Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin

1925–2014 · American · Dow Chemical, later independent (Lafayette, California)

Synthesized and personally tested over 200 psychoactive compounds, most of them phenethylamines and tryptamines, and published the syntheses and dose/duration reports himself in PiHKAL (1991) and TiHKAL (1997) rather than in journals. That choice is why most of this taxonomy has documented human data at all. He did not discover MDMA — Merck synthesized it in 1912 — but he resynthesized it in 1976, and passing it to the psychologist Leo Zeff is how it reached psychotherapy.

Compounds credited overall: 200+ synthesized and self-tested; 179 phenethylamine and 55 tryptamine entries across PiHKAL and TiHKAL

On this site

• Entactogens
• MDMA C11H15NO2 popularised it, 1976

  Resynthesized it after a student described the effects, then introduced it to the psychologist Leo Zeff, who brought it to psychotherapy.

• Psychedelics
• DOM C12H19NO2 first synthesis, 1963
• 2C-B C10H14BrNO2 first synthesis, 1974
• 2C-E C12H19NO2 first synthesis
• Mescaline C11H17NO3 popularised it

  Not his compound — mescaline is the peyote alkaloid, isolated by Arthur Heffter in 1897 — but his 1960 mescaline experience is what turned him to this work.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shulgin
• https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml