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Psychedex

Alexander Shulgin

1925person

A chemist who synthesised and self-tested several hundred phenethylamines and tryptamines, publishing the results with Ann Shulgin in PiHKAL (1991) and TiHKAL (1997) after conventional journals would not carry them.

He is the most-cited source in this corpus by a wide margin, because for many compounds here there is nothing else: no trial, no case series, no pharmacokinetic study. Where a substance page gives a duration or a qualitative character and the citation is a book rather than a journal, it is usually one of these two.

What it claims

That a specific compound, at a described exposure, produced a described set of effects over a described time course, in a small number of self-experiments — usually his own, sometimes a small circle of experienced volunteers.

How well attested

Primary and thin, in a way worth being precise about. The synthetic chemistry is checkable and has been independently reproduced for many compounds. The human observations are unblinded self-report at n of 1 to a handful, with no control, no randomisation, and full knowledge of what was taken — a design that cannot separate effect from expectation. His rating scale is a shorthand for intensity, not a measurement. This corpus treats these reports as the historical record of what was observed, and as the weakest tier of evidence a claim can rest on.

Cited by

73 substance records cite this source

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