Alexander Shulgin
1925-2014
American chemist and psychopharmacologist whose work moved between industrial chemistry, psychedelic synthesis, self-experimentation, and the ethnobotanical pharmacology of psychoactive plants.
Alexander Theodore Shulgin was born in Berkeley, California in 1925 and trained in chemistry after service in the U.S. Navy. He worked at Dow Chemical, where he developed the first biodegradable pesticide, then built an independent career around the synthesis, classification, and phenomenological study of psychoactive compounds.
Shulgin is best known for his later work with MDMA and for the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL, co-authored with Ann Shulgin. Those works made him a central figure in late twentieth-century psychedelic chemistry, but his published record also included more conventional reviews of plant chemistry and pharmacology.
The 1973 article on Piper methysticum belongs to that broader side of Shulgin's work. Written for the Bulletin on Narcotics, it places kava in a comparative frame that includes Pacific preparation practices, uncertain pharmacological classification, and the chemistry of kavalactones and related Piper species.
Sources in the archive
View all sources →For the archive, Shulgin's kava article is useful because it moves away from LSD and psilocybin while showing how a chemist associated with synthetic psychedelics also engaged global plant intoxicants and the technical vocabulary of international drug-control science.
Notes and references
- Shulgin, Alexander T. "The Narcotic Pepper: The Chemistry and Pharmacology of Piper methysticum and Related Species." Bulletin on Narcotics 25, no. 2 (1973): 59-74.
- Shulgin, Alexander, and Ann Shulgin. PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, 1991.
- Washington Post and Los Angeles Times obituaries of Alexander Shulgin, June 2014.