2C-T-7's BAD TRIP

Sasha Shulgin invented 2C-T-7. Then he published the recipe.

It was only a matter of time before his drug turned up on the tongues
of non-scientists.

In the beginning, Alexander Shulgin created 2C-T-7, and it was good.
Shulgin has dedicated his life to the idea that psychedelics can be
used to explore the potential of the human mind, and of all the many
drugs he has sampled, 2C-T-7 was one of his personal favorites. "If
all the phenethylamines were to be ranked as to their acceptability
and intrinsic richness, 2C-T-7 would be right up there near the top,"
he wrote of his 1986 invention.

It was a glowing statement from the man believed to have consumed a
wider variety of drugs than anyone else on the planet.

In his fifty-plus years as a chemist, the genial, wild-haired Shulgin,
who is better known to his friends and admirers as "Sasha," has become
a renegade scientific folk hero responsible for bringing more than two
hundred new drugs into the world.

Timothy Leary once called Shulgin and his wife Ann "the two most
important scientists of the twentieth century." Throughout Shulgin's
career, which has included stints as a UC Berkeley instructor and
expert witness at Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) trials, Shulgin's work
has been marked by his special love for psychedelics. Nowadays he
often refers to them by the terms "phenethylamines" or "tryptamines,"
concerned as he is by the connotations of hippie excess attached to
the word "psychedelic."

Shulgin does not design drugs for the commercial market.

His inventions exist primarily on paper and in controlled laboratory
quantities. Also known as "research drugs," they have never undergone
widespread testing and often have been sampled only by Shulgin and
Ann, his partner in chemical exploration. While it is legal for
Shulgin to invent them in the lab, it's not legal for any of his
inventions to be manufactured, sold, or consumed as so-called
"analogues" designed to mimic the effects of illegal narcotics. But
despite the stringency of the laws that govern such drugs, 2C-T-7 was
not destined to stay confined to the Shulgins' Lafayette lab forever.

In 1991, the couple published the first in a series of 800-page books
that included directions for synthesizing a total of more than 200
chemical compounds, including 2C-T-7. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story
(the acronym stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) was a
unique book by any standard, weaving together lab procedure, highly
personalized accounts of each compound's creation, and Sasha and Ann's
own love story, as told in the alternating voices of two
not-quite-fictional characters named Shura and Alice Borodin. It was
followed in 1997 by TIHKAL: The Continuation (the "T" is for
Tryptamines). Alternately hailed as invaluable contributions to the
scientific world or derided as cookbooks for amateur pharmacologists
searching for a novel high, the massive tomes found a ready audience
among establishment and underground chemists.

PIHKAL, now in its fifth printing, has sold about 35,000 copies,
TIHKAL about 12,000. Recipes and commentary from both books are posted
all over the Internet.

It was only a matter of time until the compounds Shulgin described in
his books began turning up on the tongues of people not tasting them
in the name of science.

The path by which 2C-T-7 went from research to recreational drug is
not terribly difficult to divine.

In 1999 it made its first commercial appearance in Holland's
drug-dealing smart shops in both tablet and powder form. It was given
the street name "Blue Mystic," perhaps in order to differentiate it
from its chemical cousin, another Shulgin creation named 2C-T-2. By
2000, 2C-T-7 had acquired limited popularity in the United States,
along with the street names "beautiful," "7-Up," and
"tripstasy."

The drug acquired a reputation for its mescaline-like properties,
which were said to produce an intense yet clearheaded trip with
flowing visual effects. But the "trip reports" posted on drug-related
Web sites such as The Vaults of Erowid (www.erowid.org) and The
Lycaeum (www.lycaeum.org) also told a more complicated story.

While many users praised the drug's powerful visual effects and the
strong feelings of well-being it produced, others urged caution,
complaining that 2C-T-7 was extremely painful to inhale when taken
nasally, and that it could cause a host of unpleasant side effects
including nausea, vomiting, muscle tension, body tremors, panic
attacks, and violent episodes.

Because individual responses varied so widely, users suggested the
drug was highly dose-sensitive and that a bad trip could be triggered
by mismeasurement, a too-generous dose, or 2C-T-7's interaction with
other drugs.

Titles of these Web site trip reports show the complete range of
experience: from "Extremely Euphoric" and "Shiny Things Are Fun" to
"Aliens Reprogrammed My Brain" and "2C-T-7 and MDMA, A Dangerous Combo."

By October 2000, wary drug users had another reason to pass on 2C-T-7:
a twenty-year-old casualty from Norman, Oklahoma named Jake Duroy.
According to an announcement posted on Erowid, Duroy died after taking
thirty-five milligrams of the drug. Duroy snorted the drug, which
multiplies its effect well beyond that of the ten-to thirty-milligram
oral dose that Shulgin had suggested in PIHKAL would be sufficient for
most people.

Duroy's death was both frightening and violent; about an hour after
taking the drug, he became extremely agitated, and began yelling about
evil spirits.

A half-hour later he was convulsing, vomiting, and bleeding heavily
from his nose; the coroner later found a large edema in his lung.

Two more deaths were soon linked to 2C-T-7. In April 2001, the staff
at Erowid posted the news that an acquaintance of theirs, a
24-year-old Web designer from Seattle, died after swallowing an
unknown quantity of 2C-T-7 in conjunction with 200 milligrams of
Ecstasy. Although his name wasn't released to the media, the report
seems reliable because of his personal connection to the Erowid staff.

In the same month, Joshua Robbins, a seventeen-year-old from Cordova,
Tennessee died after snorting between thirty and thirty-five
milligrams of 2C-T-7, not long after taking several other stimulant
drugs.

According to Rolling Stone, which ran an article on Robbins' death, in
the twelve hours before he died Robbins also had consumed Ecstasy,
nitrous oxide, and a "mini-thin" containing ephedrine and guaifenisen.
His final hours were agonizing: Robbins' friends recall that he
vomited heavily, became panicky and violent, and spent the last few
moments of his life yelling, "This is stupid! I don't want to die!"

Media coverage has misrepresented 2C-T-7 as a quasi-legal toxic trend
that is sweeping the nation.

But 2C-T-7 has never really shown signs of becoming a sweeping drug
phenomenon. For starters, it's not particularly easy to make. Its use
also seems to have been geographically scattered; it never appeared
with any great prevalence in the Bay Area. Members of an Oakland-based
group called SHARE Project, a group that does health education work at
raves, report that they've scarcely seen it. "It's not a big concern
here," says media liaison Le Liu. By the beginning of 2001, even many
of Holland's smart shops voluntarily agreed to stop selling Blue
Mystic, the same year that at least two online suppliers stopped
selling the chemical.

In fact, 2C-T-7 may well have been on the downswing of its popularity
last January when Rolling Stone published the article on Robbins,
touting it on the cover as "The New (Legal) Killer Drug." It was an
unfortunate headline choice -- especially for a publication that very
likely gave 2C-T-7 its first mass-media exposure -- since the drug is
certainly not, as the magazine claims, "perfectly legal."

Some observers worry whether the recent media attention paid to 2C-T-7
will produce an upsurge of morbid interest from the sort of users who
can read about a gory death and still want to sample the powder that
caused it. "It just goes along with the attraction of it being illegal
and dangerous," Liu says. Several Web sites even have featured debates
over whether 2C-T-7 itself cost the young men their lives, or whether
their deaths were caused by taking too much of too many drugs too fast.

In any case, it is an ironic and flamboyant fate for a chemical whose
inventor's own approach to drug exploration is so profoundly different
from that of the rave culture that is making his creation famous.

The media has occasionally portrayed Sasha Shulgin as a drug-guzzling
mad scientist, but it is hard to see him as a nefarious figure,
although he certainly has an iconoclastic bent and mischievous wit.
Now in his seventies, Shulgin is bearded, bespectacled, and
sandal-clad. Both Shulgins sport leonine masses of hair, although
Sasha's is more to the silver and Ann's more to the gold. A rather
charming passage in PIHKAL has Shulgin theorizing that he
unconsciously willed his hair completely white by age thirty in order
to enhance his appearance as a "harmless old professor" which, as he
put it, "can be useful at times when you do the kind of work I do."
Ann, reclining in an easy chair with a cigarette in hand, is the
handbrake to his runaway train, gently rebuking her husband when he
embarks upon conversational detours liable to confuse visitors without
a PhD in chemistry.

And there are many visitors.

Their hillside Lafayette home, fondly referred to as the Farm, is
something of a tourist destination for pharmacophiles. Although the
Farm displays little differentiation between lab and living space, the
most popular exhibit is a tiny backyard lab where the inventor keeps
the classical music cranked up to eleven.

The lab is filled with glassware, and a discarded nuclear-magnetic-resonance
console lies in the backyard grass like the carcass of some sci-fi
dinosaur.

Guests are advised to protect their watches from the powerful magnets
in one lab, and not to breathe too deeply when trooping through the
storage shed, which houses thousands of brown glass bottles of powders
and liquids, the combined odor of which lies somewhere between fruit
punch and vulcanized rubber with several less pleasant stops in between.

The Shulgins keep a strip of yellow police line tape pinned up on the
dining-room wall, perhaps as a souvenir of the unwanted attention
Sasha's work has received.

Berkeley native Sasha Shulgin's fascination with the relationship
between mind and chemical matter began, oddly enough, in the Navy
during World War II. A severe infection on his left thumb required
surgery.

Before he went under the knife, he was handed a glass of orange juice,
at the bottom of which he noticed some undissolved white crystals.

Convinced it was a sedative, Shulgin drank the juice but resolved to
stay alert.

He promptly blacked out. Upon waking, he was surprised to discover
that the knockout drug had been nothing more than sugar; his mind had
tricked itself over the simplest of placebos.

Shulgin resolved right then to devote his career to the relationship
between drugs and the human mind.

After leaving the Navy, he returned to UC Berkeley to study
biochemistry. Reading the works of Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux, he
became intrigued with mescaline, which he tasted for the first time in
1960. "It was a day that will remain blazingly vivid in my memory, and
one which unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life,"
he wrote in PIHKAL. "The world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had
when I was a child.

I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and
me. ... The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome
recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid."

After receiving his doctorate from Cal, Shulgin worked for a decade as
a senior research chemist at Dow Chemical, where he was given a good
deal of research freedom after inventing a profitable insecticide. It
was during this period that Shulgin began a lifelong policy of
taste-testing all his work. He began by testing a mescaline analogue
called TMA, expecting a repeat of his previous experience. Instead, he
was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the TMA produced only
feelings of rage. He describes one trip during which he found himself
in Tilden Park angrily hurling rocks and sticks. It was a pivotal
moment in his development as a researcher; a chemical structurally
similar to mescaline had produced the opposite effect. His subsequent
work would focus on this very phenomenon, rearranging the atoms of
known active substances to produce isomers that might yield different
effects.

In 1966, Shulgin left Dow to attend medical school at UC San
Francisco. But he only stayed for two years; it turned out he was more
interested in learning how the body and brain worked than learning how
to repair them. So he set up a home lab and hung out his shingle as a
consultant, beginning his curiously interdependent relationship with
the DEA. Despite Shulgin's persistent interest in sampling drugs and
the agency's persistent interest in stopping people from doing so, the
two parties developed a surprisingly close relationship. Shulgin wrote
a handbook on the Controlled Substances Act that became a standard
desk reference for DEA employees, and he later would serve as an
expert witness for both the prosecution and defense in DEA drug trials.

In return, the DEA granted Shulgin a license to handle certain illegal
drugs, which was subject to a rigorous annual inspection. Shulgin also
became a university instructor, teaching classes in forensic
toxicology at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

Sasha and Ann met in 1978 at a weekly discussion group in Berkeley. At
the time, Ann was a divorced mother of four; Sasha's wife of thirty
years, the mother of his son, had passed away the year before after a
stroke.

Ann, who had tried peyote and been extremely moved by the experience,
was eager to trip again and pelted the chemist with questions about
his work. He soon invited her to the Farm to try MDMA, now better
known as Ecstasy (a name they both dislike, since a good portion of
what is marketed as Ecstasy is not truly MDMA).

Shulgin had begun experimenting with MDMA as early as 1967. Although
MDMA is the drug that made him most famous, it is not his own invention.

The compound was created in 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company
Merck, only to fall into obscurity.

Shulgin helped repopularize its use, claiming that it might have value
as an antidepressant since it allowed people to look deep inside their
own psyches without reservation. In Ann he found a willing partner in
exploration. As a lay therapist, Ann joined the movement of psychologists
and psychiatrists who claimed that MDMA was a powerful therapeutic tool that
could, for example, help rape victims or war veterans open up to a
therapist.

Ann soon became a regular in the most unconventional part of Shulgin's
research. Unlike university or pharmaceutical company scientists, Shulgin is
his own prime test subject. But one does not survive swallowing untested
drugs for more than forty years by luck alone. Shulgin developed a
painstaking system. He swallowed only minute amounts of untried chemicals,
letting 48 hours go by before boosting the dose, usually by a factor of two
or less. He learned his own body's warning signs -- never let your thoughts
fall into a rut; never stare too long into a mirror while on MDMA; watch out
for anything that provokes jumpiness or sleepiness at a low dose. He
developed a scoring system in which the effects of new materials were rated
from "minus," or "no effect," up to "plus four," a "one-of-a-kind, mystical,
or even religious experience." Once he concocted something promising, he
would invite a half-dozen friends to spend a day sampling it with him. This,
too, had rules. No one who was sick, on medication, or had taken any other
drugs within the previous three days could partake. The group would bring
food and sleeping gear for an overnight stay. The safety rules were strict:
a hand signal meant the speaker was about to raise a real-life safety
concern, each participant could veto group suggestions that might affect
their experience, and people not in established relationships were
discouraged from sexual behavior. The friends generally spent their time
eating, walking in the garden, listening to classical music, and paging
through picture books. Like Shulgin, they'd start with tiny amounts of a new
drug and slowly boost their doses. Afterward, the participants were expected
to share their impressions with Shulgin, who made it clear he was a
researcher, not their personal candy-man.

If Shulgin's tasting weekends weren't lab protocol, they certainly weren't
wild drug parties, either. "Use them with care, and use them with respect as
to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary
research tool," Sasha Shulgin once said of phenethylamines. "Go banging
about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get
into a really bad place psychologically."

Even as the Shulgins' collaboration deepened -- they were married by a DEA
agent in 1981 -- the laws surrounding their work were changing rapidly,
largely in response to the behavior of other drug enthusiasts whose
experimentations were less scientific. In 1984, the federal government
listed MDMA as a so-called Schedule I drug, barring it from future clinical
testing as a substance with no medicinal value and a high potential for
abuse. The loss to the Shulgins was enormous. They believed a powerful tool
was taken from researchers because of the government's overreaction to
MDMA's increasing prominence in nightclub culture. Why, they asked, were
limitations on medical research being set by the DEA, a law enforcement
agency?

The following year, the federal government went even further, passing the
Controlled Substances Analogue Enforcement Act as a reaction to the
proliferation of designer drugs such as heroin analogue China White. The
Analogue Act criminalizes the sale or manufacture for sale of any chemical
with a structure or action "substantially similar" to that of a Schedule I
or II drug.

In a letter published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Shulgin
complained that the law has a "carefully worded vagueness," which allows the
government to arbitrarily decide which chemicals to okay and which to
squelch. "By designing the net which has a completely variable mesh size,
one can catch whatever fish one wishes to and let escape another fish that
is not wanted," he wrote.

Regulators say the law is fairer than that. "I wouldn't say it casts a wide
net," says one official from the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, who
asked to remain anonymous. "It's a very narrowly crafted law that only
affects substances that are not being studied for use as medicines for
humans, but are being manufactured or distributed for human consumption
outside of approved research, have been found on the street, and which are
likely to meet the findings for control under our laws in the future."

In either case, the effect on Shulgin's research was obvious -- the group
drug-tasting experiments had to stop. By this time, many of the scientific
journals that once had welcomed Shulgin's work were turning away his papers,
citing legal worries. Seeking another outlet, the Shulgins published PIHKAL
and TIHKAL.

Even though PIHKAL begins with a warning that to synthesize any of its
recipes for human consumption is to "risk legal action which might lead to
the tragic ruination of a life," and even though more than half of the
recipes were previously published in scientific journals, the authors could
have faced legal action. They published anyway. Asked why, Shulgin tells the
story of Wilhelm Reich, inventor of a "cloudbuster" that he claimed could
make it rain, and the orgone box, a device he said could treat cancer. After
the FDA charged Reich with fraud for selling an unlicensed medical device,
he died in prison in 1957. The court ordered that all of his research be
burned, and his life's work was lost. "I can see having maybe two or three
people in the higher echelons of the government who may not like what I do,
and I did not want particularly to have all of this be seizable and
burnable," Shulgin says. "So I published it. Now you cannot get rid of it."

The Shulgins take a long view towards the role of psychedelics in human
history. People have used psychoactive substances for thousands of years,
they note, and it's unlikely that anyone will stop soon. "People all over
the world are trying to fiddle around with chemical compounds and if you
close one down, ten more spring up, because it's a fascinating pursuit,"
says Ann. "Publishing the recipes is an effort to minimize the harm that
could come from somebody following the wrong instructions, or maybe no
instructions at all, and ending up with a compound that kills him or poisons
all his friends." Plus, she adds, the recipes in the books are written in
scientific language targeted at experienced chemists. "The complaint that
they could easily be made in anyone's bathtub is total nonsense," she says.
"No way."

But after PIHKAL's publication, Shulgin's relationship with the DEA
changed -- although the agency never took any official action against the
book itself. In 1994, the DEA raided the Shulgins' lab. In a chapter of
TIHKAL simply called "Invasion," Ann's alter ego describes the raid. She
remembers DEA agents and state narcotics officers -- some wearing helmeted
biohazard suits -- pulling up in a fleet of vehicles, including a firetruck
and a decontamination truck. She also remembers the DEA agents shyly asking
the chemist to autograph their copies of PIHKAL.

Ultimately, Shulgin was written up for a series of chemical storage
violations that somehow never caught the attention of previous inspectors.
At the DEA's urging, he surrendered his Schedule I drug handling license,
paid a $25,000 fine, and made some changes to his laboratory to comply with
environmental regulations. Shulgin says the loss of his license doesn't
affect his inventing at all -- after all, he doesn't need Schedule I drugs
for his own research and is not interested in producing analogues of them.
"If a chemical turns out to have an action of a Schedule I drug, I'll just
publish the damn thing and go on to something else," he says.

But the investigation had a powerful psychological effect. "Never again will
Shura work with a sense of absolute freedom," Ann wrote in TIHKAL. "He's had
a taste of that particular form of power-flexing peculiar to people who are
employed by government agencies. The authorities intended to frighten him
and perhaps they even hoped to silence him, but that is not and will not be
possible. ... The magical laboratory still stands."

Law enforcement's get-tough reaction to what is clearly a significant
American curiosity about psychedelic drugs unwittingly encourages
people to sample research chemicals and other exotic compounds,
drug-policy-reform advocates argue. "Drug laws are driving people to
try drugs they ordinarily wouldn't because they can't get the tried
and true, like mushrooms or LSD," writes one freelance drug researcher
and Erowid contributor who goes by the screen-name "Murple."

Both sides of this debate agree, however, that once a research drug
hits the street, it can mean trouble.

Research drugs' lack of prior testing and the legal misunderstandings
surrounding them combine to create the worst of all possible scenarios
-- a period of heightened interest in an untested substance during
which dealers are quick to cash in on a new trend, emergency room
technicians are unlikely to recognize the drug in the event of an
overdose, and information about safe usage is scarce and anecdotal at
best. Little is known about research drugs' side effects, interactions
with other drugs, and safe dosages because FDA clinical trials are not
conducted on substances that hold no promise of patents and profits
for university or pharmaceutical company researchers. So people
commonly resort to what Julie Ruckel of the Drug Policy Alliance calls
"dancefloor pharmacology," an informal network in which information
passes from friend to friend. "It's all word-of-mouth," she says.
"Someone took twenty milligrams and it was fine, so they'll tell the
next person."

Just about everyone involved in the 2C-T-7 debate agrees this is a
dangerous practice. "A small difference in the dose can make a huge
difference in the experience," says Liu of the SHARE Project. Other
factors, including a person's weight, how much fluid is in their
system, and what medications they are taking also can determine how a
trip turns out. For its part, the DEA cautions that taking any non-FDA
approved drug is a risky prospect. "You don't oftentimes know what the
safety risks are, you don't know what the dose would be, what the
administration should be," the DEA official says.

Certainly the government collects information on new street drugs, but
the generation of partygoers who have been instructed since
toddlerhood to "Just Say No" often just tune out government education
efforts. "Who wants to be the wet blanket at a party?" sighs Kate
Malliarakis, branch chief officer of demand reduction for the Office
of National Drug Control Policy. "If you've got ten people standing
there saying, 'Come on, mellow out, take a chill pill,' and you have a
couple of old farts like myself standing there saying, 'This is going
to do damage to you,' it's like an old cartoon. Who's going to believe
me?"

Liu agrees that government drug-awareness programs have overemphasized
the negative effects of drug use, so teenagers have lost faith in
them. "You don't want to withhold information from people, especially
young people," he says. "If you tell them the whole truth, they're
going to be more open to you telling them about the risks.

If you only tell them the bad things about drugs, they'll know you're
not telling them the whole story. Kids are smart enough to know that
you're telling them this information about this drug because people
are using it. But they're going to think, 'Why are people using it?'
Obviously there's some sort of benefit, so you must be lying."

In the absence of information perceived as reliable, curious drug
enthusiasts now often get their information through two channels that
owe a great deal to the expansion of the Internet -- online bulletin
boards and the studies of amateur researchers. The popularity of Web
sites such as Erowid and the Lycaeum shows the breadth of public
interest in research drugs; the fact that amateurs have bothered to
craft their own studies reveals the depth.

Erowid, for example, gets 20,000 page views a day. Both Erowid and the
Lycaeum have adopted a tell-it-all philosophy toward both the positive
and negative effects of drugs such as 2C-T-7. Their disclaimers don't
mince words. "When you take a research chemical, you are stepping out
into the unknown, and you could be the unfortunate person to discover
a new drug's lethal dose," reads the "Research Chemical FAQ" Erowid
site. In general, news posted on these sites is acknowledged to be so
far ahead of the curve -- and so readily available -- that regulators
are learning to check there first for information about new drug trends.

So far, you could count the number of scientific papers devoted to
2C-T-7 on one hand and still have a finger left over. In 1991, Shulgin
published the first report on 2C-T-7 in the Journal of Psychoactive
Drugs. Two years later, another study appeared in the Journal of
Ethnomedicine , but it was extremely limited, consisting of only eight
test subjects who each took a single dose. The only other studies out
there have been conducted by nonscientists who disseminated their
results online.

One of them, published in the Summer 2000 Bulletin of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies by amateur
researcher Casey Hardison, simply surveyed the experiences of 48
people who tried differing amounts of 2C-T-7 at a conference for what
he calls "entheogen enthusiasts."

The following year, Erowid contributor Murple posted the results of a
larger e-mail survey of more than 400 people who had tried 2C-T-7 in a
variety of dosage amounts, both by snorting and swallowing. The
results of both studies reaffirmed what already had been posted on
Erowid and Lycaeum trip reports.

In general, 2C-T-7 produced feelings of lucidity and euphoria, as well
as the rare panic attack; neither study indicated a pattern that could
show users when to expect which result.

The vast majority of those surveyed expressed interest in trying the
drug again. Murple's much larger and more systematic survey also
documented a high incidence of side effects, with about two-thirds of
the users reporting nausea, about half reporting muscle tension, with
one-third reporting vomiting and another third reporting headaches.

His report also included detailed chronicles of the three
2C-T-7-related deaths, as well as further anecdotes collected from
around the world of seizures and blackouts apparently prompted by 2C-T-7.

The most interesting conclusion he drew from his research, Murple
says, is that 2C-T-7 appears to be both erratic in its effect and
highly dose-sensitive, much more so than other phenethylamines. Why is
the difference between a good trip and a nasty one just a few
milligrams of powder, he asks, and why are some people so floored by
the drug and others barely feel it? While he believes the three
connected deaths make 2C-T-7 a bad bet for clinical trials on people,
Murple points out that 2C-T-7's apparent volatility makes it a worthy
subject for mainstream medical researchers who could come to the table
with better funding and equipment than any amateur could. "I think if
we could figure out what makes 2C-T-7 so unique, we'd learn something
very valuable about the way the human brain works and about the way
this whole class of drugs works," he writes. "There is something very
unusual going on here, and we owe it to ourselves as a society to find
out what."

But not everyone thinks the Internet is a safe place for curious
pharmacophiles to be exchanging such research.

A recent National Drug Intelligence Center report sparked huge outrage
by concluding that Web sites and bulletin boards that post information
about the production or effects of illicit substances constitute a
"threat" to American youth. "I have trouble with the Web sites because
they talk about the here and now, but not the consequences," says
Malliarakis. "They do talk about what a bad trip is all about, but not
about what it's going to be like five years from now." Plus, she
medical or therapeutic applications if given further study.

As an example, he mentions Aleph-4, a particularly unpleasant chemical
that produced a totally emotion-free state. "You couldn't feel sorrow,
you couldn't be angry, you couldn't be happy," he says. "You were a
piece of cardboard.

"I'm creating tools to study the function of the mind -- not the
brain, the mind. And here's a good example -- total lack of effect.

That is a rare but real clinical thing, and here's a drug that
produces that state.

Can't you see the joy I would have by putting a radioactive tracer on
it and sticking it into a person who had that medical problem and to
another person who is a control who didn't have the medical problem
and seeing this goes up here, but that goes over there?

"Ah!" he sighs, his voice dropping lower. "That would be
marvelous!"

Another compelling example is a drug called DIPT that is remarkable
among psychedelics for its auditory, as well as visual, effects.

In fact, after tasting DIPT for the first time, Shulgin only noticed
the onset of the drug because he happened to be listening to the
kitchen radio, which suddenly sounded terribly out of tune. "I assumed
it was probably some little group somewhere," he remembers. "It turned
out to be the Philadelphia Symphony, which is very excellent.
It was me who was out of tune!"

In TIHKAL, Shulgin had expressed great interest in learning how DIPT
might affect the brain's auditory processing centers.

And years later, he is still wondering aloud if studying DIPT might
have other benefits.

For example, could it cast some light on schizophrenia, which usually
results in auditory, rather than visual, delusions?

Shulgin doesn't seem likely to stop inventing new compounds, either,
and he says he's not looking for anything in particular. "I don't have
a holy grail. I'd just like to find something new," he says. "If it's
never been made before, of course it's never been tasted before.

And if the structure is similar -- not substantially similar, but
similar -- to other things that are active, it's so damned intriguing
to know if it's going to be active and what it will do. The motive is
to satisfy the curiosity.

And once you've found the answer -- 'Oh hey, it's kind of neat,' or
'Oh my, I'm on the edge of convulsions,' or 'Oh my, I went to sleep'
-- you've answered the question."

But the Shulgins' days of experimenting with 2C-T-7 and chemicals like
it are behind them. After five decades of fascination with lab-made
synthetics, Sasha Shulgin has turned his attention to botanicals, in
specific a rather unexplored type of cactus alkaloid called
isoquinolines. The hill behind the Farm is speckled with more than one
hundred cactus plants, and the beakers in his lab are now lined with a
sludgy olive-green residue. He's at work on the manuscript for a third
book, one the couple jokingly refers to as QIHKAL.

"Most of the cacti out there are not known by anybody to do anything,"
says Ann, indicating the hillside slope. "It's all new," agrees Sasha
Shulgin, who very excitedly pulls down one of the many notebooks from
his laboratory shelf and opens it to a page in which he has pasted a
jagged graph: a mass spectrometer printout of the chemical makeup of
one species of cactus.

Each peak represents a compound in need of a name and analysis, a
compound that might turn out to do something new and unusual and
previously unobserved.

"And you don't know what it will do," Ann adds gently, in a tone
that's half statement, half question.

"I'm going to find out as much as I can," says Sasha, smiling broadly.
"That's my whole art."
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