Interview: Alexander Shulgin World Famous Developer of Pyschedelic Drugs

by frankiespeakin 5 Replies latest jw friends

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  frankiespeakin

  Link and Clip:

  http://www.mdma.net/alexander-shulgin/21stc.html

  21st Century Highs
  The Future of Psychedelics

  An interview with Alexander T. "Sasha" Shulgin by Dee

  

  Alexander Shulgin is the world's foremost developer and explorer of psychedelic drugs. Born in 1925, this self-described "manic libertarian psychedelic chemist", over the past 30 odd years or so, has been a prolific writer and his publications (150 scientific papers, 20 patents and a handful of books) provide a great introduction into the world of psychedelics and also he is the discover of DOM (at one time known as STP), MMDA and many other psychedelics and is generally regarded as the reinventor or stepfather of MDMA (Ecstasy - E).

  With a PhD in Biochemistry from UC Berkeley, he has been a scientific consultant for such state-run organisations as The US National Institute on Drug Abuse, NASA, the US Drug Enforcement Organisation etc., but in private, has used his government licensed research lab, discreetly, but legally, designing hundreds of new psychoactive compounds, together with his wife Ann and a small, but dedicated research team, who sample each new drug as it's developed. Through cautious escalation of dosage, they discover and map out the range of each new drug's effects, experimenting with the various aspects of their psychological and/or spiritual potential.

  In fact, one of the reasons he decided to write his autobiographical "chemical love story" Pihkal (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and its continuation, Tihkal (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved), published late in 1997 and reviewed in Fringecore 2, was because he could see the need to get a lot of information published into a form that could not be destroyed. The books not only detail Sasha and Ann's remarkable adventures, but also set out recipes for recreating hundreds of Sasha's finely crafted magic molecules.

  Sasha claims to be inspired partly by the history of Wilhelm Reich and considers Castanada to be his model and hero, not only seeing psychedelics as a potential enrichment to everyday life, but also as a means to increasing personal insight and expansion of one's mental and emotional horizons.

  Psychedelics may be best defined as physically non-addictive compounds which temporarily alter the state of one's consciousness. Sasha believes that the use of psychedelic drugs, including the minor risks involved (an occasional difficult experience or perhaps some body malaise) are more than balanced by the potential for learning. He has a strong preference for psychedelics over heroin or cocaine (especially crack), both of which he has tried, because he feels both tend to allow the user to escape from who he or she really is, even to the point, from who you are not. Heroin, in particular, he feels, creates a loss of motivation and alertness and under its influence, nothing seems important to him. Cocaine, on the other hand stimulates a sense of power, but also the inescapable knowledge that it is not true power.

  There is a healthy dose of humour in Sasha's writings and I was looking forward to talking with him about the future of psychedelics and the likely highs for the 21st C.

  Dee: What effect will future users be looking for, particularly in terms of ASC (Altered State of Consciousness)?

  Sasha Shulgin: The effects that will be sought by future users of psychedelic drugs will, I believe, depend on the circumstances of their
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  Satanus

  As an aid in explaining to nondrug spiritual types why 'druggies' can also have spiritual experiences, not that drug use is necesarily spiritual. In most cases, i think it isn't. Also, this thread is soley about psychedelics, which are in a completely different category than opiates.

  Do you think that all of the states of consciousness which psychedelics induce are naturally present in the human or are they sometimes a unique reaction created by the interfacing of the chemicals with the endogenous neurotransmitters?

  S: I am a strong advocate of the hypothesis that psychedelic drugs do not do things, but rather they allow things to happen. All the states of consciousness that can be revealed have always been present within that remarkable organ we call the brain, but we normally remain ignorant of our potentials. There is no way that a few micrograms or milligrams of a simple white solid could have the property of producing a religious experience or of seeing a divine image, all tucked away in its crystalline lattice. It is we, as curious and uninformed individuals, who bring these new states of consciousness into our awareness. The drug is merely the catalyst that lets this happen. All possible states are all with us all the time, and we were simply unaware of them.

  S
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  frankiespeakin

  Satan,

  Shulgin worked for the DEA and was very valueble to them:

  http://www.mdma.net/alexander-shulgin/psychedelic-chemist.html

  So talented a chemist is Shulgin, and so desperate was the government for his knowledge, that for 20 years he possessed a rare license to manufacture any illegal drug. But while working for the DEA and presenting himself as a friend of law enforcement, he quietly carried on a double life, leading a tiny underground movement that continued the radical psychedelic research of the 1960s. After nearly achieving the movement's goal of establishing MDMA as a psychotherapeutic medicine, Shulgin suffered a crushing defeat in the mid-1980s when MDMA, by then known as ecstasy, became an illegal street drug. His reputation destroyed, he was exiled to the margins of his field, where he labored on in private, inventing a dazzling variety of psychedelic drugs.

  By now Shulgin has created more than 100 molecules that produce altered states of consciousness, new ways of thinking, feeling and seeing - making him a kind of Einstein of pharmacology, if not one of the most influential scientists of his time. But even today his work is virtually unknown outside a select West Coast circle. At the age of 78 Shulgin is a ghost to history, mentioned only in passing in a few articles and missing from the scholarly drug books, the result of a careful, lifelong avoidance of the mainstream press as well as a dose of government suppression. But in an era when psychopharmacology is reassessing its past and future, Shulgin's legacy is far from decided. In fact, his influence is growing.

  THE TRUE BELIEVERS

  There is no university lab, no corner office in a glass hospital tower. The world's leading psychedelic chemist lives on a tumbledown property in the hills of Contra Costa County, in a ranch house sewn
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  LittleToe

  And yet, just like Jesus,. they'll not entirely expunge his name from history, and his work will go on

  Fascinating article, thanks.
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  frankiespeakin

  Here something some might like a recorded interview of Alex and his wife,,they have some very interesting things to say.

  http://pot.tv/archive/shows/pottvshowse-798.html
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  frankiespeakin

  Another audio:

  http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2002/09/20020904_b_main.asp