Psychedelic Chemist Explores the Surreality of Inner Space, One Drug at a Time

Alexander Shulgin endured a government crackdown and hallucinations of his bones melting in pursuit of new mind-bending compounds. By David Biello.

Alexander Shulgin is the world's foremost "psychonaut." The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann.

"I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?" says Shulgin, known to friends as Sasha.

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Thanks to the wonderful Philosophy-Explained blog