Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff
a priori illegal. But those who understood Shulgin’s research knew that he wasn’t just looking for new ways to get people high. He was on a lifelong journey of exploring the relationship between drugs and the human mind. He knew that some new psychoactive substances could have terrible effects, but he also believed many could be lifesaving medicines.
Astronauts take voyages into outer space; psychonauts, by contrast, take voyages into their own psyches, testing new, just-created recreational chemicals that might make them incredibly high—or might make them lose their minds. Many brag about their exploits. Some have done themselves irreparable harm.
Alexander Shulgin, better known as Sasha, who lived to eighty-eight, stood above them all. He took thousands of psychedelic trips, on hundreds of drugs that were never before consumed by humans. Many he invented himself. He spread their gospel to the masses, publishing his recipes in books that became underground best sellers. More than anyone else, he helped create the world of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) we live in today. Some believe Shulgin deserved a Nobel Prize. Others wanted him locked away.
Shulgin first began thinking deeply about drugs as a young man while serving in the Navy during World War II. Aboard a destroyer escort in the Atlantic, he faced terrifying spurts of conflict followed by long periods adrift. To pass the time he read through a giant chemistry textbook, memorizing its contents. In 1944, off the coast of England, his thumb got infected. When his ship arrived in Liverpool, Shulgin was prepared for surgery at a military hospital and given a glass of orange juice he believed contained a powerful sedative. He promptly passed out and slept through the procedure. Only later did he learn there had been no sedative at all. The incident inspired a profound belief that, more than anything, one’s mind determines what happens when one takes a drug.
This lesson stayed with Shulgin when he was a biochemistry PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in 1955. He tried mescaline for the first time and experienced seeing the world around him as if he were a child. The psychedelic, originally derived from cactus plants and still at that time legal, evoked awesome sense memories. Again he wondered: Was this the drug, or was this his mind?
“This awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid,” he wrote, “but . . . in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche.”
Shulgin soon realized his calling: to explore psychedelic drugs from a scientific perspective, which he began doing during his employment, in the late 1950s and 1960s, at Dow Chemical, the industrial giant that manufactured the crippling herbicide Agent Orange, which was sprayed in the Vietnam war. While under the company’s employ, Shulgin synthesized a biodegradable insecticide branded “Snail Slug ’n Bug Killer” (“This one really works,” read the packaging), which was enormously profitable. After that, he was given carte blanche and began experimenting with psychoactive drug structures. He tweaked chemicals like mescaline—which, after being consumed for thousands of years in its natural form by Native peoples in the Western Hemisphere, had been the first psychedelic synthesized in a lab, in 1918.
Shulgin believed drugs were the most efficient way to tap the powers of the world’s greatest resource—the human brain. He hoped, by studying how psychedelics affected people, to benefit science, medicine, psychiatry, the arts, and even religion. “He argued to his superiors that this could be therapeutically important, at doses at which there was no risk of psychotic effects,” said Shulgin’s Dow colleague Solomon Snyder.
Once he had created a new compound, Shulgin tested it on himself, starting at very low dosages, and occasionally would get a reaction he had never experienced before. This wasn’t standard scientific protocol; human clinical trials would have been untenable and unethical, and no animal could usefully describe a psychedelic’s effects. Shulgin’s drug testing often began on his morning hike from his Bay Area home in Lafayette, California, along a canal to Dow’s Walnut Creek facility a few miles away. Dow went along with his ideas and even patented some of his creations. One was a psychedelic known as DOM, which Shulgin found to be even more intense than LSD.
“The body tremor feels like poisoning, there is no escaping the feeling of being disabilitated, but at least there is no nausea,” he wrote, after sampling a particularly strong dose. “The music was exceptional, the erotic was exceptional, the fantasy was exceptional. . . . This may be a bit much for me.” Shulgin never distributed the drug, but according to his protégé Paul Daley, he coached the famous psychedelic chemist Nick Sand on how to make it in the mid-1960s. Hoping to fund the production of his famous Orange Sunshine brand of LSD, Sand sold quantities of DOM to the Hell’s Angels. At some point along the way, DOM was renamed STP—Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace—and the Hell’s Angels began disseminating tablets of it.
Provoked by California’s banning of LSD, thousands of people gathered not long afterward, on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for an event called the Human Be-In, its name inspired by civil rights sit-ins. The event would set the tone for that year’s upcoming Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performed, while the psychedelic thought leader Timothy Leary advised the crowd to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Unfortunately, many who took STP landed in the emergency room, for the tablets the Hell’s Angels distributed were of a much higher dosage than Shulgin recommended.
Spooked by Shulgin’s forays into a realm increasingly associated with lawless youth culture, Dow Chemical asked him to cease using its name on his publications. He took the hint, left the company entirely, and began working exclusively out of a lab next to his house, on a twenty-acre plot near Berkeley called the Farm. Here, he would continue to hone his research and build his reputation, eventually becoming known as the “Godfather of Ecstasy.”
Ecstasy is not a narcotic that sets users floating on a cloud, like the opioids; it’s not a traditional amphetamine that seems to instill one with superpowers, like meth; and it’s not a psychedelic that lets users see the world as if for the first time, like LSD. Instead, it’s something of a combination of the three, fusing the cerebral and the sensual to instill a sense of profound happiness. It has become one of earth’s most popular illicit substances in recent decades, emerging from the electronic dance music scene and gradually infiltrating the mainstream while transcending geography and culture. Sasha Shulgin didn’t invent the drug known as ecstasy, MDMA—which is also sometimes called Molly—but he earned the title “Godfather of Ecstasy” for popularizing it.
MDMA was created by the German pharmaceutical company Merck when it was trying to develop a blood-clotting drug. Another local company was also doing work in this area, so Merck patented MDMA late in 1912. Merck had no idea of its psychoactive effects. Very little was done with MDMA in the ensuing decades, until the US Army began using it and similar drugs for studies on animals in 1953. What inspired the program or what the army was looking for is not clear—possibly a truth serum, possibly a “happy bomb” (a chemical weapon that incapacitated but didn’t kill an enemy). In 1960 MDMA’s synthesis was described in a scientific paper written by a pair of Polish scientists, and Sasha Shulgin first synthesized MDMA in 1965 while working at Dow. Shulgin’s approach was to take the structure of a known drug and use it as scaffolding—a skeleton structure to which he would add or subtract other chemical elements or groups, to see if anything interesting was formed. His work with MMDA, which is more psychedelic than MDMA, may have led Shulgin to first synthesize that structurally similar drug in 1965. Shulgin did not, however, immediately realize ecstasy’s effects, possibly because he took too small a dose.
The formula leaked out, and MDMA began to be used recreationally; in 1972 police discovered it on the streets of Chicago. Shulgin was alerted to its effects by a University of California, San Francisco, graduate student. Shulgin then resynthesized the material, began documenting his experiences, and was astonished. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible,” he wrote. “The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day, and evening, and through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience, and how much more powerful it was than previous experiences, for no apparent reason, other than a continually improving state of