RIP Alexander Shulgin (the inventor of Ecstasy)
Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2014 2:42 pm
Well, it seems great visionaries keep dropping like flies.. I guess that's the nature of the moment of history we live in:
This man has done probably more than any other person in history considering psychoactive compounds. Time to take dirt nap my friend. RIP.Alexander Shulgin, the researcher who transformed MDMA from an obscure chemical to a party drug known as Ecstasy, has died at his home in Northern California. He was 88, and the cause was liver cancer, .
, Shulgin's wife and collaborator, Ann Shulgin, said:
"Sasha died today, at exactly 5 o'clock in the afternoon. He was surrounded by family and caretakers and Buddhist meditation music, and his going was graceful, with almost no struggle at all."
Shulgin's contribution to research into psychedelic compounds is immense. :
"For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. (Timothy Leary called him one of the century's most important scientists.) By Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, 'empathogens,' convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one's sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion — in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy."
