“I’m curious!” That was Alexander Shulgin’s simple answer to the question of why he had dedicated much of his life to the exploration of psychedelic drugs. The American chemist who died in 2014 at the age of 88 was famous not only for synthesizing a large number of mind-altering substances but also for experimenting with them on himself, his wife and friends. He worked within the context of existing laws because the compounds he synthesized had not existed before and therefore were legal at the time he made them. Dr. Shulgin never intended his creations to be used as “street drugs;” his interest was in researching the effects of chemicals on the mind. Nevertheless, many of the drugs he created became the subject of abuse and were eventually made illegal. Perhaps the best known of these is Ecstasy, which had actually been patented by Merck back in 1914, but was abandoned because the company could not find a use for it. Shulgin developed a novel synthesis for the drug, and after experimenting on himself, suggested it could be used as a treatment for anxiety. He never intended it to be used as a recreational substance.
Shulgin was interested in chemistry from a young age, but it was surgery for an infection of his thumb that launched his enthusiasm for pharmacology. Prior to the surgery he was been given a glass of orange juice that had some undissolved crystals at the bottom. Convinced he had been given a sedative, he promptly fell asleep. As he was to learn later, the crystals were just sugar and it was his mind that had actually lulled him into sleep. What sort of chemistry was going on in his brain, he wondered? He began to explore the literature of mind altering substances and became interested in the chemistry of mescaline, the active ingredient in the peyote cactus, a plant long used by Native North Americans for spiritual purposes. Eventually he tried mescaline himself and was amazed by the hallucinations it produced.
After obtaining a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkley, Shulgin was hired by the Dow Chemical company to work on insecticides and came up with Zectran, one of the first biodegradable such products. It turned out to be so profitable that as a reward Dow allowed Shulgin to work on any project of his choosing. He didn’t have to think much about what that would be. Before long he had prepared a number of compounds that were candidates for mind altering effects with therapeutic potential. By this time he had come to learn that many compounds that affected the mind, such as mescaline and amphetamine, shared a common feature in terms of molecular structure. They all had a “phenethylamine” grouping of atoms. When Dow decided against pursuing this line of research, Shulgin left, set up a lab in his home, and began to churn out compounds. Because of the expertise he had acquired on drugs that had a potential for abuse, he developed an interesting relationship with the Drug Enforcement Agency, often giving talks to agents about the identification of such substances. For a while he even had a researcher’s license to produce Schedule 1 drugs, those that have no accepted medical use and have great potential for abuse.
Shulgin did not work in secret; he published numerous scientific papers about the drugs he had made. But as drug abuse became more and more of a problem, he had increasing difficulty in getting his research into the scientific literature. He then decided to release it all in a self-published book written with his wife under the curious title of “PiHKAL.” Readers would learn that it stood for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.” The book was divided into two sections, with the first being a long-winded story about the couples romance and numerous drug experiences, while the second section was a compilation of the 179 compounds Shulgin had made, including dosages he had used, effects experienced, and details of synthesis. Inevitably this led to abuse, with the book essentially becoming a manual for making drugs that had a potential for doing harm through improper dosage or through impurities introduced by inexperienced chemists. Many of the listed compounds would eventually be made illegal.
There is no question that Alexander Shulgin’s unconventional research methods and his descriptions of the effects of the compounds he synthesized stimulated pharmacological research into drugs, Ecstasy being an example, that may actually have therapeutic potential. But we are still left with the disturbing idea that curiosity sometimes kills the cat.
