In 1976, a student at San Francisco State University handed Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin a compound with an old corporate paper trail and almost no public reputation as a mind-altering drug. MDMA had been patented decades earlier by Merck as an intermediate, not developed as a therapy; Shulgin made his own synthesis route, then introduced it to psychologist Leo Zeff, who began using it to augment talk therapy.[1]
Alexander Shulgin personally bioassayed hundreds of psychoactive compounds, beginning with tiny doses and recording their effects with unusual care. He is also widely credited with bringing MDMA to the attention of psychologists and therapists in the late 1970s.
Berkeley was the first laboratory of his life. Shulgin was born there in 1925, studied organic chemistry at Harvard, left in 1943 to join the U.S. Navy, then returned to California and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.[2] He later did postdoctoral work in psychiatry and pharmacology at UCSF, a pairing of fields that helps explain why molecules, for him, were never only formulas.[2]
At Dow Chemical, a pesticide bought him freedom. Shulgin developed Zectran, described by the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute as the first biodegradable pesticide, and the profitable patent gave him unusual latitude inside the company.[2] He used that room to move toward psychopharmacology, a subject that became less comfortable for Dow as public alarm about street drugs grew during the 1960s.[2]
The Chemist as His Own First Instrument
Shulgin later pointed to mescaline as the experience that redirected him. “I first explored mescaline in the late ’50s,” he said, describing a dose of 350 to 400 milligrams. “I learned there was a great deal inside me.”[2] From there, he began making and studying new compounds, especially phenethylamines and tryptamines, and publishing in journals including Nature, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and Psychopharmacology Communications.[2]
The procedure was careful, intimate, and dangerous. Shulgin first tested new creations on himself, starting with minuscule doses and gradually increasing them until an effect appeared.[2] Beginning in 1960, a small group of friends joined regular testing sessions, and the participants recorded their results in detail.[2] To make those reports less vague, he developed the Shulgin Rating Scale, a way to quantify the intensity of subjective effects.[2]
The famous number can sound almost mythical. Accounts of Shulgin’s career often cite more than 230 psychoactive compounds synthesized or personally tested, while the Shulgin Research Institute describes his personal bioassay work as extending across hundreds of novel psychoactive compounds.[2] The more revealing detail is the sequence behind the number: a tiny dose, a pause, a change in perception, a written report.
MDMA Leaves the Lab
MDMA was older than Shulgin’s involvement with it. Merck had patented it as an intermediate compound, and later accounts note that the company had not investigated its psychological effects.[1] Shulgin’s role was to bring the neglected molecule into a different kind of room. After encountering MDMA in 1976, he synthesized it and introduced it to Leo Zeff, a psychologist colleague.[1] Zeff then helped circulate it among therapists interested in using it to support talk therapy, before MDMA became far better known as ecstasy or molly.[1]
His public life sat in a strange overlap. Shulgin taught at local universities and San Francisco General Hospital, served as an expert witness, and sometimes performed chemical analysis for law enforcement.[2] He also received several DEA awards and wrote Controlled Substances: Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, a reference work on federal drug law.[2] The chemist associated with underground psychedelic culture also spent years in conversation with drug agents.
In 1991, Shulgin and his wife Ann published PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, followed in 1997 by TiHKAL: The Continuation.[3] The books are remembered as part memoir and part chemistry manual, built around phenethylamines and tryptamines, the two families of compounds central to much of Shulgin’s work.[3]
Shulgin died in Lafayette, California, in 2014, at 88.[3] The enduring image is small rather than spectacular: a chemist at his bench, reducing the first dose to almost nothing, waiting for a signal, then reaching for the notebook.
