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Abused Substances: Essay by Sasha Shulgin
(Alexander T. Shulgin, Technology Review, August 2005)

For the past four decades, I have studied psychoactive drugs at the far end of the spectrum: those that affect the mind. These substances are usually discovered by people experimenting on humans. . . . It should be stated outright that the uses of these drugs are not merely recreational (although of course they are used that way all the time, and for other, more meditative reasons). Recently, several researchers successfully navigated the bureaucratic paperwork necessary to get approval of and permission for clinical studies of psychedelics. A study by Francisco Moreno at the University of Arizona using psilocybin in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder has been completed. And two other studies of psychedelics are under way: one, at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, is exploring psilocybin as a treatment for anxiety in patients with advanced-stage cancer; the other, being conducted in South Carolina, studies the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder patients with MDMA--the drug more commonly known as ecstasy. Additional studies should soon be up and running, including one at Harvard's McLean Hospital that will investigate the potential value of MDMA in treating cancer patients' anxieties. . . . I choose to call these psychoactive compounds psychedelics, but many names have been used for them. . . . The very first psychedelic I experienced (this was 45 years ago) was the peyote-cactus alkaloid, mescaline. It was an awesome experience in several ways. But its most dramatic result was my realization that there was no way the forgotten memories of my childhood that had just resurfaced, and the display of colors of which I had previously been unaware, could be contained in a few hundred milligrams of a white crystalline powder. To me it was inescapable that all the richness of that day had been inside my mind all along, and the drug was just the catalyst that gave me access to it. Since I am a chemist, I can easily synthesize chemicals with subtle structural differences--like a slightly longer carbon chain here or a sulfur in place of an oxygen there--to find the dosages where they become active. . . . Two or three examples. When I moved one of the methoxy groups of mescaline to an adjacent position, and replaced another one with an ethyl group, I got a beautiful white solid that I named 2C-E. It was fully active in me at 20 milligrams taken orally. The visual activity and color enhancement it effected were very much like those of LSD, but 2C-E had a strange and (for me) novel property. On occasion, during a psychedelic experience, I would ask myself an important, private question to see what answer might bubble up. If the question turned out to be too complex, or touched on unpleasant subjects, I would drop it and ask another. But 2C-E wouldn't let me do that. I had to stay with each question until I worked through to an answer. . . . I have little insight as to how these remarkable compounds do what they do. The human mind is a mysterious and complex thing. There have never been dependable ways to get into it, take it apart, and see how it works. My hope is that psychedelic compounds may be the tools, or may lead to the discovery of tools, that can throw some light on elusive questions about how the mind works. Say a person is called "mentally ill" because he hears God speaking to him. Maybe you can put a positron emitter on a chemical that gives you distortion in sound recognition, inject it into a normal subject who is in a PET scanner, and observe that it goes to a most unusual place in the brain. Maybe that is where the physician should look for the tumor in the brain of the person who hears from God. . . . One of the major impediments to the expansion of research in this fascinating area is the war on drugs. The categorization of psychedelics as evil and dangerous keeps them in the Schedule I category, where they are said to have no medical value. Discoveries are not being published, because researchers feel that if new and potentially useful compounds are openly discussed in the medical literature, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency will add them to the illegal list. With the series of clinical trials using psychedelics, I hope the wind is shifting.

Alexander "Sasha" T. Shulgin is a pharmacologist and biochemist. He was the first to synthesize hundreds of psychedelic compounds.

posted by LoZo 11:43 AM