Ann Shulgin: An explorer & investigator of psychedelics

By CLAY RISEN

Ann Shulgin, who alongside her husband, Alexander Shulgin, developed and experimented with hundreds of psychedelic drugs that he concocted in his California laboratory, then showed readers how to formulate them in a pair of massive books that attracted a cult following, died earlier this month at her home near Lafayette, Calif. She was 91. People who use themselves as guinea pigs to research new psychoactive drugs, or to explore the mind-altering capacities of existing ones, are known as psychonauts, and the Shulgins were among the world’s most experienced: Shulgin claimed to have experienced 2,000 drug-induced psychedelic episodes, an astounding number that pales only in comparison to her husband’s 4,000.

They took their work seriously. Whenever Alexander Shulgin, known as Sasha, who had a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, would concoct a new drug, Shulgin would give it a try, at a minuscule dose. If it seemed to have an effect, they would convene a panel of friends — fellow chemists, psychiatrists and anthropologists — to test it at higher dosages.

One of their friends, the psychologist and noted fellow psychonaut Timothy Leary, told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “I consider Shulgin and his wife to be two of the most important scientists of the 20th century.”

They believed psychedelic drugs held immense promise for use in psychotherapy, and Shulgin employed drugs like MDMA, better known as Ecstasy or Molly, with her clients for years as a lay therapist. For decades that belief put them far outside the mainstream, but it turns out they were simply ahead of their time: Researchers and therapists have recently begun to embrace the use of hallucinogens, including Ecstasy, in small doses to treat a range of psychological disorders.

“Sasha and I work pretty much as a team,” Shulgin said in a 2001 interview with the French newspaper Libération, published in English on Erowid, a website devoted to research on psychoactive drugs. “We both have the same interests, but our viewpoints are different: He has the scientific viewpoint, and I have the psychological and the spiritual. We supplement each other in our writing.”

Dr Shulgin was known as the “godfather of Ecstasy”: He didn’t invent the drug (that happened in 1912), but he was the first person to describe its potential uses in therapy. He never approved of its recreational use, not because he was a killjoy — he and his wife went to the Burning Man Festival three times — but because its abuse led governments to outlaw it.

The Shulgins were among the few researchers in the country allowed to work with federally banned drugs — so-called Schedule 1 drugs — thanks to Dr Shulgin’s close ties with the Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was an occasional consultant. In 1981 an administrator from the agency officiated at their wedding, in his backyard.

In 1993 the feds raided Dr Shulgin’s laboratory, fined him $25,000 and took away his Schedule 1 license. From then on, the Shulgins insisted, they never experimented with proscribed drugs, just the new ones that Dr Shulgin devised, which remained legal until they were added to the Schedule 1 list. In any case, their focus was on breaking new ground.

“Inventing new psychoactive drugs,” Shulgin said, “is like composing new music.”