The Second Psychedelic Revolution Part II: Alexander Shulgin
Via Reality Sandwich
This article is Part Two in a series. Read Part One here.
‘I first explored mescaline in the late '50s, three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me.’ — Alexander Shulgin, LA Times, 1995
If there is ever a Psychedelic Hall of Fame, the section on chemists will be small, since there have only really been two giants in this field — Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD-25 and psilocybin (and later isolated that compound from the magic mushroom specimens provided by R. Gordon Wasson), and Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, who seems to have invented nearly everything else. (So great are the shadows of these two men that twin statues of them facing each other should be the Hall’s entranceway arch.) However when the remarkable volume PiHKAL; A Chemical Love Story [1] first appeared in 1991, few people outside of the psychedelic community in California knew about Sasha and the quiet existence that he and his wife Ann (the co-author of both PiHKAL and TiHKAL) lived; and those that knew of him knew mostly the fact that he was the ‘popularizer’ of the empathogen MDMA.
Read the full article at Reality Sandwich