HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/shulgin.visit

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 16KB | 281 lines

Dr. Alexander Shulgin is a noted chemist who has been studying the
chemistry and effects of the psychedelics for over 30 years.  He is
probably most widely known for his book 'PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story'
(Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved).  He is also the discoverer of
DOM (at one time known as "STP"), MMDA (not MDMA) and many other
psychedelics, and was indirectly responsible for the introduction of
MDMA to psychotherapy in the late '70s.

If you have any interest in psychoactive drugs and haven't read PiHKAL,
I strongly recommend that you order and read it.  It is available for
$22.95 postpaid (+ $1.38 tax for California residents) from:
    TRANSFORM PRESS
    P.O.Box 13675
    Berkeley, CA
    94701

The following is a description of my visit this fall to Dr. Shulgin,
known as Sasha to his friends.  It should be of some interest to those
who enjoyed his book or are interested in the psychedelic drugs in
general.  I wrote it mainly to satisfy other Net people's curiosity
about what Sasha, his house, and his laboratory are like (and of course
to satisfy my own impulse to write.)

I have a few ground rules I would like readers of this article to
accept:
1.    Sasha values his privacy -- I will not give out his address, phone
number, or email address to anyone;
2.    All names except Sasha's, his wife Ann's, and mine have been altered;
3.    This was all written from memory -- don't expect total accuracy, and
all dialogue is approximate;
4.    I'm not a chemist, so you should not rely closely on me or consult me
on technical points -- consult one of the resident chemists on
alt.psychoactives, sci.chem, or sci.med or talk to someone reliable
you know;
5.    (Obvious to the clueful, but...) I don't deal in or currently possess
any illegal drugs or psychedelics; please don't ask me where to get
any.

Prologue:

Earlier this year (while using a different account) I posted several
descriptions of experiments I had made about 10 years ago with plants
containing natural psychedelics.  One of these was Syrian Rue (Peganum
harmala) which contains the harmala alkaloids, a family of psychedelic
beta-carbolines.  Much to my surprise, I received a letter from Dr.
Shulgin himself, asking for my permission to include excerpts from my
description in his next book.  I was thrilled -- I had just ordered and
was reading his book 'PiHKAL', and I had adopted him as my newest hero.
I wrote back a chatty letter giving him permission to reprint my
account, and we began an occasional correspondence, first by letter and
later by email.

This fall I was in California for several weeks, and was able to
persuade Sasha to allow me to visit him at his house east of the Bay
Area.  I was invited to arrive mid-morning on a Sunday; Sasha warned me
that it would be something of an open house situation, with guests
possibly coming and going.  Although I arrived with a long list of
questions I wanted to ask, I left with most of them totally forgotten in
the flow of conversation.

Sasha's house is located on the side of a fairly steep hill.  I located
his drive and turned up it, past an open gate marked "Keep Closed At All
Times" to an old garage by a sprawling ranch-style house in warm earth
tones.  I parked and descended the steps to the courtyard; recognizing
the potted cacti as large peyote cacti, I knew I must have found the
right place.  On entering the house, I immediately met a genial,
slightly stooped white-haired and bearded man.

"I'm Sasha," he said, extending his hand.  I introduced myself, and
Sasha introduced me to his wife Ann, who was nursing a cold with a pot
of herb tea.  (I had little chance to meet her during the course of the
visit.)

The house was comfortably untidy and a little dusty, with books stacked
on every horizontal surface; slightly dark, but with a gorgeous view
across a valley to the north.  It reminded me slightly of the home of
another writer I know -- here order had taken second place to creation.
We cleared some space at the dining table and sat down to coffee.

Sasha quizzed me briefly about my email name; I explained briefly that I
really was the Pope of my own little sect of the SubGenius, and he was
delighted.  "The Church of 'BoB'?  Yes, I think I've heard of them."
From then on, the conversation raced all over the map.   Sasha is an
extraordinary raconteur and conversationalist, and as lively and witty
in person as in his writings.

He began by talking about the recent conference on shamanism he'd been
to at San Luis Potosi.  After summarizing the conference, he noted that
the city had proved difficult to get around in -- the conference had
been moved from one hotel to another at the last moment, and in trying
to find the new hotel, it had turned out that all of the city maps
included a number of streets, interchanges, and landmarks which did not
yet exist but were slated for construction one day.

He showed me a newly acquired specimen of peyote which he was preparing
to plant, and we chatted a little about the MDMA and 5HT-1 receptor
controversy.  Sasha believes that MDMA will eventually prove to be much
less neurotoxic to humans than to rats (though he qualified this as just
his opinion); apparently many areas of brain chemistry function somewhat
differently in rats than in the "higher mammals."  He also cited several
studies on dogs and monkeys (one critical one as yet unpublished) which
showed a lack of neurotoxic effects in humans at the levels predicted by
the rat studies, and hinted that there might be some government pressure
via the granting agencies to slow or halt publication of studies which
show no MDMA toxicity.  Everyone seems to agree that there is some toxic
level of MDMA consumption; it's just not clear what that level is for
humans.   Hopefully Grenville's(?) study at UCSD will reveal some bounds
for that figure.

The conversation jumped again with new introductions when Sara, a friend
of Sasha's came in.  She admired the peyote button, and asked a few
questions about the effects of DMT (N,N-dimethyl-tryptamine), a very
short-acting psychedelic.  Sasha answered gnomically, "DMT always seems
to me to have a very dark aspect to it", and then passed the question to
me.  I admitted that I had smoked 5MDMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyl-
tryptamine), but not DMT itself, and that I didn't know how they
compared.  I did observe that once when I tried a small dose of 5MDMT
when I was severely depressed (fearing to risk a big dose with the wrong
mental "set") instead of sending me on a trip it seemed to kick me
abruptly and permanently out of the depression and back to my normal
state of mind.  Sasha was intrigued as to the possible mechanism for
this (restoring depleted serotonin levels?) but had no answers.

This topic put him in mind of something else which had recently happened
to him.  He asked me if I had ever heard of a church in New York which
used psychedelics as part of their sacrament.

"Was this the Church of the Tree of Life?" I asked dubiously.  "No, no,
no!  Nothing like that at all.  No comparison.  These people are 100%
sincere Jesus believers.  They take it to see God.  They sent me some of
their literature -- you can't make up stuff like that.   It could only
come from true believers."

Apparently a journalist from New York had recently contacted him to ask
him about the effects of DPT (N,N-dipropyl-tryptamine.)  Sasha obliged
with the standard information -- dosage, duration (circa 2 hours),
active orally or parenterally (i.e., via eating, smoking, or snuffing)
and type of effects (classic psychedelic.)  Then he began quizzing the
journalist about how he had heard of him, and the story emerged:  the
journalist had found out about the church's psychedelic sacrament (being
used very responsibly, by his account) and had contacted the DEA for
more information on it, which they should have had.  Rather than
answering him, they had referred him to their designated expert -- Dr.
Alexander Shulgin.  Sasha speculated that since DPT is not specifically
scheduled by name, unlike DMT and DET (N,N-diethyl-tryptamine), and
since it is apparently being used in a bona fide religious context,
possibly the DEA would rather just not know about it.  As they could be
slammed by the media with equal ease for ignoring it ("tolerating
blatant drug abuse") or for cracking down ("religious persecution")
someone in the department may have made the judgement call that it was
safer for them to know nothing at all about the situation until
officially forced to take cognizance of it.

While Sara was off giving her friend Joe a tour of the house, Sasha
showed me a whole book on Syrian rue which argues that it was the source
for the "soma" of the ancient Aryan Rig-Vedas.  (Unfortunately, I didn't
jot down the author and title.)  Sasha chuckled over the fact that this
author and Gordon Wasson (who has written on the theory that Soma was
the agaric mushroom) have each constructed a theory which he himself
believes is totally air-tight, and each airily dismisses the other's
theory.  They don't talk at conferences.

The conversation flowed from there to the other natural source of the
harmala alkaloids, namely ayahuasca or yage', the hallucinogenic drink
compounded from Banisteriopsis Caapi and related vines.  I had read the
Burroughs and Ginsberg books on ayahuasca from the early '60s, and a few
anthropological books such as Harner's 'Hallucinogens and Shamanism.'
Consequently, I had believed that it was used largely by remote Indian
tribes and by the poor in rural areas.  Sasha corrected me.  According
to him, use of ayahuasca has now become an accepted phenomenon in the
Brazilian middle-class.  On occasion, wealthy Brazilians in the U.S.
import the vine, paying up to several hundred dollars per dose.  Some of
the other plants which go into the traditional brew are unavailable here
and can not be imported, because Customs has them on record as
containing DMT.  As one part of the Brazilian tradition is that the
compounding of the drink is solely at the discretion of the individual
curandero (healer), curanderos in the U.S. may substitute psilocybin
mushrooms or even LSD in the brew on occasion to produce the desired
combination of effects.

Along the same lines, many resorts and restaurants in Thailand have
traditionally served "magic mushroom" omelettes for their hipper
tourists.  They are now coming under pressure from the government to cut
this out; the result, according to Sasha, is that some are now serving
ordinary mushroom omelettes with LSD added to the filling.  No net
improvement in any sense, and rather less picturesque.  (Note to the
curious: while I have heard some people complain that psilocybin
mushrooms have a nasty flavor, this must be limited to a couple specific
species of the genus; the only types I've ever tried had a pleasantly
bland flavor that would have been quite suited to an omelette.)

Around this time, another morning guest, Fred, joined us.  Eventually I
managed to slow the conversation enough to get a tour of the work areas.
Sasha showed me his writing study: floor to ceiling library shelves, an
old IBM XT, and a brand-new 486 PC clone, which he is still transferring
files to.  On the desk was a letter from one of his correspondents, with
a sample vial of a new indole-based psychoactive to look into.  I got a
brief look at the "clean lab" (spectrometers and more books) and then
went out along the garden path to the little outbuilding with the "wet"
lab.  It was quite as fantastical as described in his book -- every
cubic inch, it seemed, filled with glassware and chemical apparatus, and
old leaded glass cabinets along one wall filled with reagents.

Sasha pointed to one bottle filled with a mass of needle-like white
crystals suspended in clear liquid.  "What's that?" he quizzed me.  I
peered at the label... C(NO2)4.  "Surely that's some kind of explosive?"
I answered.  He looked pleased.  "Tetra-nitro-methane.  As a liquid it's
not too bad -- the tri-nitro- is worse -- but once it gets cool enough
to crystallize, I try not to touch the bottle again until spring."  I
got a brief glance at his latest project, a synthesis for DBT (N,N-
dibutyl-tryptamine.)  As both the dimethyl- and diethyl- tryptamines are
so important, Sasha has decided to survey as many of the N,N-dialkyl-
tryptamines as he can synthesize.  So far, he is only up to the butyls.

The last stop on the tour was the reagent storage shed, set back on a
far corner of his property and safely away from any neighbors, with
highly reinforced shelving.  OSHA has recently been more strict about
enforcing workplace safety regulations, which affect many hospitals and
labs which must keep small quantities of some highly hazardous reagents
on hand.  In some cases, they've been ordered to stop storing reagents
which they still need intermittently, and which there is no good way to
dispose of safely.  In such cases, Sasha has made arrangements to step
in and rescue the reagants from the workplaces; the labs or hospitals
can still call him if they need to borrow the reagants, while he
provides safe storage in return for free access to the reagents for his
syntheses.  A win-win situation.

On the way back, Sasha proudly pointed out his San Pedro cacti
(Trichocereus pachanoi, a mescaline-containing cactus.)  One looked
nearly five feet tall.  It appeared that some of them had been trimmed
back periodically -- I wonder why...

Over lunch, Fred, Sasha, and I chatted about topics less directly
related to psychoactives.  We talked over possible changes in the
general government attitude under the Clinton administration; Sasha
believes he has seen some subtle softening in the DEA and FDA positions
in the last few months, while they wait to see what Clinton's postition
will be.  We rambled through the lack of walnut trees in Walnut Creek
and Walnut Grove, the ineptitude of FEMA at disaster management and
response, the decidedly sinister nature of some of the Federal Executive
Orders on record, the varying lingua franca required to communicate in
foreign countries, and the convenience of bribery in visiting or living
in the Third World.

We did discuss the status of the upcoming book for a while.  For those
who don't know, it was leaked on the Net a while back that Sasha is
working on 'TiHKAL' (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved).  This book
will do the same job for all of the indole or tryptamine-derived
psychoactives that PiHKAL did for the phenethylamines.  Thus it would
cover DMT and all the di-alkyl-tryptamines mentioned above, DMT
analogues and derivatives like 5MDMT, psilocybin and psilocin, the beta-
carbolines such as harmine and harmaline, everyone's favorite problem
child LSD and its related ergot alkaloids, and doubtless many compounds
which the rest of us have never heard of.  There will also be an
appendix on new phenethylamines which have been reported to him during
the last year.  Apparently the publication of PiHKAL has brought a
number of researchers "out of the closet" with more material for him to
publish.

Sasha thinks he has most of the material he needs; the problem is in
getting the time to sit down and write it.  He had sworn off conferences
to get more writing time; then he was invited to deliver keynote
addresses at two conferences, one on 'Drugs as Sacraments', the other on
'Drugs and Civil Disobedience.'  He is feeling sorely tempted by both,
as he would be able to choose his own topics.  (Personally, I wish I had
the time and money to attend such conferences, never mind speaking at
them.)

Eventually I had to make my apologies and leave, as I was late for
another appointment.  I left with my head buzzing with ideas to think
about.  Somehow I retained enough dignity to not beg for any free
samples.  I hope I shall be able to return one day for another visit.

Happy New Year, everyone.

  -- Clifton

[[e-mail]]