Dr. Leospace
Alpiniste Kundalini
- Inscrit
- 28/10/05
- Messages
- 686
This Man Has Invented More Than 80% Of The World's Known Hallucinogenic Drugs, Has Had More Than 4000 Psychedelic Experiences, And In 1967 Created The Drug Ecstasy. Meet Dr Alexander Shulgin, Groundbreaking Scientist And Explorer Of The Human Mind
It seems rather appropriate to meet Doctor Alexander Shulgin, a man who has spent most of his life creating and consuming hallucinogenic drugs, high on a mountain.
Shulgin, whom Timothy Leary called "one of the most important scientists of his generation", lives with his Antipodean wife, Ann, on a steep Californian hillside a few miles from San Francisco, that former bastion of free love, acid trips and tie-dye T-shirts.
In his lifetime, Shulgin, now 81, has been canonised by chemists and chastised by the police, invented a groundbreaking insecticide, written two groundbreaking books, invented more than 80% of the known hallucinogenic drugs in the world and, by his own admission, had more than 4000 psychedelic experiences.
He is also one of the people responsible for the emergence and popularity of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the drug more commonly known as ecstasy. As a result, he often finds himself accused of being responsible for all the deaths related to the popular rave drug. During our rambling and, at times, slightly surreal, interview over lunch at his house, this is the only subject that makes him and his wife become overtly defensive. When I ask if Shulgin himself still takes ecstasy, his reply is surprising.
"No," he says firmly. "It's illegal and I don't use illegal drugs."
The jolly, white-haired and bearded chemist, who resembles a rather malnourished Santa Claus after several nights on the tiles, claims he has always been motivated by a higher purpose than just getting high.
"My art is being able to make new compounds that can be used as tools in new ways," he says picking at a piece of quiche on the long wooden dining table in his photograph-cluttered dining room. "I'm exploring these areas to develop tools for study of the mind. The purpose has always been that, in time - probably not in my lifetime - people would have access to these materials and actually go into the mental process to try to work out the mechanism of the human mind. Not the brain, but the mind."
Shulgin's own mind is still working well. His body may be failing him - - "I'm virtually blind in my left eye and my teeth are falling apart" - - but his brain is fully functioning and, throughout our interview, he only occasionally fails to recall places rather than people or the complex names of chemicals.
But why the specific interest in the continued creation of psychedelic drugs rather than in creating drugs which could lead to a cure for cancer or make you more intelligent?
"I don't buy the smart-drug classification," he says. "I've seen no evidence in my own exploring. And I'm just totally fascinated by where psychedelic drugs can take the mind."
Initially, I'm not convinced this isn't just a rather grand way of justifying a trippy, hedonistic lifestyle made possible by Shulgin's unquestionable genius when it comes to concocting and altering chemical compounds ( he holds more than a dozen patents for different drugs and unique methods of synthesis ). But it becomes clear during our interview he is equally, if not more, fascinated with tinkering with chemicals than in simply taking them.
"Primarily, it is about the conversion of a structure," he tells me. "It's a fun process and it's tremendously fascinating." He is more animated when speaking about the details of how he managed to alter a drug to change its effect than when asked about the effect those changes had when he tested the new compound on himself. In fact, for a man who has had so many psychedelic experiences, his stories of his 'trips' are disappointingly dull, while listening to him talk about experiments and chemical structures and hearing complex chemical names trip excitedly off his tongue is thoroughly entertaining.
"Chemistry is a music form to me," Shulgin says and, for the past 70 years, he has been composing at a rate Beethoven would have been proud of. Shulgin, who stands just over six feet tall, was born in Berkeley, California, in 1925, the only child of his Russian father and American mother.
"I got interested in chemistry very early," he tells me with his pleasant yet protective wife hovering nearby and continually adding food to the table. "They had these little chemistry kits with test tubes and you add this to that and it goes red. I had one in the basement and I loved the idea of using things that were not in the set."
His love and aptitude for the subject deepened and he was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16 to study chemistry.
"I hated it," he reveals. "All the kids had wealthy parents and I didn't. It was a centre of snobbery and they teach chemistry very rigidly. They never teach it for the fun of it."
Shulgin joined the navy as a way out. At the end of the Second World War, he returned to California, got his PhD in bio-chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and went to work for Dow Chemical in the area of synthetic chemistry, where his natural ability allowed him to shine. He predicted that, with a few alterations, a seemingly inactive chemical compound Dow were close to abandoning could be made 'active' and transformed into a neurotoxin.
"I predicted it and ( the end result ) was a new compound," Shulgin says as he gets up and shuffles slowly out of the room. He returns a few seconds later and hands me a small box labelled 'Zectran: Snail, Slug and Bug killer'. It is the first commercial product Shulgin invented; a powerful but biodegradable insecticide which Dow manufactured and sold around the world.
Ann, seeing the package, says proudly, "Oh. They offered him carte blanche after that."
"They said, well if you can predict this sort of thing, then why don't you just work on whatever you want to work on," Shulgin says, sitting down again. "Well, that was when I had my first mescaline experience and the answer was what I wanted to work on was producing analogues of mescaline."
Mescaline is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. It is found in certain cacti, but can be synthesised in a laboratory. Although it has been famously devoured and written about by people including Hunter S Thompson and Aldous Huxley, the side effects can include nausea, dizziness and diarrhoea. Yet devotees claim the hallucinations and the new thought processes make the experience worthwhile.
Shulgin says not only did he enjoy his first mescaline experience - "it was an eye-opening revelation" - but "it gave me the direction I wanted to go in my life."
Needless to say, Dow Chemical weren't thrilled at the thought of one of their employees making derivatives of mescaline and trying them out on himself and a close group of friends but, as Zectran was a global success and as Shulgin's credentials were truly impeccable when it came to chemical innovations, they suggested he carry on working for them - but from home.
As Shulgin started to research and create psychedelics in earnest, he discovered there weren't many active compounds out there.
"At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelics that were known - mescaline and marijuana," Shulgin tells me. "In 1950, there were about 20 - LSD, analogues of LSD, two of three phenethylamines, amphetamines which were psychoactive, DMT, DET, and four or five tryptamines. Coming into this century, there were 200 known psychedelics and by 2050 you'll have 2000."
I'm still not sure I know for what genuine purpose or function and Shulgin only reiterates: "The primary legitimate use will eventually be research into the function of the mind."
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Shulgin devoted most of his time to creating hallucinogenic compounds but claims he didn't party with the legendary hippy crowd in San Francisco.
"I knew a lot of them but I didn't hang out with them," he says, stroking his beard. "My direction was something different. I was creating new things and having the time of my life doing it. All they were doing was consuming things which had already been created. I wanted not to get into the habit of using one thing with any regularity as that would jeopardise my search for new things."
Shuglin also vowed he would never sell his wares. "Very early, I fell into a very good philosophy which is that I don't sell drugs," he says. "There is no such thing as a completely safe drug, so if you sell drugs and someone gets hurt you are involved. I stay out of that."
What has made Shulgin so unique and notorious, celebrated by some and reviled by others, is that every time he has modified an existing psychedelic drug to create a new one, he has published his notes, in effect the 'recipe' for the new drug as well as details of the effects it is likely to have and at what dosage levels.
His work has aided both the police and those who make and sell illegal drugs. While drug pushers have been able to follow Shulgin's recipes and sell the compounds he has created, the police have been able to use his work to break down substances they have found and determine whether or not they are - or should be - illegal. The US Drug Enforcement Agency's western division nurtured a relationship with Shulgin and have used him several times as an expert witness in trials ( the head of the division became such good friends with Shulgin that Shulgin asked him to the best man at his wedding ).
Shulgin has never been arrested but his back-garden laboratory has been raided twice by officials. The first time, after samples of unrecorded drugs were found in his possession, he was asked to pay a fine and give up his Schedule 1 licence which allowed him to possess illegal narcotics for research purposes. The second time nothing illegal was discovered.
I'm keen to see the laboratory where so many of the world's hallucinogenics have been distilled into existence. I have visions of a spotless white room with neatly arranged test tubes and unfathomable diagrams on smooth walls behind a large, locked steel door. When Shulgin finishes eating and leads me out to his 'shed', the reality is so far removed from that image, I think the aging alchemist must have slipped one of his concoctions into my drink.
Nestled against the hillside and at the end of a narrow path leading from the back of the Shulgin's expansive bungalow, lies a tatty, one-room building with broken windows and a scruffy door with rusty hinges.
"Be careful of the broken glass," Shulgin says as he escorts me inside. "The squirrels get in and knock over everything." I think Shulgin must be joking but I immediately see he is telling the truth as smashed glass vessels and fresh animal droppings are visible all over the acrid-smelling room.
He doesn't do much work in here these days, spending most of his time in his office working on a new book - an encyclopaedia of all known psychedelics. The lab, with its exposed girders, chemical condensers, crucibles, brown bottles, dirty floor and open drawers filled with tubes and vials and glass pipettes, has obviously seen better days. Behind this shed, slightly higher up the hill, is another one-room building. Shulgin leads me there, unlocks the door and reveals a sight that would cause any chemist to start salivating.
Free-standing shelf units are filled from ceiling to floor with myriad different sized and shaped, clear and brown, black-capped bottles containing liquids, powders, and solutions - a dazzling Aladdin's cave for chemists.
"This is my chemical store room," Shulgin explains. "I must have between 10-15,000 chemicals in here."
None of the bottles contain anything illicit, it is only when various contents are mixed and prepared in the right way that illegal substances can be created. In 1967, using a mix of the ingredients in the store room and preparing the product in his then pristine lab, Shulgin re-synthesised MDMA, the drug now known as ecstasy. "I was curious," Shulgin tells me. "It was a virtually unknown chemical and no-one had pursued it."
MDMA had been patented by the drug company Merck in 1912 but only as a step in a process, not as a compound in and of itself. In the 1960's, Shulgin became aware of some tests that were being conducted using MDMA.
"I was told it was being looked at as a stimulant," Shulgin reveals. "But the answer I was given was that it was not a stimulant, it's something different. I re-synthesised it in the lab."
Shulgin had been told that, rather than act as stimulant, MDMA made people very relaxed and lose their inhibitions.
"I tasted it and I was quite amazed something could be that capable of making you drop your barriers and your borders," he says. He thought it would be a good drug for people in psychotherapy.
"It is such a beautiful thing for psychotherapy because you open up that awareness not just between you and your therapist, but between you and yourself. You begin acknowledging your own thoughts," he says. Shulgin doesn 't mention whether or not he started dancing.
He gave some samples to some psychologists who tried it and took it with their patients. Its supposed benefits became apparent very quickly and it was used legally in America, including for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, until it was declared illegal in 1985.
I ask if Shulgin ever imagined it would become a popular, if occasionally fatal, street drug and spawn a whole culture of music and dance.
"No, not at all," Shulgin says as we walk slowly back to the house. He says that once he had passed samples on to friends who were psychiatrists and they started using it with their patients, his involvement with MDMA was over.
"I just watched as a casual observer," he tells me.
"Sasha's not responsible for it or for what happens," Ann says defensively, using her husband's nickname. Shulgin folds his arms. Over the past decade, numerous journalists have either asked Shulgin if he feels responsible for anyone who has died from taking the drug, or unilaterally convicted him in newsprint for being the architect of the ecstasy explosion. The questions and accusations obviously rile the libertarian couple.
"I've not done anything illegal," Shulgin insists. "I invent the drugs and it's up to the law writers to make them illegal. My desire is just to find new things."
But does Shulgin believe people should be free to take drugs?
"I think there is no reason to have general drug laws except to protect children, to prevent people giving other people drugs without their knowledge and to prevent driving while under the influence of drugs. These are the drug laws that it is valid to maintain."
With those exceptions, Shulgin believes people should be free to consume whatever drugs they wish, whenever they wish.
"I believe all these materials should be yours to explore, to try, to know," he says. "The illegality of drugs is one of the incentives for many people to use them."
Like so many pro-drug advocates, Shulgin believes crime would drop and quality would improve if narcotics were legalised. I suggest one set of problems would just be replaced with another and vulnerable people would be more at risk because of ease of access.
"Let me ask you an adverse question," says Ann. "Probably the one human experience that is responsible for more deaths, suicides and murders is falling in love and having the love affair break up. How do you protect vulnerable people from falling in love?"
Our serious discussion is turning somewhat frivolous and Shulgin seems for the first time slightly fatigued, so after a short pause I ask him if he can remember his best drug-induced experience.
"I got into a bliss state once," he recalls, a little livelier now we have changed tack. "It was a power trip. There was a package of cement that was upside down and I looked at it and said, 'Other side up', and it turned over. Maybe there was some visual hallucination along with this, you know - but that's what I could do. I had total control over all aspects of everything."
I'm not sure that after more than 50 years of experiments, simply believing you have managed to flip over a bag of cement without touching it is a great pay-off but, as Shulgin continues to talk passionately about his work, I don 't doubt he genuinely believes he is doing something for the benefit of generations to come rather than just for Generation X.
I ask, of all the drugs he has invented, which one is he most proud of.
"The next one is probably the best one because it's never been made before," he says. "And, by definition, it can't be illegal." He laughs, an impish grin seems to take over his face and there is a wickedly knowing and mischievous twinkle in his eye. Then again, maybe I'm just seeing things.
It seems rather appropriate to meet Doctor Alexander Shulgin, a man who has spent most of his life creating and consuming hallucinogenic drugs, high on a mountain.
Shulgin, whom Timothy Leary called "one of the most important scientists of his generation", lives with his Antipodean wife, Ann, on a steep Californian hillside a few miles from San Francisco, that former bastion of free love, acid trips and tie-dye T-shirts.
In his lifetime, Shulgin, now 81, has been canonised by chemists and chastised by the police, invented a groundbreaking insecticide, written two groundbreaking books, invented more than 80% of the known hallucinogenic drugs in the world and, by his own admission, had more than 4000 psychedelic experiences.
He is also one of the people responsible for the emergence and popularity of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, the drug more commonly known as ecstasy. As a result, he often finds himself accused of being responsible for all the deaths related to the popular rave drug. During our rambling and, at times, slightly surreal, interview over lunch at his house, this is the only subject that makes him and his wife become overtly defensive. When I ask if Shulgin himself still takes ecstasy, his reply is surprising.
"No," he says firmly. "It's illegal and I don't use illegal drugs."
The jolly, white-haired and bearded chemist, who resembles a rather malnourished Santa Claus after several nights on the tiles, claims he has always been motivated by a higher purpose than just getting high.
"My art is being able to make new compounds that can be used as tools in new ways," he says picking at a piece of quiche on the long wooden dining table in his photograph-cluttered dining room. "I'm exploring these areas to develop tools for study of the mind. The purpose has always been that, in time - probably not in my lifetime - people would have access to these materials and actually go into the mental process to try to work out the mechanism of the human mind. Not the brain, but the mind."
Shulgin's own mind is still working well. His body may be failing him - - "I'm virtually blind in my left eye and my teeth are falling apart" - - but his brain is fully functioning and, throughout our interview, he only occasionally fails to recall places rather than people or the complex names of chemicals.
But why the specific interest in the continued creation of psychedelic drugs rather than in creating drugs which could lead to a cure for cancer or make you more intelligent?
"I don't buy the smart-drug classification," he says. "I've seen no evidence in my own exploring. And I'm just totally fascinated by where psychedelic drugs can take the mind."
Initially, I'm not convinced this isn't just a rather grand way of justifying a trippy, hedonistic lifestyle made possible by Shulgin's unquestionable genius when it comes to concocting and altering chemical compounds ( he holds more than a dozen patents for different drugs and unique methods of synthesis ). But it becomes clear during our interview he is equally, if not more, fascinated with tinkering with chemicals than in simply taking them.
"Primarily, it is about the conversion of a structure," he tells me. "It's a fun process and it's tremendously fascinating." He is more animated when speaking about the details of how he managed to alter a drug to change its effect than when asked about the effect those changes had when he tested the new compound on himself. In fact, for a man who has had so many psychedelic experiences, his stories of his 'trips' are disappointingly dull, while listening to him talk about experiments and chemical structures and hearing complex chemical names trip excitedly off his tongue is thoroughly entertaining.
"Chemistry is a music form to me," Shulgin says and, for the past 70 years, he has been composing at a rate Beethoven would have been proud of. Shulgin, who stands just over six feet tall, was born in Berkeley, California, in 1925, the only child of his Russian father and American mother.
"I got interested in chemistry very early," he tells me with his pleasant yet protective wife hovering nearby and continually adding food to the table. "They had these little chemistry kits with test tubes and you add this to that and it goes red. I had one in the basement and I loved the idea of using things that were not in the set."
His love and aptitude for the subject deepened and he was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16 to study chemistry.
"I hated it," he reveals. "All the kids had wealthy parents and I didn't. It was a centre of snobbery and they teach chemistry very rigidly. They never teach it for the fun of it."
Shulgin joined the navy as a way out. At the end of the Second World War, he returned to California, got his PhD in bio-chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and went to work for Dow Chemical in the area of synthetic chemistry, where his natural ability allowed him to shine. He predicted that, with a few alterations, a seemingly inactive chemical compound Dow were close to abandoning could be made 'active' and transformed into a neurotoxin.
"I predicted it and ( the end result ) was a new compound," Shulgin says as he gets up and shuffles slowly out of the room. He returns a few seconds later and hands me a small box labelled 'Zectran: Snail, Slug and Bug killer'. It is the first commercial product Shulgin invented; a powerful but biodegradable insecticide which Dow manufactured and sold around the world.
Ann, seeing the package, says proudly, "Oh. They offered him carte blanche after that."
"They said, well if you can predict this sort of thing, then why don't you just work on whatever you want to work on," Shulgin says, sitting down again. "Well, that was when I had my first mescaline experience and the answer was what I wanted to work on was producing analogues of mescaline."
Mescaline is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. It is found in certain cacti, but can be synthesised in a laboratory. Although it has been famously devoured and written about by people including Hunter S Thompson and Aldous Huxley, the side effects can include nausea, dizziness and diarrhoea. Yet devotees claim the hallucinations and the new thought processes make the experience worthwhile.
Shulgin says not only did he enjoy his first mescaline experience - "it was an eye-opening revelation" - but "it gave me the direction I wanted to go in my life."
Needless to say, Dow Chemical weren't thrilled at the thought of one of their employees making derivatives of mescaline and trying them out on himself and a close group of friends but, as Zectran was a global success and as Shulgin's credentials were truly impeccable when it came to chemical innovations, they suggested he carry on working for them - but from home.
As Shulgin started to research and create psychedelics in earnest, he discovered there weren't many active compounds out there.
"At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelics that were known - mescaline and marijuana," Shulgin tells me. "In 1950, there were about 20 - LSD, analogues of LSD, two of three phenethylamines, amphetamines which were psychoactive, DMT, DET, and four or five tryptamines. Coming into this century, there were 200 known psychedelics and by 2050 you'll have 2000."
I'm still not sure I know for what genuine purpose or function and Shulgin only reiterates: "The primary legitimate use will eventually be research into the function of the mind."
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, Shulgin devoted most of his time to creating hallucinogenic compounds but claims he didn't party with the legendary hippy crowd in San Francisco.
"I knew a lot of them but I didn't hang out with them," he says, stroking his beard. "My direction was something different. I was creating new things and having the time of my life doing it. All they were doing was consuming things which had already been created. I wanted not to get into the habit of using one thing with any regularity as that would jeopardise my search for new things."
Shuglin also vowed he would never sell his wares. "Very early, I fell into a very good philosophy which is that I don't sell drugs," he says. "There is no such thing as a completely safe drug, so if you sell drugs and someone gets hurt you are involved. I stay out of that."
What has made Shulgin so unique and notorious, celebrated by some and reviled by others, is that every time he has modified an existing psychedelic drug to create a new one, he has published his notes, in effect the 'recipe' for the new drug as well as details of the effects it is likely to have and at what dosage levels.
His work has aided both the police and those who make and sell illegal drugs. While drug pushers have been able to follow Shulgin's recipes and sell the compounds he has created, the police have been able to use his work to break down substances they have found and determine whether or not they are - or should be - illegal. The US Drug Enforcement Agency's western division nurtured a relationship with Shulgin and have used him several times as an expert witness in trials ( the head of the division became such good friends with Shulgin that Shulgin asked him to the best man at his wedding ).
Shulgin has never been arrested but his back-garden laboratory has been raided twice by officials. The first time, after samples of unrecorded drugs were found in his possession, he was asked to pay a fine and give up his Schedule 1 licence which allowed him to possess illegal narcotics for research purposes. The second time nothing illegal was discovered.
I'm keen to see the laboratory where so many of the world's hallucinogenics have been distilled into existence. I have visions of a spotless white room with neatly arranged test tubes and unfathomable diagrams on smooth walls behind a large, locked steel door. When Shulgin finishes eating and leads me out to his 'shed', the reality is so far removed from that image, I think the aging alchemist must have slipped one of his concoctions into my drink.
Nestled against the hillside and at the end of a narrow path leading from the back of the Shulgin's expansive bungalow, lies a tatty, one-room building with broken windows and a scruffy door with rusty hinges.
"Be careful of the broken glass," Shulgin says as he escorts me inside. "The squirrels get in and knock over everything." I think Shulgin must be joking but I immediately see he is telling the truth as smashed glass vessels and fresh animal droppings are visible all over the acrid-smelling room.
He doesn't do much work in here these days, spending most of his time in his office working on a new book - an encyclopaedia of all known psychedelics. The lab, with its exposed girders, chemical condensers, crucibles, brown bottles, dirty floor and open drawers filled with tubes and vials and glass pipettes, has obviously seen better days. Behind this shed, slightly higher up the hill, is another one-room building. Shulgin leads me there, unlocks the door and reveals a sight that would cause any chemist to start salivating.
Free-standing shelf units are filled from ceiling to floor with myriad different sized and shaped, clear and brown, black-capped bottles containing liquids, powders, and solutions - a dazzling Aladdin's cave for chemists.
"This is my chemical store room," Shulgin explains. "I must have between 10-15,000 chemicals in here."
None of the bottles contain anything illicit, it is only when various contents are mixed and prepared in the right way that illegal substances can be created. In 1967, using a mix of the ingredients in the store room and preparing the product in his then pristine lab, Shulgin re-synthesised MDMA, the drug now known as ecstasy. "I was curious," Shulgin tells me. "It was a virtually unknown chemical and no-one had pursued it."
MDMA had been patented by the drug company Merck in 1912 but only as a step in a process, not as a compound in and of itself. In the 1960's, Shulgin became aware of some tests that were being conducted using MDMA.
"I was told it was being looked at as a stimulant," Shulgin reveals. "But the answer I was given was that it was not a stimulant, it's something different. I re-synthesised it in the lab."
Shulgin had been told that, rather than act as stimulant, MDMA made people very relaxed and lose their inhibitions.
"I tasted it and I was quite amazed something could be that capable of making you drop your barriers and your borders," he says. He thought it would be a good drug for people in psychotherapy.
"It is such a beautiful thing for psychotherapy because you open up that awareness not just between you and your therapist, but between you and yourself. You begin acknowledging your own thoughts," he says. Shulgin doesn 't mention whether or not he started dancing.
He gave some samples to some psychologists who tried it and took it with their patients. Its supposed benefits became apparent very quickly and it was used legally in America, including for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, until it was declared illegal in 1985.
I ask if Shulgin ever imagined it would become a popular, if occasionally fatal, street drug and spawn a whole culture of music and dance.
"No, not at all," Shulgin says as we walk slowly back to the house. He says that once he had passed samples on to friends who were psychiatrists and they started using it with their patients, his involvement with MDMA was over.
"I just watched as a casual observer," he tells me.
"Sasha's not responsible for it or for what happens," Ann says defensively, using her husband's nickname. Shulgin folds his arms. Over the past decade, numerous journalists have either asked Shulgin if he feels responsible for anyone who has died from taking the drug, or unilaterally convicted him in newsprint for being the architect of the ecstasy explosion. The questions and accusations obviously rile the libertarian couple.
"I've not done anything illegal," Shulgin insists. "I invent the drugs and it's up to the law writers to make them illegal. My desire is just to find new things."
But does Shulgin believe people should be free to take drugs?
"I think there is no reason to have general drug laws except to protect children, to prevent people giving other people drugs without their knowledge and to prevent driving while under the influence of drugs. These are the drug laws that it is valid to maintain."
With those exceptions, Shulgin believes people should be free to consume whatever drugs they wish, whenever they wish.
"I believe all these materials should be yours to explore, to try, to know," he says. "The illegality of drugs is one of the incentives for many people to use them."
Like so many pro-drug advocates, Shulgin believes crime would drop and quality would improve if narcotics were legalised. I suggest one set of problems would just be replaced with another and vulnerable people would be more at risk because of ease of access.
"Let me ask you an adverse question," says Ann. "Probably the one human experience that is responsible for more deaths, suicides and murders is falling in love and having the love affair break up. How do you protect vulnerable people from falling in love?"
Our serious discussion is turning somewhat frivolous and Shulgin seems for the first time slightly fatigued, so after a short pause I ask him if he can remember his best drug-induced experience.
"I got into a bliss state once," he recalls, a little livelier now we have changed tack. "It was a power trip. There was a package of cement that was upside down and I looked at it and said, 'Other side up', and it turned over. Maybe there was some visual hallucination along with this, you know - but that's what I could do. I had total control over all aspects of everything."
I'm not sure that after more than 50 years of experiments, simply believing you have managed to flip over a bag of cement without touching it is a great pay-off but, as Shulgin continues to talk passionately about his work, I don 't doubt he genuinely believes he is doing something for the benefit of generations to come rather than just for Generation X.
I ask, of all the drugs he has invented, which one is he most proud of.
"The next one is probably the best one because it's never been made before," he says. "And, by definition, it can't be illegal." He laughs, an impish grin seems to take over his face and there is a wickedly knowing and mischievous twinkle in his eye. Then again, maybe I'm just seeing things.
