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1 A place where, I have a feeling, he has “tasted” many a psychedelic with various captains of industry. According to one friend, he was spotted offering to teach the head of Boeing “a new way to fly.”When I arrived at Shulgin’s home in Lafayette, California, he was peacefully sitting at the kitchen table. I walked through the sliding glass door, greeted him, and then embraced him, which produced a euphoria far greater than that of MDMA and a time dilation more profound than the effects of 2C-T-4. We disengaged and, without pause, he began to riddle me: “Can you name the two words in the English language that begin with two consecutive a’s?”I thought for a moment before answering, “Aardvark is one…”“Yes, good, and the other?”“I don’t know, I can’t think of another.”He bent down his head and said in a low whisper, “Aardwolf.”“Aardwolf?” I asked, and with that he had already risen from his chair and shuffled into the hallway to retrieve a giant yellow dictionary, which he dropped onto the kitchen table and pushed toward me. Sure enough, it’s there, and on his prompt I read the definition aloud:

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2 “Fungi,” “fungus,” and “funguses,” with special attention paid to the variant pronunciations of “fungi”—“fun-gee” and “fun-guy.” It should be noted these questions come from a man who published a two-page editorial in the Journal of Clinical Toxicology dedicated to how irksome it is when people incorrectly pluralize the word “amphetamine.” The implication being that this grammatical error is the most heinous amphetamine abuse of all. So please, in the future remember Adderall contains amphetamine, not amphetamines.

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3 Shulgin’s first chemical modification to the mescaline molecule was the addition of a single carbon atom to the ethylamine side chain, which produced an amphetamine called TMA. From there he developed TMA-2 through TMA-6. They became moderately popular psychedelics in Japan and the US, and TMA-6 remains an unscheduled substance. Shulgin enjoyed TMA-6, although he felt “toasting the toast in the toaster was difficult.”
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4 Shulgin created a series of sulfur-containing psychedelic amphetamines named after the Hebrew letter א. ALEPH-1 was the first. True to his method of vigilant titration, his first dose was 250 nanograms. Over the course of 18 trials he worked up to a single milligram. It detonated an intellectual hydrogen bomb in his prefrontal cortex.

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5 2C-B is the archetypal Shulgin psychedelic. It possesses all the qualities he searched for throughout his carrier. 2C-B is potent, warm, corporeal, associative, shows no signs of physical toxicity, and has a short duration, ideal for psychotherapy. It is also extremely “erotic.” Shulgin said, “If there is anything ever found to be an effective aphrodisiac, it will probably be patterned after 2C-B in structure.” It was, unfortunately, made illegal after a brief stint as a legal sex enhancer and widespread distribution under the name Ubulawu Nomathotholo by South African shamans (an incredible story for another time).

