Program Notes
Guest speakers: George Greer, John Gilmore, Rick Doblin, Annie Oak
Today’s podcast features the tributes to Sasha Shulgin that were made at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2014 Burning Man Festival. In addition to comments from the audience, we hear from Dr. George Greer (MDMA Researcher and Co-founder of the Heffter Research Institute), Rick Doblin PhD (President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), John Gilmore (Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Annie Oak (Co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress).
The Shulgin Research Institute
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
Well, in two days I’m going to be posting
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my first podcast for year 11. That’s right, this podcast marks the end of my first 10 years of
00:00:33 ►
podcasting and hopefully there are going to be 10 more years to come. And I guess that I should let
00:00:40 ►
you know that I’ve been hearing that iTunes has now dropped the salon from its listings,
00:00:45 ►
which seems kind of strange since there were so many five-star reviews there.
00:00:49 ►
But anyway, since I’m on Linux, I don’t have access to iTunes,
00:00:53 ►
so if you happen to work there, maybe you could look into it for us.
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Now, before I introduce today’s program, I first want to give a happy birthday shout-out,
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even though it’s almost a
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month early, to Alan. And you can thank Kirsten for that, Alan. Also, congratulations to Periscope
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streamer and fellow salonner, Dominano R., who tells me that he met the love of his life through
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the salon. I don’t know the whole story, but I’m sure that it’s interesting.
00:01:32 ►
So now let’s turn to today’s podcast, which is the tribute to Sasha Shulgin that was held at last year’s Burning Man Festival. This tribute begins with George Greer speaking, and he’ll be
00:01:38 ►
followed by John Gilmore, Rick Doblin, Annie Oak, and then there’s also going to be several members of the audience who will say a few words.
00:01:48 ►
As you know, Sasha Shulgin died on June 2nd of last year,
00:01:52 ►
and on the 17th of June this year, 2015, had he lived, he would have been 90 years old.
00:02:00 ►
So now let’s join the Saloners who were on the playa at Burning Man last August
00:02:05 ►
as they record their thoughts about the greatest chemist who have lived during my lifetime.
00:02:12 ►
This is the Burning Man tribute to Sasha Shulgin.
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And my name is George Greer. I’m a psychiatrist.
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This is Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS.
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Annie Oak, head of Camp Soft Landing. And John Gilmore, drug policy reformer.
00:02:39 ►
So we’re each going to talk about Sasha, I guess, a little bit. I’m going to start, because I met Sasha,
00:02:46 ►
I think, before any of you. I met Sasha summer of 1975, before he had met his later wife,
00:02:55 ►
Ann. I was in a workshop at Esalen about psychedelics, and he was sort of an irritated, unhappy guy, it seemed to me.
00:03:06 ►
Really smart, talking about pharmacology, but just kind of like an edge,
00:03:10 ►
kind of an irritated, kind of angry edge to him.
00:03:15 ►
Next time I saw him was in 1980 when I approached him about me making MDMA in his lab
00:03:21 ►
so I could use it in my practice.
00:03:24 ►
And he was with Ann, and he was really happy.
00:03:28 ►
He was a really happy person.
00:03:30 ►
And that was very impressive.
00:03:33 ►
And he didn’t know me from Adam.
00:03:39 ►
So I just said, I want to make MDMA and use my practice.
00:03:43 ►
I’ve done the legal research.
00:03:45 ►
And he said, okay, well, let’s take MDMA together and we’ll talk about it.
00:03:51 ►
So my wife, his wife, we took MDMA and we just had a great time.
00:03:55 ►
And they talked a lot about sex, and maybe a little more than I wanted to hear.
00:04:09 ►
But they were just sweet.
00:04:13 ►
And the day we made MDMA, they had this procedure.
00:04:16 ►
Aluminum is a catalyst for the reaction, piperonyl acetone and methylamine, I think.
00:04:23 ►
And so Ann says, okay, so I’ll tear up the aluminum foil sheets.
00:04:27 ►
So she would tear one strip of aluminum
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and then tear it into one-inch squares, one at a time,
00:04:35 ►
and there needed to be like 300 squares of aluminum.
00:04:40 ►
So it took a long time to tear 300 individual squares of aluminum.
00:04:46 ►
So I’m going to brag here.
00:04:54 ►
I had an innovation was let’s layer several sheets of aluminum on top of each other,
00:04:56 ►
and we can make more than one square at a time.
00:05:00 ►
And they just thought that was just the most brilliant thing.
00:05:06 ►
So in making the MDMA it was pretty easy and Sasha insisted on doing all the things
00:05:09 ►
that would dry your skin off
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like letting acetone touch your skin
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and we spent most of the day doing that
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and then it was only half of what we expected
00:05:20 ►
was produced
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and he didn’t know why that was
00:05:24 ►
and I paid for all of his supplies what we expected was produced. And he didn’t know why that was.
00:05:27 ►
And I’d paid for all of his supplies.
00:05:31 ►
So the next day, he thought of something,
00:05:33 ►
I’ll change the pH,
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and then the rest of it came out of solution.
00:05:37 ►
And we made 80 grams,
00:05:41 ►
and he did all the spectroscopy, pure MDMA,
00:05:44 ►
and used it in therapy, and it was great.
00:05:46 ►
And we wrote it up.
00:05:52 ►
So the other thing I just want to say, just a few little stories about him and related to that.
00:05:53 ►
They had Fourth of July parties every Fourth of July,
00:05:58 ►
and one year in 81 we went, and everybody’s there.
00:06:01 ►
And everybody, come on over here, you know.
00:06:03 ►
And I’m talking to Ralph Metzner.
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He says, they wouldn’t get married, something like this.
00:06:10 ►
No, they’re not going to get married.
00:06:11 ►
No, they had a surprise wedding at their Fourth of July party.
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Their minister was a DEA chemist who was a close friend of Sasha’s.
00:06:21 ►
The ceremony was a Native American marriage ceremony.
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So to have a DEA chemist doing a Native American marriage ceremony
00:06:31 ►
with Ann and Sasha was pretty awesome.
00:06:35 ►
It was just fabulous.
00:06:38 ►
And there’s a picture.
00:06:40 ►
Where are those pictures, Annie?
00:06:42 ►
They’re at the temple.
00:06:44 ►
We took them to the temple last night. Oh, took them to the temple. There was a black and white picture my wife? They’re at the temple. We took them to the temple last night.
00:06:45 ►
Oh, took them to the temple.
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There was a black and white picture my wife took of Sasha at the wedding.
00:06:49 ►
It’s in Lees, and he is just beaming with joy.
00:06:52 ►
Oh, that picture is still on the altar in the tea house.
00:06:56 ►
Okay, in the altar in the tea house, you can see a picture of Sasha on his wedding day
00:07:00 ►
and see how happy he was at that time.
00:07:07 ►
Let me just think of a couple more things.
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I guess I’m getting a little emotional now
00:07:11 ►
because I haven’t really emotionally experienced grief about his passing.
00:07:16 ►
I haven’t seen him in a long time and I’ve been very preoccupied.
00:07:20 ►
But he was just, you know, after after he was with Anna I never saw him
00:07:27 ►
get irritated he was relentlessly happy had relentless positive attention for
00:07:39 ►
whoever was he was talking to but he also had some skills because people would come up to him with you know
00:07:48 ►
wild theories about you know like the Pleiadians are going to raise Atlantis and bring on the new
00:07:53 ►
age or if DMT will interact with this receptor in your pineal gland and you’re experienced you
00:08:00 ►
know all these weird theories and he let him talk for a while. And he had two responses to wild theories like this.
00:08:06 ►
One was, well, why not?
00:08:10 ►
And that would just kind of stop him in their tracks, you know.
00:08:13 ►
Like they were trying to convince him to go, well, why not?
00:08:15 ►
He just, you know.
00:08:17 ►
And then the other response was, they finished, he’d go, and?
00:08:23 ►
Like, so what?
00:08:21 ►
So, and?
00:08:24 ►
Like, so what?
00:08:30 ►
So he was fun.
00:08:31 ►
He was funny.
00:08:33 ►
He was just so loving.
00:08:41 ►
And just a story coming to my mind, he would have experiences at his,
00:08:45 ►
he would have parties, and I guess he would take LSD and be high on LSD.
00:08:47 ►
And he was on one of these parties at his house.
00:08:48 ►
He was high on LSD.
00:08:54 ►
And he got a phone call and he picked up the phone and they said, where are you?
00:08:58 ►
And it’s like, well, I’m here.
00:09:05 ►
So he said, well, you’re supposed to be here at like the Bohemian Club doing recital of our string quartet right now.
00:09:08 ►
So he said,
00:09:11 ►
okay, I’ll be there in 30 minutes.
00:09:15 ►
So I just took myself down from the LSD experience,
00:09:18 ►
drove to San Francisco,
00:09:19 ►
did the string quartet,
00:09:20 ►
it all went fine,
00:09:21 ►
played the viola,
00:09:22 ►
came back,
00:09:24 ►
turned myself back on and continued my day.
00:09:28 ►
And he had skills I think most of us don’t have.
00:09:34 ►
One more story.
00:09:35 ►
One of the last times I saw him, he was a few years ago. He had just had a heart
00:09:40 ►
valve replaced. It was a Hefter reception.
00:09:44 ►
So he walks in with a cane. First thing he
00:09:47 ►
says is, Hi George, Ann was going to sell my heart valve on eBay but they already threw
00:09:53 ►
it away. So I’ll leave you with that.
00:10:01 ►
Great. So this is a memorial for Sasha Shulgin. How many people here knew Sasha? Raise your
00:10:11 ►
hands. How many people read his books, know about him? Great. How many people have no
00:10:18 ►
idea what we’re talking about? Okay. Sasha was a chemist who worked for Dow Chemical in the 50s,
00:10:28 ►
very sort of straight-looking kind of guy.
00:10:31 ►
He invented the first biodegradable insecticide in the world.
00:10:38 ►
Dow marketed this under the name Zectran,
00:10:41 ►
and they made a billion dollars out of it over the years.
00:10:46 ►
And, you know, it was the sort of thing that would break down in the environment after it killed the bugs instead
00:10:49 ►
of leaching into the waterways. And so after that, Dow basically said, work on whatever
00:10:57 ►
you want to work on. We like your hunches. And what he decided to focus on was drugs that affect the mind.
00:11:07 ►
He had taken mescaline and he started making variations on mescaline and on other mind-altering substances
00:11:15 ►
by pulling away, changing the chemical structure just a little bit and then seeing how it interacted in his own mind.
00:11:22 ►
and then seeing how it interacted in his own mind.
00:11:27 ►
And in the course of that research, which started in the late 50s and went on all of his life until he died this year,
00:11:31 ►
he invented hundreds and hundreds of chemicals
00:11:34 ►
that had never been seen before in nature,
00:11:37 ►
tried them on himself.
00:11:40 ►
The ones that he thought were useful,
00:11:44 ►
he passed on to a small group of friends.
00:11:47 ►
The ones they found to be useful and not too hazardous, they passed on to a larger community.
00:11:53 ►
And some of those have gone on to worldwide fame like MDMA and 2CB and things like that.
00:12:01 ►
So Sasha was the brain that first experienced each of those drugs.
00:12:15 ►
And I can’t say he was lucid up until the day he died, because I didn’t see him that
00:12:20 ►
day, but I saw him within a month of when he died, and he was still sharp. He understood
00:12:27 ►
what you were talking about. He became fewer and fewer and fewer words as he aged, but
00:12:34 ►
he was always happy to respond with a terrible and inappropriate pun.
00:12:39 ►
And let’s hear from some of the other folks who remember it.
00:12:48 ►
Well, there’s a crucial turning point in 1992 where Sasha played a pivotal role in changing the attitudes of the FDA regarding psychedelic research.
00:13:06 ►
And what had transpired before that is that there was this incredible series of studies
00:13:12 ►
in the 50s and 60s, thousands of studies of psychedelic research.
00:13:16 ►
And then there was also, as we know, the widespread popular use.
00:13:20 ►
And then came the crackdown.
00:13:21 ►
So in 1970 was the Controlled Substances Act, and all these drugs were criminalized.
00:13:27 ►
And then sort of as inevitably happens, the research was squashed all over the world.
00:13:33 ►
And so for several decades, one of the most promising areas of psychiatric research was just completely obliterated.
00:13:42 ►
And there were a few people, like Sasha and others,
00:13:45 ►
that continued to try to develop new drugs.
00:13:49 ►
He would try to modify.
00:13:50 ►
This was before the government had passed the analog bill
00:13:54 ►
that tried to criminalize every new drug
00:13:57 ►
if it’s similar to drugs that are already illegal.
00:13:59 ►
So he found a way to create legal drugs.
00:14:04 ►
He had a DEA license to do it.
00:14:07 ►
And he also had connections to therapists that were working in an underground way.
00:14:13 ►
And so when he would develop new drugs, they would be tried by himself, tried by Ann,
00:14:20 ►
tried by a small group of around 12 people.
00:14:24 ►
by Anne, tried by a small group of around 12 people, and those ones that they thought were particularly useful would then be sort of moved towards the therapeutic community.
00:14:31 ►
And so there was this sort of vibrant but quiet and relatively small underground community
00:14:37 ►
that used psychedelic psychotherapy through the 70s and 80s.
00:14:42 ►
And then as we know, out of this community,
00:14:45 ►
some of the people said, you know, this drug MDMA,
00:14:49 ►
which had the code name ADAM as it was used in therapy,
00:14:53 ►
that they could make a lot of money and a lot of people should have this.
00:14:56 ►
Some of these people were coke dealers,
00:14:58 ►
and they got disillusioned with, you know, dealing cocaine,
00:15:01 ►
and they thought, okay, we’ll make it into ecstasy,
00:15:04 ►
and we’ll sell it that way. And that attracted the government attention, and then there was the
00:15:08 ►
crackdown. And so throughout this period of time, it was really unable to get permission to do
00:15:16 ►
anything from psychedelics. And so George, actually, and others, once the crackdown came,
00:15:22 ►
MDMA, the DEA tried to criminalize it in 1984,
00:15:31 ►
and we had a series of different efforts to try to do the research in an above-ground way, and the FDA said no, consistently said no.
00:15:37 ►
And finally, I had worked with Charlie Grobe, a psychiatrist,
00:15:41 ►
and we had prepared a protocol for MDMA for cancer patients with anxiety.
00:15:48 ►
And what we didn’t realize was that in 1990 at the FDA, the group of people that regulated
00:15:55 ►
psychedelics was switched from one group to another. And the new group that now had the
00:16:00 ►
responsibility to evaluate psychedelics and marijuana, they wanted to see research take place.
00:16:07 ►
And so in 1990, they approved DMT, a research project with Rick Strassman.
00:16:12 ►
And so Charlie Groban and I submitted this protocol for MDMA for cancer patients,
00:16:18 ►
and it turned out the FDA decided that now that they were confronted with these efforts
00:16:24 ►
to look at the therapeutic use of MDMA and other psychedelics,
00:16:28 ►
that they needed to decide whether this should take place and how.
00:16:32 ►
And so they convened two meetings.
00:16:34 ►
There was one meeting by the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
00:16:38 ►
and this was with all of the people that they had funded
00:16:41 ►
to do animal research with psychedelics.
00:16:45 ►
And Sasha was invited to come to this meeting.
00:16:49 ►
And this was a meeting that took place the day before two days of FDA advisory committee.
00:16:55 ►
And they had invited people from the drug czar’s office, people from the DEA,
00:16:59 ►
people from NIDA, and this FDA advisory committee.
00:17:03 ►
And what I saw Sasha do was just this incredibly courageous step.
00:17:08 ►
So during the day-long meeting for these NIDA researchers,
00:17:13 ►
and many of them were saying that their research was becoming increasingly irrelevant
00:17:18 ►
because how do you know what the animal data means unless you can correlate it with human data?
00:17:23 ►
know what the animal data means unless you can correlate it with human data.
00:17:27 ►
And the absence of human research meant that their animal data was becoming increasingly hard to interpret and irrelevant.
00:17:32 ►
So during this NIDA meeting, they asked Sasha to give a talk.
00:17:38 ►
And so there he was with the DEA there, with the drug czar’s office,
00:17:42 ►
and he gave a talk about the different drugs it was on the
00:17:46 ►
structure activity relationships between different psychedelics and he described a lot of what he had
00:17:53 ►
done and then he went this one step further that was kind of breathtaking whereas he started
00:17:58 ►
describing what he and others knew from taking these drugs as to how they acted.
00:18:06 ►
And that was clearly not the way drugs are supposed to be researched.
00:18:10 ►
You’re supposed to do the animal studies first,
00:18:13 ►
and then you get permission from FDA, and then you do the human research.
00:18:16 ►
So Sasha made himself vulnerable in front of the DEA,
00:18:22 ►
in front of the drug czar’s office,
00:18:29 ►
vulnerable in front of the DEA, in front of the drug czar’s office, and showed how the research that was being done in humans was absolutely essential to understanding what these drugs did
00:18:34 ►
and how they worked. And then what happened was that there was a sort of a vote of all these
00:18:42 ►
animal researchers that were funded by NIDA,
00:18:46 ►
what would they do?
00:18:52 ►
Would they decide to vote in favor of opening the door to human research?
00:18:56 ►
Because their recommendation was then going to be what opened the FDA meeting.
00:19:02 ►
And what it felt like from being in the room was that people who saw Sasha take this courageous step and put himself on the line,
00:19:06 ►
that it inspired the other people to say,
00:19:10 ►
yes, we need more human research.
00:19:12 ►
And they voted in order to do that,
00:19:14 ►
at some risk of them losing their grants if it went the other way.
00:19:18 ►
So it was this group courageous activity
00:19:20 ►
that Sasha was really the catalyst to make it happen.
00:19:24 ►
And then the very next morning, the FDA advisory committee meeting
00:19:28 ►
opened with the report from the NIDA meeting before.
00:19:32 ►
And when the National Institute on Drug Abuse people said,
00:19:34 ►
yes, we’re in favor of resuming human research with psychedelics,
00:19:39 ►
that set the tone for the whole rest of the meeting.
00:19:42 ►
And the end up of the advisory committee said, now it’s time to resume human research.
00:19:49 ►
And that’s what’s led the groundwork 22 years ago for the work that we’re doing now, the
00:19:53 ►
work that Hefter is doing with looking at therapeutic applications of psychedelics.
00:19:59 ►
And maybe it would have turned out that way even if Sasha hadn’t been at that meeting, but it felt like that he really galvanized the others to take courage
00:20:08 ►
and to support the openness that he had made.
00:20:13 ►
And so from my perspective, I see that as the crucial turning point
00:20:18 ►
that’s led to everything after and that Sasha played a major role in that
00:20:22 ►
and that he had the courage to do that despite the fact that there were potential threats against himself
00:20:30 ►
from these people in the room.
00:20:31 ►
And we know that, as George mentioned,
00:20:34 ►
that Sasha had a friend who was a DEA agent, a DEA chemist,
00:20:39 ►
and that that person protected Sasha in certain ways.
00:20:42 ►
And it was only after that person retired
00:20:45 ►
that Sasha’s lab was raided
00:20:48 ►
and that he sort of had to voluntarily give up his license.
00:20:53 ►
So Sasha was someone who I felt was a role model in a lot of ways
00:20:59 ►
because he also focused on communicating with the DEA.
00:21:04 ►
He communicated with the people on the other side. He wasn’t just
00:21:07 ►
part of the sort of underground psychedelic community. He was out front.
00:21:12 ►
He shared information with whoever wanted it. And he did that
00:21:15 ►
it was like when the DEA finally came after him, it was like
00:21:19 ►
irrelevant because he had done so much up to that point and
00:21:24 ►
had developed so many psychedelics and
00:21:25 ►
really helped energize the entire field this underground psychedelic therapy and the therapeutic
00:21:30 ►
use of MDMA so he had this courage and at the same time there was a you know humor, but he became a role model for me. How do you do what you’re doing in the open
00:21:47 ►
with the people who are behind prohibition
00:21:51 ►
and yet stay true both to the whole range,
00:21:55 ►
to the underground therapeutic community, to the police?
00:21:58 ►
And, you know, he would provide them reference samples
00:22:01 ►
for all the different drugs that he was making.
00:22:03 ►
And he just felt that this information should be free and he would share it with anybody. And I thought
00:22:09 ►
and somehow he managed to balance. And George also mentioned that he was at the Bohemian
00:22:13 ►
Club. You know, that’s sort of the movers and shakers of American society and he was
00:22:17 ►
there because of his music. And while he was there sometimes, he would try out different
00:22:22 ►
substances with different people that were there. were there, and captains of industry and captains of politics, and they would go for walks in
00:22:29 ►
the woods and try these different things. So he was like an emissary and did it in a
00:22:36 ►
way that was just remarkable.
00:22:41 ►
What I also felt that there was this decision that he made.
00:22:47 ►
John mentioned about his books.
00:22:50 ►
And so when he decided finally to write Picol,
00:22:55 ►
which was Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,
00:22:58 ►
and to release that, and he and Ann worked a lot on that book,
00:23:01 ►
it was pretty clear that making that public,
00:23:06 ►
he did not want that information to be lost in any way.
00:23:10 ►
But it was pretty clear that as he was releasing that
00:23:14 ►
into the teeth of this ferocious drug war,
00:23:17 ►
that there would be some backlash.
00:23:19 ►
But he felt that as long as it could be made public
00:23:22 ►
and that this information wouldn’t be lost, it was worth it.
00:23:26 ►
And so, again, it was both his friend retired and he published B-Call,
00:23:30 ►
and then came the raid on his lab.
00:23:33 ►
And he’s continued to do other books.
00:23:37 ►
And I’ll say the last thing that I’ll say about him
00:23:41 ►
is that there was this documentary.
00:23:44 ►
Peter Jennings made a documentary in 2004 called Ecstasy Rising.
00:23:49 ►
And it was the best documentary still that’s ever been made on MDMA.
00:23:53 ►
It really took the people’s stories of how they benefited seriously.
00:24:00 ►
And there was a lot of concern at the network about how this would be perceived.
00:24:05 ►
And actually the White House had people call the president of ABC
00:24:10 ►
and tell him not to put the documentary on.
00:24:13 ►
And they decided to do it anyway.
00:24:15 ►
And that was sort of the turning point of the public perception of MDMA,
00:24:21 ►
from horrible brain-damaging drug to something that has a lot of potential.
00:24:25 ►
And then one of the people that worked on that documentary wanted to do a documentary on MDMA
00:24:30 ►
therapy. And there was this interview that they did with Sasha that sadly has never been released.
00:24:35 ►
They couldn’t get the money to complete that documentary. But that there’s one thing that
00:24:39 ►
Sasha said during that documentary that I think I said earlier during my talk
00:24:45 ►
that it was I think how Sasha really looked at things and I think it’s kind
00:24:49 ►
of a lesson for all of us and he talked about and it was a picture of him
00:24:54 ►
walking from he had this lab at his house that was at one point he tells the
00:25:00 ►
story that the head of the NIMH came to visit his lab his lab was like a
00:25:04 ►
primitive alchemist’s
00:25:06 ►
lab filled with spiders and spider webs, and he had a little fireplace in there, and he
00:25:10 ►
had all these bottles all over the place. And this fellow who was the head of NIMH said,
00:25:16 ►
you know, how come we give so much money to so many people and we get nothing, and we
00:25:23 ►
give nothing to you and we get everything from you.
00:25:27 ►
But what
00:25:28 ►
Sasha said as he was walking
00:25:29 ►
down the path behind his house
00:25:31 ►
and being filmed as walking into
00:25:33 ►
the door of his lab, he said
00:25:36 ►
that these drugs don’t
00:25:38 ►
give you a drug
00:25:39 ►
experience. They give you an experience
00:25:42 ►
of yourself that the drugs
00:25:44 ►
help bring to the surface.
00:25:46 ►
That these are human experiences
00:25:48 ►
and that they’re something that we
00:25:50 ►
have all of as our birthright.
00:25:52 ►
And I think so many people
00:25:53 ►
who are sort of opponents
00:25:56 ►
and scared of drugs and prohibition,
00:25:58 ►
they talk about these things. They try to
00:25:59 ►
dismiss and diminish
00:26:02 ►
the value of these experiences by
00:26:04 ►
saying, that’s just a drug experience.
00:26:06 ►
It’s somehow or other artificial and fake, and it’s induced by the drug,
00:26:10 ►
and there’s nothing real about it.
00:26:12 ►
It’s all a hallucination.
00:26:14 ►
And Sasha’s view was just the opposite,
00:26:16 ►
that these are drugs that open us up to our own selves.
00:26:19 ►
They’re just a window and a doorway into ourselves.
00:26:23 ►
And as he said that, he walked into the doorway of his lab.
00:26:27 ►
So it’s beautiful.
00:26:30 ►
I don’t know if you’ve seen that yet.
00:26:31 ►
So hopefully one day that last interview will come public.
00:26:35 ►
So Sasha has been an inspiration for me and a role model
00:26:39 ►
and someone who I think we will have to try our best to be
00:26:44 ►
worthy of the discoveries that he made and shared with so many people.
00:26:51 ►
My name is Annie Oak, and I knew Sasha the last 15 years of his life.
00:27:00 ►
He was, for me and I think for a lot of other people our psychedelic grandfather.
00:27:06 ►
He and Anne were the psychedelic grandparents we always wanted and actually had,
00:27:13 ►
those of us who were fortunate enough to know them and spend time with them
00:27:19 ►
and go to his Easter parties and his Fourth of July parties and his evenings at his house.
00:27:28 ►
He started something at his house called the Friday night dinners,
00:27:32 ►
and he would invite members of the psychedelic community
00:27:36 ►
to come and eat dinner at his house.
00:27:39 ►
It had some ground rules.
00:27:41 ►
People weren’t allowed to get altered during the event or buy or sell anything.
00:27:48 ►
It was just a social gathering. He was a very social, very warm man. He was a beautiful
00:27:55 ►
guy. And he loved cheap red wine and bad jokes. He loved women a lot he loved Anne
00:28:05 ►
tremendously
00:28:07 ►
he was for me
00:28:10 ►
the best example
00:28:11 ►
I’ve ever seen of somebody
00:28:14 ►
who used
00:28:15 ►
mind enhancing
00:28:18 ►
chemicals
00:28:18 ►
to make themselves
00:28:21 ►
not only open to all the
00:28:24 ►
possibilities in life and open to all the possibilities in life
00:28:25 ►
and open to their own creative potential,
00:28:29 ►
but also open to incredible joy at every moment
00:28:37 ►
and great deep kindness.
00:28:41 ►
He was a very kind person.
00:28:43 ►
He was kind to everybody. People who pestered him
00:28:47 ►
and asked silly questions, wanted to discuss
00:28:51 ►
chemistry day and night.
00:28:56 ►
As Rick said, and as John and George have said, he
00:28:59 ►
experimented a lot on himself.
00:29:03 ►
He was the classic alchemist
00:29:05 ►
and the classic renaissance man.
00:29:09 ►
He played the viola.
00:29:11 ►
He loved reciting bits of poetry.
00:29:16 ►
He, I think, spoke Russian.
00:29:19 ►
Yes?
00:29:21 ►
Oh, he didn’t speak Russian?
00:29:24 ►
Oh, I thought he did
00:29:25 ►
he was a man for all seasons
00:29:29 ►
and he took his experiences
00:29:32 ►
and he really
00:29:35 ►
used them to
00:29:37 ►
make himself
00:29:40 ►
into
00:29:42 ►
the most loving and wisest,
00:29:49 ►
most creative person he could be.
00:29:52 ►
And that was very clear.
00:29:55 ►
He had a laboratory, as Rick said,
00:29:58 ►
in the back of his house
00:29:59 ►
that looked just like the classic alchemist’s lab,
00:30:02 ►
covered in spider webs and down a little garden path.
00:30:06 ►
And if you were fortunate enough to go to his parties,
00:30:08 ►
he would bring you inside and very excitedly draw
00:30:11 ►
what he called dirty pictures,
00:30:14 ►
drawings of molecules on his chalkboard
00:30:17 ►
and excitedly discuss with you the molecular structure
00:30:21 ►
of whatever substances that had caught his fancy at that time.
00:30:25 ►
He had boundless enthusiasm.
00:30:27 ►
He was a superb teacher.
00:30:30 ►
He taught for years in various capacities.
00:30:33 ►
His students loved him for his patience and his kindness and his generosity to share his knowledge.
00:30:43 ►
About eight, nine years ago, I founded an organization called the Women’s Visionary Congress,
00:30:49 ►
a non-profit that brings together women and their male allies,
00:30:54 ►
people of all genders,
00:30:55 ►
who are interested in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
00:30:58 ►
And Sasha and Anne would come,
00:31:00 ►
and they would just sit for a couple hours and do ask the shoguns and you could ask
00:31:07 ►
them any question you wanted about anything about psychedelics about life about love about sex
00:31:16 ►
about the universe whatever art music culture and he had something to say about everything. Everything.
00:31:33 ►
When it became clear that Burning Man was the thing to do,
00:31:37 ►
he and Ann came to Burning Man for several years.
00:31:41 ►
They were here and he was well into his 70s by then, I believe.
00:31:49 ►
And they formed a camp. And those of us who were working in some capacity assisting others with challenging psychedelic and emotional experiences here
00:31:56 ►
in the playa, as we do here in the tea house, as is done on the zendo, the other side of
00:32:02 ►
the playa, we would come to him if we had questions about how to better serve people,
00:32:09 ►
and he would always take the time, he and Anne, to answer our questions.
00:32:12 ►
We’d say, somebody came to us with this question or this difficulty,
00:32:17 ►
what’s the best approach?
00:32:19 ►
And he was always generous with his knowledge and his wisdom.
00:32:24 ►
Picol and Tikal and the Shogun Index are classic books
00:32:27 ►
and will be for a long time.
00:32:31 ►
He liked to sit around and just chew the fat at Burning Man.
00:32:34 ►
He did it all the time.
00:32:36 ►
He would have been here with us, you know,
00:32:39 ►
doing the same thing right now.
00:32:43 ►
And last night we did a procession to the temple
00:32:46 ►
and we have a series of photographs of him
00:32:50 ►
that are in the temple that you can go to
00:32:52 ►
and leave your offering or leave a message for him
00:32:55 ►
and look at some of those photographs.
00:33:00 ►
And it was a sad moment,
00:33:04 ►
but also knowledge that he had a lot of joy here
00:33:07 ►
on the playa with us as an old man
00:33:10 ►
he was very courtly
00:33:15 ►
he loved Anne as Rick said
00:33:17 ►
and every time she’d come home
00:33:20 ►
he’d go up to the car to greet her
00:33:21 ►
he’d open doors for her
00:33:23 ►
he was very much the gentleman
00:33:26 ►
and as I said he was very fond of the ladies
00:33:30 ►
and the ladies were very fond of him
00:33:32 ►
because he was the essence of the perfect gentleman
00:33:36 ►
respectful, kind
00:33:39 ►
sweet, funny
00:33:42 ►
naughty, loved dirty jokes,
00:33:46 ►
but always in a joyful way.
00:33:50 ►
I saw him a couple days before he died,
00:33:53 ►
and he was so peaceful.
00:33:55 ►
You know, he had,
00:33:57 ►
towards the end of his life,
00:33:59 ►
he had fewer words,
00:34:01 ►
but he listened a lot,
00:34:03 ►
and he was a really beautiful example of how to gracefully be a very old person
00:34:08 ►
and just listen, deeply listen.
00:34:13 ►
I guess when we’re really that old,
00:34:16 ►
hopefully we’ll be in a space where we just listen more deeply
00:34:20 ►
and perhaps we say less because that’s just where we’re at but he really showed
00:34:26 ►
the way for how to be graceful and loving and very present old person who never stopped being
00:34:36 ►
delighted by everyone he met and listening deeply and if we’re very fortunate perhaps we’ll take those lessons to heart when we’re old people
00:34:45 ►
in his and um when i saw him two days a couple days before he died uh he was very calm he was
00:34:54 ►
very very um very present but not speaking his eyes were closed he was laying in bed, laying in bed on his back, just very, very calm,
00:35:07 ►
very blissful. And I said, oh, Sasha, you know, we love you so much, and we’re here
00:35:18 ►
for you. And he was very quiet, no response. I said, you know, you’ve given so much to
00:35:24 ►
the world. There’s so many
00:35:26 ►
people who’ve grown so much with
00:35:27 ►
the compounds that you created
00:35:29 ►
and are so grateful.
00:35:33 ►
No response.
00:35:35 ►
And I said,
00:35:36 ►
and you know,
00:35:37 ►
at our Women’s Congress, we’re
00:35:39 ►
going to give you a big shout-out and a
00:35:42 ►
big hug and kiss from
00:35:43 ►
all the ladies there. And
00:35:45 ►
he squeezed my hand. He was there. You know, he was waiting for his moment, right? He was
00:35:57 ►
harboring his energy for the gesture that mattered and for the communication that he wanted to give.
00:36:05 ►
And that’s a lesson.
00:36:07 ►
He used his gifts and his energy wisely and in great service to the community and with
00:36:14 ►
great joy.
00:36:15 ►
So I think that’s a lesson for all of us.
00:36:18 ►
And I feel very fortunate to have known him.
00:36:21 ►
We have a little bit of his ashes here on the playa with us.
00:36:27 ►
And if any of you are interested,
00:36:29 ►
perhaps we could take a walk over
00:36:30 ►
to the temple after this talk
00:36:34 ►
and we’ll show you where his shrine is
00:36:37 ►
in the temple and you can pay your respects.
00:36:40 ►
I’d like to say one more thing.
00:36:42 ►
We’re serving tea in his honor
00:36:44 ►
tonight in the tea house. If you’d like to come one more thing. We’re serving tea in his honor tonight in the tea house.
00:36:47 ►
If you’d like to come and have a cup of tea with us
00:36:50 ►
and tell your favorite Sasha story, we’d love to hear it.
00:36:53 ►
We’re also looking for tea servers.
00:36:55 ►
If you’d like to serve with us,
00:36:56 ►
we are looking for tea servers in the tea house.
00:36:59 ►
We would like to toast him throughout the rest of the burn
00:37:02 ►
and remember him.
00:37:04 ►
So that’s what I’d like to say.
00:37:06 ►
Thank you.
00:37:14 ►
Do we have anyone else here
00:37:17 ►
who wants to talk about Sasha
00:37:18 ►
in his memory?
00:37:21 ►
When I first learned of Sasha’s passing,
00:37:24 ►
I cried harder than i’ve cried learning the
00:37:27 ►
passing of some of my family members it was and it wasn’t it wasn’t sadness it was just
00:37:34 ►
joy that somebody so beautiful can change the lives of so many people it’s so beautiful i
00:37:40 ►
guarantee you one thing that right now he’s the most, second only to Jesus, the most high-five person in heaven, sitting on a plush velvet couch.
00:37:48 ►
But I have one question. I would like to know the distance of time between when he first made his lab
00:37:55 ►
and got in good with the DEA and when they actually, you know, went to raid his lab
00:38:01 ►
with the discovery of the PCAL book.
00:38:03 ►
went to raid his lab with the discovery of the P-Cal book?
00:38:08 ►
Yeah, more than 20 years.
00:38:09 ►
I’m not sure of the exact time,
00:38:14 ►
but he was able to be a resource for all aspects of the community for multiple decades.
00:38:17 ►
That was like a masterful act of how he was able to do that.
00:38:24 ►
Also, he had plaques on his wall from the DEA in appreciation for his work because he
00:38:30 ►
would analyze, you know, what are the chemicals in glassware they would take from drug dealers
00:38:37 ►
instead.
00:38:38 ►
And then he would keep the glassware.
00:38:39 ►
So he was pretty amazing.
00:38:41 ►
And I think it was more like when I knew him, he had this paper, 25 years on an ever-changing quest.
00:38:47 ►
And that was like, you know, 1985 or something.
00:38:52 ►
So he was like his first mescaline experience was probably around 1960, I’m guessing.
00:38:59 ►
Maybe 58.
00:39:00 ►
So, yeah, decades of working on this line before they shut him down.
00:39:07 ►
And the technicality they shut him down for was not keeping an accurate inventory of every single controlled substance he had.
00:39:15 ►
That was their technicality.
00:39:22 ►
Thank you.
00:39:26 ►
Hello.
00:39:28 ►
My name is Dr. Nathalie,
00:39:30 ►
and I had the pleasure of first witnessing Sasha here on the playa in 2006,
00:39:36 ►
back in the days of Entheon Village, for those of you who may have been here.
00:39:41 ►
And at that time in my life, I was quite naive to the world of psychedelics.
00:39:45 ►
I was quite a novice.
00:39:46 ►
I had my first LSD experience here that year,
00:39:49 ►
which was altering, to say the least.
00:39:52 ►
But I remember being at Entheon Village
00:39:55 ►
and watching Sasha and Anne
00:39:57 ►
in the most beautiful, delicate space of love
00:39:59 ►
come onto the stage and speak.
00:40:02 ►
And I was just immediately impressed
00:40:04 ►
by the very palpable bond
00:40:06 ►
that’s present between them and continues, and by the incredible wisdom that they had to share
00:40:11 ►
on all sorts of levels. And four years later, at the first psychedelic science conference in 2010,
00:40:19 ►
I had the pleasure of chatting with Sasha about some manipulations on 2C-B type molecules.
00:40:28 ►
Prior to becoming a doctor, I was a pharmaceutical chemist.
00:40:30 ►
So I got to rap chemistry with him, which was really cool and really fun.
00:40:35 ►
And to see the musings of his mind and my mind and someone else came over
00:40:38 ►
and we just kind of nerded out on molecular structure.
00:40:41 ►
And it was awesome.
00:40:43 ►
And the next memories I have of him are at his home,
00:40:49 ►
having been invited to go out to Fourth of Julys
00:40:52 ►
and Easters and birthdays.
00:40:53 ►
And at that point, he was in a less lucid state.
00:40:58 ►
And the last experience I had of being with him
00:41:01 ►
was at Easter this year.
00:41:03 ►
And I was taking an archetypal astrology class
00:41:08 ►
in a graduate program that I’ve just completed in San Francisco,
00:41:12 ►
and I was doing a project about Anne’s life,
00:41:17 ►
and I was looking at her astrological birth chart
00:41:19 ►
and series of events throughout her life,
00:41:23 ►
including meeting and marrying Sasha in the backyard
00:41:25 ►
and the surprise 4th of July picnic, as George mentioned.
00:41:31 ►
And, of course, how could you not look at Sasha’s chart
00:41:33 ►
when you’re looking at Anne’s chart?
00:41:34 ►
And it was incredibly amazing to see in the astrology
00:41:39 ►
their work with MDMA specifically.
00:41:42 ►
It is in the stars, and it was so beautiful to bear witness to that.
00:41:47 ►
And about three days before I gave this presentation,
00:41:50 ►
I was at their house for Easter,
00:41:52 ►
and I got to talk with Ann about this presentation I was going to give
00:41:55 ►
and get some details kind of sorted out.
00:41:59 ►
And my last memory of Sasha was going over and just kneeling down by his presence,
00:42:06 ►
and he was just sitting quietly in a chair,
00:42:09 ►
and I just knelt down by his side,
00:42:11 ►
and I watched what he was watching,
00:42:15 ►
and he was brilliantly thrilled and excited
00:42:20 ►
to see these two little girls running around,
00:42:22 ►
and you could just see this joy in his face
00:42:24 ►
by just witnessing these children play.
00:42:27 ►
And one of my dear friends came over and fed him some durian.
00:42:31 ►
And Sasha just started going,
00:42:34 ►
and someone came and took the durian out of his mouth.
00:42:39 ►
And I just sat there, and I just started to weep.
00:42:43 ►
And I just felt, oh, my God god I’m so blessed to be in the
00:42:46 ►
presence of this beautiful man
00:42:48 ►
and I just said to him
00:42:50 ►
thank you so much
00:42:51 ►
and he just kind of smiled and
00:42:54 ►
shrugged his shoulders like
00:42:55 ►
what are you even thanking me for?
00:42:57 ►
didn’t say anything and I just got to
00:43:00 ►
just hold his hand and
00:43:02 ►
yeah just be with him
00:43:04 ►
for a moment and that was about a month and a half
00:43:07 ►
before his passing and when he passed we had a shrine up at our house for a couple weeks honoring
00:43:13 ►
him and i’ve been back out to the the farm a couple times since then and um most recently had
00:43:20 ►
a fun time hanging out with paul daly andzy, who are two of the amazing psychedelic chemists that are continuing on his work.
00:43:29 ►
There’s a palpable energy that is still present from his presence,
00:43:35 ►
but also missing in the lack of his physical presence.
00:43:40 ►
Bless him. Thank you.
00:43:51 ►
So, let’s see.
00:43:57 ►
I didn’t know Sasha in his prime, but I’ve heard many a story.
00:44:00 ►
I knew him the past four years of my life,
00:44:04 ►
and I just wanted to give a shout-out to the legacy that he created,
00:44:05 ►
to the community that he created. Visiting the Shulgin farm was just like visiting family a really really weird family
00:44:11 ►
reunion the last conversation that I had with him was also at the Easter event that Natalie was
00:44:21 ►
talking about and what I realized was that what stayed with him was
00:44:27 ►
being very into ladies, always, until the end. He was such a ladies’ man. He would always kneel
00:44:34 ►
down and kiss your hand. Very flattering. And also, I spoke Russian to him the last time that
00:44:42 ►
I saw him, which I had been wanting to do for a while,
00:44:47 ►
but this time I knelt down,
00:44:49 ►
and I sat down next to him,
00:44:50 ►
and I said,
00:44:52 ►
Kakadila, how are you?
00:44:53 ►
And he said,
00:44:56 ►
and suddenly he got this big smile on his face,
00:44:58 ►
and you knew that he was connecting,
00:45:00 ►
you knew that he was present and really excited,
00:45:01 ►
and he said,
00:45:07 ►
harashua, which means good, and then he looked at me again, and he said harashua which means good and then he looked at me again and he goes watching harashua very good so until the very last day he was just he was a rock star he was
00:45:16 ►
loving life and he had such a supportive amazing community around him that that’s still here that’s
00:45:22 ►
still supporting each other at his his memorial, it was so beautiful
00:45:25 ►
just to see everyone there and how big and strong and connected the whole crew is. So
00:45:30 ►
thank you, Sasha. Keep rocking out.
00:45:42 ►
Anyone else? Okay, this is a lesson.
00:45:45 ►
I don’t want to bug anyone.
00:45:46 ►
This is a lesson on how not to ask someone the wrong question.
00:45:50 ►
So anyways, in 2010, he was over at the Burning Man lecture.
00:45:54 ►
And so people are raising their hand, where do I put the endole receptor?
00:45:57 ►
And he’s like, over here.
00:45:59 ►
And so I asked him, just because I was curious, but it’s not really his field.
00:46:03 ►
I said, what do you think about woodrow seeds in LSA?
00:46:06 ►
And he was like, it’s active.
00:46:11 ►
I wish I would have asked him what other financial means,
00:46:14 ►
what he thinks about the other financial means that are in Cactus besides the meslin.
00:46:18 ►
Anyway, ask people the right questions when you have the opportunity.
00:46:23 ►
I just want to add from what Irina said,
00:46:27 ►
is that the memorial service to Sasha is online.
00:46:31 ►
I’m not sure how to find it,
00:46:33 ►
because I was just sent a URL, but I don’t remember it.
00:46:37 ►
But if you do a Google search on it,
00:46:39 ►
you might be able to find it.
00:46:40 ►
It’s just about an hour and a half,
00:46:41 ►
an hour and a half of all sorts of people
00:46:43 ►
offering tributes to Sasha. It’s very worth an hour and a half of all sorts of people offering tributes to Sasha.
00:46:46 ►
It’s very worth seeing if you can.
00:46:50 ►
Also, if you search online, the Shulgens do accept donations for their farm
00:46:57 ►
and are looking to raise money to continue Sasha’s research.
00:47:01 ►
So please Google search either Elysium Foundation
00:47:05 ►
or donate to Sasha Shulgin
00:47:07 ►
in order to find those causes you can support.
00:47:12 ►
I think you can search for Shulgin Research Institute,
00:47:18 ►
and we think that a link to the memorial service
00:47:21 ►
is up on that site.
00:47:23 ►
And you can donate to the Sh services up on that site. And you can donate
00:47:25 ►
to the Shogun
00:47:27 ►
Research Institute, which will
00:47:29 ►
continue to carry forward
00:47:31 ►
the work that Sasha
00:47:33 ►
did. I want to say something
00:47:35 ►
also about the Bohemian Grove.
00:47:38 ►
We haven’t mentioned that.
00:47:40 ►
I don’t know if anybody knows what the
00:47:41 ►
Bohemian Grove is.
00:47:43 ►
It’s a playground for oligarchs, basically.
00:47:48 ►
The captains of the universe got together every year.
00:47:52 ►
And what I mean by that is like high government officials,
00:47:55 ►
you know, the Henry Kissingers of the world,
00:47:58 ►
you know, the captains of industry, the multimillionaires.
00:48:03 ►
But not just those folks. It was an interesting
00:48:06 ►
combination of high-level government and business
00:48:08 ►
people and artists and
00:48:11 ►
good musicians.
00:48:15 ►
Actors, a really, a men’s
00:48:18 ►
club, no ladies.
00:48:20 ►
They would gather in this redwood grove every year
00:48:23 ►
and they would form different camps, like we have theme camps, and they would gather in this redwood grove every year and they would form different camps
00:48:27 ►
like we have theme camps
00:48:29 ►
and they would just go from camp to camp
00:48:31 ►
kind of having cocktail parties and playing music
00:48:34 ►
and they did a lot of theater and drag
00:48:37 ►
and it was just like a boys camp
00:48:39 ►
that they got to do together
00:48:41 ►
and I have more than just a feeling,
00:48:47 ►
but a couple of unconfirmed reports
00:48:49 ►
that Sasha played a very interesting role in that community.
00:48:54 ►
Let’s just think about that for a second.
00:48:56 ►
High-level government officials and artists,
00:49:00 ►
they also have a beautiful building in downtown San Francisco,
00:49:04 ►
Bohemian Grove Group.
00:49:07 ►
I’m sorry, the Bohemian Club.
00:49:10 ►
So high-liver government officials, artists, business people.
00:49:18 ►
And here comes this chemist, this jolly chemist.
00:49:22 ►
And everyone’s kind of in a off the record sort of event
00:49:26 ►
I have a feeling that
00:49:28 ►
he took more than one
00:49:30 ►
very straight high government
00:49:32 ►
official on their
00:49:34 ►
first psychedelic journey
00:49:36 ►
and perhaps that changed the
00:49:38 ►
world in ways that we don’t even
00:49:40 ►
really fully know
00:49:42 ►
but I have a good feeling that it
00:49:44 ►
made the world a different place
00:49:45 ►
than otherwise could have been.
00:49:53 ►
If you read Picard, actually,
00:49:55 ►
he talks about this. He doesn’t name
00:49:57 ►
the Bohemian Grove specifically
00:49:59 ►
because there’s a confidentiality
00:50:01 ►
thing about being a member.
00:50:04 ►
But he talks about the Owl Society or the Secret Club or something like this.
00:50:10 ►
And he talks about taking his low-calorie martinis to there.
00:50:16 ►
He’s like, well, it’s only this much liquid,
00:50:20 ►
and it doesn’t add any weight to you at all.
00:50:24 ►
And he would take that there and share it with people on appropriate occasions
00:50:29 ►
according to his own completely fictional writings in the first half of Picard,
00:50:35 ►
which are all about people who are not named Sasha and Ann Shulgin,
00:50:41 ►
but who have other names and somehow they were inspired to write this book.
00:50:48 ►
So not only did he talk directly with the DEA,
00:50:52 ►
I think he partied with the DEA too. And they have some
00:50:55 ►
of the best drugs.
00:50:59 ►
Anybody else have stories they want to share?
00:51:03 ►
Bruce?
00:51:01 ►
else have stories they want to share?
00:51:04 ►
Yep. Bruce?
00:51:10 ►
Paul Daly and Scott Badarki and a whole team of us had
00:51:12 ►
a final lunch with Sasha
00:51:14 ►
maybe about two weeks before he passed
00:51:16 ►
and Sasha was at
00:51:18 ►
the lunch and it was a
00:51:19 ►
group meeting about creating
00:51:22 ►
a whole new cannabis technology
00:51:23 ►
organization and event and things like
00:51:26 ►
this and he was listening in and listening in we were all eating and and i you know to try to
00:51:33 ►
see if he kind of grokked it because this is an event to fund the exalt zander sasha research
00:51:39 ►
institute this is a serious endeavor in his name. And we finished the lunch
00:51:45 ►
and I crouched down by him and I said,
00:51:47 ►
Sasha, we just, we did something
00:51:50 ►
here to forward your research.
00:51:52 ►
Not necessarily with a
00:51:54 ►
drug of your choice,
00:51:56 ►
but I think it’ll capitalize
00:51:57 ►
the continuation of your
00:52:00 ►
work. And he turned to me with his
00:52:01 ►
toothy grin and said, sounds
00:52:03 ►
great!
00:52:08 ►
Anybody else? work and he turned to me with his toothy grin and said sounds great anybody else i’ll just say something very briefly uh which is that one of my best burning man experiences was
00:52:16 ►
in 2006 when we brought sasha and ann to uh the first anthion village and larry harvey who founded
00:52:22 ►
burning man found out that sasha was going to be on the property
00:52:26 ►
and he wanted to meet with him.
00:52:28 ►
And so I had a chance to go along with him.
00:52:30 ►
And it was just so incredible to hear the two of them
00:52:33 ►
sort of share psychedelic stories
00:52:35 ►
about how they’d been inspired by psychedelics
00:52:38 ►
and what they did with that as an outcome.
00:52:41 ►
So Sasha really has been to the heart of Burning Man
00:52:44 ►
in a lot of ways.
00:52:46 ►
Nope. I turned on or off. Okay. I just wanted to add really quickly about donating to the
00:52:50 ►
Shulgens. T-Fairy wrote a really great post about this. I think that we all in our minds
00:52:55 ►
before actually visiting the Shulgen farm and Shulgen lab, assuming that it’s this like
00:52:59 ►
super rich, expensive, big place with a lot of money. But really, it’s very quite modest,
00:53:06 ►
the most modest thing you can even imagine.
00:53:08 ►
There isn’t a lot of money put into it.
00:53:10 ►
They had to sell a part of their property
00:53:12 ►
to help pay for Sasha’s health.
00:53:14 ►
So donating to this cause is a really good idea,
00:53:18 ►
and everyone should do it.
00:53:23 ►
I also would like to give a shout out
00:53:25 ►
to all the people who took care of Sasha
00:53:27 ►
at the end of his life
00:53:28 ►
they were a really beautiful group of people
00:53:31 ►
in addition to Ann
00:53:33 ►
and Wendy and Jason
00:53:35 ►
and the rest of the immediate family
00:53:37 ►
Tanya and Greg Manning
00:53:40 ►
who
00:53:41 ►
have been living with the
00:53:43 ►
Sasha and Ann Shulgin for years
00:53:45 ►
really stepped up
00:53:47 ►
and were their caretakers and guardians and friends.
00:53:55 ►
And we owe them a great debt.
00:53:58 ►
And, you know, we’re all…
00:54:00 ►
If we’re that lucky,
00:54:01 ►
we’ll have really good guardians and caretakers and friends at the end of our lives.
00:54:07 ►
So I just wanted to send out some love to them.
00:54:10 ►
They are not on the playa with us this year, but I’m thinking about them a lot.
00:54:15 ►
He also had a group of Tibetans who were the most radiant people.
00:54:21 ►
Oh, my gosh.
00:54:23 ►
Who took care of him at the end of his life. And when he died,
00:54:27 ►
they were so excited, you know, as Tibetan Buddhists are when somebody passes. They’re like,
00:54:33 ►
isn’t it great? He’s moved on to another dimensional place. The wheel is turned and we should celebrate you know they were
00:54:47 ►
really remarkable people and really kind of kept it all in perspective for everybody
00:54:52 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a
00:55:01 ►
time a few moments ago rick goblin mentioned the fact that sasha believed that information should One thought at a time. certainly remember that that is also the hacker’s mantra. Information wants to be free.
00:55:26 ►
So I guess we can say that Sasha Shulgin was an open-source chemistry hacker.
00:55:32 ►
And as for the discussion about Sasha and the Bohemian Club,
00:55:37 ►
I’d like to add a little bit here because his affiliation with that group
00:55:40 ►
has caused the conspiracy theorists among us to speculate that it indicated
00:55:45 ►
a dark side of Sasha linking him to the CIA and other nefarious groups. Well, I’ve been fortunate
00:55:53 ►
to have read a great deal of the personal correspondence between Sasha and Myron Stolarov.
00:55:59 ►
And interestingly, even though the members of the Bohemian Club were not supposed to discuss what they did during their time together,
00:56:07 ►
well, Sasha wrote long and detailed accounts of his time there in his letters to Myron.
00:56:13 ►
And I’m here to tell you that Sasha always remained one of us.
00:56:18 ►
As you already heard, it wasn’t unusual for him to take some of his fellow campers on psychedelic voyages using some of his magic potions.
00:56:27 ►
And those trip reports are not only interesting from an historical perspective, but they’re also quite funny in some parts.
00:56:35 ►
Like the time that Sasha was tripping there at the Bohemian Club, fell down and got injured.
00:56:41 ►
And so when he went to the medical tent he became the first camper that year
00:56:45 ►
to have his balls jiggled by a doctor thus winning that doctor a bet as to who would be the first to
00:56:51 ►
have his balls so jiggled that year so you see it wasn’t all a deep dark conspiracy going on there
00:56:57 ►
also i i laughed at sasha’s comment once concerning a performance of Peter and the Wolf that his camp had staged.
00:57:07 ►
I think Sasha played the viola for it, and the narrator of the piece was Henry Kissinger.
00:57:13 ►
But according to Sasha, Kissinger was so bad at reading the script that he distracted from an otherwise great performance.
00:57:21 ►
Oh boy, he had some really funny tales to tell about the bohemian club.
00:57:27 ►
Now also, we heard Rick Doblin mention the fact that after Sasha had tested a new compound on himself,
00:57:33 ►
that he would then test it with a small group of about 12 people.
00:57:37 ►
And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:57:40 ►
you already know that one of the last members of that small group is Myron Stolaroff’s widow, Jean.
00:57:48 ►
Well, Jean is a close friend of mine, and when I was editing this talk and heard Rick say that,
00:57:53 ►
I gave her a call to let her know that the research work that she and the rest of the group did was still being recognized.
00:57:59 ►
Obviously, she was pleased and asked me to say hi to everyone here in the podcast.
00:58:04 ►
Obviously, she was pleased and asked me to say hi to everyone here in the podcast.
00:58:12 ►
And I want to thank the three people who took time to send her a card or a letter a while back when I asked you to do that.
00:58:15 ►
You have no idea how much those cards meant to her.
00:58:21 ►
As you know, Jean is now 88 years old and living alone in her home in the high desert. And just to put those cards into perspective,
00:58:29 ►
Jean was more excited about them than she was a week ago when one day she encountered a rattlesnake on her patio
00:58:33 ►
and a day or so later watched through her living room window
00:58:36 ►
as a black bear strolled through her yard.
00:58:40 ►
What an amazing woman she is.
00:58:44 ►
Now, since we are honoring the memory of Sasha Shulgin, who was one of the great scientists of our age,
00:58:51 ►
it seems like the right time to also bring up the fact that even though psychedelic mushrooms have been used by medicine women and men for ages,
00:58:59 ►
nonetheless, mushrooms are also medicine. And I know this from first-hand experience because my wife began the psilocybin end-of-life anxiety study with Charlie Grobe.
00:59:12 ►
And since then, as you know, research into the medicinal properties of magic mushrooms has been growing every year.
00:59:19 ►
And this year, an event is being organized to highlight this fact and to bring it into a broader public awareness.
00:59:27 ►
I’m talking about the 920 Coalition, which is organizing dozens of events on September 20, 2015, both in the United States and around the world.
00:59:37 ►
And these events are going to be focused on recent research into the role of psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms in our societies and health care systems.
00:59:47 ►
But rather than listen to me talk about this, I’m going to let you listen to what Duncan Trussell has to say about it.
00:59:54 ►
The 920 Coalition, you can find them at 920coalition.org,
00:59:59 ►
is a new organization that is supporting events focused on new research about psilocybin mushrooms
01:00:04 ►
and its role in medicine and society. There’s research being done all over the world right now
01:00:10 ►
that is showing that psilocybin has powerful medicinal benefits in anxiety reduction,
01:00:17 ►
overcoming depression, treating addiction. This is from Stephen Ross, who is one of the scientists
01:00:24 ►
doing research on psilocybin. And this is from a great article is one of the scientists doing research on
01:00:26 ►
psilocybin and this is from a great article
01:00:28 ►
that was written about in the New Yorker called
01:00:30 ►
The Trip Treatment
01:00:31 ►
cancer patients receiving just a single
01:00:34 ►
dose of psilocybin
01:00:36 ►
experienced immediate and dramatic
01:00:38 ►
reductions in anxiety and depression
01:00:40 ►
improvements that were
01:00:42 ►
sustained for at least 6
01:00:44 ►
months.
01:00:47 ►
This is something a lot of us already know.
01:00:52 ►
So I know that many of you guys out there are well aware of the fact that mushrooms seem to calibrate your soul in the direction of love.
01:00:55 ►
We all know that.
01:00:55 ►
But what’s really exciting right now is that our own subjective experiences are being backed
01:01:00 ►
up by hard science.
01:01:02 ►
And that is incredible.
01:01:03 ►
And what that means is that in the same way,
01:01:06 ►
in different parts of the country,
01:01:08 ►
marijuana is becoming prescribable
01:01:11 ►
and even purchasable just for recreational use.
01:01:17 ►
There is a very real possibility
01:01:19 ►
that the same thing could happen for psilocybin.
01:01:22 ►
And this is why the 920 Coalition is so important.
01:01:27 ►
This group is planning on facilitating events on September 20, 2015 at colleges and universities all over the country.
01:01:40 ►
They are collaborating with Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
01:02:00 ►
They are collaborating with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and they wanted to advertise on this podcast to put the word out that if you’re a student and you want to host one of these events, please contact them by sending an email to hello at 920coalition.org.
01:02:03 ►
You can also visit their website.
01:02:08 ►
That’s 920coalition.org. You can also visit their website. That’s 920coalition.org. So if you’re in college right now and you want to do some incredible service for the universe and for
01:02:14 ►
the psychedelic community and you feel inclined to doing this kind of volunteer work, here is a
01:02:20 ►
great organization for you to get in touch with. You guys know that this is so important.
01:02:27 ►
You know that there is nothing more ridiculous and absurd than the fact that psilocybin is
01:02:34 ►
placed in the same category as PCP.
01:02:38 ►
It’s ridiculous.
01:02:39 ►
There’s nothing more insane than the fact that if you have in your pocket a fungus that enhances
01:02:47 ►
your ability to love, that grows off of cow shit, you can go to jail or get fined hundreds
01:02:54 ►
of thousands of dollars. That’s insane. People have to fight tooth and nail to get these
01:03:02 ►
kinds of draconian drug policies transformed.
01:03:05 ►
And you can be one of those people who joins this very important movement
01:03:11 ►
that’s happening all over the world to reform and change drug policies
01:03:18 ►
that are not keeping us safe,
01:03:21 ►
but are actually slowing down the spiritual evolution of our species.
01:03:27 ►
Please go to 920coalition.org.
01:03:32 ►
That’s 920coalition.org.
01:03:36 ►
Check them out.
01:03:37 ►
If you feel called to work with these people, no matter what you think you can do, even
01:03:43 ►
if you can just help connect them with people at your college or whatever your particular skill set happens to be, this kind of stuff happens through collaboration.
01:03:55 ►
So it doesn’t matter.
01:03:57 ►
Maybe you don’t even know what you can do.
01:03:59 ►
Just email them, 920coalition.org, and let them know that you would like to help out.
01:04:07 ►
There’s also, if you don’t feel like volunteering or maybe you’re not at college right now but you want to donate,
01:04:14 ►
if you go to 920coalition.org, there’s a donate button there too so you can chip in in that way.
01:04:22 ►
We live in an incredible era right now,
01:04:26 ►
and thanks to social networking,
01:04:28 ►
drug laws and policies that formerly would have been impossible to change,
01:04:35 ►
we can now change, but we can only do it if we all work together.
01:04:38 ►
And if we support, in whatever way we can,
01:04:44 ►
organizations like the 920 Coalition who are working really hard to try to create a world where people can ingest psilocybin safely and without fear of being thrown into a dungeon surrounded by murderers just because you
01:05:08 ►
wanted to connect with your family more it’s ridiculous 920coalition.org go visit them
01:05:15 ►
they have sponsored this podcast why not support them all the links will be located
01:05:21 ►
at dunkintrussell.com in the comments section of the podcast.
01:05:28 ►
As you can tell, I lifted that bit from Duncan Trussell’s podcast.
01:05:32 ►
So thank you very much, Duncan.
01:05:34 ►
And rather than me repeating all of those links in today’s program notes,
01:05:38 ►
I’m suggesting that you surf on over to dunkintrussell.com.
01:05:43 ►
That’s D-U-N-C-A-N-T-R-U-S-S-E-L-L dot com.
01:05:49 ►
And check out not just those links, but his podcast as well.
01:05:54 ►
Of course, since so many of our fellow salonners are also Joe Rogan fans,
01:05:58 ►
my guess is that, well, you’re probably already listening to Duncan, too.
01:06:02 ►
But getting back to Duncan’s call to action for volunteers for the
01:06:06 ►
920 Coalition, well, I hope that you will look into volunteering yourself. As these podcasts
01:06:13 ►
progress this year, I’m going to be bringing you more and more student speakers from events that
01:06:17 ►
are now being organized at many U.S. campuses. You have no idea how gratifying it is for an old guy
01:06:23 ►
like me, you know, somebody who came from the era where you couldn’t even discuss marijuana on your college campus
01:06:29 ►
to where we’re now seeing student psychedelic organizations springing up everywhere
01:06:34 ►
and by the way whomever winds up organizing at UCLA or in the Los Angeles area
01:06:42 ►
please let me know because yesterday when Dr. Charlie
01:06:45 ►
Grobe stopped by for a visit, I told him about the 920 Coalition and he said that as long
01:06:51 ►
as he was in town that day, he’d be pleased to participate in one of your events, as will
01:06:56 ►
I for any event that gets scheduled in San Diego County.
01:07:00 ►
So let’s leave it at that for now and right now you should surf on over to 920coalition.org and get on their mailing list.
01:07:10 ►
And just so that you know, I’m going to be back here in two days to celebrate the official end of our first 10 years of podcasting.
01:07:17 ►
And can you guess who’s going to be my featured speaker?
01:07:21 ►
Well, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful
01:07:27 ►
out there my friends! Thank you.