By DRAKE BENNETT
Published: January 30, 2005
"I've always been interested in the machinery of the mental process,'' Shulgin told me not long ago. He has also, from a very young age, loved playing with chemicals. As a lonely 16-year-old Harvard scholarship student soon to drop out and join the Navy, he studied organic chemistry. His interest in pharmacology dates to 1944, when a military nurse gave him some orange juice just before his surgery for a thumb infection. Convinced that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of the glass were a sedative, Shulgin fell unconscious, only to find upon waking that the substance had been sugar. It was a revelatory, tantalizing hint of the mind's odd strength... [link to article]
...Once a Shulgin compound develops a reputation, it is almost invariably placed on the Drug Enforcement Agency's list of Schedule I drugs, those deemed to have no accepted medical use and the highest potential for abuse or addiction. It is therefore rather striking that Shulgin is not only still a free man, but also still at work. His own explanation is that, quite simply, ''I'm not doing anything illegal.'' For more than 20 years, until a government crackdown, he had a D.E.A.-issued Schedule I research license. And many of the drugs in his lab weren't illegal because they hadn't existed until he created them...
...''The Chemical Story,'' is not a story at all, but capsule descriptions of 179 phenethylamines. Each entry includes step-by-step instructions for synthesis, along with recommended dosages, duration of action and ''qualitative comments'' like the following, for 60 milligrams of something called 3C-E: ''Visuals very strong, insistent. Body discomfort remained very heavy for first hour. . . . 2nd hour on, bright colors, distinct shapes -- jewel-like -- with eyes closed. Suddenly it became clearly not anti-erotic. . . . Image of glass-walled apartment building in mid-desert. Exquisite sensitivity. Down by? midnight. Next morning, faint flickering lights on looking out windows...
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