Did some googling. Are you talking about MPTP? >The neurotoxicity of MPTP was hinted at in 1976 after Barry Kidston, a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student i

Did some googling. Are you talking about MPTP? >The neurotoxicity of MPTP was hinted at in 1976 after Barry Kidston, a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student in Maryland, US, synthesized MPPP with MPTP as a major impurity and self-injected the result. Within three days he began exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The National Institute of Mental Health found traces of MPTP and other pethidine analogs in his lab. They tested the substances on rats, but due to rodents' tolerance for this type of neurotoxin, nothing was observed. Kidston's Parkinsonism was treated with levodopa but he died 18 months later from a cocaine overdose. Upon autopsy, Lewy bodies and destruction of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra were discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP Seems you were mostly right, with a few caveats: 1. The toxin was an impurity in his synthesis of MPPP, which is a synthetic opioid. 2. He was diagnosed with parkinsonism and treated, but died from a cocaine OD(one wonders whether the cocaine was an attempt at self-medication, or a deliberate suicide attempt). According to the article this case of MPTP-induced parkinsonism has happened again in the 80s, again with tainted batches of MPPP. I'd say this young chemist was more similar to Shulgin than most psychonauts, but he was also skipping steps and clearly had issues with addiction. This would likely be avoided by Shulgin because he'd probably get the chemistry right in the first place. Shulgin also had a lot of pharmacology understanding that allowed him to make educated guesses about what kind of structures might be very dangerous. But he definitely was the first to both synthesise and ingest a lot of these more obscure psychedelic compounds. But he was extremely careful, which is why he lived well into his 80s.