Said Ann Shulgin, quoted in
"Ann Shulgin, 91, Who Explored Psychedelics With Her Husband, Dies
The couple advocated the use of hallucinogens in psychotherapy and documented their experiences with hundreds of drugs in two widely read books" (NYT).
[“PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” (1991)] is divided into two parts: first a thinly veiled autobiography, then a do-it-yourself guide to making some 170 drugs, a feature that made this self-published volume an underground hit in the United States and Europe....
“Inventing new psychoactive drugs,” Ms. Shulgin told The Los Angeles Times in 1995, “is like composing new music.”...
She took her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. “We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head,” she recalled in “PiHKAL.”
“It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence.”
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23 comments:
RIP. Both books are really great.
I once modified a pair of brass knuckles by attaching smoky rutilated quartz to the surface and went to Phish and Yonder Mountain concerts asking hippy new agers if they needed there chakras realigned. Very few takers.
Haven't read the books and probably won't at this point in my life. But I know that spiral.
--- I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence [in the early '60s]
Perhaps because, like so many others at that time, she had read the Aldous Huxley account of his first trip in "The Doors of Perception," published 1954.
In the movie, though, she will be the brilliant, determined scientific researcher, and he will be the weepy, intuitive spiritual-psychological type.
Great gig, do all the drugs you want and write off on your taxes.
I believe that some people have benefited from their psychedelic experience and other people not so much. I note in passing that those who explore psychedelics are praised as pioneers by the sort of people who ridicule those who take ivermectin for covid....Some people like to explore the boundaries and see the view from the mountaintop. There are risks involved in falling off the cliff, but there are also risks involved in choosing the wrong mountain.
I guess I don't see the romance here. It wasn't a doorway. It was a visual hallucination. The chemicals made her brain start firing randomly, like a dream. That experience might indeed be interesting, like dreams sometimes are, but trying to dress it up with cosmic significance just sounds sad.
I pretty much had the same experience my first time as she described about her first, though mine was a few years later, after it had become illegal. Most of the times I did it subsequently were as profound, especially the experiences in Golden Gate Park.
Someday someone's going to figure out how to use the power of these drugs to solve, or at least ameliorate, the most common mental-health issues. But of course it won't be the pharma companies that lead the way. They wouldn't dare kill the golden goose of daily $$RI dependence.
Stairway to Heaven?
I have read and own a copy of the book.
A philosophy major back in college once discussed with me his perceptions of the inadequacy of the scientific method as a way of discerning the great truths of life. He made a lot of good points, quoting from Aristotle all the way up to peyote-worshipper Carlos Castenada. I countered with the beneficial development of the germ theory of disease and how flames worked. Both of us were happy we could share. No drugs were consumed before or during this discussion.
Spiral staircase to heaven?
The kind of drug advocacy that was the centerpiece of Shulgin's life seems irresponsible to me. There are many good reasons for requiring rigorous testing before permitting use of psychoactive pharmaceuticals. Drugs that alter neurological signaling can do so in ways that produce long or short term adverse consequences, and dangerous side effects.
So we can partially thank these self-obsessed morons for the plethora of home made and toxic psychedelic substances being cooked up and sold around the country?
Please note that psychotherapy is an ineffective bunch of nonsense which has a lower "success" rate at curing psychological ills than just leaving people to themselves. The only thing that has shown any success at solving mental illnesses are pharmaceuticals.
So these two are double quacks - home made psychedelics AND psychotherapy.
So she was a housewife and her husband’s Guinea pig?
When I was a medical student I had a patient who had been using LSD in psychotherapy. He and the psychiatrist would both drop acid. In one session he had an illusion that he was a fetus and curled up in a fetal position . This left him quadriplegic. Fortunately, he recovered and was in the hospital to have his cervical cord AV malformation repaired.
”He has the scientific viewpoint and I have the psychological and spiritual.”
Did Ann Shulgin claim that psychology isn’t a science? Or did she just appropriate the word to dignify her opinions?
If psychedelics had any benefit, one would assume their ingestion would enhance rational productivity, but personal histories like Ann Shulgin’s suggest that is not the case.
Timothy Leary at the start of his career at Harvard seemed to have it made — a brilliant young pioneer in neuroscience with tenure, but that didn’t last, did it?
Waste and devastation, devastation and waste.
I've never done psychedelics. But I note that from talking with friends who have, it seems that they give you the sense, the impression, that you are perceiving more or perceiving the world more clearly or accurately than before - without any evidence that that's the case. Nothing you can look at afterwards and see that, yes, the butterfly wing really IS made up of tiny scales or whatever.
This is, again, based only on my very limited conversations with a few friends.
In my dreams, sometimes I can fly; as a child I used to try to replicate what I did in my dream to take off, and it never came close to working. I don't see how psychedelics are different.
A doorway to an other side of existenance.
An overdose will get you to that "other side" alright, otherwise it is just a hallucination.
Her husband died at 88; she made it to 91. Perhaps all those warnings about the risks of psychedelic drugs, however well-meant, were a bit overwrought?
Or maybe they were wealthy grifters selling bullshit and poison to bucketloads of idiots and emotional children while being abetted by the CIA.
I spent a long week typing Rick Doblin's Magic Mountain opus about visiting the Shugins and their peers. For cash -- unlike these types, I had to work to go to school. I can speak with bored authority that they were addled and dull. Like people on acid. But it led me to look deeper into their agenda decades later. They are government funded disinformation agents -- and dupes -- drugging America into complacency and distraction. That's all.
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