Compound Interest

This week's New York Times Magazine has a sympathetic profile of psychonautical chemist Alexander Shulgin, who retrieved MDMA from obscurity, synthesized some 200 other psychoactive compounds, and co-authored (with his wife, Ann) the memoirs/drug guidebooks PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and TIHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved). Shulgin is a remarkable figure who, despite his never-ending interest in mind-altering substances, has not only managed (for the most part) to stay out of serious legal trouble (largely because the government can't ban a drug that hasn't been identified yet) but has held a Schedule I research license and served as a consultant to the DEA. Working out of a backyard laboratory with a sign on the door notifying curious law enforcement officers that his activities are well-known to local, state, and federal authorities, Shulgin harks back to an earlier era of scientific investigation in which a lone experimenter using himself as a test subject could operate without interference from bureaucrats anxious to sort all the world's chemicals into good and evil categories:

Asked why he does what he does, he replies, "I'm curious!"…Shulgin has on occasion run PET scans to see where in the brain some of his drugs go. He has offered theories as to mechanisms of action or, as with MDMA, even suggested an application for a drug. But his primary purpose, as he sees it, is not to worry about things like that--much less about the political and social consequences of his creations. His job is to be first and then push on somewhere new. What to do with the widening wake of chemicals he leaves behind is for the rest of us to figure out.