Zeff was so impressed after trying MDMA in 1977 that he came out of retirement to evangelize its benefits. The so-called “Johnny Appleseed of MDMA,” Zeff trained upwards of 4,000 therapists in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, who treated an estimated 200,000 clients.
‘’Without exception,” reminisced psychiatrist George Greer to The New York Times of the 1980s glory days when MDMA was legal, “every therapist who I talked to or even heard of, every therapist who gave MDMA to a patient, was highly impressed by the results.’’
But it was only a matter of time before the cat got out of the bag. Over the early 1980s, MDMA grew a reputation in underground club scenes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Dallas. News segments detailed hospital visits of dehydrated ravers and declared that no recreational drug had ever spread so quickly. MDMA was banned by the DEA and placed on its list of Schedule I substances in 1985, at the height of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No and after an extensive public campaign about its neurotoxic effects.
That year, Rick Doblin formed MAPS to oppose the ban and support psychedelic research. Like many others in the psychedelic community, Doblin believes the medicalization of psychedelics is the key to making them legal. In fundraising talks for MAPS, he often points to the example of cannabis: once medical marijuana proliferated in several states, nationwide support for its legalization crossed a crucial threshold.
Today, nationwide support for the legalization of psychedelics hovers at a tepid 9%. No matter: after years of setbacks, false starts, and trials in every sense of the word for Doblin and MAPS, somehow, against all odds, victory is in sight.
Our understanding of trauma has improved since PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980, but treatments remain lengthy and ineffective, and diagnoses have mushroomed. An estimated half-million servicemen and women returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD. An average of 22 servicemen and women commit suicide each day. With long lines at the VA, many are not receiving the treatment they need.
Despite years of anecdotal evidence from therapists and patients about MDMA’s ability to treat PTSD, MDMA remains a Schedule I drug — no medical value, high potential for abuse. What’s needed is scientific proof.
To that end, MAPS has been sponsoring clinical trials into MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD since 2005, with an aim to have the FDA approve MDMA as a prescription medication. The participants include combat veterans, victims of sexual assault, firefighters and policemen, among others.
The results have been nothing short of mind-blowing. After three doses of MDMA in conjunction with therapy, patients reported a 56% decrease in symptoms. Two-thirds of participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD after the trials.
“MDMA therapy saved my life,” said Nicholas Blackston, a combat veteran who suffers from PTSD and a participant in the MDMA trials. “I regained the hope and purpose that I needed.”
The results are confirming what MDMA therapists have been saying for years: one session with MDMA can yield the sorts of breakthroughs that took other methods years to attain, if they obtained them at all.
“We are not discovering something,” said Andrew Felmar, one such early psychedelic therapist, of the new MDMA trials. “We are proving something that we very well know. There is absolutely no doubt in our minds.”
In December 2016, the F.D.A. approved the third and final phase of trials with MDMA for treatment of PTSD. Compared to the first two trials, Phase III will require hundreds more patients, which means approximately 250 new therapists to train, which will require lots and lots of money ($20 million, according to MAPS’ “optimistic” estimate). If the final trials are successful, MDMA could become a legal prescription drug as early as 2021.
It’s a development that Shulgin himself long predicted. “I’m very confident,” he said in 1995, “that there will come a time when this work will be recognized for its medical value.”
