People - Going to a talk by Shulgin on Friday

[Hyperreal]

Heyyyyyyyyyy yeah. Alexander Sasha Shulgin is giving a talk in my town on Friday and I'm going. I'll get to meet the man himself, maybe even ask him a few questions.


What should I ask him about?Future drugs? -FLY compounds? Salvinorin-A? Legal issues? Whether he's still tripping at the age of 79?

[DrugPhreak]

Did he speak about his upcoming book, which deals withopiate-like compounds? He was speaking close to where I live a while back, but I wasn't able to make it. Edited by: DrugPhreak

[Hyperreal]

Trip report:


The talk was due to start at six, so at about twenty to six, I met up with a motley gang of a dozen or so friends, acquainances, friends of acquaintances, psychonauts, heads and friends of heads (All straight and sober, by the way). After a detour to buy a disposable camera for the occasion, we paid €3 in and took our seats at the back. The place was a little over half full when we got in, but I noticed that he front row was empty - nobody ever goes for the front row - so we moved up to the prime seats and waited for the fun to start, discussing drugs and speculating about what The Man would talk about. It was a very weird nostalgic evening for me; I kept running into ghosts from my past, all congregated in one room. I felt myself 'coming up'.


Sasha came out at about 6:15, along with Ann Shulgin and the chairman of the society. I hadn't known Ann was going to be there, because none of the posters had bothered to mention it. Sasha was wearing a dress suit with sandals - what a fuckin' dude. He is an archetypal wise man - with the hair and the beard and a deep, mellodious voice with a gentle American accent. Age has hunched him over slightly, and his hearing seems to be bad, but he is as healthy and sprightly as you could possibly hope to be at 79.


The chairman read the minutes of the last meeting and went through the formalities. He announced that Sasha was going to talk for a few minutes, followed by an open discussion in which the audience could ask Sasha any questions they might have. Here Sasha corrected him, saying that both himself and Ann would take questions, bouncing off each other, taking up each other's points and interrupting each other.


He only talked for about five minutes, just outlining the work he had done over the years. He said he had started out as a chemist with an interest in psychoactive drugs, but not necessarily psychedelics. He was studying hypnotics and sedatives and tranquilizers, when someone introduced him to mescaline. He was given three or four hundred milligrams of the sulfate salt and it was a turning point in his life and career. During the trip, he revisited childhood memories of growing up in Berkeley that he had long forgotten, he remembered playing at a fence behind his house, remembered his father. After he came down, he was amazed at the effect a few hundred milligrams of salt crystals had had on him, but he explained that he thought it would be wrong to attribute the experiences to the crystals, rather the experiences are already present and hidden in the psyche, and the drug can catalyze and unleash the powers of the mind. As a chemist, of course, his imagination was captured by the power of the substance. So he looked at mescaline - 3,4,5-trimethoxy-phenethylamine - and couldn't help wondering what would happen if one were to move the methoxy groups around, or extend the chains, or replace the groups with other things. He started working away at this and testing all these phenethylamine on himself. This work resulted in all sorts of new drugs: DOM, the 2Cs, TMA-2 and others. Later, he discovered the tryptamines, and did the same sort of work on them. He said that hewas often wrongly credited with inventing MDMA. He recounted the history of MDMA, whioch I won't repeat here, as I'm sure you all know the story. He spoke of one chapter in its history wich I had never heard about - thatthe US army conducted studies of its toxicity in animals during the Fifties. He synthesized it in 1965, having heard from someone that it had interesting action in humans.


The floor was then opened to questions. Someone asked what his relationship with the DEA and law-enforcement had been over the years. He was publishing this work in research journals, but when the so-called war on drugs started, the journals became reluctant to publish reports of psychedelic studies in humans. So the only thing to do was to publish independently, which is what became PIHKAL and TIHKAL. Ann said that the reason for publishing the sythesis methods, a move for which they have often been criticized, was that people - mostly, but not exclusively, college students, she said - around the world had been attempting to make these compounds and had been making serious mistakes and producing dangerous compounds. The synthesis, she said, were published for the sake of damage reduction. Sasha said that recently (I think for the past wo years or so) the DEA had banned its members from having any contact with the Shulgins. Because Sasha is a chemist, he has many friends and collegues in the DEA, but for the past few years, if they contact him, they will be automatically fired from their jobs and if he contacts them, they have to report it to their superiors. He said he sometimes appeared in drug cases as an expert witness for the prosecution, which the DEA look favorably on, and that he sometimes appears as an expert witness for the defense, which the DEA don't like. He then turned to Ann and said, "Should I tell them that story about the methamphetamine case in California... the one with the judge?" He has a habit of doing this, checking with Ann before he tells a story. It's hilarious, and oddly endearing, to see a 79-year-old man getting his wife's opinion n little things like that. The story was about one time he was called as an expert witness in a trial involving someone in California who had been arrested for synthesizing some amphetamine. The analog act states that it is illegal to manufacture a drug which is "substantially similar" to a scheduled drug. So the lawyer for the prosecution showed him a structural diagram of methamphetamine, and a structural diagram of whatever it was this guy had been producing, and asked Sasha, "Are these two molecules substantially similar?" Sasha turned to the judge and explained that he didn't understand the question. The judge asked the lawyer to rephrase the question, but of course, he was unable to rephrase it, as he was just repeating what was written in the law. Sasha stepped down from the stand and the lawyer called another chemist who confirmed that the two molecules were "substantially similar" and the defendant was found guilty and went to jail. Sasha referred to George Orwell's claim that fighting a war that can't be won helps keep the population under control, but twice as effective is to fight two wars that can't be won, such as the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. In a war on drugs, he asked, what constitutes victory? Ann said she was surprised that the US government had failed to learn the ignorance of prohibition from the attempt to prohibit alcohol, which led to the rise of the gangs, and did so much more harm than good.


Somebody then asked him if he had experienced any ill-effects from ecstasy (most of the people at the talk weren't familiar with Shulgin's work, of course, and saw him mostly as 'the godfather of ecstasy'). Sasha said that he didn't know what 'ecstasy' was; he was familiar with MDMA, but the term 'ecstasy' is imprecise and he couldn't comment on such a drug. "The bad effects of MDMA..." he mused, evidently trying to remember if there were any, "well... I suppose there was a certain amount of tooth-grinding, which can easily be solved by placing a rag in the mouth." This was greeted with laughter and applause. Ann went a bit more into the issue, saying that a lot of people reported a headache or a feeling of depression the day after doing pills. She said that the depression had no physiological cause, that it occurs in people whose lives aren't going well and who know it, because with MDMA they are shown how they should feel, and it should be like, and the return to baseline makes them despair. (Ann Shulgin seemed to know a bit about psychology. She said she ad done two-and-a-half years of amateur psychotherapy work.) As for the headache, that seemed to be an effect of the impurities or else of dehydration. Sasha said that when one starts doing MDMA, there's a certain magic present, be it on the 1st time or the 2nd or the 10th, and that with repeated usage, while MDMA still has effects, that magic is gone, and there was no way he knew of to make it return. (I've heard it said that about 500mg of 5-HTP beforehand will do just that.)


Someone asked Sasha if he agreed with Rick Strassman's assessment of DMT in his book The Spirit Molecule, whether he thought DMT was a particularly special drug. Sasha said that he thought DMT was special and unique, but only in the same way that every drug is special and unique. He said his own experience with DMT was that it was nothing extraordinary, that it did give intense visuals and thought distortion, and that while it will make you lie on your bed tripping out for half an hour, one has a sense of 'who cares' towards these effects. 5-MeO-DMT, he said, he found far more interresting. I must say, my own experience of DMT concurs with Shulgin's. He said an interesting side-note on DMT is that it is one of the only drugs that occurs naturally in the body. This indicates, he said, that it must have some physiological role, but what it does is as yet unknown.


Somebody asked Sasha what drug had had the most effect on him as a person. He said he was reluctant to pick a 'favorite drug', which is something he's often asked, because each drug is unique and because he doesn't use any drugs regularly, rather he just experiments with new ones. He said that one drug both he and Ann had really enjoyed was 2C-B. There were a few whoops of agreement from the audience at this remark. Ann said that 2C-B had proved successful following MDMA psychotherapy, to supplement the MDMA and add a new element after the patient had gotten too used to MDMA alone.


The next question (obviously from a non-user) was that throughout the discusssion, people had been saying that drug experiences come from one's own psyche, but was it not more likely that they were in fact a distortion or a misrepresentation of one's real mind. Sasha ssaid that the working of our minds are largely hidden to us, but altered states can shed some light on what's going on in the brain. Then he turns to Ann: "Should I tell them that story about the five schizophrenics?" He recounted an experiment that scanned the brains of five schizophrenic patients and five control subjects while nder the influence of some drug. (I forget what the drug was.) The results showed no visible pattern; each of the ten scans looked completely unique, and there was no way of telling which were schizophrenics and whih were not. But the funny thing was when one of the control subjects saw the ten scans, he said, "I bet I can tell which one's mine." And, indeed, he was able to correctly pick out the scan of his own brain from the ten. When asked how he did it, he replied, "You see that star-shaped thing there? I see that the whole time!"
Another example he gave of how drugs canmanifest the mysterious mechanations the brain was to be seen in the auditory effects of DPT. DPT affects thesound centres of the brain in such a waythat every sound is lowered in frequency. The weird thing, though, is that the decrease in frequency is not propotional, but rather by the same factorfor everysound. For example, if you were hearing note of 100 and 50 cycles per second, they wouldnot both be halved to 50 and 25 cycles, which would just soundlike sounds were getting deeper. Rather, every sound is lowered by 43 cycles per second, so they would become 57 and 7 cycles per second. This means that the usual harmony of sound goes completely haywire and music sound discordant. What can tis tell us about how the brain processes sound?


Somebody asked if chemicals that occur naturally in the body could be used as drugs. Ann said that she thought it was possible to get hgh through certain forms of meditation - she said she wasn't sure exactly which ones - by controlling the release of endogenous chemicals like dopamine, serotonin or DMT. She said she knew of a hypnotherapist who specialized in putting people in trance states and then bringing them back to the state of mind they had experienced with MDMA, just by suggestion.


Someone asked Sasha when he used a test subject for a new drug and when he used himself. Ann said, "Oh, he always uses himself." Sasha looked shocked at the idea, and said that he would never dream of giving someone an uknown compound without first trying it out on himself. He said the thing to do was, if you don't know about a compound, to start out at a tiny dose, maybe in the microgram level, just to be sure, and then next week, if that doesn't work, to take double the does, and so on, working your way up.


Someone asked him if he had ever come close to dying from all his drug use. Ann said, "Well, we've thought we were dying." "Should I tell them that story about stopping the clock?" Sasha asked his wife. He told us about one experiment (he always refers to doing drugs as an 'experiment', rather than the usual terms 'tripping' or 'partying') when they had both stated looking at a clock to gauge their perception of time. When the second hand was at the minute, time was moving normally, but with each passing second it slowed a little. "By ten seconds it was really quite slow. By 17 or 18 seconds it seemed to be about to stop entirely. We both started thinking 'if time stops, then our hearts have stopped, then we're dead'..." Ann interrupted him here, "What do you mean, we were both thinking it? HE was thinking it!" His life was saved, as it were, by a time-bubble which came down between him and the clock, so that although time outside had stopped, he could live normally in a different time-frame. I had to wonder, if that's the closest he's come to dying in over forty years of drug use, how dangerous can these substances be?


There was a question about where the war on drugs and the legal situation was likely to go in the future. Sasha said that with the Internet had come a new and strange market trading internationally in controlled and uncontrolled drugs. Hesaid that someone had e-mailed him asking him about 5-MeO-DALT. Sasha e-mailed the guy the relevant chapter from his forthcoming book, which is in the same format as a chapter of PIHKAL or TIHKAL, and includes a synthesis. Then the guy posted it on his website, without Shulgin's prior knowledge or consent, and, although he thought better of it and took it down after two weeks, the drug was being manufactured in China and sold on the Internet within three months! As for current drug laws, Sasha said they should all be repealed, while there is an obvious need for restrictions on who can take drugs and when and where.


There was a question about whether the drugs that hae been particularly demonized - like heroin or crack cocaine - have a possible legitimate potential as recreational drugs. Ann said she and Sasha disagreed on this point. She believed that addicitve drugs didn't have any legitimate application. She recounted the story of some of her daughter's friends (the Shulgins have four children and eight grandchildren) who had started using heroin at weekends, because it was relaxing and blissful. Somehow, and she didn't know the details, they had started using it mre often, like twice a week, then three times a week, until they were full-blown addicts and it took them many years to recover. They had set themselves a limit and then broken it. She said the advantage of psychedelics is that, with very few exceptions, they are not addictive. One exception, and a drug she is very wary of, is ketamine. She said she had seen people fall into ketamine addiction when they had started off looking for a mind-expanding experience, She said, "I haven't tried it yet. I will try it some time, because I'm always saying bad things about it." What a fucking cool thing to say! She said Sasha had a mantra, "There is no casual experiment" which should be considered with addictive drugs. Sasha said that he thought heroin, for example, could have recreational applications, if use was properly limited. He said he preferred the term 'dependancy' to 'addiction' or 'habituation', as it could then be seperated into the psychological and the physiological.


The last question was from an anti-drug warrior, who seemed to be taking notes, possibly she was a journalist. (I hadbeen trying to get a question in, about new or future compounds Sasha knew about, but the chairman seemed to have something against me, and I never got to ask.) She said that, contrary to all the talk of people using drugs to expand their minds and help themselves in life, the facty of the matter was that people today used drugs self-destructively. I thought this was a bit of a stupid question, given that she was surrounded by people who have used drugs to enhance their lives, both the Shulgins and the audience. Sasha gave the example of the peyote cults of America, and Ann said that people who use psychedelics self-destructively do so because they are in that sort of set in their lives.She had heard of youngsters going on a binge of every psychedelic and psychotropic drug they had heard of and winding up dead, because that's what they'd been trying to do. The prohibitionist said that peyote cults were different from modern drug use, because "in the East, they live in a more symbolic lifestyle." What the fuck?! The audience decided not to allow, any more of this nonsense, and cut her off with loud applause.


After the talk, everyone crowded around the Shulgins, eager for autographs, photographsor knowledge. I edged forward into a cabal gathered around this white mane of drug wisdom, and took a peripheral role in the discussion of Internet drug trading and other topics. I got a few photos with Sasha and Ann. I then turned in conversation to someone I had met at the talk


It was a good talk, a good night, he did not speak specifically about his forthcoming book.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good report

[TranceAddict]

Amazing. For some strange reason I honor this man, Alexander Sasha
Shulgin, and I think the few people I have told this to think I'm weird
because of it. Someone who has as he put 'experimented' with so many
substances amazes me. What a life!

[freakybass]

Who was there ? Students ? researcher ? politics ?

[Hyperreal]

It was a college talk, but open to the public. Mostly students, a few journalists

[DrugPhreak]

That’s probably the best synopsis I have ever read! I felt like I was there! Thanks Hyperreal!

[joachimist]

i would really have loved to be there !

thank you for the report !

[Iggypoop]

Shulgin is the man! Its crazy, he must be the best advertisement for drugs evr! 79 and still going strong. If only more people would take his viewpoint on drugs the world would most definitely be a better place!


Brilliant synopsis btw as well

[DrugPhreak]

Shulgin whipping up a batch....

[Peyote]

GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAT POST!! Beautiful!! Nice reading..!! Thanks alot dude.

[QGdoxl]

Loved it thanks!

[poweredbyhate]

Thanks for the post, Hyperreal. I've been doing a bit of reading
on Shulgin, and it's really nice to hear from somebody who got to see
him speak. He really is a remarkable guy, and your synopsis was
really interesting to read. Thanks!

[Muirner]

Great post, i felt like i was sitting next to you listning to the questions and the talk. How'd you remember all the questions and such did u write them down? or are you just that damn good. What did u end up scoring after the talk?


Great post

Muirner

[Hyperreal]

or are you just that damn good. What did u end up scoring after the talk?

I'm just that damn good..... and they say drugs impair your memory! If they weren't illegal, I would have bought some MDMA (pure crystal form, oh yeah) and some microdots of acid.

[enquirewithin]

Thanks for that very i</span>nfomative post, Hyperreal. I am green with envy-- on two counts!

[billbong]

SHULGIN Brill man Second to Leary imho though

[enquirewithin]

Shugin second to Leary</span>. Wow! They are very </span>different.
Leary was 'a hero of consciousness' in Allen Ginsberg's words, but
Leary was political as well. Where Leary was rash and flamboyant,
Shulgin was quite and methodical. Leary changed and really stopped
using drugs to alter his consciousness in his old age. Shulgin carries
on, reliable and sane, still giving to the world even now.