Dirty Pictures

The people who do not know anything about this whole area.

They similarly ask are you on anything now?

They think that we

go around on psychedelic drugs all the time. - They're not all the time.

Uh, mushrooms, psilocybin,

I call 2CB as being a very,

2CB

a very, excellent psychedelic.

Uh, mescaline.

Mescaline.

I don't like drugs that get too

too sparkly.

Like the MDA world.

Yeah I don't like stoning drugs.

I don't like being stoned.

Thats uh.

You don't learn anything.

Um,

I don't like drugs that inhibit communication.

It's like for instance,

2CE.

I mean, right, MDE.

Oh okay, I agree with you. Yeah.

I could do without MDE.

2CI is good.

2CI is very good.

The sexual aspects are always very,

very,

positive contributors to...

If you can't make love on a drug then

this something not quite right.

This fire in here, we got Ethel B-3 burning.

Lets go! Everybody out of here!

All we’re going to do is,

we’re going to try and figure out what you’re doing there, and if what’s your doing is legal

In 1966 Shulgin quit his job as a chemist for Dow Chemical

to devote himself entirely to the study of

psychoactive drugs.

Drugs that alter the mind.

The stepfather of rave's favorite pharmaceutical lives in the hills behind San Francisco.

In the mid-1960s,

he resynthesized an obscure drug that had been patented, but then ignored.

It was called 3/4 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

MDMA for short.

It would later acquired a street name, ecstasy.

Just as LSD marijuana and Woodstock

unite a generation.

Ecstasy and the rave scene

act as a glue for millions of savvy middle-class kids

seeking an escape.

From Bangkok to Bournemouth. Manchester to Miami.

If there was one place on earth where it all began, then it's right here in California.

In the small home laboratory of a man.

He's known

as The Godfather

of ecstasy.

No other drug

has ever spread so fast.

25 milligrams, no effect. 40, no effect.

60 milligrams. No effect. 81 milligrams is,

that I got a plus-one.

53 minutes smooth shift into a light intoxication

distinct, almost early alcohol like intoxication.

I first met Ann and Sasha many years ago.

I thought about how I would introduce him and everything I thought about saying,

I got so emotional, I started crying.

Hello, this is kind of a personal question..

Is there anything that does to the brain, what MDMA does to the heart?

Alexander Sasha, Shulgin, PhD is a pharmacologist, chemist, and drug developer.

2C-T-7, 2C-I, and 2C-B are the most well known.

Shulgin personally tested hundreds of drugs.

New York Times Magazine.

It's an article on Dr. E, for ecstasy.

There’s no reason that I should be

Doctor Ecstasy,

Ecstasy is not the name I gave anything.

I called it MDMA,

and uh, its just uh, its an element of notoriety that does no good.

He didn't even invent it in his

Discoveries and his own inventions he encountered this drug that somebody else had made.

It didn't exist in nature until chemists

working for the German pharmaceutical company, Merck

synthesized it by accident in their laboratories in 1912.

No use for the new molecule was discovered,

and MDMA remained little more than a formula on faded paper for more than 60 years.

So somebody made it,

but didn't realize its potential.

This is World War one

with Germany's defeat,

MDMA and every other patented drug

is turned over to the Allies as a spoil of war.

Its existence is lost from memory,

until the Cold War compels the Pentagon

to re-examine its potential for national defense.

The love drug does nothing of use for war.

but the compound still exists.

It sat on a shelf

but he thought hmm they never really took it orally.

I wonder if it's active.

Let's try it at the

50 milligram dose let's try it at

the hundred milligram dose.

Oh there's something going on here.

Wow!

Whoa this has an

altered state experience.

Dr. Shulgin made these careful notes.

The first recorded experience on ecstasy.

Actually, the first, first trial in that particular guise was on a train trip.

He published a paper on it,

described its effects,

and several of his friends are psychiatrists

and they decided to try it.

Tried it on themselves first.

In the psychotherapeutic community,

MDMA is called empathy.

Its effect is likened to a year of therapy, in six hours.

Once the psychiatrists started using it,

whew.

Man, it was in demand.

We've got another drug

it is synthetic

and it makes you love everybody.

I was diagnosed to have terminal cancer a few months ago,

and naturally there's a lot of fear, and anger, and pain.

Emotional pain that surrounds something like that.

It has allowed me to open up and have

communication with my family

that I have never been able to have before.

It's called, it's called ecstasy.

Now who doesn't want to take ecstasy?

The whole concept of the MDMA going into

Ecstasy,

well really, it was Empathy, but nobody really knew what Empathy was.

they called E for ecstasy.

It is a popularization

and in essence destroy the...

medical value

effectively of the material.

Had MDMA not strayed from that community,

it might have remained legal.

But beyond the therapist office,

it becomes wildly popular

and that is the beginning of the end

for the legal use of ecstasy.

This morning the Drug Enforcement Administration

is announcing its intention

to place the drug known as MDMA,

or by the street name ecstasy,

under emergency controls in schedule 1.

This whole thing is is pitched as a self-development

type of experience.

Get in touch with nature, get in touch with the universe, get in touch with your mother.

They said half a head of E would be fun.

Everywhere you look, it's there.

Including service members, I mean, it's everywhere.

And now the term now applies to anything and everything that's used at a rave

doesn't have to have any MDMA in it at all.

Just the term is used as a

as a party escape drug.

And I am saddened to say that I am not happy with it.

To Dr. Shulgin it was just one of hundreds of mind-altering drugs he concocted.

In books and papers he has published the formulas

and the effects of each.

His critics argue that Shulgin is simply providing a road map

for drug abuse.

They're you!

I didn't want my life to be a carbon of his own.

That the number one reason I knew he was a brilliant

scientist.

I would never even compete within that world.

That I didn't want to be compared against

See, my dad was very hip.

During the 60s and the 70s he was the beatnik

and I was the rebel.

Titan close and not involved

in that world I just I didn't want anything to do with this world.

Where our heads were connecting

was a flash of light that shot out

straight ahead and we can see it.

Basically I see psychedelics as spiritual tools.

which is not quite the way Sasha sees them.

And it produces this cascade of inflammatory changes.

They are very good tools

for anyone who's on any kind of spiritual journey,

whatever that means and it means different things to different people.

Psychotherapy can be

part of that.

I mean

people who go into psychotherapy are on a spiritual quest,

whether they call it that or not.

How do you define consciousness and how much of it is determined by chemistry

Well that's not a question.

I consider consciousness where you are if you're alive.

A lot of people put it as a brain function, I consider consciousness a mental function.

He's outside the mainstream I mean he is kind of a rogue.

He's not part of an official establishment .

He's doing things that are sort of socially frowned upon by the majority of of our society.

I always duck down in case a bird flies out.

Oh my golly.