33 ms·

Alexander Shulgin has died

590 points by infinity 12y ago

whtrbt 12y ago
That's sad to hear - Pikhal and Tikhal are fascinating works, and reading them I got the sense that he was a very kind, patient and curious person.
allworknoplay 12y ago
I had dinner with him once at a conference; he was amazing. When asked about the safety of self-testing novel substances (he of course starts at insanely low doses, but still), he said that he's learned to identify the signs of grand mal seizures, and if he feels one coming on, he simply sticks himself with a couple hundred miligrams of phenobarbital, straps himself in, and goes for a ride. Then he gets back to work.
- weatherlight 12y ago
  That's awesome.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Why?
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      I'd venture that it's because "he said that he's learned to identify the signs of grand mal seizures, and if he feels one coming on, he simply sticks himself with a couple hundred milligrams of phenobarbital, straps himself in, and goes for a ride. Then he gets back to work." How is it not awesome that someone can detect and prevent a major infirmity with such nonchalance and grit?
      - linker3000 12y ago
        "How is it not awesome that someone can detect and prevent a SELF INFLICTED major infirmity with such nonchalance" A bit like being impressed by a surgeon's ability to fix up his own femoral artery when he deliberately shoots himself in the groin. Hmm, it's a fine line...
        knockGnock 12y ago
        sure if the surgeon had shot himself as part of an experiment that would teach the world something. the line - and the observation frankly - look pretty thick otherwise.
        WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        Where can I read about the fact that he decided to give himself grand mal seizures?
        allworknoplay 12y ago
        start with pihkal and tihkal; they discuss his methodologies.
        WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        I imagine that obtaining those books might get me put onto a certain government list or two based on what I read at Wikipedia (but thanks anyway! ... just kidding - I don't really know :) > In 1994, two years after PIHKAL was published, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided Shulgin's lab and requested that he turn over his DEA license. Richard Meyer, spokesman for DEA's San Francisco Field Division, has stated in reference to PIHKAL "It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books," suggesting that the publication of PIHKAL and the termination of Shulgin's license may have been related. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL#Impact_.26_popularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL#Impact_.26_popularity
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
waterfowl 12y ago
what a legend. One of the few people who actually bases their opinions of psychoactives on controlled experiences with them.
Nursie 12y ago
One of my heroes has died today. RIP to a great chemist and experimenter.
fear91 12y ago
It's a great shame. I recommend the "Dirty Pictures" - a documentary about his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5q1bBVzDpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5q1bBVzDpc
- Lapsa 12y ago
  thanks for sharing the link
codeshaman 12y ago
Some of the most amazing moments I've had in life were on MDMA. I'm sure this is true for hundreds of millions of other people who've taken it. This substance has revolutionised our word in many ways - music, fashion, art, architecture, etc. Apart from MDMA, Shulgin has synthesised, experimented with and wrote about countless substances and plants which affect the mind or spirit. A great explorer, and from what I've read, a great human being as well. Rest in peace & Keep exploring ;)
- bemused 12y ago
  http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020....
  - dfc 12y ago
    Can you provide some context for this link?
    - bemused 12y ago
      there are more suited places to talk about things like this, but since the OP was talking about MDMA and mentions "countless substances" - this is quite a nice one https://www.google.de/#q=shulgins+favourite+drug https://www.google.de/#q=shulgins+favourite+drug although you could argue that synthesising and experimenting with unknown substances might have been his real favourite thing
ph4 12y ago
A one of a kind, once in a generation human being.
jongold 12y ago
How many people can say they've altered the course of human conciousness? What a hero. RIP.
- sehr 12y ago
  MDMA is growing more and more popular as we speak, quickly replacing cocaine's position as the most popular party drug in my experience. His biggest contributions are probably yet to be seen tbh, an entire generation is growing up alongside them
  - h1karu 12y ago
    MDMA is a party drug that longs to live a straight life.. see the video I posted elsewhere in this thread.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      Aye. Everything I've read seems to suggest that the various mental malfunctions I have would be greatly improved by occasional, monitored uses of MDMA, but I'm rather apprehensive about even approaching such a thing due to the fact that it is schedule one. It's a complete and utter shame that the DEA is clinging to now-discredited research as to why even research on the chemical shouldn't be performed.
      - h1karu 12y ago
        Occasional, unmonitored use changed my life for the better no question about it, and I still feel that way even though I haven't touched it in years. I can't think of another drug that I could say that about. If you're waiting around for the DEA to decide to write you a permission slip then you may end up waiting for the rest of your life. The government probably views this drug as the most dangerous one in existence and I'll try to explain why: MDMA seems to have the power to help people heal psychological wounds and come together despite their differences, but that's a nightmare for a government who rather have populations remain afraid of one another, fighting with one another, and relying on the government to solve their problems. The government sees it's role as manifesting order out of chaos, and if people are not psychologically conflicted and fighting with one another then a day might come when they begin to feel that they can work together to solve problems on their own without the need for nearly as much government supervision.
h1karu 12y ago
RIP to one of the true heros of our generation. thank you Alexander Shulgin! gone by not forgotten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8
azurelogic 12y ago
The original brain hacker is no longer with us. RIP Dr. Shulgin.
idm 12y ago
MDMA may have been discovered in a Merck laboratory, but Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin devised an excellent DIY MDMA synthesis that could be attempted outside a laboratory environment. Shulgin has been accused of intentionally designing his MDMA synthesis in ways that may have reduced yields, but which utilized precursors that were simpler to obtain by DIY chemists. Shulgin's decisions to facilitate DIY may be responsible for the proliferation of MDMA, which will only increase in importance as MDMA is given more attention in mainstream psychological research. As a psychologist myself, I suspect Shulgin's gentle subversion (a spirit that persists through PiHKAL and TiHKAL) will ultimately be viewed as a heroic act that brought attention to an important therapeutic tool.
- cnp 12y ago
  Amazing, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this fact. Discovering MDMA a few years ago has had nothing but positive effects for just about everyone I know and knowing that he was using his expertise in order to help facilitate that is just so (so) cool.
  - leephillips 12y ago
    I'll admit I don't know much about this, but Sam Harris says that while he had good experiences with MDMA in the past, he warns people against it now because the evidence is clear that it's a neurotoxin.
    - cnp 12y ago
      This is still very (very) much in dispute. You will find serious scientific evidence on both sides arguing for and against, but since three beers floors me the next day and completely destroys my ability to think clearly, where MDMA refreshes and revitalizes pretty much every mental and sensory organ, I'll just go with my own findings on the matter :) This is the article I always like to post whenever the discussion comes up: "Pure MDMA can be 'safe' for adults", says BC's top health official http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pure-ecstasy-can-be-safe-for-adults-health-official-says-1.1229517 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pure-ecstasy-... ...And this video from 60 Minutes ("Ecstasy Rising") pretty much describing the demonization of MDMA as an elaborate government frame-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpFqJcJcps&feature=kp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpFqJcJcps&feature=kp
sehr 12y ago
Whether or not you approve, this man had changed the face of human kind forever. An amazing man, will be missed
raaxe 12y ago
"(with 100 mg) I had weighed correctly. I had simply picked up the wrong vial. And my death was to be a consequence of a totally stupid mistake. I wanted to walk outside, but there was a swimming pool there and I didn't dare fall into it. A person may believe that he has prepared himself for his own death, but when the moment comes, he is completely alone, and totally unprepared. Why now? Why me? Two hours later, I knew that I would live after all, and the experience became really marvelous. But the moment of facing death is a unique experience. In my case, I will some day meet it again, and I fear that I will be no more comfortable with it then than I was just now. This was from the comments of a psychologist who will, without doubt, use psychedelics again in the future, as a probe into the unknown." http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020....
- bemused 12y ago
  Please note that these extended comments in Pihkal are not based on personal experience by Shulgin, but from letters he received from other persons. His approach to testing new substances has been a very careful (scientific) one - you will barely find any reports like this in Pihkal/Tihkal among his own comments
  - raaxe 12y ago
    Ah, I had no idea - thanks for the correction. Either way, it's a lovely passage.
  - samwilliams 12y ago
    While some of the commentary is not from himself or Anne, some of it was. I believe the quoted experience was not Alex Shulgin's though.
jMyles 12y ago
I had the incredible fortune to have met Sasha and Ann several times, and always enjoyed their company enormously. Good work, man!
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  Story time?
weatherlight 12y ago
A true pioneer.
VonGuard 12y ago
An amazing man. Truly the Copernicus of his time: persecuted for his pursuit of science. In 100 years, this man will be considered one of the most important neural science researchers ever.
- blhack 12y ago
  Persecuted by whom? He had a DEA schedule 1 license, meaning he could pursue whatever research he wanted, and he was seemingly universally loved by everyone who knew who he was.
  - VonGuard 12y ago
    The DEA eventually got upset with him and took away that license, raided his house, and ruined his lab. In the end, they closed him down based on a single reading of slightly elevated mercury levels in his yard. Read his books.
    - blhack 12y ago
      Wow, I did not know that. That's nuts. Although it sounds like he just violated the terms of the license: http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/shulgin_alexander_raid.shtml http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/s...
      - VonGuard 12y ago
        Yeah, well, they'd never bothered him until he wrote 2 books that contained the recipes for making lots of psychedelic drugs. Shortly after publishing these books (TIHKAL and PIHKAL) the DEA came down on him. In his book he writes that it was very, very clear someone had basically flipped the switch at the DEA and said "shut him down any way you can." The fact that it was the mercury readings in his soil points to the fact they were grasping at straws, especially because they took dozens of soil samples and only one was mildly above normal limits. The DEA was pissed at him for disseminating knowledge, and after they took his license, he basically stopped doing chemistry full time.
alx 12y ago
"The Shulgin Rating Scale is a simple scale for reporting the subjective effect of psychoactive substances at a given dosage, and at a given time. The system was developed for research purposes by the American biochemist Alexander Shulgin and detailed in his book PiHKAL" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulgin_Rating_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulgin_Rating_Scale PLUS FOUR (++++) [...] If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.
pmoriarty 12y ago
The BBC obituary on Shulgin[1] calls him the "Godfather of Ecstasy"[2], but he was far more than that. He synthesized and carefully chronicled the effects of hundreds of psychoactive compounds on himself and a small, dedicated core group of explorers of human consciousness. His efforts were published in two massive, definitive tomes called PiHKAL[3][4] and TiKHAL[5][6], the titles of which stand for "Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved" and "Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved", respectively. These volumes contained detailed chemical synthesis instructions for the compounds he created, along with "trip reports" and ratings[7] of the compounds' psychoactivity, ranging from: PLUS / MINUS (+/-) "The level of effectiveness of a drug that indicates a threshold action. If a higher dosage produces a greater response, then the plus/minus (+/-) was valid. If a higher dosage produces nothing, then this was a false positive." to PLUS FOUR (++++) "A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a 'peak experience', a 'religious experience,' 'divine transformation,' a 'state of Samadhi' and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment." His chemistry lab was DEA-licensed to handle "illegal" (scheduled) compounds, though he often synthesized entirely novel compounds which were not scheduled because neither the compounds nor the laws scheduling them existed yet. Shulgin tirelessly educated the public and the law-enforcement community on the effects and value of psychedelic and psychoactive compounds, and wrote a highly informative Q&A column.[7] Shulgin's pioneering work inspired generations of chemists, self-experimenters, and explorers. He was well known, loved, and respected as one of the most highly accomplished psychedelic chemists in history. His presence and guidance will be deeply missed. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin [2] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27676669 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27676669 [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL [4] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.sht... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIHKAL [6] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.sht... [7] - http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html
Nanzikambe 12y ago
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” RIP Shulgin, a singular being.
jjj222 12y ago
Today I work in IT security- in my former life, he was a great inspiration. I had almost forgotten him..... I was in a closed circle of psychonauts, we where about 60 people. We would get our hands on the most exotic substances and share amongst us, and compare trip reports. It was my entire life, 2cb,2ci,2c-t7,2ce,DIPT,5-meo dipt, lsd etc. So I have tried many of hes creations, and i idolised him. Then in 6 months 4 of the group died, 1 suicide, 3 ODs(not on any of shulgins creations of course). Then I quitted, dropped all my friends, started taking life seriously.... But I have one thing to remind of that time in my life...a book I inherited from one of my now dead friends: http://i.imgur.com/S2pCuux.jpg http://i.imgur.com/S2pCuux.jpg He actually wrote with Shulgin himself, doing experiments using cactusses injected with ummm...some variety of DMT I think- to make the cactus metabolise it into something else. Shulgin adviced him, and my friend did the experiments. RIP DEX! RIP SHULGIN!
- tumanian 12y ago
  Unrelated, but your book collection is old school.
  - jjj222 12y ago
    They all represent periods of my life :)
- serf 12y ago
  >Enterprise Java with UML Man, if I were you i'd have gotten back into the drugs at that point. (I kid)
  - jjj222 12y ago
    well...then c,c++, then learning to code secure-then reverse engineering and exploit writing- it kinda makes sence, dosnt it? :)
    - ultramancool 12y ago
      It does actually. That looks like a great bookshelf to me.
contingencies 12y ago
Can we start a crowdfunding campaign for a museum of ecstasy with legal public samples? Anyone know German law? How would this go down in Darmstadt, where it was first discovered by Merck? I for one will donate significantly.
- j_jochem 12y ago
  I haven't seen any drug samples behind bullet-proof glass yet at the Mathildenhöhe exhibition (the expressionism display only had old Merck Cocaine adverts), but I imagine it should be possible to get an exemption permit.
andywood 12y ago
Would somebody be kind enough to tell me whether I've been hell-banned? Thank you.
- gweinberg 12y ago
  Evidently not.
- owenversteeg 12y ago
  Why did you think you were?
  - andywood 12y ago
    I just have been having trouble with Paul's software, and thought I was being moderated unintentionally. I forgot there's dang now. He seems kind of new to an "old timer" like me :)
- dang 12y ago
  Please email hn@ycombinator.com with such questions. We always answer, though not always immediately, and I hope we're always nice. Your last comment was killed because it was a duplicate of your previous comment. We've unkilled it.
igivanov 12y ago
With all the praise of self-experiments (or experiments on a dedicated core group), there is this fact: we know that even a single use of a psychedelic drug may be "a life-changing experience". We also know that some substances may cause irreversible changes in the brain (e.g. glue-sniffing). So IMHO it doesn't sound like a rigorous science, who knows what changes those countless tests had caused and how those changes affected subsequent tests.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  Evidently the "100% of users experience instant terribly painful hyper-death" mantra many would like to believe just isn't true. His book is mainly case reports, but that doesn't mean that higher level evidence doesn't exist.
rurban 12y ago
Not to be mixed up with Alexei Shulgin, the popular internet artist from Moscow: http://www.easylife.org/ http://www.easylife.org/ He is well and alive.
dmerrick 12y ago
My favorite quotation from the man: "How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it."
- mzemel 12y ago
  I believe the 'veil' he references is from this poem by Shelley (which he quotes in PiHKAL): "Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear."
dzhiurgis 12y ago
It would be interedting to have 'Ask HN' about drug use, especially correlated with age. Jobs has taken many different drugs, but I can't stop wondering how long did he continue to do so. I really doubt he did any after age of 30 or so.
dingdingdang 12y ago
WIP, there is no death
Myrmornis 12y ago
I believe he was a hero.
muloka 12y ago
Cross posting this for Erowid: --- We are trying to collect a record of all tweets and retweets of hashtag: #ThanksSasha and #Shulgin We want to continue to track these. So we don't want just an output, but a way to grab all existing tweets and collect them going forward. We would also like to grab google plus matching posts as well, but twitter is the first target. If someone has PHP and twitter experience, it seems like a pretty easy application to write a scraper that saves the data to sql, xml, or text. We want a downloadable data file that can be updated over time. I spent a while looking for existing tools and didn't find anything that could provide a downloadable, reliable format that we could use to try to track this. Thanks for any help or suggestions of services that would provide that data as a lump, without having to have one of us manually slog through many, many clicks and parsing extremely obscure HTML/js. earth earth@erowid.org
- ChristianBundy 12y ago
  As much as I love Erowid, I've had an impossible time trying to contact them for using their experience vault for research. I have the time and the skillset to make the application they're looking for, but I highly doubt Earth would get back to me.
danelectro 12y ago
it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do
danelectro 12y ago
it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do

590 points by infinity 12y ago

That's sad to hear - Pikhal and Tikhal are fascinating works, and reading them I got the sense that he was a very kind, patient and curious person.

allworknoplay 12y ago

I had dinner with him once at a conference; he was amazing. When asked about the safety of self-testing novel substances (he of course starts at insanely low doses, but still), he said that he's learned to identify the signs of grand mal seizures, and if he feels one coming on, he simply sticks himself with a couple hundred miligrams of phenobarbital, straps himself in, and goes for a ride. Then he gets back to work.

weatherlight 12y ago
That's awesome.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Why?
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    I'd venture that it's because "he said that he's learned to identify the signs of grand mal seizures, and if he feels one coming on, he simply sticks himself with a couple hundred milligrams of phenobarbital, straps himself in, and goes for a ride. Then he gets back to work." How is it not awesome that someone can detect and prevent a major infirmity with such nonchalance and grit?
    - linker3000 12y ago
      "How is it not awesome that someone can detect and prevent a SELF INFLICTED major infirmity with such nonchalance" A bit like being impressed by a surgeon's ability to fix up his own femoral artery when he deliberately shoots himself in the groin. Hmm, it's a fine line...
      - knockGnock 12y ago
        sure if the surgeon had shot himself as part of an experiment that would teach the world something. the line - and the observation frankly - look pretty thick otherwise.
      - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        Where can I read about the fact that he decided to give himself grand mal seizures?
        allworknoplay 12y ago
        start with pihkal and tihkal; they discuss his methodologies.
        WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        I imagine that obtaining those books might get me put onto a certain government list or two based on what I read at Wikipedia (but thanks anyway! ... just kidding - I don't really know :) > In 1994, two years after PIHKAL was published, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided Shulgin's lab and requested that he turn over his DEA license. Richard Meyer, spokesman for DEA's San Francisco Field Division, has stated in reference to PIHKAL "It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books," suggesting that the publication of PIHKAL and the termination of Shulgin's license may have been related. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL#Impact_.26_popularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL#Impact_.26_popularity
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

waterfowl 12y ago

what a legend. One of the few people who actually bases their opinions of psychoactives on controlled experiences with them.

Nursie 12y ago

One of my heroes has died today. RIP to a great chemist and experimenter.

fear91 12y ago

It's a great shame. I recommend the "Dirty Pictures" - a documentary about his life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5q1bBVzDpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5q1bBVzDpc

Lapsa 12y ago
thanks for sharing the link

codeshaman 12y ago

Some of the most amazing moments I've had in life were on MDMA. I'm sure this is true for hundreds of millions of other people who've taken it. This substance has revolutionised our word in many ways - music, fashion, art, architecture, etc. Apart from MDMA, Shulgin has synthesised, experimented with and wrote about countless substances and plants which affect the mind or spirit. A great explorer, and from what I've read, a great human being as well. Rest in peace & Keep exploring ;)

bemused 12y ago
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020....
- dfc 12y ago
  Can you provide some context for this link?
  - bemused 12y ago
    there are more suited places to talk about things like this, but since the OP was talking about MDMA and mentions "countless substances" - this is quite a nice one https://www.google.de/#q=shulgins+favourite+drug https://www.google.de/#q=shulgins+favourite+drug although you could argue that synthesising and experimenting with unknown substances might have been his real favourite thing

ph4 12y ago

A one of a kind, once in a generation human being.

jongold 12y ago

How many people can say they've altered the course of human conciousness? What a hero. RIP.

sehr 12y ago
MDMA is growing more and more popular as we speak, quickly replacing cocaine's position as the most popular party drug in my experience. His biggest contributions are probably yet to be seen tbh, an entire generation is growing up alongside them
- h1karu 12y ago
  MDMA is a party drug that longs to live a straight life.. see the video I posted elsewhere in this thread.
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    Aye. Everything I've read seems to suggest that the various mental malfunctions I have would be greatly improved by occasional, monitored uses of MDMA, but I'm rather apprehensive about even approaching such a thing due to the fact that it is schedule one. It's a complete and utter shame that the DEA is clinging to now-discredited research as to why even research on the chemical shouldn't be performed.
    - h1karu 12y ago
      Occasional, unmonitored use changed my life for the better no question about it, and I still feel that way even though I haven't touched it in years. I can't think of another drug that I could say that about. If you're waiting around for the DEA to decide to write you a permission slip then you may end up waiting for the rest of your life. The government probably views this drug as the most dangerous one in existence and I'll try to explain why: MDMA seems to have the power to help people heal psychological wounds and come together despite their differences, but that's a nightmare for a government who rather have populations remain afraid of one another, fighting with one another, and relying on the government to solve their problems. The government sees it's role as manifesting order out of chaos, and if people are not psychologically conflicted and fighting with one another then a day might come when they begin to feel that they can work together to solve problems on their own without the need for nearly as much government supervision.

h1karu 12y ago

RIP to one of the true heros of our generation. thank you Alexander Shulgin! gone by not forgotten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8

azurelogic 12y ago

The original brain hacker is no longer with us. RIP Dr. Shulgin.

idm 12y ago

MDMA may have been discovered in a Merck laboratory, but Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin devised an excellent DIY MDMA synthesis that could be attempted outside a laboratory environment. Shulgin has been accused of intentionally designing his MDMA synthesis in ways that may have reduced yields, but which utilized precursors that were simpler to obtain by DIY chemists. Shulgin's decisions to facilitate DIY may be responsible for the proliferation of MDMA, which will only increase in importance as MDMA is given more attention in mainstream psychological research. As a psychologist myself, I suspect Shulgin's gentle subversion (a spirit that persists through PiHKAL and TiHKAL) will ultimately be viewed as a heroic act that brought attention to an important therapeutic tool.

cnp 12y ago
Amazing, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this fact. Discovering MDMA a few years ago has had nothing but positive effects for just about everyone I know and knowing that he was using his expertise in order to help facilitate that is just so (so) cool.
- leephillips 12y ago
  I'll admit I don't know much about this, but Sam Harris says that while he had good experiences with MDMA in the past, he warns people against it now because the evidence is clear that it's a neurotoxin.
  - cnp 12y ago
    This is still very (very) much in dispute. You will find serious scientific evidence on both sides arguing for and against, but since three beers floors me the next day and completely destroys my ability to think clearly, where MDMA refreshes and revitalizes pretty much every mental and sensory organ, I'll just go with my own findings on the matter :) This is the article I always like to post whenever the discussion comes up: "Pure MDMA can be 'safe' for adults", says BC's top health official http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pure-ecstasy-can-be-safe-for-adults-health-official-says-1.1229517 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/pure-ecstasy-... ...And this video from 60 Minutes ("Ecstasy Rising") pretty much describing the demonization of MDMA as an elaborate government frame-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpFqJcJcps&feature=kp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNpFqJcJcps&feature=kp

sehr 12y ago

Whether or not you approve, this man had changed the face of human kind forever. An amazing man, will be missed

raaxe 12y ago

"(with 100 mg) I had weighed correctly. I had simply picked up the wrong vial. And my death was to be a consequence of a totally stupid mistake. I wanted to walk outside, but there was a swimming pool there and I didn't dare fall into it. A person may believe that he has prepared himself for his own death, but when the moment comes, he is completely alone, and totally unprepared. Why now? Why me? Two hours later, I knew that I would live after all, and the experience became really marvelous. But the moment of facing death is a unique experience. In my case, I will some day meet it again, and I fear that I will be no more comfortable with it then than I was just now. This was from the comments of a psychologist who will, without doubt, use psychedelics again in the future, as a probe into the unknown." http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020....

bemused 12y ago
Please note that these extended comments in Pihkal are not based on personal experience by Shulgin, but from letters he received from other persons. His approach to testing new substances has been a very careful (scientific) one - you will barely find any reports like this in Pihkal/Tihkal among his own comments
- raaxe 12y ago
  Ah, I had no idea - thanks for the correction. Either way, it's a lovely passage.
- samwilliams 12y ago
  While some of the commentary is not from himself or Anne, some of it was. I believe the quoted experience was not Alex Shulgin's though.

jMyles 12y ago

I had the incredible fortune to have met Sasha and Ann several times, and always enjoyed their company enormously. Good work, man!

Scoundreller 12y ago
Story time?

weatherlight 12y ago

A true pioneer.

VonGuard 12y ago

An amazing man. Truly the Copernicus of his time: persecuted for his pursuit of science. In 100 years, this man will be considered one of the most important neural science researchers ever.

blhack 12y ago
Persecuted by whom? He had a DEA schedule 1 license, meaning he could pursue whatever research he wanted, and he was seemingly universally loved by everyone who knew who he was.
- VonGuard 12y ago
  The DEA eventually got upset with him and took away that license, raided his house, and ruined his lab. In the end, they closed him down based on a single reading of slightly elevated mercury levels in his yard. Read his books.
  - blhack 12y ago
    Wow, I did not know that. That's nuts. Although it sounds like he just violated the terms of the license: http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/shulgin_alexander_raid.shtml http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/s...
    - VonGuard 12y ago
      Yeah, well, they'd never bothered him until he wrote 2 books that contained the recipes for making lots of psychedelic drugs. Shortly after publishing these books (TIHKAL and PIHKAL) the DEA came down on him. In his book he writes that it was very, very clear someone had basically flipped the switch at the DEA and said "shut him down any way you can." The fact that it was the mercury readings in his soil points to the fact they were grasping at straws, especially because they took dozens of soil samples and only one was mildly above normal limits. The DEA was pissed at him for disseminating knowledge, and after they took his license, he basically stopped doing chemistry full time.

alx 12y ago

"The Shulgin Rating Scale is a simple scale for reporting the subjective effect of psychoactive substances at a given dosage, and at a given time. The system was developed for research purposes by the American biochemist Alexander Shulgin and detailed in his book PiHKAL" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulgin_Rating_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulgin_Rating_Scale PLUS FOUR (++++) [...] If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.

pmoriarty 12y ago

The BBC obituary on Shulgin[1] calls him the "Godfather of Ecstasy"[2], but he was far more than that. He synthesized and carefully chronicled the effects of hundreds of psychoactive compounds on himself and a small, dedicated core group of explorers of human consciousness. His efforts were published in two massive, definitive tomes called PiHKAL[3][4] and TiKHAL[5][6], the titles of which stand for "Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved" and "Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved", respectively. These volumes contained detailed chemical synthesis instructions for the compounds he created, along with "trip reports" and ratings[7] of the compounds' psychoactivity, ranging from: PLUS / MINUS (+/-) "The level of effectiveness of a drug that indicates a threshold action. If a higher dosage produces a greater response, then the plus/minus (+/-) was valid. If a higher dosage produces nothing, then this was a false positive." to PLUS FOUR (++++) "A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a 'peak experience', a 'religious experience,' 'divine transformation,' a 'state of Samadhi' and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment." His chemistry lab was DEA-licensed to handle "illegal" (scheduled) compounds, though he often synthesized entirely novel compounds which were not scheduled because neither the compounds nor the laws scheduling them existed yet. Shulgin tirelessly educated the public and the law-enforcement community on the effects and value of psychedelic and psychoactive compounds, and wrote a highly informative Q&A column.[7] Shulgin's pioneering work inspired generations of chemists, self-experimenters, and explorers. He was well known, loved, and respected as one of the most highly accomplished psychedelic chemists in history. His presence and guidance will be deeply missed. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin [2] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27676669 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27676669 [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL [4] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.sht... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIHKAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIHKAL [6] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.shtml http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.sht... [7] - http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html

Nanzikambe 12y ago

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” RIP Shulgin, a singular being.

jjj222 12y ago

Today I work in IT security- in my former life, he was a great inspiration. I had almost forgotten him..... I was in a closed circle of psychonauts, we where about 60 people. We would get our hands on the most exotic substances and share amongst us, and compare trip reports. It was my entire life, 2cb,2ci,2c-t7,2ce,DIPT,5-meo dipt, lsd etc. So I have tried many of hes creations, and i idolised him. Then in 6 months 4 of the group died, 1 suicide, 3 ODs(not on any of shulgins creations of course). Then I quitted, dropped all my friends, started taking life seriously.... But I have one thing to remind of that time in my life...a book I inherited from one of my now dead friends: http://i.imgur.com/S2pCuux.jpg http://i.imgur.com/S2pCuux.jpg He actually wrote with Shulgin himself, doing experiments using cactusses injected with ummm...some variety of DMT I think- to make the cactus metabolise it into something else. Shulgin adviced him, and my friend did the experiments. RIP DEX! RIP SHULGIN!

tumanian 12y ago
Unrelated, but your book collection is old school.
- jjj222 12y ago
  They all represent periods of my life :)
serf 12y ago
>Enterprise Java with UML Man, if I were you i'd have gotten back into the drugs at that point. (I kid)
- jjj222 12y ago
  well...then c,c++, then learning to code secure-then reverse engineering and exploit writing- it kinda makes sence, dosnt it? :)
  - ultramancool 12y ago
    It does actually. That looks like a great bookshelf to me.

contingencies 12y ago

Can we start a crowdfunding campaign for a museum of ecstasy with legal public samples? Anyone know German law? How would this go down in Darmstadt, where it was first discovered by Merck? I for one will donate significantly.

j_jochem 12y ago
I haven't seen any drug samples behind bullet-proof glass yet at the Mathildenhöhe exhibition (the expressionism display only had old Merck Cocaine adverts), but I imagine it should be possible to get an exemption permit.

andywood 12y ago

Would somebody be kind enough to tell me whether I've been hell-banned? Thank you.

gweinberg 12y ago
Evidently not.
owenversteeg 12y ago
Why did you think you were?
- andywood 12y ago
  I just have been having trouble with Paul's software, and thought I was being moderated unintentionally. I forgot there's dang now. He seems kind of new to an "old timer" like me :)
dang 12y ago
Please email hn@ycombinator.com with such questions. We always answer, though not always immediately, and I hope we're always nice. Your last comment was killed because it was a duplicate of your previous comment. We've unkilled it.

igivanov 12y ago

With all the praise of self-experiments (or experiments on a dedicated core group), there is this fact: we know that even a single use of a psychedelic drug may be "a life-changing experience". We also know that some substances may cause irreversible changes in the brain (e.g. glue-sniffing). So IMHO it doesn't sound like a rigorous science, who knows what changes those countless tests had caused and how those changes affected subsequent tests.

Scoundreller 12y ago
Evidently the "100% of users experience instant terribly painful hyper-death" mantra many would like to believe just isn't true. His book is mainly case reports, but that doesn't mean that higher level evidence doesn't exist.

rurban 12y ago

Not to be mixed up with Alexei Shulgin, the popular internet artist from Moscow: http://www.easylife.org/ http://www.easylife.org/ He is well and alive.

dmerrick 12y ago

My favorite quotation from the man: "How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it."

mzemel 12y ago
I believe the 'veil' he references is from this poem by Shelley (which he quotes in PiHKAL): "Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear."

dzhiurgis 12y ago

It would be interedting to have 'Ask HN' about drug use, especially correlated with age. Jobs has taken many different drugs, but I can't stop wondering how long did he continue to do so. I really doubt he did any after age of 30 or so.

dingdingdang 12y ago

WIP, there is no death

Myrmornis 12y ago

I believe he was a hero.

muloka 12y ago

Cross posting this for Erowid: --- We are trying to collect a record of all tweets and retweets of hashtag: #ThanksSasha and #Shulgin We want to continue to track these. So we don't want just an output, but a way to grab all existing tweets and collect them going forward. We would also like to grab google plus matching posts as well, but twitter is the first target. If someone has PHP and twitter experience, it seems like a pretty easy application to write a scraper that saves the data to sql, xml, or text. We want a downloadable data file that can be updated over time. I spent a while looking for existing tools and didn't find anything that could provide a downloadable, reliable format that we could use to try to track this. Thanks for any help or suggestions of services that would provide that data as a lump, without having to have one of us manually slog through many, many clicks and parsing extremely obscure HTML/js. earth earth@erowid.org

ChristianBundy 12y ago
As much as I love Erowid, I've had an impossible time trying to contact them for using their experience vault for research. I have the time and the skillset to make the application they're looking for, but I highly doubt Earth would get back to me.

danelectro 12y ago

it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do

danelectro 12y ago

it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do