Church of the Sacred Mushroom

Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin
(born June 17, 1925 in Berkeley, California)

Shulgin, Ph.D., is a pharmacologist and chemist known for his creation of new psychoactive chemicals.

Shulgin began studying organic chemistry as a Harvard University scholarship student. In 1943, at the age of 19, he dropped out of school, and joined the U.S. Navy, where he eventually became interested in pharmacology. After serving in the Navy (vet of the World War II), he returned to Berkeley, California, and in 1954 earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Through the late 50's, Shulgin completed post-doctoral work in the fields of psychiatry and pharmacology at University of California, San Francisco.

After working at Bio-Rad Laboratories as a research director for a brief period, he began work at Dow Chemical Company as a senior research chemist.

It was at this time that he had a series of psychedelic experiences that helped to shape his further goals and research, beginning with an experience with mescaline.

"I first explored mescaline in the late '50s, Three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me"

– Alexander Shulgin, LA Times, 1995

He would later write that everything he saw and thought "had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid... I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability."

Shulgin's professional activities continued to lean in the direction of psychopharmacology, furthered by his personal experiences with psychedelics. But during this period he was unable to do much independent research. His opportunity for further research came with his development of , the first biodegradable pesticide, a highly profitable product. Dow Chemical Company, in return for Zectran's valuable patent, gave Shulgin great freedom.
During this time, he created and patented drugs when Dow asked, and published findings on other drugs in journals such as Nature and Journal of Organic Chemistry. Eventually, Dow Chemical requested that he no longer use their name on his publications.

In 1965, Shulgin left Dow to pursue his own interests, and became a private consultant, also frequently teaching classes in the local universities and at the San Francisco General Hospital. Through his friend Bob Sager, head of the U.S. DEA's Western Laboratories, Shulgin formed a relationship with the DEA and began holding pharmacology seminars for the agents, supplying the DEA with samples of various compounds, and occasionally serving as an expert witness in court. He also authored a definitive law enforcement reference book on controlled substances and received several awards from the DEA.

In the late 50s and early 60s he did post-doctorate work in psychiatry and pharmacology at U.C. San Francisco and worked briefly as a Research Director at BioRad Laboratories before becoming a senior Research Chemist at Dow Chemical Co.

In 1960, Sasha tried mescaline for the first time. He then experimented with synthesizing chemicals with structures similar to mescaline such as DOM. After leaving Dow in 1965 to become an independent consultant, Sasha taught public health at Berkeley and San Francisco General Hospital.
In 1967, he was introduced to the possibilities of MDMA by an undergrad at San Francisco State University at a time when very few people had tried MDMA.

Though Shulgin didn't invent the chemical, he did create a new synthesis process in 1976 and introduced the material to Leo Zeff, an Oakland psychologist who worked with psychedelics in his therapy practice. Zeff introduced hundreds of therapists to MDMA and word quickly spread outside the therapist community. Sasha's partner Ann Shulgin also conducted psychedelic therapy sessions with MDMA before it was scheduled in 1985.

Since that time, Shulgin has synthesized and bioassayed (self-tested) hundreds of psychoactive chemicals, recording his work in four books and more than two hundred papers. He is a fixure in the psychedelic community, speaking at conferences, granting frequent interviews, and instilling a sense of rational scientific thought into the world of self-experimentation and psychoactive ingestion.

In 1991 and 1997, he and his wife Ann Shulgin authored the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL on the topic of psychoactive drugs. Shulgin discovered many noteworthy phenethylamines including the 2C* family of which 2C-T-2, 2C-T-7, 2C-E, 2C-I, and 2C-B are most well known. Additionally, Shulgin performed seminal work into the descriptive synthesis of compounds based on the organic compound tryptamine.

He is currently continuing his work at home in Lafayette, California, and is writing a new comprehensive psychedelic drug index.