PiHKAL
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A Chemical Love Story
Alexander (“Sasha”) and Ann Shulgin’s PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story has become a foundational work in the genre — the first book to fully impart the how-to chemistry and convey the effects of many of the entheogenic drugs now being studied and used to heal trauma and deal with death. PIHKAL is an acronym for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.”
The book is divided into two parts. The first is a fictionalized autobiographical novel — the main fiction is that it is fiction. It is the love story of Shura and Alice, two people who fall in love while navigating a painful triangle, and who share many psychedelic journeys together. The reader travels with them through both the heart and the psychedelic experience with grace and deep insight into human nature.
The second half, “The Chemical Story,” contains detailed instructions for and effects of the synthesis of 179 psychedelic phenethylamines, mostly discovered by Shulgin himself — with information on synthesis, dosage, duration, and subjective effects.
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Alexander Shulgin
After serving in the Navy, he obtained his doctorate in biochemistry from UC Berkeley in 1954. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow in psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, and briefly as a research director at BioRad Laboratories, before becoming a senior chemist in chemical research at Dow Chemical Co. In 1960, he worked with mescaline for the first time. He then decided to synthesise it, which led to the DOM, among other things. In 1965, he left Dow Chemical Co to become independent. He taught public health at Berkeley and San Francisco General Hospitals. In 1967 he had the opportunity to work with MDMA, although at the time no one had used it. Although he did not invent MDMA, he created a new synthesis process in 1976 and presented the material to Lion Zeff, an Oakland psychologist who worked with so-called psychedelics. Zeff introduced hundreds of therapists to MDMA and the word quickly got out in the therapy community. Sasha's partner, Ann, also conducted psychedelic therapy sessions with MDMA. Since that time, Shulgin has synthesised hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in four books and over two hundred journals. He is a figure in the psychedelic community, lecturing, giving frequent interviews, and instilling a sense of reasonable scientific thought in the world of self-experimentation and psychoactive ingestion. He is a member of the Bohemian Club. According to some authors, his approach as a chemist is similar to an artistic approach in his quest for perfection (the search for an effective and non-toxic substance that is powerful and controllable).