Program Notes
Guest speaker: Friends of Ann & Sasha Shulgin
On August 2, 2014, a memorial was held for Sasha Shulgin. In addition to several of the talks that were presented that afternoon, Bruce Damer captured a few sound bites from those in attendance. At the end of the podcast you will also hear a short segment from one of the famous “Ask the Shulgins” conversations.
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story
By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin
Tihkal: The Continuation
By Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin
The Shulgin Memorial (video)
Shulgin on Alchemy, Basel, 2006
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
As you know, a few days ago in Berkeley, California,
00:00:32 ►
a memorial celebration was held to honor the life and work of Sasha Shulgin.
00:00:36 ►
A few days before the memorial was to take place,
00:00:41 ►
I got a call from my longtime friend in New York, Wild Bill Ratazinsky,
00:00:44 ►
and he was calling to ask if I was going to be there.
00:00:50 ►
When I told him that I wasn’t going to make it, he said, well, he was still thinking about going, even at this late hour.
00:00:55 ►
And the reason he found the upcoming event so compelling, as he said, is,
00:01:01 ►
this is going to be the last great gathering of all the old heads from the 60s until now.
00:01:06 ►
The old guard’s fading. There’s never going to be another one like this. Never again. And you know, he was absolutely right about that. So he got me thinking about what it would
00:01:14 ►
be like to be there in the middle of, well, close to a thousand psychedelic heads, all of whom
00:01:19 ►
already knew and loved Sasha. Actually, it just blows me away just to think about it.
00:01:27 ►
But I wasn’t going to be able to make it myself,
00:01:29 ►
and so I did the next best thing.
00:01:31 ►
I convinced my good friend, Bruce Dahmer,
00:01:33 ►
who I knew would be going,
00:01:37 ►
to just turn on his recorder whenever he was talking to somebody and ask them what Sasha meant to them.
00:01:39 ►
You know, sort of a man on the street kind of thing.
00:01:42 ►
Now, if you’ve ever been to a large conference,
00:01:45 ►
you know that the background din of a thousand voices,
00:01:48 ►
well, it can be kind of loud.
00:01:50 ►
But that’s the real beauty of what we’re about to hear,
00:01:53 ►
because Bruce did a really good job of bringing us the true flavor of the event.
00:01:58 ►
And what I’ve done now is to put together a few of my favorite interviews,
00:02:02 ►
and then to follow that with a brief selection of a few of the talks that were given during the service itself.
00:02:09 ►
And if you want to watch the entire ceremony, it’s still available to watch online at ustream.tv.
00:02:16 ►
And I’ll put a link to it in the program notes for this podcast, which, as you know, you
00:02:20 ►
can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:02:23 ►
You really ought to check it out and watch some of the video segments in it,
00:02:27 ►
particularly the alchemy segment at the beginning.
00:02:30 ►
In fact, during the event, besides watching it on Ustream with over 400 other people,
00:02:36 ►
I also noticed that shortly after the alchemy video was shown,
00:02:40 ►
that Connie Littlefield tweeted a link to that video,
00:02:43 ►
and I’ll try to remember to embed it in today’s program notes as well.
00:02:48 ►
Now, one of the labels that academics have attached to our species is homo faber, man the maker, or more specifically, man the tool maker.
00:02:59 ►
Sasha always considered himself to be primarily a tool maker.
00:03:03 ►
Sasha always considered himself to be primarily a toolmaker.
00:03:10 ►
And, in my opinion, Sasha is the greatest toolmaker that our species of toolmakers has ever produced.
00:03:17 ►
Okay, this is Bill Radizinski. Am I pronouncing that right?
00:03:18 ►
Yeah, right close enough. You are a friend of Lorenzo Haggerty’s.
00:03:20 ►
Yeah.
00:03:30 ►
He told me to find you and ask you the question because he wants to do a series of voices in the Salon podcast.
00:03:34 ►
What did Sasha Shulkin mean to you?
00:03:37 ►
He was like a spirit.
00:03:41 ►
The closest thing I could say is like a spiritual grandfather.
00:03:42 ►
A spiritual grandfather?
00:03:42 ►
Yeah.
00:03:45 ►
As a matter of fact, I can’t think of him without thinking of Ann as a couple. It was like having spiritual grandfather. Spiritual grandfather. Yeah. Matter of fact, you know, I can’t think of him without thinking of Ann
00:03:46 ►
as a couple.
00:03:47 ►
It was like having
00:03:48 ►
spiritual grandparents.
00:03:50 ►
And he was just
00:03:52 ►
a lovely man.
00:03:54 ►
He was a mensch.
00:03:54 ►
He was a mensch.
00:03:55 ►
Yeah,
00:03:55 ►
true mensch.
00:03:56 ►
And he had the worst
00:03:57 ►
jokes in the world.
00:04:00 ►
You know,
00:04:01 ►
they were,
00:04:02 ►
oh,
00:04:02 ►
terrible,
00:04:04 ►
dreadful jokes.
00:04:05 ►
And we all loved them and we’re going to miss them.
00:04:07 ►
Yeah.
00:04:08 ►
He was just an inspiration.
00:04:11 ►
He’s making jokes to the very end.
00:04:13 ►
I mean, he was constant.
00:04:15 ►
Yeah, I can imagine.
00:04:17 ►
When did you first meet him?
00:04:19 ►
Palenque.
00:04:21 ►
In the 90s?
00:04:23 ►
Yeah, back in 97, actually.
00:04:26 ►
It was the first time I met the man.
00:04:29 ►
And I didn’t know a damn thing
00:04:30 ►
about chemistry. Flunked it three times
00:04:32 ►
and twice in high school.
00:04:34 ►
But he made things
00:04:36 ►
quite clear. He was a great teacher.
00:04:38 ►
He was a good teacher. I had a reasonably good
00:04:40 ►
understanding of what was going on
00:04:42 ►
after spending a couple hours with him.
00:04:45 ►
Yep, yep. So you came out from from new york for this yeah it was uh wednesday i said you know i cannot not
00:04:54 ►
go right you know i’ve been out of the loop for quite a while and so i don’t even know what was
00:04:58 ►
coming on until someone called me you have your team children evolution hat too it was like at
00:05:03 ►
the it was like at the last minute and i I said, you know, I cannot not go,
00:05:06 ►
because when I leave this plane, I’m going to leave with some regrets.
00:05:11 ►
I’ve lived a pretty full life, but that’s one regret I don’t want to deal with.
00:05:14 ►
Right.
00:05:15 ►
And I owe it to the man to show up.
00:05:18 ►
And many of us couldn’t be there in his last months, but we can be here today.
00:05:22 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:05:22 ►
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
00:05:23 ►
Yeah.
00:05:21 ►
his last months, but we can be here today.
00:05:23 ►
Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
00:05:25 ►
It’s been rough. We lost Zalman Shai,
00:05:27 ►
the rabbi.
00:05:32 ►
He’s gone, and
00:05:33 ►
it’s, you know, it’s just that
00:05:35 ►
time.
00:05:37 ►
It’s that time today.
00:05:39 ►
We have to slip
00:05:40 ►
shod into the 21st century and create
00:05:42 ►
the new ones.
00:05:45 ►
Today, we’ll have all these.st century and create the new ones. Yeah, yeah. And today we’ll have all these.
00:05:47 ►
Making space for the new people.
00:05:48 ►
Yeah, and there’s beautiful new people.
00:05:51 ►
Yeah.
00:05:51 ►
Totally.
00:05:52 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:05:53 ►
The minions of Sasha.
00:05:56 ►
Yeah.
00:05:56 ►
Minions of Sasha.
00:05:58 ►
It’s going to be interesting to see who turns up today.
00:06:00 ►
Yeah.
00:06:02 ►
Quite a guy.
00:06:02 ►
Thank you, Bill.
00:06:03 ►
And you want to say anything to Lorenzo
00:06:05 ►
because I’ll send this to him
00:06:06 ►
Lorenzo I brought my small camera I’ll take a couple of pictures
00:06:08 ►
I’ll try to get you some shots
00:06:10 ►
ok great thank you
00:06:12 ►
thank you Bill
00:06:13 ►
I would yeah sure I would love to attempt
00:06:17 ►
to give him some
00:06:19 ►
material
00:06:19 ►
JP how’s it going
00:06:21 ►
I unfortunately never had the pleasure of meeting the man,
00:06:26 ►
but it’s impossible for me to describe how big an effect he’s had on my life.
00:06:33 ►
And I believe that he was a genius
00:06:39 ►
and a man with an amazing heart to follow the path of truth for the rest of us.
00:06:47 ►
The rest of us.
00:06:48 ►
Yeah, and I can’t even express how much appreciation I have for that.
00:06:53 ►
And I was really hoping for the day to express that to him in person,
00:06:56 ►
but I feel that I was not able to.
00:06:59 ►
You’re ushering all of us in to his service.
00:07:02 ►
Yes, and when I found out about the service, there was absolutely no way I was going to miss it.
00:07:07 ►
So we traveled from Las Vegas to come here.
00:07:09 ►
Okay, okay.
00:07:10 ►
Wow.
00:07:11 ►
So this is hopefully how I can express my appreciation for the man.
00:07:15 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:07:16 ►
Great, thank you.
00:07:17 ►
My pleasure.
00:07:18 ►
I’m Tripp.
00:07:19 ►
Tripp.
00:07:20 ►
So I’ll put that into the record.
00:07:21 ►
So Lorenzo, this is a wonderful recounting of how Sasha influenced Tripp.
00:07:28 ►
Or the Tripp influenced Sasha, actually now.
00:07:31 ►
Thank you.
00:07:32 ►
And thank you, Lorenzo, for everything you do.
00:07:34 ►
You’re a huge hero of mine, and I really appreciate the psychedelic salon.
00:07:39 ►
Great.
00:07:41 ►
Name?
00:07:42 ►
Celestine Starr.
00:07:43 ►
And what did Sasha Shulgin mean to you?
00:07:47 ►
He meant friendship.
00:07:49 ►
He meant
00:07:50 ►
my consciousness awakening.
00:07:53 ►
He meant
00:07:54 ►
love, laughter.
00:07:57 ►
He was so true
00:07:58 ►
to a person. You could really
00:08:00 ►
trust. So he meant
00:08:02 ►
the deepness of
00:08:03 ►
family and friendship and community
00:08:07 ►
and just his offerings
00:08:10 ►
and very delightful awakenings with his elixirs.
00:08:18 ►
The man was a courageous chemist.
00:08:20 ►
The man was a courageous chemist.
00:08:22 ►
Yes, yes.
00:08:23 ►
But his, I mean mean if you actually listen
00:08:26 ►
okay what i have gotten from listening to and reading the things he had to say like everybody
00:08:33 ►
will say oh shogun yes uh he pioneered mdma or something but he was not all that keen on on being
00:08:39 ►
thought of as the pie i mean he wasn’t even the pioneer right it’s like acid or something somebody
00:08:44 ►
come up with it and he kind of like
00:08:45 ►
rediscovered it and said, hey, you know, this could be
00:08:48 ►
useful like this. And then
00:08:49 ►
therapists who were friends of his said,
00:08:52 ►
hey, you’re right. But for
00:08:54 ►
him, it was just an investigation.
00:08:55 ►
You know, he was
00:08:56 ►
a diligent researcher, bringing
00:08:59 ►
data forth for the public to
00:09:01 ►
chew upon. And I
00:09:03 ►
didn’t really see him as a campaigner for the underground, even though he was adopted
00:09:08 ►
by it and being a wonderful person, you know, it turned out to be like that.
00:09:13 ►
How did he, go ahead.
00:09:14 ►
Well, you know, I’ll just put a little slightly different twist on that, you know.
00:09:19 ►
And I think, you know, one of the things that we notice with the important people, important,
00:09:24 ►
creative, dynamic, brilliant people,
00:09:26 ►
is that everybody’s got sort of a different angle, a different take on them.
00:09:31 ►
And I wasn’t intimately familiar with him.
00:09:34 ►
We’re all through whatever karmic connections or whatever.
00:09:40 ►
We all end up spending time with different teachers.
00:09:43 ►
I didn’t spend a lot of time with him.
00:09:45 ►
But if you’re part of this community, you can’t help but be aware of how important he is just as one of the elders.
00:09:51 ►
But it always seemed to me he was very much into that persona that got created.
00:09:56 ►
I mean, had those dinners, those parties, and all the freaks, all the intelligent, intellectual, high-functioning freaks would be there.
00:10:08 ►
How did he affect you guys personally?
00:10:09 ►
How did he affect your life personally, directly or indirectly?
00:10:15 ►
Well, I go to MDMA.
00:10:18 ►
I mean, I don’t know.
00:10:19 ►
MDMA would not be part of the community scene if it wasn’t for him,
00:10:22 ►
whatever his role was in getting that out there.
00:10:26 ►
And that certainly changed my life, you know,
00:10:28 ►
in terms of how I function as a psycho-emotional human being.
00:10:32 ►
Right. It rewired your gears.
00:10:34 ►
Yes.
00:10:35 ►
Put them out, put them back in a different order.
00:10:37 ►
Yeah, I did with his assistance or however you want to look at that.
00:10:41 ►
You know, what I was thinking of is like there are some actors
00:10:47 ►
who have become particularly identified with a single role that they tore up.
00:10:54 ►
But they themselves never thought of it as what they really wanted their career to be about.
00:11:00 ►
It’s a bigger picture they were holding.
00:11:02 ►
Right. I mean, like, I don’t know.
00:11:02 ►
by. It was a bigger picture they were holding.
00:11:03 ►
Right. I mean, like,
00:11:04 ►
I don’t know.
00:11:06 ►
Jeremy Brett became best known for his
00:11:10 ►
portrayal of Sherlock Holmes
00:11:12 ►
in the BBC television series.
00:11:14 ►
But he always thought of himself
00:11:15 ►
primarily as a hoofer.
00:11:17 ►
And his favorite role is
00:11:19 ►
the supportive role he did in My Fair Lady.
00:11:22 ►
So,
00:11:22 ►
he’ll say, yes, yes, I did this Holmes thing
00:11:26 ►
and it was all very nice, but my real
00:11:28 ►
heart, you know, or like
00:11:30 ►
Cagney was, again, a dancer
00:11:32 ►
and a showman, but he
00:11:34 ►
became known as like a criminal
00:11:36 ►
gangster.
00:11:38 ►
That’s a good analogy. I mean, I think
00:11:40 ►
ultimately, you know, he was just an elder
00:11:41 ►
that, you know, by
00:11:43 ►
who he was, he influenced any situation he was part of
00:11:47 ►
because of the wisdom and compassion that he brought to the moment.
00:11:51 ►
I think of him as one of the very few modern alchemists,
00:11:58 ►
a magician plus a chemist plus a spiritual being.
00:12:03 ►
Something timeless in that.
00:12:05 ►
And I feel very fortunate that I got to see his laboratory.
00:12:10 ►
And that captured so much of what you’re describing, I think.
00:12:16 ►
I only saw it in the movie. I missed going there.
00:12:20 ►
That’s definitely the alchemical flavor right there.
00:12:23 ►
Thank you, gentlemen.
00:12:25 ►
There’s another two good old friends here saying hello to the Salon podcast.
00:12:32 ►
Kind of a weird twist.
00:12:34 ►
I mean, how sausage changed my life is he wrote a paper in 1971
00:12:38 ►
to do with terpene and the composition of terpenes,
00:12:42 ►
and I found that paper,
00:12:44 ►
and at that time you weren’t able to isolate those terpenes in And I found that paper, and at that time,
00:12:45 ►
you weren’t able to isolate those terpenes in that form.
00:12:48 ►
But now you are.
00:12:48 ►
So that became, it was irrelevant until we separated them
00:12:54 ►
in the composition that we have today.
00:12:56 ►
So it’s kind of a fascinating thing, because I told Sasha,
00:12:59 ►
hey, you know, he’s smelling my bottle of terpenes,
00:13:01 ►
and I was saying, you know, it really helped that paper
00:13:04 ►
that you wrote in 1971 about terpenes isolation.
00:13:07 ►
He said to me, I wrote a paper on terpene isolation?
00:13:10 ►
I said, sir, you’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know.
00:13:12 ►
And that’s my quote.
00:13:15 ►
And you are?
00:13:15 ►
Ken Morrow.
00:13:16 ►
Ken Morrow.
00:13:17 ►
So this is from Ken here, a real chemistry recollection of Sasha, which is what we need.
00:13:23 ►
Yes, it was incredible, incredible to meet the man. I met him through Paul Daly, and it was we need yes it was incredible incredible to meet
00:13:25 ►
the man i met him through paul daly and it was just such an honor and a pleasure to meet
00:13:29 ►
thank you very much how did sasha shulgin change my life well
00:13:37 ►
to be honest i don’t know very much about sashaulgin, but I’m indeed sure that he changed my life.
00:13:47 ►
Well, I know he’s associated with MDMA, and I took MDMA.
00:13:52 ►
And I think he changed my life peripherally, actually,
00:13:56 ►
because all the people who he affected a change in consciousness through all the novel tryptamines and phenethylamines.
00:14:04 ►
I don’t know i so he
00:14:09 ►
changed the whole like scene the whole ecosystem the ecosystem of consciousness yeah and for me
00:14:15 ►
he’s my son so he’s the one who has a lot of appreciation for these things and he had intrigue
00:14:20 ►
about the spirituality and all of that so sometimes know, it’s not easy to feel and find.
00:14:31 ►
And with certain things, you know, you just kind of see some amazing things which make you a believer, kind of.
00:14:37 ►
So he was telling me that, Mom, it helped a lot of people, you know, address a lot of inner issues. And connecting to God, which they wouldn’t be, you know, just hearing and thinking and all of that.
00:14:45 ►
So, you know, because of him, I am of that. So, you know, it’s just because of him I am here.
00:14:47 ►
I can’t believe I get to see you.
00:14:49 ►
And believe in a lot more things than just the traditional kind of, you know,
00:14:53 ►
ways of living and understanding things.
00:14:56 ►
And your names are?
00:14:57 ►
My name is Amit Tripathi, and this is my mom, Asha Tripathi.
00:15:02 ►
And onward to your, would you care to?
00:15:06 ►
I’m Fleet Montgomery.
00:15:07 ►
Right.
00:15:08 ►
And we go way back, you know, many, many, many, many years ago.
00:15:12 ►
Just changed my attitude about everything in the world.
00:15:15 ►
And basically opened portals in my conscious mind and unconscious mind to experience new things and perceive things in a different way.
00:15:26 ►
And in a way that really changed my life forever.
00:15:29 ►
It was part of a whole subculture of people that were opening the different spots of our mind
00:15:36 ►
and our unconscious and our conscious minds to understand new ways of looking at things.
00:15:40 ►
And it crossed over to everything in my life.
00:15:42 ►
And here, that group is all here are a big
00:15:46 ►
chunk and ones that are still alive are here today yeah yeah we’re here straight from the
00:15:52 ►
hog farm to here right right sure enough i mean the hog farm is where some of this was going up
00:15:59 ►
well i was the uh the other side of that the uh mary pranksters and uh part of that whole group way
00:16:07 ►
back in the the dawn of it with uh hagan and baps and mountain girl and zonker and you know
00:16:13 ►
and ken kesey and neil cassidy in the 60s you know so and then they kind of crossing cross
00:16:21 ►
reference with everybody from the hog farm and you know, Sasha was active that whole time
00:16:26 ►
and he’s one of the last
00:16:28 ►
people that was from that
00:16:30 ►
era because you just mentioned a number of names
00:16:32 ►
of people who are gone.
00:16:33 ►
Right.
00:16:35 ►
Yeah, I was a kid and everybody was
00:16:38 ►
older than me, hanging out with all those
00:16:40 ►
people.
00:16:41 ►
The magic is still going on
00:16:43 ►
in our hearts and our minds you know
00:16:46 ►
it’s just a power of love and power of conscious consciousness that’s prevailed and
00:16:51 ►
opened a lot of other people’s minds to new ways of looking at things
00:16:55 ►
beautiful thank you good to see you see you again all right you were talking about the Friday night dinners. I went to the Friday night dinners in Marin for about 10 years,
00:17:09 ►
and he was always there.
00:17:11 ►
He was amazing, but mostly I was interested that he was doing all this research
00:17:19 ►
on drugs in someone that I thought, too, were very valuable.
00:17:28 ►
drugs and someone that I thought too were very valuable and it frustrates me that that like it’ll be mainstream after he’s gone you know it’s too bad that’s really the irony of the whole thing
00:17:35 ►
and I thought he was always doing brilliant work and he was a true gentleman right at the dinners. Oh, absolutely lovely and charming and nice to strangers
00:17:45 ►
and not
00:17:47 ►
affected or snotty.
00:17:50 ►
Yeah, they all were. Everybody was very
00:17:51 ►
warm and embracing
00:17:53 ►
people. Those
00:17:55 ►
Friday night dinners sound like they
00:17:57 ►
were very important.
00:17:59 ►
Well, I think they were.
00:18:01 ►
I’ve only been here about 20
00:18:03 ►
years, but in the 10 years before that, like 30 years,
00:18:07 ►
the people, I think, who went, there was no other place to go to say,
00:18:13 ►
okay, this is the value of these drugs.
00:18:16 ►
Apart from the people who were doing a lot of drugs, it was a different story.
00:18:21 ►
But there was a handful of people who either were researchers or who paid for research there was that
00:18:28 ►
guy from microsoft who paid for a lot of work that these people were doing and then he died
00:18:34 ►
and after he died it kind of changed a little and you are sherry miller i live in turon. I’m a painter with a studio in Sausalito. Oh, okay. J.B. Porter.
00:18:50 ►
I knew Sasha for the last three years. I helped out at the ranch clean up through the maps
00:18:58 ►
people. I got a couple of afternoons. I got to sit down with the man and just ask him questions
00:19:05 ►
and stuff that I’d always wondered about.
00:19:09 ►
He cleared up a lot of good stuff.
00:19:10 ►
A lot of things I had no idea about.
00:19:13 ►
He just kind of filled in the blanks.
00:19:14 ►
The guy had an amazing sense of humor and was musical.
00:19:19 ►
Right.
00:19:20 ►
What do you say about Alandre?
00:19:21 ►
But he’s the neatest guy in the world.
00:19:23 ►
You know, he just, you world. He could just sit down.
00:19:26 ►
He could talk to anybody.
00:19:27 ►
It’s really important.
00:19:30 ►
Wow.
00:19:31 ►
That just sums it up.
00:19:33 ►
Just wow.
00:19:33 ►
I mean, the guy was…
00:19:35 ►
He’s done so much for our culture.
00:19:39 ►
His books are going to be around for hundreds of years.
00:19:42 ►
We’re going to just enjoy them.
00:19:47 ►
He said what he had to say. going to be around for hundreds of years and we’re going to just enjoy them. And he just,
00:19:52 ►
he said what he had to say and put all the information out there, which he thought was very important. So I think, I just love the guy. He was the man.
00:19:59 ►
Well, thank you, JB.
00:20:02 ►
Jonathan Slott Phillips, Psychonaut Productions, Electric Jesus book.
00:20:08 ►
And the question of the hour is, what did Sasha mean to you?
00:20:12 ►
Oh, my God.
00:20:13 ►
Sasha is like the original Psychonaut.
00:20:16 ►
Like, not only did he make these incredible compounds,
00:20:20 ►
he actually took the journeys himself, which I’m really impressed with.
00:20:24 ►
And I think he
00:20:25 ►
had a lot of courage and honor with that and on top of that i know that ecstasy is like his problem
00:20:30 ►
child a little bit he views it that way but for those who have read my book i would not be on my
00:20:36 ►
spiritual journey i would not be an energy healer i would not have a whole new life if it weren’t
00:20:42 ►
for mdma so i’m super thankful for Sasha.
00:20:46 ►
Okay, there you have it.
00:20:48 ►
Any words for Lorenzo?
00:20:50 ►
Hey, Lorenzo.
00:20:52 ►
Thanks so much.
00:20:53 ►
I love your podcast,
00:20:54 ►
and I really appreciate you putting up that Vancouver Electro Jesus reading.
00:20:59 ►
I thought it was pretty ballsy and awesome.
00:21:00 ►
Thanks, man.
00:21:02 ►
This is MJ.
00:21:04 ►
How did Sasha change your life? Sasha Shulgin.
00:21:08 ►
Well, I think before I learned about Sasha, I had wanted to be a chemist growing up, but
00:21:16 ►
as I got older, I started to get the impression that what chemists did was manipulate oil into a bunch of new poisons and i didn’t want
00:21:28 ►
any part of it so i went to art school um but then i in art school i i saw pical and i started to
00:21:36 ►
learn about sasha and it kind of it not only like reinvigoratedated my kind of passion for chemistry, but I actually started to, with the help of some of his tools, I started to think that there wasn’t as many barriers to being a chemist as I thought. art school and I got my foot in the door at an environmental lab doing field work and
00:22:05 ►
then eventually running their mobile GC mass spec and I mean it changed my life. I had
00:22:11 ►
a 10 year run with analytical chemistry and I would have never gone back to that dream.
00:22:21 ►
And then you hung out with Sasha in the last few years. Yeah, and then I met him in 2011.
00:22:26 ►
And on January 4th, somebody invited me to the party.
00:22:29 ►
And he wasn’t doing well at that time.
00:22:32 ►
He had just gotten over his stroke.
00:22:35 ►
And his dementia was increasing.
00:22:41 ►
And I had just gone through the whole thing
00:22:45 ►
with what happened to Robert Anton Wilson
00:22:48 ►
where I was just devastated
00:22:50 ►
that somebody who was so important to so many people
00:22:54 ►
so many people point to Robert Anton Wilson’s book
00:22:56 ►
and at the end of his life
00:22:57 ►
he’s having to sell off his possessions
00:22:59 ►
and his rings
00:23:00 ►
and I just made the decision that day
00:23:04 ►
that we’re going to do something.
00:23:06 ►
And we pretty much did.
00:23:08 ►
And thank you so much for what you’ve done for Sasha and for Dan.
00:23:11 ►
It was the community, you know?
00:23:13 ►
I mean, the idea was there.
00:23:15 ►
And as soon as we decided to just start talking about it nonstop,
00:23:22 ►
I mean, the community all over the world really helped.
00:23:26 ►
This guy, Lackin Bell in Australia, I mean, he single-handedly doubled or tripled the intake from our online auctions.
00:23:32 ►
Wow.
00:23:33 ►
You guys did a fantastic thing.
00:23:35 ►
Yeah.
00:23:35 ►
And then we found this guy in Prague who had his life kind of changed by Sasha, and he happened to be a millionaire.
00:23:43 ►
And he came over and helped pay off a lot of Sasha’s medical bills about be a millionaire he came over and helped
00:23:46 ►
pay off a lot of Sasha’s medical bills
00:23:48 ►
about a month before he died
00:23:49 ►
really really wonderful
00:23:51 ►
absolutely wonderful
00:23:53 ►
it was amazing
00:23:56 ►
it was amazing
00:23:57 ►
I’m so proud of everybody
00:24:00 ►
as soon as we start talking about it
00:24:02 ►
everyone wanted to help
00:24:03 ►
Dennis Berry we saw John maybe we are everybody as soon as soon as we start talking about it everyone wanted to help yeah dennis
00:24:05 ►
very we saw john maybe we we are it’s a phenomenal group hi it’s great i’m glad you guys are here
00:24:14 ►
oh i am too it’s been way too long it’s been way too long yeah four whole weeks Priyasi and Tulio and what did Sasha Shulgin mean to you?
00:24:29 ►
wow
00:24:30 ►
that’s it
00:24:32 ►
this is Paul Daly
00:24:35 ►
and this is Scott Bodarki
00:24:37 ►
and this is for the Psychedelic Salon Podcast
00:24:39 ►
he’s putting a collage of voices together
00:24:42 ►
about Sasha
00:24:43 ►
and he wanted to know the one question, how did Sasha change your life?
00:24:49 ►
Well, I’m going to be speaking here in a little bit, and I’ve got it worked out.
00:24:56 ►
Sasha and I met 36 years, 9 months, and I think 6 days ago.
00:25:03 ►
And although I didn’t work with him continuously for anywhere near all of that,
00:25:10 ►
I think he kind of immediately validated that my interest in psychedelics
00:25:15 ►
and my interest in psychedelic science was a totally legitimate, valued,
00:25:20 ►
and desired course of study.
00:25:24 ►
And it was just one of the great pleasures of my life to have been able to work with him
00:25:29 ►
and in at least some way carry on a bit of his work.
00:25:34 ►
So it changed my life quite a lot.
00:25:36 ►
Thank you, Paul. And Scott?
00:25:40 ►
Well, I guess I’d have to say that psychedelics and pathogens
00:25:44 ►
cracked open the shell of ego for me
00:25:48 ►
to reveal that we’re not simply this sort of structuralized personality
00:25:55 ►
navigating through a landscape of objects, that there is rather more to the story than just that.
00:26:00 ►
There’s more to the story.
00:26:01 ►
So when did you meet Sasha’s first, personally?
00:26:05 ►
I guess I met Sasha in 2000.
00:26:09 ►
So you’ve had about a 12-year, 13-year, 14-year relationship with him off and on.
00:26:16 ►
Yes.
00:26:18 ►
I met him, I think, first around that time.
00:26:21 ►
Uh-huh, yeah.
00:26:22 ►
Yeah, met him in Palenque.
00:26:24 ►
In Palenque, yeah. Right by the him in Palenque. In Palenque, yeah.
00:26:26 ►
A break by the pool in Palenque.
00:26:28 ►
Indeed.
00:26:30 ►
Which is where Lorenzo met all of you guys.
00:26:34 ►
In Palenque in 99, 98, I think, his first.
00:26:39 ►
Yeah, I don’t think that’s where I met Lorenzo,
00:26:41 ►
but I can’t actually say where I met him.
00:26:45 ►
I met him later in 2003. That’t actually say where I met him. I met him
00:26:46 ►
later in 2003. That was kind of
00:26:47 ►
my coming out party.
00:26:49 ►
I had been kind of hiding my light under
00:26:52 ►
a bushel from
00:26:53 ►
the early 80s until 2003.
00:26:57 ►
But at the
00:26:58 ►
2003 Mind States, my
00:26:59 ►
divorce went final
00:27:02 ►
and I
00:27:03 ►
cracked open my egg of psychedelic interest.
00:27:08 ►
There you go, Lorenzo.
00:27:12 ►
Two old friends, another appreciation of Alexander Sasha Shulgin.
00:27:18 ►
We are now walking into this incredible Berkeley Community Theater,
00:27:23 ►
getting ourselves seated for this memorial
00:27:25 ►
service for Sasha.
00:27:28 ►
Paul Bailey, chemist and longtime friend of the family.
00:27:34 ►
Good afternoon.
00:27:36 ►
36 years, 9 months and 6 days ago, I was a newly minted graduate student starting my
00:27:44 ►
Ph.D. program here at Berkeley.
00:27:47 ►
I read in the Berkeley Bar about a conference that was going to take place in Washington
00:27:51 ►
State, the second international conference on hallucinogenic mushrooms. I didn’t even
00:27:59 ►
think that such conferences existed, but I figured I had to be there.
00:28:12 ►
So I drove myself up, and on a Friday evening, the first social gathering of this meeting,
00:28:18 ►
I got my glass of cheap red wine, walked up to the first three gentlemen that I saw standing there.
00:28:24 ►
The one in the middle stood out like a beacon on fire.
00:28:31 ►
Tall, skinny gentleman, wild shock of gray hair, and a big, toothy grin.
00:28:36 ►
Well, he introduced himself as Alexander, call me Sasha, Shogun.
00:28:41 ►
And he changed my life very fundamentally.
00:28:47 ►
I may not have had a continuous relationship with
00:28:53 ►
him, but I had many, many hours where I could watch him answering questions, talking to people who thronged to see the great Dr. Shulgin. He taught me a great deal about how to be
00:29:02 ►
as a scientist, how to be as someone who sought truth. I was very,
00:29:11 ►
very fortunate in his later years to be able to work with him a bit more closely, help
00:29:16 ►
him with writing projects, to help restore his lab and bring it back to life. And it
00:29:26 ►
his lab and bring it back to life. And it breaks my heart that we’re missing him now.
00:29:37 ►
But somehow, it seems that Sasha Shulgin is out tripping in the cosmos somewhere. And somehow, I also have the feeling that I’ll be running into him again, and I’ll probably recognize him in whatever form he’s taken.
00:29:47 ►
So I just wanted to let Sasha know, keeping my eye out.
00:29:52 ►
Scott Bedarki, Shulgin Legacy Project.
00:29:56 ►
Sasha Shulgin was, perhaps, the last Renaissance man.
00:30:01 ►
Citizen scientist, working in a shed out in the yard, fueled by his curiosity,
00:30:09 ►
the love of the truth.
00:30:11 ►
The fruits of his labor revealed how much we do not understand.
00:30:18 ►
Like Socrates and Galileo before him, he penetrated deeply enough into the mystery
00:30:25 ►
to reveal that we are not as solid as we seem.
00:30:30 ►
When our cherished illusions are threatened,
00:30:34 ►
the psyche experiences anxiety and responds with repression,
00:30:39 ►
the ego’s attempt to manufacture safety.
00:30:44 ►
Sasha was after the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
00:30:50 ►
The fall from Eden is commonly misconstrued.
00:30:55 ►
Only by eating the fruit of duality do we enter the phenomenal world.
00:31:00 ►
This is no sin, but rather the necessary prerequisite for human existence.
00:31:07 ►
The truth is we are in Eden still, for there is no place outside the garden of God.
00:31:15 ►
The ego is the vehicle through which the divine may live in the world.
00:31:22 ►
The human being is a peculiar animal, the one who forgets what it is. We need the ego to
00:31:29 ►
live in the world, but we become lost inside it, and our anxiety prevents us from seeing this.
00:31:37 ►
Sasha’s work was about catalyzing the deepest longing of the human heart to know itself.
00:31:43 ►
longing of the human heart to know itself.
00:31:47 ►
Sasha’s allegiance was to the truth.
00:31:49 ►
He served no other master.
00:31:54 ►
Every human being must undergo ego death,
00:31:57 ►
at physical death, if not before.
00:32:01 ►
Sasha systematically developed technology dedicated to facilitating this evolution.
00:32:05 ►
Perhaps one day, pharmacological self-determination will be a human right.
00:32:11 ►
Charlie Grobe, psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher.
00:32:17 ►
Over the last 25 years, I’ve had many opportunities to meet with Sasha and to appreciate his enormous contributions to our field
00:32:26 ►
and to the lives of countless beneficiaries of his remarkable discoveries and insights. While not
00:32:32 ►
the original discoverer of MDMA, he was the first to appreciate its vast potential as an adjunct and
00:32:38 ►
facilitator of a distinctly novel form of psychotherapy. Sasha’s introduction of MDMA to his friend and retired psychotherapist, Leo Zeff, in 1976,
00:32:50 ►
and his landmark 1978 article on the human pharmacology of MDMA, co-authored with David Nichols,
00:32:58 ►
catalyzed a wave of scientific and lay interest in the range of effects of phenethylamine compounds
00:33:03 ►
that persist to this present day.
00:33:06 ►
Over these many years, I have found Sasha a great source of inspiration
00:33:10 ►
and a courageous role model for speaking the truth
00:33:14 ►
and challenging politically motivated and often dishonest and deceptive scientific gospel.
00:33:21 ►
While the generations that follow Sasha will surely miss his genius, his creativity, and his remarkable sense of humor, the world will be a richer place for the many contributions he has made.
00:33:36 ►
Maria Vittoria Mangini, scientist, teacher, and friend of the family.
00:33:43 ►
Lots of speakers today have talked about Sasha’s playfulness.
00:33:47 ►
He enjoyed laughter himself.
00:33:50 ►
He could instigate laughter in others,
00:33:52 ►
and sometimes at the expense of others if they were particularly pompous.
00:33:57 ►
Sasha loved jokes and wordplay and was a collector of palindromes.
00:34:03 ►
He also knew a great many limericks
00:34:05 ►
and wrote quite a few, like this one.
00:34:08 ►
When Lady Chatterley swoons,
00:34:11 ►
her breasts pop up like balloons,
00:34:14 ►
but her butler stands by with hauteur in his eye
00:34:17 ►
and pops them back in with warm spoons.
00:34:30 ►
Another favorite humor style was the periprostokian, a kind of inside-out word play.
00:34:37 ►
I told my doctor that I broke my arm in two places. He told me not to go to those places.
00:34:43 ►
I’ve had a wonderful evening. Unfortunately, this wasn’t it.
00:34:51 ►
Sasha had the excellent talent of delivery with diversion,
00:34:54 ►
and he loved to catch us off guard.
00:34:59 ►
Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time,
00:35:02 ►
which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet.
00:35:05 ►
He also ate very little, which made him rather frail,
00:35:06 ►
and with his odd diet,
00:35:08 ►
he suffered from bad breath.
00:35:10 ►
This made him a super calloused,
00:35:11 ►
fragile mystic,
00:35:12 ►
hexed by halitosis.
00:35:21 ►
Sasha could synthesize something that had never existed
00:35:23 ►
anywhere in the universe before,
00:35:25 ►
find out what it does, and bring back the results for their potential benefit to the community,
00:35:30 ►
and do it with wit.
00:35:34 ►
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
00:35:41 ►
This gathering has been a remarkable mixture of the public and the private,
00:35:48 ►
the worldly and the sacred, the revealed and the concealed.
00:35:54 ►
Some of us have told stories that have been previously held secret.
00:36:00 ►
But during the course of Sasha’s lifetime,
00:36:03 ►
there have been remarkable and radical shifts on what is or can be said about the use of his discoveries.
00:36:13 ►
Although conservatism has dominated decades of electoral politics, it has not been able to entice the genie of pluralism back into the bottle.
00:36:22 ►
the genie of pluralism back into the bottle.
00:36:31 ►
According to some, attaching disgrace to psychedelic drug use is a hidden keystone of the campaign to smear the entire range of liberatory idealism that decades ago gave hope, heart, and character
00:36:38 ►
to my generation.
00:36:41 ►
Whether or not this is so, the concept that taking psychedelic drugs could be benign and even beneficial
00:36:48 ►
has been politically extremely unpopular in recent American history,
00:36:53 ►
although it has been a popular view for millennia.
00:36:58 ►
Still, many of us know that the insights, ideals, and commitments that we brought home from psychedelic experience
00:37:06 ►
have contributed to our formation as socially responsible, ethical, and humane citizens.
00:37:13 ►
While there may be a discrepancy between the ideals and insights that we connect to our psychedelic experiences
00:37:19 ►
and the values and commitments that structure our everyday lives,
00:37:23 ►
I suspect that for many of us, our ethics,
00:37:26 ►
our spiritual beliefs, and our daily practices have been formed by the insights derived from
00:37:31 ►
our psychedelic experiences. I know that mine certainly have. In my research, experienced users
00:37:40 ►
of psychedelic drugs related to me their experiences of interconnectedness with nature,
00:37:46 ►
with the deity, and with others, and many describe how these experiences have led them to engage in
00:37:52 ►
political activism, to take up philanthropy, to undertake ecological restoration, or to enter
00:37:58 ►
public service. Their psychedelic experiences did not encourage these people to turn away from
00:38:04 ►
social responsibilities,
00:38:06 ►
but seemed to have moved them to become more involved in caring for the community and for the natural environment.
00:38:12 ►
As a group, I feel us to be culturally and politically vital.
00:38:17 ►
If, as I suspect is true, our psychedelic experiences have had lifelong implications
00:38:23 ►
not only for our personal growth and our spiritual development,
00:38:27 ►
but also for our community involvement and our political activism.
00:38:30 ►
We should stand up and claim those experiences as influential in our lives.
00:38:37 ►
And we have not even to make the journey alone,
00:38:41 ►
because the heroes of all time have gone before us. And where we had thought to find an
00:38:51 ►
abomination, we will find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we will slay ourselves.
00:38:59 ►
And where we had thought to travel outwardly, we will travel to the center of our own existence.
00:39:06 ►
And where we had thought to be alone,
00:39:09 ►
we will be with all the world.
00:39:11 ►
Thank you.
00:39:13 ►
Earth and Fire Arrowhead.
00:39:16 ►
Friends of the family.
00:39:19 ►
Awesome.
00:39:21 ►
It seems a little unfair to go last with the crying and such.
00:39:27 ►
We’ve had the honor of knowing Sasha and Anne for almost 20 years.
00:39:30 ►
And when we were asked to say some words today, a few memories jumped to mind to share.
00:39:35 ►
One was that Sasha was really a very gracious celebrity.
00:39:40 ►
We first met Sasha and Anne at the Entheobotany Conference in 1996 in San Francisco.
00:39:44 ►
And we had just started Arrowhead about a year earlier.
00:39:47 ►
We were super excited to meet the authors of Bacall.
00:39:50 ►
It was a bit of a chaotic scene as we joined with other young drug geeks clustering around Dr. Shulgin
00:39:54 ►
to talk about psychoactive chemistry, pharmacology, and experience,
00:39:58 ►
and he happily chatted with anyone who approached him, drawing dirty pictures, answering questions, and, of course, making puns.
00:40:04 ►
But despite being the center of attention and one of the stars of the show, he engaged
00:40:08 ►
each person, focusing his attention on their questions and becoming genuinely interested
00:40:14 ►
in what they were saying.
00:40:16 ►
Earth and I have frequently discussed in the years since how graciously both Sasha and
00:40:19 ►
Anne handled talking to excited fans, often answering the same questions repeatedly year
00:40:23 ►
after year
00:40:25 ►
with patience and humor, and they became role models for us
00:40:28 ►
in how to talk with audiences and fans of Arrowhead.
00:40:31 ►
Another thing that really comes to mind when we think of Sasha and Anne together
00:40:36 ►
is how they worked as a team.
00:40:38 ►
At that same Entheobotany conference, I nervously, I was so nervous,
00:40:42 ►
approached Sasha and asked him to sign my copy of Peacol.
00:40:44 ►
I think he was the first author I ever asked to sign a book.
00:40:47 ►
And his response was that I should ask Anne to sign it first and then come back and get him to sign it.
00:40:52 ►
And although the meaning of that gesture might be lost on some people, it was really striking for me.
00:40:56 ►
As a part of a couple that works as a team, I had already experienced people assuming that Earth as the male was the lead of the project.
00:41:03 ►
And Sasha’s response to my request for his signature showed me that he and Anne were committed to working as a team, as Earth
00:41:08 ►
and I do. Sasha was really a dedicated teacher. When we met Sasha, we were just in our early 20s,
00:41:18 ►
and he was 70. At the time, our knowledge of chemistry and pharmacology was pretty limited.
00:41:24 ►
But over the past 20 years, as we attended social gatherings
00:41:26 ►
and presented at conference together with Anne and Sasha around the world,
00:41:31 ►
Sasha was always extremely generous with his time and knowledge.
00:41:35 ►
In fact, I often joke that everything I know about chemistry
00:41:37 ►
I learned from Sasha drawing dirty pictures in the air.
00:41:41 ►
Sasha was extremely generous in that he was always making himself available to us,
00:41:46 ►
whether to answer chemistry questions by phone or email or having lunch with us at their house,
00:41:52 ►
where we had wide-ranging discussions about politics and pharmacology.
00:41:58 ►
Or he was offered to sign books or posters to help fundraise for Arrowhead.
00:42:02 ►
And we’re also immensely grateful for Sasha and Ann’s willingness to help us,
00:42:07 ►
to allow us to help them archive some of the notebooks and materials of Sasha’s from his lab work.
00:42:13 ►
Perhaps most important to the wider community,
00:42:16 ►
they also offered their home and created other spaces as a meeting place for drug geeks
00:42:23 ►
and people who are interested in the topics.
00:42:29 ►
They’ve acted as a community hub for people interested in all aspects of psychedelics and empathogens,
00:42:31 ►
whether technical, recreational, or spiritual.
00:42:36 ►
My father always said to me that in order to stay fully connected to the world, you need to keep and make friends of all ages.
00:42:40 ►
There always needs to be an array of ages that you know some people at.
00:42:46 ►
And gatherings at the Shulgin’s home always included an amazing array of students,
00:42:50 ►
teachers, professionals, researchers, and policymakers from young to old.
00:42:55 ►
And since we’ve met Sasha and Ann 20 years ago,
00:42:57 ►
we’ve been thrilled to move ourselves from being acquaintances to junior colleagues to friends.
00:43:02 ►
And we’ll miss you, Sasha.
00:43:04 ►
We love you, Ann.
00:43:06 ►
David Presti, neurobiologist and longtime friend.
00:43:12 ►
Hi.
00:43:12 ►
I’d like to offer another riff on Sasha’s science.
00:43:17 ►
So most discoveries in science occur when there’s a confluence of knowledge
00:43:23 ►
and technology that make it ripe
00:43:25 ►
for them to happen. If such and such a person hadn’t discovered something, then somebody
00:43:30 ►
else probably would have sometime soon. Some discoveries are different, though, like Albert
00:43:36 ►
Einstein and general relativity. If he hadn’t thought of this, it’s a good chance nobody
00:43:40 ►
else would have. And if Sasha had not done the work he did, it’s likely that a vast
00:43:47 ►
landscape of pharmaceutical chemistry would have gone undiscovered, uncharted.
00:43:54 ►
Sasha’s work is, by all objective criteria, worthy of the very highest academic honors,
00:44:01 ►
Nobel Prize kind of stuff. But such honors are impossible as we struggle as a society to learn how to balance the complexities
00:44:10 ►
that are stirred up by the power of psychedelics.
00:44:15 ►
What’s true is this.
00:44:17 ►
Some kinds of work are simply too big for universities, for government research institutes,
00:44:24 ►
and for industries, impressive
00:44:27 ►
as these institutions are, Sasha’s work was like this.
00:44:31 ►
It was too big to be done in a multi-million dollar laboratory.
00:44:36 ►
It instead required an alchemist’s den, a courageous spirit, a careful focus of intention,
00:44:44 ►
and a goodly dose of mystical insight.
00:44:47 ►
Then the stuff of legend happened.
00:44:50 ►
Thank you, Sasha.
00:44:52 ►
Tanya and Greg Manning.
00:44:55 ►
Team Shogun!
00:45:04 ►
Hello, everyone.
00:45:06 ►
It’s so great to be here on stage with Sasha’s more prickly friends.
00:45:11 ►
I was so blessed that Wendy fell in love with Jason
00:45:14 ►
because I was able to take over her job and start working for Sasha about ten and a half years ago.
00:45:20 ►
Every morning he would greet me with a cup of coffee and a smile
00:45:24 ►
as we enjoyed classical music playing in the background
00:45:28 ►
His childlike curiosity for discovery was contagious
00:45:32 ►
It was one of the things that made him a great teacher and scientist
00:45:36 ►
He was incredibly passionate about his work
00:45:39 ►
but when Anne walked in the room he would drop everything and ask
00:45:44 ►
What can I do for you, my love?
00:45:46 ►
And then they would have their kiss of the morning.
00:45:51 ►
A couple of years later, Sasha and Ann invited us to live at the farm.
00:45:55 ►
I will always remember him putting his arm around Greg and saying,
00:46:00 ►
You are family now.
00:46:03 ►
We were completely honest with one another.
00:46:07 ►
He was the greatest boss, teacher, and one of the best friends I ever had.
00:46:13 ►
His desire to connect and play with people made it so fun to be with him
00:46:17 ►
as he held court at conferences, events, and parties.
00:46:23 ►
Sasha and Ann taught me how to make friends with my shadow
00:46:26 ►
and deepen my understanding of the world around me and within me.
00:46:32 ►
Thank you all for helping us take such good care of Sasha.
00:46:36 ►
Your support made a huge difference.
00:46:40 ►
Sasha’s spirit and legacy live on, and on lives the tribe.
00:46:44 ►
Thank you. Thank you.
00:46:45 ►
Thank you.
00:46:54 ►
We are all here because Sasha had a very personal and intimate effect on our lives,
00:47:02 ►
and we are grateful.
00:47:01 ►
and an intimate effect on our lives.
00:47:04 ►
And we are grateful.
00:47:08 ►
Tanya and I have been blessed with the privilege of living on the farm with Sasha and Ann.
00:47:12 ►
And we are so very grateful.
00:47:16 ►
And boy, do we have some stories to tell.
00:47:21 ►
I remember the first time Sasha took me out to the lab
00:47:24 ►
and instructed me to sit down
00:47:28 ►
and describe my thoughts as he opened a succession of test tubes for me to smell.
00:47:37 ►
He asked me if I believed that those thoughts and memories and feelings came from within those test tubes.
00:47:46 ►
Of course not, I said.
00:47:49 ►
And that’s the point, he said.
00:47:52 ►
All I am is a tool maker.
00:47:55 ►
People use my tools to unlock doors and access rooms full of knowledge
00:48:01 ►
and wisdom and spirituality that already exist within them.
00:48:09 ►
I am just a toolmaker.
00:48:12 ►
Fast forward to last year, one afternoon during the early stages of Sasha’s dementia,
00:48:22 ►
sitting around the dining room table.
00:48:24 ►
I remember Sasha’s dementia, sitting around the dining room table.
00:48:30 ►
I asked Sasha to repeat something that he had just said,
00:48:33 ►
and he said, oops, can’t remember.
00:48:38 ►
I said, how does that feel, Sasha,
00:48:41 ►
to not have all that stuff running around in your brain anymore?
00:48:45 ►
Sasha said, it’s very freeing.
00:48:49 ►
I am in shy amazement of the world in front of me
00:48:51 ►
that I haven’t touched yet.
00:48:56 ►
Thank you, Sasha.
00:48:58 ►
Your heart and humility
00:49:00 ►
and generosity
00:49:03 ►
and playfulness
00:49:06 ►
have taught me to be a better person.
00:49:11 ►
I love you and I miss you, my friend.
00:49:33 ►
Does anyone need a summary of who we are and what we do?
00:49:35 ►
Yes?
00:49:39 ►
Why don’t you explain because you know better than I do.
00:49:39 ►
Okay.
00:49:41 ►
Oops.
00:49:43 ►
Seriously? Seriously?
00:50:06 ►
We’ve only got an hour. This gentleman, known as Sasha, is, I think at present, he’s probably the world’s top researcher in the effect of psychedelic drugs on human beings.
00:50:15 ►
Most people who deal in this area are using the drugs or experimenting on animals.
00:50:26 ►
And, well, there is in this field a term, L-A-B, I think it is.
00:50:28 ►
L-A-B, right.
00:50:30 ►
L-A-B, which means… Lab experiments.
00:50:31 ►
L-A-B.
00:50:33 ►
It’s short for large animal biochemistry.
00:50:36 ►
Right.
00:50:37 ►
Large animal being human beings.
00:50:41 ►
The thing we’ve also done at a certain point in the 80s, I think,
00:50:49 ►
Sasha published everything that he had discovered,
00:50:55 ►
and that included dosage levels and their effects in humans, et cetera, et cetera.
00:51:05 ►
He was publishing in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
00:51:10 ►
and other scientific journals who have peer review.
00:51:17 ►
But at a certain point, and I forget when,
00:51:20 ►
when was it that the lawyers for those journals got cold feet?
00:51:24 ►
It was in the 1980s.
00:51:26 ►
I think it was, yeah.
00:51:26 ►
The legal advisors of the various editors of the various medical journals and pharmacological journals
00:51:32 ►
were advising the editors not to let human experiments be published
00:51:39 ►
unless they had been approved by and had been overseen by a research advisory panel of some type.
00:51:48 ►
And so in our little research group, we decided to be a research advisory panel
00:51:51 ►
and advise ourselves as to how we should do things.
00:51:54 ►
And that went along for about two or three years, and then that felt to be uncomfortable.
00:52:00 ►
The journals are strictly a little bit uncomfortable publishing human data
00:52:03 ►
that did not come from known clinical sources.
00:52:08 ►
Well, everybody was getting cold feet.
00:52:10 ►
It was the beginning of the war on drugs in general.
00:52:14 ►
And they decided it was just too risky.
00:52:17 ►
Actually, our research group did include the kind of people who are supposed to be included in a, what do you call it, advisory panel,
00:52:26 ►
psychiatrists and psychologists.
00:52:31 ►
Lawyers, yeah, not too many lawyers.
00:52:34 ►
So anyway, that was the point at which we began to think that the best thing to do
00:52:41 ►
was to put all this information,
00:52:47 ►
all this knowledge, into a different form, one that did not depend
00:52:52 ►
on peer review. And so we began writing the first
00:52:56 ►
book, which was Picard.
00:52:58 ►
And we very cautiously indicated that it was a fictional book.
00:53:03 ►
So there would be no complications.
00:53:05 ►
The chemistry is not fictional.
00:53:07 ►
Well, maybe it is.
00:53:09 ►
No.
00:53:09 ►
Okay.
00:53:11 ►
Nope.
00:53:13 ►
But the rest of the story, you might say, is nonfiction here and there.
00:53:22 ►
Let’s put it that way.
00:53:23 ►
But some of it is fictional.
00:53:25 ►
And as far as the authorities go, it most definitely is a fictional story.
00:53:35 ►
And as far as my children go, it certainly is fictional because there’s a lot of sex in it.
00:53:40 ►
And parents don’t do that kind of thing.
00:53:45 ►
It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do.
00:53:48 ►
They don’t want to know.
00:53:52 ►
Children prefer not to know.
00:53:56 ►
So, that was the beginning of the writing.
00:54:00 ►
And I was doing work as a lay therapist at that time,
00:54:05 ►
and I did that for about two and a half years,
00:54:08 ►
and that was incredible work using MDMA before it became illegal.
00:54:16 ►
And let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug.
00:54:24 ►
is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug.
00:54:30 ►
And I’m so happy to know that various places around the world,
00:54:38 ►
it’s now being used in what I think is going to be its most important way,
00:54:42 ►
and that is dealing with PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:54:48 ►
Especially for veterans of war, I think MDMA is going to save a lot of sanity.
00:54:58 ►
And anyway, after MDMA became illegal and the idea of the book became more important,
00:55:05 ►
I quit the therapy, having learned a tremendous lot. And we began writing Picard.
00:55:09 ►
We submitted the manuscript to a very good friend who’s a publisher.
00:55:18 ►
And he sent it back saying, I wish I could, but it’s too political.
00:55:23 ►
We understood.
00:55:29 ►
And we did not submit the manuscript to anyone else.
00:55:33 ►
And we went ahead and did our own publishing,
00:55:37 ►
and we have been delighted to have done so ever since.
00:55:39 ►
And the second book is Tikal.
00:55:44 ►
Oh, the first book, Pihkal, P-I-H-K-A-L,
00:55:48 ►
stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved.
00:55:50 ►
That was Sasha’s idea.
00:55:54 ►
And the second book is Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved.
00:56:01 ►
And people who don’t know a thing about chemistry enjoy the first half of the book, which is the story.
00:56:05 ►
And those who are pure chemists ignore the first half and just go straight to the chemistry.
00:56:08 ►
And that’s pretty much…
00:56:10 ►
For the rest, you have to read the books.
00:56:15 ►
That’s sort of the best summary I could give.
00:56:18 ►
You got anything more?
00:56:19 ►
No, I think it’s beautiful.
00:56:20 ►
Okay.
00:56:22 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:56:26 ►
Be well, my friends.