"Alexander Shulgin, who has died aged 88, was an American chemist known as the “Godfather of Psychedelics”. In his psychopharmacological studies Shulgin used himself as a guinea pig to analyse human reactions to more than 200 psychoactive compounds. His experiments most famously introduced the empathogenic drug MDMA into the popular consciousness — under its street name, Ecstasy. MDMA — known chemically as 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine but by Shulgin as a “low-calorie martini”— had originally been created as a blood-clotting agent in 1912 . In the mid-Seventies, however, Shulgin synthesised (artificially concocted) the drug and took it himself, noting its beneficial effects on human empathy and compassion. Effectively Shulgin had created a “love drug”. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria,” wrote Shulgin in his journals. “The cleanliness, clarity, and marvellous feeling of solid inner strength continued through the next day. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.” [SIZE=1.4em]Shulgin and his friend Leo Zeff, a psychologist from California, promoted MDMA across America to hundreds of psychologists and therapists as an aid to talk therapy. One of those therapists who embraced the drug was the lay Jungian psychoanalyst Ann Gotlieb, who met Shulgin in 1979. The pair bonded over their interest in mind-altering substances and married two years later.[/SIZE] Alexander Theodore Shulgin (often known as Sasha) was born on June 17 1925 in Berkeley, California. Both his parents were schoolteachers in Alameda County. Shulgin studied Organic Chemistry at Harvard University as a scholarship student but dropped out in 1943 to join the US Navy, and while serving during the Second World War he became interested in psychopharmacology. Prior to having surgery for a thumb infection he was handed a glass of orange juice, and, assuming that the crystals at the bottom of the glass were a sedative, he drank it and fell asleep. After the surgery he discovered that he had simply drunk fruit juice with added sugar and he had been given a placebo. He was, he said, amazed that “a fraction of a gram of sugar had rendered [him] unconscious”." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10872900/Alexander-Shulgin-obituary.html
