The Measure of Prejudice
A significant portion of Shulgin’s philosophy stems from an uncomfortable realization: humans have spent millennia seeking out plants and fungi to soothe pain, sustain effort, or peer into their own minds, and only in the 20th century did this search become subject to criminal prosecution. Opium and nightshades for pain; tea, coca, or kola for fatigue; peyote, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and cannabis for introspection: these three families of ancient use coexisted for centuries without reports of collective catastrophes.
Why, then, the modern obsession with prohibiting the third family in particular? Shulgin points to two mechanisms. One is paternalism: the State, in exchange for “taking care” of us, claims the right to decide what we can do with our own consciousness. The other is what he called provincialism—better understood as ethnocentrism: measuring others by the yardstick of one’s own customs. The classic example is alcohol, naturalized in Christian cultures and banned in many Muslim ones, where cannabis has historically found a better home. Each society distributes permissions and condemnations based on its own tradition, not on neutral health criteria.
From this, Shulgin draws a conclusion that should be read with a cool head: by criminalizing indiscriminately, we also renounce potentially useful tools and close the door to researching them. This is a critique of rigid prohibitionism, not an invitation to consume; what he demanded was knowledge, not a free-for-all. Upon this conviction, he built his life as a chemist who synthesized substances and then tested them on himself—a method no ethics committee today would approve, and one that should not be romanticized.
Mescaline: The Benchmark
When Shulgin began his career in the 1950s, psychedelics were enjoying a golden decade in intellectual circles: Huxley was publishing The Doors of Perception, film stars were undergoing LSD therapy, and Albert Hofmann’s molecule was beginning to circulate wrapped in therapeutic promise. Before setting out to create variants, Shulgin wanted to know the classic substance firsthand: mescaline, the active principle of peyote and the historical reference point for this entire family.
This centrality had a technical translation: for years, other molecules were compared in “mescaline units,” a scale of relative potency. Shulgin found this figure insufficient. It served to rank potency, but it said nothing about what truly interested him: the quality of each experience and its unique character. That is why in PIHKAL he dwells on mescaline more than on other substances, describing how its effects changed according to the dosage. Reproducing those figures here would make little sense—this is not a user guide—but the content of those passages is significant.
At lower doses, he describes energy and a certain restlessness, the sensation of hovering near something transcendent without reaching it; with Mozart’s Requiem playing in the background, he experienced an intense aesthetic state and an empathetic outlook that allowed him to contemplate major problems—nuclear energy, hunger—without anguish. At higher doses, the narrative becomes more hallucinatory: faces turning into caricatures, cars appearing to chase one another, colors perceived with overwhelming detail, and a tenderness so overflowing toward small things that he felt unable to pick a flower. In another trial, objects shimmered, and his cat appeared as a dancing figure that eventually dissolved into pure dance without a dancer. PIHKAL also includes a trial by Ann Shulgin, with a tone more aesthetic than philosophical: going out into the street and finding colors and textures intensified, amused by people going about their ordinary lives.
It is best to read these testimonies as what they are: subjective notes from someone who was writing while researching, not clinical descriptions or guarantees that “this is how everyone feels.” The same molecule that gifted him empathy might push another person toward confusion or anxiety.
The Problem Child: From Lab to Street
In the early 1960s, Shulgin tested TMA, which did not convince him, but a small change in its structure led him toward MMDA, which possessed properties he found interesting. Between 1963 and 1964, again starting from TMA, he synthesized DOM, which he tested in very small doses with his inner circle and valued for its intensity.
The problem arose when DOM left his laboratory. Around 1967, it appeared on the street under the name STP—“Serenity, Tranquility, Peace”—and, crucially, in quantities several times higher than those he had handled. Shulgin analyzed samples of that “mystery drug” and recognized his own molecule; over time, the street manufacturing was attributed to chemist Nick Sand. The result was a wave of hospital admissions for prolonged delirious states, including some episodes of serious self-harm under its influence.
The case summarizes a risk that remains relevant today: a substance active at tiny amounts becomes dangerous as soon as it is distributed without dose or purity control. This coincided with the legal crackdown on LSD and psilocybin and the withdrawal of many researchers. It is no coincidence that DOM was referred to as Shulgin’s “problem child,” just as LSD had been Hofmann’s. Even so, Shulgin remained steadfast: he had no intention of abandoning his path.
Chemist on His Own Terms
Shulgin spent a decade at Dow Chemical, but by the mid-sixties, the relationship had soured. He continued to patent, but his findings were psychoactive molecules that had no place in a company focused on insecticides and herbicides. He described the company’s evolution toward his work as a descent from encouragement to tolerance, then to disapproval, and finally to prohibition. When they asked him to stop signing with his name, he began using his home address on articles published in journals like Nature or the Journal of Organic Chemistry, hinting that he was researching at home. At the end of 1966, he took the logical step: setting up his own laboratory and working independently.
During those years, he dedicated time to studying medicine to better understand how substances act on the brain and collaborated briefly on a project whose objective he never fully understood; sensing it pointed toward military applications, he quit. In 1967, he attended an ethnopharmacology congress in San Francisco alongside figures like Andrew Weil, Gordon Wasson, and Richard Evans Schultes. There, during a break, a student told him about some friends’ trial with a certain MDA derivative and how emotionally intense it had been. Shulgin already knew that little-known molecule—he had synthesized it in 1965 without ever testing it. The reader likely intuits which substance we are talking about; it will be the thread of the next installment.
Critical Reading
Shulgin’s biography is often told in a heroic key, that of the solitary “alchemist” who dared to test what he created. It is worth qualifying that epic. His self-trials belong to another era and a research ethic that would be unacceptable today: without independent controls, with the same person acting as designer, subject, and chronicler. As a historical account, it is invaluable; as a model to imitate, it is not.
The DOM episode offers the most practical and current lesson. The leap of a compound from a careful laboratory to an untraceable market—with inflated doses and no analysis—is exactly what turns a manageable molecule into a public health problem. Today, that same dynamic reappears with the new psychoactive substances circulating without control. That is why Shulgin’s most useful legacy is not any recipe, but his insistence that information reduces harm far better than ignorance forced by law. The figures and descriptions he left in writing are documentation, not a manual: individual variability, mixtures, prior mental health, and the real purity of any street substance make extrapolating his accounts to oneself simply a bad idea.
(To be continued)
