I thought it might be interesting to have a discussion parallel to the cannabis one about MDMA.
I got the thought because I just got this email from Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance:
I am pleased to invite you to a live audio web chat on Tuesday, February 22 at 3 PM PST / 6 PM EST with myself, Dr. Sasha Shulgin, the noted psychedelic chemist and pharmacologist, and his wife Ann Shulgin, the beloved writer and therapist. Dr. Shulgin, a former Dow research chemist, is well known for his creation and discovery of new psychoactive chemicals and for his promotion in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the use of MDMA in psychotherapy. Sasha and Ann Shulgin together authored and published the books PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story and TIHKAL: The Continuation, detailing the synthesis of and their personal experience with hundreds of psychedelics.
The Shulgins will be online to address your questions on a range of topics from the "war on drugs" to the therapeutic use of MDMA. Please email questions@drugpolicy.org before February 22 to submit questions, and don't forget to bookmark the chat address!
When: Tuesday, February 22, 2005
3 PM PST / 6 PM EST
Where: http://www.drugpolicy.org/events/shulginchat
I've been a fan of Shulgin's ever since I read PIKHAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved -- the sequel is the same, but about Tryptamines).
He's fascinating guy, as the New York Times recently revealed....
There's a story he likes to tell about the past 100 years: "At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to Western science: cannabis and mescaline. A little over 50 years later -- with LSD, psilocybin, psilocin, TMA, several compounds based on DMT and various other isomers -- the number was up to almost 20. By 2000, there were well over 200. So you see, the growth is exponential." When I asked him whether that meant that by 2050 we'll be up to 2,000, he smiled and said, "The way it's building up now, we may have well over that number."
The point is clear enough: the continuing explosion in options for chemical mind-manifestation is as natural as the passage of time. But what Shulgin's narrative leaves out is the fact that most of this supposedly inexorable diversification took place in a lab in his backyard. For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. ( Timothy Leary called him one of the century's most important scientists. ) By Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, "empathogens," convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one's sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion -- in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience.
They also point out that research in the field seems to be expanding:
Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vindication. A little more than a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Harvard Medical School study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of terminal cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., started his study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, with somewhat less attention, studies at the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and the University of Arizona, Tucson, have focused on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin ( the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" ). It's far from a revolution, but it is an opening, and as both scientist and advocate, Shulgin has helped create it. If -- and it's a big "if" -- the results of the studies are promising enough, it might bring something like legitimacy to the Shulgin pharmacopoeia.
Anyway, I thought y'all would
a. like to know about the chat.
b. be interested in Shulgin as a dynamic personality -- people like these are how science progresses.
c. might want to discuss more about how MDMA could be made legal someday, what kind of applications you'd like to see for it, or even if it should be legalized at all.... |
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