Ecstacy Doctor

- Pulp Magazine- New Zealand

"Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am - only one of a different sort: one who risks his skin to prove his truths." - Che Guevara

America is in the middle of a civil war against its own citizens. As the War on Drugs gains imperialistic momentum, crushing Latin America like a puppet dictatorship, I hold in my hands a copy of a book, banned in Australia, which might never have been published. The definitive text on nearly two hundred psychedelic compounds, and how to make them, PiHKAL is the product of the work of Alexander T. Shulgin. Regaled as the godfather of Ecstasy, being its first real proponent, and a folk-hero of demigod proportions to the underground, Shulgin (known diminutively as Sasha to his friends) represents the beautiful wayward revolutionary in this war.

When Guevera found a knapsack of medicine and a box of ammunition at his feet in the marsh at Alegria de Pio, he sealed his fate, picking up the ammunition and heading for the sound of gunfire beyond the sugarcane stalks. Shulgin, however, chose medicine, and used his body to prove his truths. "My background was basically chemistry and biochemistry, and what caught my fancy was an experience with mescaline. It absolutely caught my attention in a way I had never had it caught before. I really found it to be a remarkably rich opening of the unconscious, which might help us find out what is tucked away within us. I thought, if a little white solid can do that particular thing, what other types of little white solids, which are chemically related, what might they be able to do?"

So Shulgin enlisted the help of a few trusted doctors and academics and began making a bitch's brew of new compounds. He would think of a new molecule, go out to his backyard lab and spend the day synthesizing, and try it that night. Imagine taking a champagne glass full of orange juice and 100mg of a bitter white crystal that no one has ever ingested before. You have no idea what inner journey is ahead of you. He elucidates, "I have gone into whole new territory. The beauty of synthesis is that you are not limited by what nature makes. I started modifying the mescaline molecule and very quickly found that there were certain portions of the molecule that were absolutely unessential, yet others were very important. In filling in the unessential parts with other things, you strongly modify the type of actions the material has. Some are very colourful, some are very good for memories, some are strictly intoxicants, and it may even be a convulsant. You don't know what is going to come. You are in new territory. Every single door you open, you have no idea what is on the other side of the door."

This cowboy attitude to pharmaceutical testing has gained Shulgin many friends and enemies. On one side of the fence is the argument that you cannot test psychoactive drugs without trying them on humans. After all, an animal isn't going to be able to feel insight, or empathy. "You can only watch the tale of the blood pressure in animals," Shulgin laments. On the other side are plenty of people eager to discredit his work, in the name of the war on drugs. When Shulgin published PiHKAL, he immediately came under harassment from the DEA and the EPA.

Shulgin describes his interlude with the DEA in understanding terms, surprisingly. "Yes, I was 'raided' by the Drug Enforcement Administration authorities a few years ago but it was not an aggressive attack in the search for drugs but rather a somewhat heavy handed punishment for the publication of the book PIHKAL. They saw it as an encouragement for the use of psychedelic drugs rather than a repository for factual information about them, and yet many of these agents had obviously found the information in this volume to have been useful to them. A couple of agents had the books with them and, as the evening quieted down, they actually asked Ann and I to autograph their personal copies.
There is a territorial sense there when it comes to other people having access to that information, though."

In fact, so many people were afraid to even publish Shulgin's first book, that he was forced to start his own publishing house in order to get the work published. "I wanted to get the material published, I cannot let it go to oblivion with me," Sasha entreaties. "The good thing about having our own publishing house is that our work is in print forever. It is out there, and if I want to publish something else, I can." Transform Press has turned out to be one of the best decisions Sasha and his wife/ co-author Ann ever made. The first book is in its fifth printing, and sales are steady. "I know it to be a fact that these two books have already become completely integrated in to the lives and libraries of many people today."

Ann Shulgin is quite comfortable with the doors of perception herself. As a lay therapist, she worked extensively throughout the 60's and 70's with MDMA as a therapeutic drug alongside hypnotherapy. In the two books, she tells in wonderfully readable chapters of the 'snake-oil' properties of Ecstasy and the miracle cures it enabled until it was made illegal in 1985 in the US. There are literally hundreds of similar stories detailing MDMA as a panacea for all ills. Shulgin credits one psychiatrist, "MDMA is penicillin for the soul, and you don't give up penicillin, once you've seen what it can do." Ann lends female clarity to the work, as well as an excellently sensitive perspective on the more subtle emotional aspects of many of the drugs assayed by Shulgin.

If you are one resigned to believe that the drugs came first, not the music, then Shulgin is also the father of modern, MDMA-driven dance music. He sees the war on drugs as a social schism as much as a policy. "I rather suspect that the animosity shown by the authorities towards the possible drug use at raves, is directed more at the people enjoying the raves than at the drugs that may be there. It is an eternal generation thing. The teenagers will gather as a social unit ignoring the demands (or even the advice) of the elders. The elders gather as a group and act in whatever way they can to disrupt the teen-agers. The music may change with the years. I have seen this from the all-night jazz to the swing to the Grateful Dead to techno."

Shulgin is so far ahead of his time that it might be many more generations before some of his ideas are ever fully explored by other seekers, and perhaps there will never be a more prolific alchemist. He has opened more doors than anyone and looked into more universes than many would dare, and few could handle. In the end, Sasha represents the bleeding edge of a humanity on the verge of chaos. He is the last great explorer.