Read on Twitter
Happy birthday to Sasha Shulgin, born on this day in 1925. He invented hundreds of chemical technologies for exploring the mind and healing the soul.
Sasha's first known publications are poems, written when he was ~9, in two chapbooks by the Poetry Workshop of the Willard Junior High School in Berkeley, Ca. While unexceptional for an adult, these works suggest a precocious ability to recognize and match patterns.
Sasha didn't begin to explore psychedelics until he was 34 and worked at Dow Chemical. This first trip with mescaline proved to be "the most consequential mescaline trip of the sixties", as Mike Jay wrote in "Mescaline: A global history of the first psychedelic"
Thru the early 1960s, Sasha created new psychedelics at Dow. With psychedelics increasingly controversial, this became awkward for Dow. However, Dow had interest in forming a pharmaceutical division. Thus, as Sasha was leaving, Dow began to seriously explore his inventions.
Sasha and Dow had identified DOET as a potential antidepressant and cognitive enhancer. Clinical studies at Hopkins were going great, when a potent drug called STP appeared on the streets.
STP unfortunately turned out to be DOM, a psychedelic related to DOET that Sasha had also invented at Dow. Spooked by the bad publicity, Dow pulled the plug on their pharmacology program.
Although Sasha received considerable unwanted publicity from the DOM/STP episode, he was still able to set himself up as a consultant and independent researcher, working from a barn-like laboratory on his land.
Free from institutional constraints, Sasha developed methods for studying new psychoactives and gathered a team of 'psychonauts' who shared his drive to explore the mind. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.688.3057&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Sasha's research has sometimes been seen as disreputable. In a book chapter, republished today on Medium, I argue he is squarely in the mainstream of a great scientific tradition of self-experimentation. https://medium.com/@mattbagg/seed-crystal-on-the-contributions-of-alexander-shulgin-to-the-science-of-consciousness-154b509b364f
Sasha discussed the motivations behind his work several times. One of his more eloquent expressions was the 1983 'Drugs of Perception' lecture at Santa Barbara, which can be heard on youtube, where it was lifted from @psychedeliclozo's great podcast https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7F5585D69A611AD3
Beyond DOET, Sasha tried to get other psychedelics investigated as medicines. Tho he did not invent it, Sasha saw the therapeutic value of MDMA and made it available to therapists who pioneered its use. Today, MDMA-assisted therapy is in Phase 3 trials for PTSD thanks to @MAPS.
Another compound that Sasha made, DOI, has shown promise in treating inflammation at subpsychedelic doses. This discovery, by Chuck Nichols, is now being developed into medicines by @eleusisltd https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2018.1481827
Today, we are still learning the full value of Sasha's work. As David Presti put, it was too big for universities, research institutes, and industries. https://maps.org/news/bulletin/articles/383-bulletin-winter-2014/5433-too-big-for-a-nobel-prize-remembering-sasha-shulgin
(Many of the photos from this thread are from @Erowid's vault on Sasha, which is an incredible resource that rewards exploration. Another valuable historical resource is @PsychedelicLozo's venerable psychedelic salon podcast https://psychedelicsalon.com/ https://erowid.org/culture/characters/shulgin_alexander/
