from Hacker News

Alexander Shulgin has died

by infinity on 6/3/14, 10:44 AM with 135 comments

by allworknoplay on 6/3/14, 12:15 PM
I had dinner with him once at a conference; he was amazing. When asked about the safety of self-testing novel substances (he of course starts at insanely low doses, but still), he said that he's learned to identify the signs of grand mal seizures, and if he feels one coming on, he simply sticks himself with a couple hundred miligrams of phenobarbital, straps himself in, and goes for a ride. Then he gets back to work.
by idm on 6/3/14, 1:37 PM
MDMA may have been discovered in a Merck laboratory, but Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin devised an excellent DIY MDMA synthesis that could be attempted outside a laboratory environment. Shulgin has been accused of intentionally designing his MDMA synthesis in ways that may have reduced yields, but which utilized precursors that were simpler to obtain by DIY chemists.
Shulgin's decisions to facilitate DIY may be responsible for the proliferation of MDMA, which will only increase in importance as MDMA is given more attention in mainstream psychological research. As a psychologist myself, I suspect Shulgin's gentle subversion (a spirit that persists through PiHKAL and TiHKAL) will ultimately be viewed as a heroic act that brought attention to an important therapeutic tool.
by raaxe on 6/3/14, 1:40 PM
"(with 100 mg) I had weighed correctly. I had simply picked up the wrong vial. And my death was to be a consequence of a totally stupid mistake. I wanted to walk outside, but there was a swimming pool there and I didn't dare fall into it. A person may believe that he has prepared himself for his own death, but when the moment comes, he is completely alone, and totally unprepared. Why now? Why me? Two hours later, I knew that I would live after all, and the experience became really marvelous. But the moment of facing death is a unique experience. In my case, I will some day meet it again, and I fear that I will be no more comfortable with it then than I was just now. This was from the comments of a psychologist who will, without doubt, use psychedelics again in the future, as a probe into the unknown."
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal020....
by codeshaman on 6/3/14, 12:38 PM
Some of the most amazing moments I've had in life were on MDMA. I'm sure this is true for hundreds of millions of other people who've taken it. This substance has revolutionised our word in many ways - music, fashion, art, architecture, etc.
Apart from MDMA, Shulgin has synthesised, experimented with and wrote about countless substances and plants which affect the mind or spirit.
A great explorer, and from what I've read, a great human being as well.
Rest in peace & Keep exploring ;)
by Nanzikambe on 6/3/14, 3:53 PM
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
RIP Shulgin, a singular being.
by fear91 on 6/3/14, 12:32 PM
It's a great shame.
I recommend the "Dirty Pictures" - a documentary about his life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5q1bBVzDpc
by jjj222 on 6/3/14, 4:58 PM
Today I work in IT security- in my former life, he was a great inspiration.
I had almost forgotten him..... I was in a closed circle of psychonauts, we where about 60 people.
We would get our hands on the most exotic substances and share amongst us, and compare trip reports.
It was my entire life, 2cb,2ci,2c-t7,2ce,DIPT,5-meo dipt, lsd etc. So I have tried many of hes creations, and i idolised him. Then in 6 months 4 of the group died, 1 suicide, 3 ODs(not on any of shulgins creations of course). Then I quitted, dropped all my friends, started taking life seriously....
But I have one thing to remind of that time in my life...a book I inherited from one of my now dead friends:
http://i.imgur.com/S2pCuux.jpg
He actually wrote with Shulgin himself, doing experiments using cactusses injected with ummm...some variety of DMT I think- to make the cactus metabolise it into something else. Shulgin adviced him, and my friend did the experiments.
RIP DEX! RIP SHULGIN!
by pmoriarty on 6/3/14, 2:49 PM
The BBC obituary on Shulgin[1] calls him the "Godfather of Ecstasy"[2], but he was far more than that.
He synthesized and carefully chronicled the effects of hundreds of psychoactive compounds on himself and a small, dedicated core group of explorers of human consciousness.
His efforts were published in two massive, definitive tomes called PiHKAL[3][4] and TiKHAL[5][6], the titles of which stand for "Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved" and "Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved", respectively.
These volumes contained detailed chemical synthesis instructions for the compounds he created, along with "trip reports" and ratings[7] of the compounds' psychoactivity, ranging from:
PLUS / MINUS (+/-) "The level of effectiveness of a drug that indicates a threshold action. If a higher dosage produces a greater response, then the plus/minus (+/-) was valid. If a higher dosage produces nothing, then this was a false positive."
to
PLUS FOUR (++++) "A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a 'peak experience', a 'religious experience,' 'divine transformation,' a 'state of Samadhi' and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment."
His chemistry lab was DEA-licensed to handle "illegal" (scheduled) compounds, though he often synthesized entirely novel compounds which were not scheduled because neither the compounds nor the laws scheduling them existed yet.
Shulgin tirelessly educated the public and the law-enforcement community on the effects and value of psychedelic and psychoactive compounds, and wrote a highly informative Q&A column.[7]
Shulgin's pioneering work inspired generations of chemists, self-experimenters, and explorers. He was well known, loved, and respected as one of the most highly accomplished psychedelic chemists in history. His presence and guidance will be deeply missed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin
[2] - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-27676669
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIHKAL
[4] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.sht...
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIHKAL
[6] - http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.sht...
[7] - http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/shulgin/blg/index.html
by VonGuard on 6/3/14, 2:27 PM
An amazing man. Truly the Copernicus of his time: persecuted for his pursuit of science. In 100 years, this man will be considered one of the most important neural science researchers ever.
by alx on 6/3/14, 2:41 PM
"The Shulgin Rating Scale is a simple scale for reporting the subjective effect of psychoactive substances at a given dosage, and at a given time. The system was developed for research purposes by the American biochemist Alexander Shulgin and detailed in his book PiHKAL"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shulgin_Rating_Scale
PLUS FOUR (++++) [...] If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.
by jongold on 6/3/14, 1:33 PM
How many people can say they've altered the course of human conciousness? What a hero. RIP.
by h1karu on 6/3/14, 1:36 PM
RIP to one of the true heros of our generation.
thank you Alexander Shulgin!
gone by not forgotten
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4L5vRZ_g8
by waterfowl on 6/3/14, 12:28 PM
what a legend. One of the few people who actually bases their opinions of psychoactives on controlled experiences with them.
by jMyles on 6/3/14, 1:42 PM
I had the incredible fortune to have met Sasha and Ann several times, and always enjoyed their company enormously. Good work, man!
by Nursie on 6/3/14, 12:29 PM
One of my heroes has died today.
RIP to a great chemist and experimenter.
by azurelogic on 6/3/14, 1:37 PM
The original brain hacker is no longer with us. RIP Dr. Shulgin.
by whtrbt on 6/3/14, 12:12 PM
That's sad to hear - Pikhal and Tikhal are fascinating works, and reading them I got the sense that he was a very kind, patient and curious person.
by dmerrick on 6/3/14, 8:04 PM
My favorite quotation from the man:
"How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it."
by sehr on 6/3/14, 1:38 PM
Whether or not you approve, this man had changed the face of human kind forever. An amazing man, will be missed
by muloka on 6/4/14, 4:42 PM
Cross posting this for Erowid:
---
We are trying to collect a record of all tweets and retweets of hashtag:
#ThanksSasha
and
#Shulgin
We want to continue to track these. So we don't want just an output, but a way to grab all existing tweets and collect them going forward.
We would also like to grab google plus matching posts as well, but twitter is the first target.
If someone has PHP and twitter experience, it seems like a pretty easy application to write a scraper that saves the data to sql, xml, or text.
We want a downloadable data file that can be updated over time.
I spent a while looking for existing tools and didn't find anything that could provide a downloadable, reliable format that we could use to try to track this.
Thanks for any help or suggestions of services that would provide that data as a lump, without having to have one of us manually slog through many, many clicks and parsing extremely obscure HTML/js.
earth
earth@erowid.org
by dzhiurgis on 6/3/14, 8:40 PM
It would be interedting to have 'Ask HN' about drug use, especially correlated with age.
Jobs has taken many different drugs, but I can't stop wondering how long did he continue to do so. I really doubt he did any after age of 30 or so.
by contingencies on 6/3/14, 6:03 PM
Can we start a crowdfunding campaign for a museum of ecstasy with legal public samples? Anyone know German law? How would this go down in Darmstadt, where it was first discovered by Merck? I for one will donate significantly.
by rurban on 6/3/14, 7:18 PM
Not to be mixed up with Alexei Shulgin, the popular internet artist from Moscow: http://www.easylife.org/ He is well and alive.
by ph4 on 6/3/14, 1:15 PM
A one of a kind, once in a generation human being.
by andywood on 6/3/14, 6:59 PM
Would somebody be kind enough to tell me whether I've been hell-banned? Thank you.
by igivanov on 6/3/14, 7:04 PM
With all the praise of self-experiments (or experiments on a dedicated core group), there is this fact: we know that even a single use of a psychedelic drug may be "a life-changing experience". We also know that some substances may cause irreversible changes in the brain (e.g. glue-sniffing). So IMHO it doesn't sound like a rigorous science, who knows what changes those countless tests had caused and how those changes affected subsequent tests.
by weatherlight on 6/3/14, 2:10 PM
A true pioneer.
by Myrmornis on 6/4/14, 3:53 AM
I believe he was a hero.
by danelectro on 6/5/14, 8:06 PM
it can be amazing what a non-institutional researcher can do
by dingdingdang on 6/3/14, 9:27 PM
WIP, there is no death