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by conformal
4329 days ago
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it is sad to hear that sasha passed, he was a great man. he did a lot of really positive work for expanding the public's knowledge of hallucinogenic compounds, mainly 5HT-2A agonists of various varieties. that said, he is typically over-attributed as being the 'godfather' of this field in an academic context when nearly every single compound he synthesized was originally synthesized and researched by someone else. there are thousands of researchers from the pharma industry and academia who spent huge parts of their adult lives just synthesizing a few of these compounds who often receive zero attribution for their life's work. knowing this, i find it rather offensive that an academic institution would provide such a trumped-up tribute to sasha shulgin. oh, and for the record, a lot of the syntheses in tikhal and pikhal have _intentional_ omissions and errors, which makes those texts mostly useless from a synthetic standpoint. |
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Similarly to Nursie, I'm interested in knowing where you learned this piece of information.
I have been researching Sasha's work for months now, reading PiHKAL, interviewing his wife, attending his memorial, talking to his supporters etc... And not once have I heard mention of this. Yes, Shulgin is the GODFATHER of Psychedelics because MDMA was originally synthesized in 1912. But Timothy Leary himself called Sasha one of the century's most important scientists. Dozens of respected scientists and academics attended his memorial in support of his work. I don't believe that his role in introducing psychedelics to the wider world is "overly attributed" at all.
Check NYTimes Mag profile on the guy http://nyti.ms/WG8wFS
"Shulgin has been credited with jump-starting today's therapeutic research, but he prefers to play down his role. While heartened by the MDMA studies and happy to play psychedelic elder statesman, he insists that he is not a healer or a shaman but a researcher. Asked why he does what he does, he replies, ''I'm curious!'' He is most animated when describing the feeling that accompanies the discovery of a new compound, no matter what its properties. Sometimes he compares the moment to that of artistic creation (''The pleasure of composing a new painting or piece of music''), and sometimes it sounds more like a close encounter of the third kind (''You're meeting something you don't know, and it's meeting something it doesn't know. And so you have this exchange of properties and ideas'')."