carte blanche and began experimenting with psychoactive drug structures. He tweaked chemicals like mescaline—which, after being consumed for thousands of years in its natural form by Native peoples in the Western Hemisphere, had been the first psychedelic synthesized in a lab, in 1918.
Shulgin believed drugs were the most efficient way to tap the powers of the world’s greatest resource—the human brain. He hoped, by studying how psychedelics affected people, to benefit science, medicine, psychiatry, the arts, and even religion. “He argued to his superiors that this could be therapeutically important, at doses at which there was no risk of psychotic effects,” said Shulgin’s Dow colleague Solomon Snyder.
Once he had created a new compound, Shulgin tested it on himself, starting at very low dosages, and occasionally would get a reaction he had never experienced before. This wasn’t standard scientific protocol; human clinical trials would have been untenable and unethical, and no animal could usefully describe a psychedelic’s effects. Shulgin’s drug testing often began on his morning hike from his Bay Area home in Lafayette, California, along a canal to Dow’s Walnut Creek facility a few miles away. Dow went along with his ideas and even patented some of his creations. One was a psychedelic known as DOM, which Shulgin found to be even more intense than LSD.
“The body tremor feels like poisoning, there is no escaping the feeling of being disabilitated, but at least there is no nausea,” he wrote, after sampling a particularly strong dose. “The music was exceptional, the erotic was exceptional, the fantasy was exceptional. . . . This may be a bit much for me.” Shulgin never distributed the drug, but according to his protégé Paul Daley, he coached the famous psychedelic chemist Nick Sand on how to make it in the mid-1960s. Hoping to fund the production of his famous Orange Sunshine brand of LSD, Sand sold quantities of DOM to the Hell’s Angels. At some point along the way, DOM was renamed STP—Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace—and the Hell’s Angels began disseminating tablets of it.
Provoked by California’s banning of LSD, thousands of people gathered not long afterward, on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for an event called the Human Be-In, its name inspired by civil rights sit-ins. The event would set the tone for that year’s upcoming Summer of Love. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performed, while the psychedelic thought leader Timothy Leary advised the crowd to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Unfortunately, many who took STP landed in the emergency room, for the tablets the Hell’s Angels distributed were of a much higher dosage than Shulgin recommended.
Spooked by Shulgin’s forays into a realm increasingly associated with lawless youth culture, Dow Chemical asked him to cease using its name on his publications. He took the hint, left the company entirely, and began working exclusively out of a lab next to his house, on a twenty-acre plot near Berkeley called the Farm. Here, he would continue to hone his research and build his reputation, eventually becoming known as the “Godfather of Ecstasy.”
Ecstasy is not a narcotic that sets users floating on a cloud, like the opioids; it’s not a traditional amphetamine that seems to instill one with superpowers, like meth; and it’s not a psychedelic that lets users see the world as if for the first time, like LSD. Instead, it’s something of a combination of the three, fusing the cerebral and the sensual to instill a sense of profound happiness. It has become one of earth’s most popular illicit substances in recent decades, emerging from the electronic dance music scene and gradually infiltrating the mainstream while transcending geography and culture. Sasha Shulgin didn’t invent the drug known as ecstasy, MDMA—which is also sometimes called Molly—but he earned the title “Godfather of Ecstasy” for popularizing it.
MDMA was created by the German pharmaceutical company Merck when it was trying to develop a blood-clotting drug. Another local company was also doing work in this area, so Merck patented MDMA late in 1912. Merck had no idea of its psychoactive effects. Very little was done with MDMA in the ensuing decades, until the US Army began using it and similar drugs for studies on animals in 1953. What inspired the program or what the army was looking for is not clear—possibly a truth serum, possibly a “happy bomb” (a chemical weapon that incapacitated but didn’t kill an enemy). In 1960 MDMA’s synthesis was described in a scientific paper written by a pair of Polish scientists, and Sasha Shulgin first synthesized MDMA in 1965 while working at Dow. Shulgin’s approach was to take the structure of a known drug and use it as scaffolding—a skeleton structure to which he would add or subtract other chemical elements or groups, to see if anything interesting was formed. His work with MMDA, which is more psychedelic than MDMA, may have led Shulgin to first synthesize that structurally similar drug in 1965. Shulgin did not, however, immediately realize ecstasy’s effects, possibly because he took too small a dose.
The formula leaked out, and MDMA began to be used recreationally; in 1972 police discovered it on the streets of Chicago. Shulgin was alerted to its effects by a University of California, San Francisco, graduate student. Shulgin then resynthesized the material, began documenting his experiences, and was astonished. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible,” he wrote. “The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day, and evening, and through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience, and how much more powerful it was than previous experiences, for no apparent reason, other than a continually improving state of being.”
Shulgin didn’t extol MDMA for it to be a party drug, but as a tool for psychotherapy. He believed it had the strong potential to benefit people’s psyches. In 1978 he coauthored, with Purdue University professor David Nichols, the first scientific paper describing MDMA’s effects. “Qualitatively, the drug appears to evoke an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones,” they wrote. Nichols, another towering figure in the realm of psychedelics studies, went on to coin the term entactogen (meaning, roughly, “to produce a touching within”) to distinguish MDMA from stimulants and psychedelics.
MDMA works by subduing a part of the brain, the amygdala, which controls our response to fear, and thus the drug can have a therapeutic effect, helping users work through painful experiences. Shulgin introduced MDMA to key figures in the psychotherapeutic community, including his friend Leo Zeff, a retired psychologist, who was initially skeptical but tried it and was immediately sold. Zeff promptly un-retired and introduced MDMA to “countless other therapists, teaching them how to use it in their therapy.”
The love drug couldn’t be contained. In the 1980s MDMA became a dance-club favorite from New York and San Francisco to Ibiza, initially going by names like Empathy and Adam, the latter implying a Garden of Eden–type innocence. The name ecstasy took hold in the early 1980s. The new “yuppie psychedelic” appealed because, unlike LSD, it wasn’t “supposed to teach you anything or take you anywhere,” according to a 1984 San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle column. “It was designed to simply stimulate the pleasure centers of the cerebral cortex. Its partisans compare Adam to Aldous Huxley’s Soma, the blissful, all-obliterating drug of Brave New World.”
Ecstasy was available at such hot spots as Dallas’s Starck Club, where patrons could buy the drug at the bar. A receipt at the end of the night might read: “2 gin and tonics, 1 ecstasy tablet.”
The DEA banned ecstasy on July 1, 1985, reasoning that a University of Chicago study of a similar chemical, MDA, showed it to cause brain damage in rats. Even the study’s authors seemed to acknowledge this was a leap of logic: “It would be premature to extrapolate the present findings to humans,” it read. Shulgin was entirely unimpressed. This new law, he argued, would impede psychotherapy. Indeed, it is hard to make the case that the ban saved lives, especially considering that today’s ecstasy is chock-full of impurities. “If you look at the period where MDMA was sold legally in nightclubs, where you could buy it with your credit card at the bar, there were no fatalities,” said DanceSafe founder Emanuel Sferios. “Zero fatalities!”
Ironically,
