the DEA, which was more tolerant of his work than might be expected. The DEA even granted him a rare license to handle schedule I drugs, which he maintained for more than two decades. The agency enlisted his help in understanding recreational chemicals, consulted his 1988 book Controlled Substances: Chemical and Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, and gave him awards for his service.
The relationship with the agency broke, however, after the publication, in 1991, of Shulgin’s psychedelic instruction manual for amateur chemists, PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, cowritten with his wife, Ann Shulgin. With its title acronym, for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, no publisher would take it on, so he and Ann published it themselves, along with a 1997 follow-up, TiHKAL—Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved. Phenethylamines and tryptamines are the two main families of psychedelics. Together the two books contain formulas for more than 230 drugs, including many substances Shulgin didn’t invent, like LSD; some psychedelics Shulgin did discover, like 2C-B, which would become popular; and others, like GANESHA (2,5-dimethoxy-3,4-dimethylamphetamine) and 4-HO-MET (4-Hydroxy-N-methyl-N-ethyltryptamine), that remain obscure. “It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs,” Richard Meyer, spokesman for the DEA’s San Francisco field division, told the New York Times Magazine. “Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books.”
On October 27, 1994, a phalanx of DEA official vehicles raided Shulgin’s property—a hillside expanse dotted with psychedelic cacti—combing the grounds in search of violations of Shulgin’s DEA license. They found some small infractions, packages from senders who hoped he would test their ecstasy to see whether it was actually ecstasy, and while he hadn’t tested the materials, he hadn’t disposed of them either, which was the problem. Ultimately, Shulgin was fined $25,000 and lost his DEA license.
Authorities around the world also began regarding Shulgin as a menace. Britain took the unprecedented step of blanket banning every compound that appeared in PiHKAL. This, of course, has not stopped Shulgin’s work from having seismic influence. Just as he had hoped, his formulas were distributed widely, and with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, a new community of tech-savvy psychonauts sampled his ouevre as if from a menu. Shulgin’s influence is felt in every corner of the psychedelic Internet, from Bluelight, an informational message board focused on illegal chemicals and harm reduction, to Erowid, a comprehensive encyclopedia of recreational substances, new and old, and their effects.
How many overdoses and deaths Shulgin’s drugs have caused is hard to know. According to Erowid, three people died from a phenethylamine named 2C-T-7, and two others from a tryptamine called 5-MeO-DIPT. There are surely others, but the number of fatalities is likely small, even though Shulgin brought well over one hundred new drugs into the world. Generally, with some notable exceptions, psychedelics don’t tend to be especially toxic, and they cause death at a tiny fraction of the rate of opioids, cocaine, meth, and benzodiazepines, which include Xanax and Valium.
Shulgin’s playbooks inspired chemists around the world to go into business, and many have used his scaffolding technique to invent numerous drugs much more dangerous than Shulgin ever made. Chinese laboratories selling his chemicals have profited in untold millions, and the same channels that help spread his psychedelics—including Internet message boards and Dark Web emporiums—are also used by people advocating and selling much darker drugs. Meanwhile, armed criminal gangs have also gotten in on the action. The mescaline derivative 2C-B, Shulgin’s favorite of all the chemicals he invented, in recent years has come to be heavily trafficked by drug organizations in Colombia and is a favored club drug in places like Medellín. Known as cocaína rosada (pink cocaine) for its color, or simply tusi (the Spanglish pronunciation of “2C”), it’s snorted like cocaine and, due to its psychedelic qualities, has displaced cocaine in popularity among some sets.
Shulgin anticipated that lab-made drugs like fentanyl could displace plant-based substances like heroin, and he lived long enough to see the adulteration of MDMA. “He was saddened seeing it escape from the relative control of the psychoanalytic community into the rave scene,” Paul Daley said. “In particular, he didn’t like being called the Godfather of Ecstasy. What was being sold as ecstasy on the street was often not. The folks who could really benefit from the MDMA experience all of a sudden had access only to impure materials, of unknown quality and dosage.”
The heavily cut “ecstasy” tablets now common on the rave scene stand in contrast to pure MDMA’s acceptance in the medical community in recent years. One of the pure drug’s leading advocates is Ann Shulgin, who said MDMA’s banning effectively shut down significant medical research on the drug for years. “If MDMA hadn’t been scheduled, it would have probably almost wiped out PTSD,” she said. “It is the most perfect drug for PTSD. Instead, they have millions of veterans all over the world suffering.”
Approximately one of every thirteen Americans suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, and veterans are twice as likely to be afflicted, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. However, in August 2017 the FDA granted MDMA a “breakthrough therapy” designation, helping to accelerate a third and final phase of medical trials to test its efficacy in treating victims of PTSD. If the trials are successful and approval is granted, certified psychotherapists will be allowed to treat patients with 125 milligram ecstasy pills in their offices, effectively legalizing MDMA for medical use, perhaps as early as 2021.
“They take the MDMA and have this expansiveness,” said therapist Julane Andries, who treated PTSD patients during phase two of the trials. “They’re not feeling fear. They’re not feeling shame. They’re not feeling anger. They can look at themselves and have compassion.” As reported by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has been spearheading this movement, one year after the phase two trials, 68 percent of the patients no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
But while ecstasy gained credibility among therapists, in the 2000s it became increasingly difficult to find—in its pure form—on the street.
The easiest way to make MDMA, Sasha Shulgin wrote in PiHKAL, is to use a precursor called safrole. A naturally occurring chemical compound found in nutmeg and other spices, safrole was once used as an ingredient in root beer before it was banned as a food additive by the FDA. Animal-testing studies showed it could lead to cancer.
Safrole oil smells like licorice, and is obtained by harvesting sassafras trees, which are found in various parts of the world including eastern Asia and North America. In the United States the trees don’t produce enough oil to make harvesting them profitable, but in countries like Myanmar, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia, the rise of ecstasy in the 1990s set off a scramble to turn native trees into a cash crop. Cambodia was particularly susceptible to exploitation by the ecstasy trade. The impoverished Southeast Asian nation of sixteen million people shares long, porous borders with Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, across which traffickers on bicycle, motorcycle, or even on foot dart through forests to evade detection. With few patrols and a history of corrupt officials turning their backs to drug crime, Cambodia maintains a reputation as a smuggling haven. It also possesses an abundance of a rare type of sassafras tree prized for its capacity to generate rich, highly potent safrole oil. Known as mreah prew phnom, it’s found in large quantities in a protected, mountainous area of the country called the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary.
The 1988 United Nations drug treaty produced an agreement to expand the drug war from crackdowns on illicit drugs to crackdowns on the compounds used to make them, including safrole oil.
Traditionally in Southeast Asia, safrole oil has been used in small quantities to make medicines, including those used to salve skin irritations. But increasing demand for MDMA toward the end of the twentieth century created a multimillion-dollar trade in Cambodia, served by increasingly large and sophisticated
