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Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin (born June 17, 1925 in Berkeley, California) is an American pharmacologist, chemist and drug developer of Russian descent. more...

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Shulgin is credited with the popularization of MDMA in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially for psychopharmaceutical use and the treatment of depression and Post-traumatic stress disorder. In subsequent years, Shulgin discovered, synthesized, and bioassayed over 230 psychoactive compounds. 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.

Early career

Shulgin began studying organic chemistry as a Harvard University scholarship student. 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, 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."

Read more at Wikipedia.org