Though formerly separated in another family (Īn (extremely) unexpected nonpsychedelic-related thing, which confuses me. Sure enough, it’s there, and on his prompt I read the definition aloud: “Aardwolf?” I asked, and with that he had already risen from his chair and shuffled into the hallway to retrieve a giant yellow dictionary, which he dropped onto the kitchen table and pushed toward me. He bent down his head and said in a low whisper, “ “I don’t know, I can’t think of another.” I thought for a moment before answering, “Aardvark is one…” We disengaged and, without pause, he began to riddle me: “Can you name the two words in the English language that begin with two consecutive a’s?” I walked through the sliding glass door, greeted him, and then embraced him, which produced a euphoria far greater than that of MDMA and a time dilation more profound than the effects of 2C-T-4. When I arrived at Shulgin’s home in Lafayette, California, he was peacefully sitting at the kitchen table. According to one friend, he was spotted offering to teach the head of Boeing “a new way to fly.” All the while he has maintained his sanity and gentlemanly composure by playing the viola, teaching university classes, and attending elite soirees at Bohemian Grove.ġ A place where, I have a feeling, he has “tasted” many a psychedelic with various captains of industry. Over the course of 50 years, he completed the most exhaustive examination of psychedelic structures ever accomplished and manufactured an array of drugs that rivals the output of many large pharmaceutical companies. He tested each new compound personally and, if he deemed it worthy, on his wife and friends, with a special emphasis on the sex-enhancing properties of psychedelics (or as he calls it, “the erotic”). Once the source was identified, Shulgin’s ties to the company were severed.įree from Dow, Shulgin set up a personal laboratory in his backyard and began researching drugs with complete independence and with the realization that the chemicals he created had the potential to find their way into the heads of at least 1 million people. Unsurprisingly, this made Dow very unhappy. To be a relative of a secret military nerve gas or as the “caviar of psychedelic drugs.” Eventually it was realized that DOM was the product of legitimate pharmaceutical research conducted by a then-unnamed chemist at Dow. At this point the drug was still largely unidentified and was alternately reported in the Police seized $8 million worth of psychedelics, including 1,500 doses of DOM, two marijuana plants, and “numerous mattresses.” Stories of emergency-room DOM freak-outs abounded in the press one user in Manhattan ingested a dose and ritualistically performed seppuku, disemboweling himself with a samurai sword on Mother’s Day. Meanwhile, less than a block from Tompkins Square Park, the NYPD busted down the door of a psychedelic chapel called the Church of the Mystifying Elation in an early-morning raid.

She reminded me that he really does not give interviews anymore and if my meeting with him were to turn into one, it would be his last. Eventually it was decided that I could visit for a few hours before an electrocardiogram appointment. I just wanted a meeting, an informal conversation. After hearing this, I carefully explained that I did not specifically require an interview. Ann told me that Sasha (Shulgin’s friends call him this) no longer grants interviews-he’s conserving his limited energy to finish his last book and work in the lab. We had a conversation she called me “honey,” which I enjoyed tremendously, and unexpectedly had a New Zealand accent. I somehow managed to dial the number and, while I listened to the ring-back chirp two-second bursts of perfectly overlapping sinusoidal waves followed by four-second stretches of exophthalmic silence and yet another sinusoidal ring-back tone, my nose actually began to The type of event that requires careful pre-call meditative deep breathing, positive affirmation, autohypnotic closed-eye success visualizations, and as many as five throat clears. It was the sort of call that you prepare for by jotting down an index card’s worth of dialogue. But he does exist, as I am about to attest.Īfter years of preparation I called the Shulgin residence, ostensibly for an interview. He is more of a mythological creature, a chemical centaur, than he is a real person. Over the span of 50 years he has created more new psychedelic drugs than the Amazon jungle ever has. He is the grandfather of Ecstasy, the molecular magician, the atomic conquistador.

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