While the government roundly condemned marijuana and LSD, far more addictive and deadly drugs like nicotine and alcohol enjoyed a commercial resurgence. Winstons tasted good like cigarettes should and leisure time was also Miller time.
Cocaine replaced LSD as the illegal drug of choice. A tsunami from Columbian cartels hit the US in the late seventies, swamping both law enforcement and hospital ERs. In the age of Disco, party-goers used coke to soar and MDMA to mellow out.
First synthesized in 1912 as a potential blood-clotting agent, MDMA, or “ecstasy,” as it would come to be known, had to wait another sixty years before anyone paid much attention to its sublime side effects.
Dow Chemical pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, subsequently nicknamed “Doctor Ecstasy,” brewed his own version of MDMA in 1965, but didn’t get around to trying it out himself until ten years later. When he did, he experienced “an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones.” Shulgin likened MDMA to a low-calorie martini.
A shambling stork of a man, Sasha Shulgin resembled a mad scientist straight out of Central Casting: Freudian chin bush, fluffy wayward brows over kind eyes, liver-colored lips curled into a perpetual grin. Leonard Pickard first began reading Shulgin’s treatises in Nature and the Journal of Organic Chemistry fresh out of high school. Here was a role model well worth emulating.
As was routine among psychonauts, Shulgin was a scientific prodigy. He entered Harvard on scholarship at sixteen to study organic chemistry and took his PhD at Berkeley in 1954. He landed a plum position with Dow Chemical6 as a research chemist in the late fifties, developing the biodegradable insecticide Zectran7, which made him a corporate superstar.
At the same time, he experimented with mescaline and had a revelation.
“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” he later told The New York Times. “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.”
Thence forward, Shulgin dedicated his life to discovering, analyzing, and ingesting psychoactive substances. He synthesized STP in 1963 and kept going, picking up the torch originally lit by Albert Hofmann. Eventually he created hundreds of such compounds—more psychedelics than anyone who’d come before or since.
He never dodged the irony that Dow made it all possible. Showing its gratitude for Zectran, the company that created Agent Orange and Napalm underwrote Shulgin’s home laboratory as well as the first decade of his research. All they asked was that he leave Dow’s name out of it.
Sasha first experimented with MDMA in the autumn of 1976. He was so thrilled with the results that he felt compelled to report his findings during a national conference the following December.
MDMA curbed inhibition and boosted empathy, he said. He told an audience of shrinks it spawned a brand-new breakthrough in psychotherapy. For angst-ridden patients unable or unwilling to put themselves into others’ shoes, a dose of “Window,” as Shulgin had dubbed his new wonder drug, would open their eyes.
And for a few years, Sasha’s prediction seemed to come true. Among those with whom he shared his discovery, psychologist Leo Zeff grew so excited that he became the Al Hubbard of MDMA. The San Francisco psychotherapist spread the drug to over four thousand psychiatric counselors nationwide, developing a whole new protocol for putting patients under its spell. Like Sasha, he gave MDMA a pet name: “Adam,” an anagram reference to the embryonic innocence of Eden.
But psychoactives seldom got a pass during the War on Drugs, and so it was with MDMA. By the end of the seventies, the DEA caught on to the analogue game. Every time a new drug surfaced, outlaw chemists came up with a variant. The moment that the government added another compound to Schedule One, a modified version hit the streets. Sasha Shulgin wasn’t the only chef cooking up new recipes.
“We all were working in the same directions, but independently,” said Pickard.
At the same time Shulgin and Zeff were trumpeting MDMA, an Indiana college chemistry instructor and a Nevada metallurgist were also synthesizing the drug. Purdue professor Dave Nichols and mining engineer Darrell LeMaire joined the growing ranks of psychedelic sorcerers replicating Shulgin’s formulae, just the way that Pickard tried to do at his Woodside cottage and later on, in the basement of his Portola Valley apartment building.
“Serendipity?” asked Pickard.
Alas, MDMA’s journey from promising panacea to banned party pill was roughly the same as lysergic acid’s, only shorter. Whereas the FDA took twenty years to outlaw LSD, MDMA made the list in less than ten.
On March 30, 1979, Dr. Oscar Janiger gathered thirty of the earliest surviving psychonauts at a Beverly Hills house party to reminisce and assess the future of LSD. Captain Al Hubbard showed up in his khaki Boy Scout uniform, complete with an official-looking badge and revolver at his hip. Sans his long locks and signature flowing robes, a sobered Tim Leary came despite grumbles from peers that he’d done more damage than good by mouthing off to the Establishment and ratting out his friends.
The rest of Janiger’s guest list read like a Who’s Who of the surviving first generation of lysergic champions:
• Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the Canadian physician who first dosed Aldous Huxley, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill W. and other notables;
• Neurologist Nick Bercel, believed to be the first ever American to drop acid (1949);
• Dr. Sidney Cohen, who conducted UCLA’s first clinical studies of LSD as therapy for alcohol abuse and end-of-life anxiety;
• Myron Stolaroff, founder of Menlo Park’s International Foundation for Advanced Study, which soldiered on, experimenting with acid even after the ban;
• Dr. Murray Jarvik, inventor of the nicotine patch and early proponent of LSD as a tool for fighting tobacco addiction;
• Hollywood sci-fi producer Ivan Tors8, who used acid to create Flipper, among other hallucinatory movie and TV animal characters;
• Willis Harman, co-founder of
