A chemist who also thought about politics
Few researchers understood the relationship between psychoactive substances and power as closely as Sasha Shulgin: after all, it is legislators who decide which molecules may legally exist and which turn their possessors into criminals. Unlike Albert Hofmann, who was more cautious and conservative in the public eye, Shulgin—even while working secluded in his laboratory—remained more in tune with countercultural movements and a specific idea of individual liberty.
Chapter 42 of PIHKAL was born from a pause during his classes at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead of continuing with chemistry, Shulgin dedicated the session to one of the topics that left the deepest personal mark on him: the trajectory of drug policy in his country. What follows is a reconstruction of his arguments, not a literal translation, provided with the necessary context to read them today.
The liberties not found in the Constitution
The United States defines itself as a constitutional republic. Upon the signing of the Constitution and, shortly thereafter, the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights—guarantees were established that Shulgin considers the foundation of the country: freedom of speech and the press, religious freedom, protection against arbitrary searches and seizures, and the right to know the charges against one and to be judged by an impartial tribunal.
His thesis is that there are, in addition, three liberties that were never written into the Constitution but are part of the national self-image: the presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, and the freedom of inquiry. He warns that these three were eroding rapidly, sheltered by a dangerous line of reasoning: that sacrificing rights matters little if it serves a higher goal. That goal, in his time, had a name: winning the “war on drugs.”
“Reasonable suspicion”: a bar set too low
Shulgin focuses on a legal formula he considers particularly abusive: reasonable suspicion. It is a vague criterion, far below the “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for a trial, yet it was enough to trigger searches and seizures.
He provides concrete examples. A Coast Guard vessel could always board a boat to check safety regulations; now, it was enough for them to claim that “something smelled funny” to search it for drugs. If they found nothing, they could detain it for hours or days and dismantle it piece by piece until they found something illegal or grew tired. All based on a simple suspicion.
He also cites a DEA operation against advertisers in High Times magazine who sold hydroponic growing equipment: customer lists were seized and those who had purchased items were visited, assuming they were growing marijuana. After several raids on innocent orchid growers, the police zeal subsided. For Shulgin, the episode portrays a mentality of “presume guilt and let the other party prove otherwise.”
“Just say no”: propaganda disguised as education
In schools, he observes, the effort was directed at repeating a slogan—“just say no”—without any real attempt to inform or give young people the data needed to form their own judgment. The message was reduced to “drugs kill,” with images as famous as the brain turned into a fried egg. Shulgin calls it what it is: it is not education, it is propaganda—the repetition of a slogan to mold behavior. It is, precisely, the opposite of the honest dissemination—including harm reduction—that he demanded.
The scapegoat and the mirage of victory
The very expression “war on drugs,” repeated relentlessly by the press, seems tendentious to him: it evokes two sides and a battle that must be won to “survive as a nation.” Under that framework, he argues, almost every social ill—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, crime, infant mortality, even terrorism—was attributed to the use of illegal drugs, as if everything would be solved by defeating that single enemy.
Here, Shulgin resorts to a deliberately harsh analogy: the persecution of the Jewish population in Nazi Germany, singled out as the cause of the country’s difficulties to forge a national unity that never actually solved anything. He fears that the person who uses drugs was occupying a similar role as a scapegoat, with the risk of consolidating an authoritarian consensus that would cut liberties without addressing the underlying problems.
The figures rarely cited
To measure the scale of the problem, Shulgin contrasted the deaths associated with various substances in the United States of his time. According to the figures he used, only tobacco and alcohol—both legal—were behind more than 500,000 deaths per year; prescription drugs accounted for another 100,000; and the total of all illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, PCP) barely totaled about 5,000. His conclusion: if illegal drugs disappeared overnight, substance-related mortality would drop by about 1%. The remaining 99% would continue to die, but “by legal and socially acceptable means.”
Hence his verdict: this war cannot be won, and the only certain result of trying is losing more liberties. The effort, he argues, should be directed at the causes of problematic use, not just its consequences.
What if the laws were repealed?
Shulgin was accused of saying that using drugs “is fine.” His response was that the country was already flooded with illegal substances accessible to anyone with money, and that prohibition had generated a criminal market and violence comparable to those of the Prohibition era. Repealing the laws, he argued, would not cause a collective orgy: after an initial period of experimentation, things would return to an equilibrium, and the penal system could be reserved for theft, rape, and homicide—the crimes that truly harm others.
His horizon was that of a nonconformist: that every adult should be able to live as they wish in their private sphere—watching television all day, talking to their cats, or using a substance—as long as they do not harm the liberty or well-being of others. The alternative, he said, is a police state capable of offering safe streets only in exchange for the human spirit. He proposed progressively reducing laws on adult consumption, replacing propaganda with truthful information about positive and negative effects, eliminating random urine tests, and redirecting the anti-drug budget toward housing, mental health, and addiction treatment.
Critical reading
Shulgin’s text is a plea, not a study, and it should be read as such. It was written in the United States of the late 20th century, at the height of Reagan-era prohibitionism, and his mortality figures are estimates from that context: they cannot be extrapolated without qualification to other countries or the present, where the opioid crisis, for example, has completely altered the relative weight of each substance. Any current numerical comparison requires recent and well-defined epidemiological data.
The analogy with Nazi persecution is rhetorically powerful but also risky: equating the stigma on consumers with a genocide can illuminate the mechanism of the scapegoat and, at the same time, trivialize the term of comparison. It deserves to be read as a stylistic device, not as a historical equivalence.
Finally, his confidence that, without prohibition, “everything would return to a natural equilibrium” is an optimistic hypothesis rather than a proven fact. Subsequent evidence on models of regulation and decriminalization is nuanced: there are promising results in harm reduction and penal decongestion, but they also depend on the specific design of each policy. What remains valid in Shulgin’s argument is the essential point: an honest drug policy needs truthful information and harm reduction, not slogans; and one should be wary of any “war” that asks for rights to be surrendered in exchange for a victory that never arrives. None of these reflections is equivalent to a recommendation of use: the goal is to understand the debate, not to encourage the use of any substance.
