Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  I had quite a number of plans already in mind. The first was to broaden my educational basis.

  Having always been a test-tube and Bunsen burner person, I knew that I had the art in hand for making new and fascinating compounds. But I had very little background for evaluating the biology of their action. Since the scene of that action was the human body, one of my earliest plans was to go to medical school and study the where's and the why's of the complex wiring patterns in the human brain and nervous system, all of which play vital roles in this activity.

  I realized that if I hoped to survive as a consultant I would have to acquire some vocabulary in a number of fields such as biology, medicine and psychology, so I applied for, and received, a government grant to help pay the tuition. Helen was completely supportive; she said she wanted me to follow the path I believed in. She was working as a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, loving the job and the economic independence it gave her. Between my grant and her salary, we figured we would manage adequately for the time necessary.

  The next two years were totally committed to the San Francisco campus of the University of California, as I learned what I could of medicine.

  But there was yet another language, that of power and politics, which I was destined to learn in a totally unexpected way. I had completed two years of medical studies which equipped me with a sound understanding of the normal functions of the cerebral red and green wires, and was on the verge of deciding whether or not to continue with the next two years (which would have given me a look at their abnormal functioning) when the decision was, in a sense, made for me.

  I received an offer to become a consultant in the area of research in psychedelic drugs. It came from a gentleman I'd never heard of, who ran a one-man analytical laboratory located in a storefront down on the San Francisco Peninsula.

  My first response was that I had no particular desire to become involved with someone else's lab, doing what might be interpreted as controversial research at a time when it seemed the whole nation was becoming increasingly polarized against recreational drug use. It was being broadly associated with hippies and liberals and academic intellectual types who were against the war in Southeast Asia. But when I finally talked with this person, I discovered that his role was only that of a finder - what is now known as a "head-hunter." He told me that he had been retained by a big government operation specifically to locate scientists from many disciplines as potential members of a research team for an unusual project that was of super-importance.

  He explained, carefully: "There will be situations in the future in which astronauts might well be exposed to long periods of sensory isolation and all the potential mental developments that might come along with that particular territory. There is being set up a research program geared to develop chemicals which could be used to train those astronauts who might be subjected to long bouts of sensory deprivation. Teach them to roll with the altered states of consciousness that could very well be a consequence of that isolation."

  He emphasized that I would have a free hand to establish instrumentation, choose personnel, and equip my own laboratory. Would I be interested in setting up a research project to develop such chemicals and describe their activity and maybe even to contribute to the design of the clinical experiments?

  Does a bear like to shit in the woods? Yes, yes, most certainly yes!

  Of course, my local contact, the storefront laboratory gentleman, was not the person who was running this astronaut-in-outer-space project. The head honcho was a Captain B. Lauder Pinkerton, who was the central hub of many different branches of biological research at the major laboratory for space research, called the San Carlos Aerospace Laboratory, which was under contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. This was located nearby, in a town called Sunnyvale.

  Captain Pinkerton was many things; he was a Captain in some branch of the military, he was an intelligence officer in some corner of the government, possibly NSA (National Security Agency) and he was a millionaire, thanks to genes he shared with the inventor of a famously successful household appliance. We met, we talked, and I think it safe to say that - at the time - we had the good instincts to respect one another, but not to indulge in anything as inappropriate as mutual trust.

  Having taken the bait, I was off into a new area of interaction. I was now a consultant, successfully launched on my new career.

  At Aerospace, I was hailed as the shining light of psychotropic medicine. There was a whirlwind of accolades as, one after another, people came up to me and said they had been reading my articles for years and thought I was doing important and fascinating work.

  So I materialized at Aerospace every morning, and began ordering glassware and instruments and mechanical things for the new laboratory, which I was told was not yet available, but would be shortly, as soon as certain necessary shifts and changes had been made. In the meantime, I explored every hallway and workroom and lab, meeting and interacting with some of the resident scientists, most of whom seemed to be gentle old-timers who had been there for years. Gradually, it became apparent that there were two entirely different worlds in coexistence at Aerospace, both under the very firm direction of Captain Pinkerton.

  One of these was the new-lab-spectroscopy-psychedelic-drug-outer-space world, most of which had not yet taken any kind of tangible form (but undoubtedly would very soon), and this world included a regular weekly summons into Pinkerton's office for an intense, highly charged conversation on some topic that was always unexpected, and sometimes completely off the wall.

  I might find myself having to deal with the nature and structure of scientific imagination and how it could be channeled. Or Pinkerton might bring up the subject of mental telepathy and the possibility of successfully influencing another person's thought processes or behavior from a distance. Once, it was an exploration of the kind of mental role-playing one might have to do in order to understand somebody else's perspective and motives, as symbolized by the old saying, "It takes a thief to catch a thief," or another old saying (which was new to me), "It takes a Turk to know a Turk."

  This was rich and tantalizing fare, as entertaining as it was unpredictable, but somehow it never seemed quite appropriate to the role that I understood myself to be playing, as an organizer of a research center for creativity in the development of psychedelic drugs, among other heady things. Was I being used as a sounding board for Pinkerton's strange flights of fancy? Or was I being probed as to my positions on some kinds of moral or ethical questions tucked in between the lines? I thought it probably wisest to be supportive of the concepts he expressed unless I disagreed, in which case I chose to remain silent.

  The only things I was totally sure of were that Captain Pinkerton was a shrewd, intelligent man, and that I hadn't a clue as to what was really going on.

  But there was the other world to be seen and explored. This was composed of the many biological research projects in other areas, which had already been established by Pinkerton.

  Here were arcane projects such as black membrane dynamics, and studies of the influence of gravity on plant growth, the relationship between magnetic fields and the blood-brain barrier, and the effects of radiation on fertility. All were intriguing studies, and all were being run in well equipped laboratories by extremely competent scientists. But I found myself being reminded of an old-person's home. There was activity, but there was a prevalent sense of disinterest. The excellent quality of the work on the workbench was obvious, but when I would go to lunch with one of the resident mavens, the talk would be of such stuff as his forthcoming retirement. There was no excitement;

  just a sense of tiredness. Remarkable, I thought; all this under the same leadership as the psychedelic project?

  The glassware and laboratory equipment were slow in arriving, I was told, and things hadn't quite straightened out yet in the assignment of space for my new lab, but it would all come together soon. Just be patient, they said. I ra
n a few experiments on equipment available in other labs, and kept busy.

  A few months into my employment at Aerospace, I was invited to Pinkerton's home, which was located in the wealthy suburb of Santa Maria, to share a dinner with him/ his wife, and what I was given to understand was his "acceptable" son, a boy in his late 'teens. But it so happened that, this particular evening, his other child - the twenty-year-old-hippie-druggie who had been at some point outcast and disenfranchised - had taken it into his head to drop by. (He himself told me, many years later, that it was not accidental at all; he had heard about me and decided to check things out for himself.)

  It also happened that he played excellent Ping-Pong, and I was informed that he routinely beat his father (there were hints that Father found this intolerable) and by flukey chance I just happened to beat the son with serves which were only marginally legal. So, a dissymmetry was established between Pinkerton and me by the inference that I could probably beat him at Ping-Pong (this was never tested, by the way). I am sure all of this was completely incidental to the direction that our relationship soon took, but the memory of that evening does nonetheless persist.

  Within the week I was called into the office of an administrative ally of Pinkerton, who had been pleasant and friendly to me and with whom I'd had several energetic conversations. He told me that he was required to process everyone who was a consultant on any of the Captain's research projects for some sort of secret clearance. The clearance level had a color or a letter attached to it/1 don't remember which. Apparently (so I was told) all the people who were presently employed at Aerospace had already received it, except for me.

  This security clearance would allow me access to all research related to my own that had already been done. But it was clear that my access to these unknown treasures could only be had in exchange for my agreeing to allow my own thoughts and creative processes to be similarly classified and controlled. I also knew that a security clearance mandates one's absolute silence for the rest of one's life in regard to anything and everything seen, heard and experienced during the time of employment by the government agency giving the clearance. I had no choice. I declined the opportunity.

  In a few days I was gently informed that I was no longer a part of the research group.

  In the months that followed, I maintained contact with some of the other scientists I had come to know at Aerospace, and eventually I learned that the funds which were available from NASA for this psychedelic study were most probably from the Department of Defense, although nobody had absolute proof, of course. In retrospect, I could see where much of the research that was going on there might well be of interest to the military and chemical warfare side of things.

  I also began to understand why the promised laboratory, glassware and equipment - not to speak of astronauts - had never materialized. Whatever it was that Pinkerton thought I might bring to his program - or add to his own professional luster - had first to be wrapped safely, tied down and secured with the ropes called Secret and Classified.

  I left with questions that are yet to be answered, and most probably never will be. Was my Captain Pinkerton a recruiter of scientific minds for what he saw as patriotic necessities? Was he a modern-day Machiavelli with some personal agenda that he chose not to share with anyone? Maybe he was simply a selfish collector of interesting and colorful people, like the art lover who has five original Van Gogh's in his personal gallery, where no one else can see them.

  In any case, I was out of the San Carlos Aerospace Laboratories, and I was out of the academic world as well. By good fortune, I had continued to build and use my own private laboratory during the time I was at Sunnyvale, so my die was cast; I was now officially a scientific consultant, and I was going to have to make every effort to survive in that role.

  CHAPTER 8. MEM

  Just what is a C-natural quarter note? A musician might define it as a little solid-black circle with a vertical arm sticking up from it, located on a line below the treble staff. But then he is stuck with having to define words such as natural, and staff. A physicist might try using the image of a sinusoidal wave on the oscilloscope with a period of something under 4 milliseconds lasting for a short while. But what is a sinusoidal, and what is a millisecond? From the neurologist, one might hear something yet different involving hairs on the cochlea and neurons in the auditory cortex area. A yet different view with a different and equally arcane jargon. All are right, and yet each can be incomprehensible without extensive further definition.

  I am faced with an equally difficult problem when I am asked, just what is mescaline? The person who swallowed it might recount its effects, the distributor who packaged it might describe its taste and color, and the chemist who synthesized it might speak in terms of molecular structure. Perhaps it is my prejudice, but I always tend to the molecular structure as I truly believe that it is one of the few consistent and incontestable definitions. But, oh my, it does require a certain leap of faith to accept the picture that is offered!

  The molecule is the smallest chunk of something that still is that something. Anything smaller, and there appears a bunch of atoms with a complete loss of the original identity. You don't see a molecule. It has an atomic connection scheme that is inferred from a lot of reasoning and a century of experimentation. But it remains the only valid vocabulary for the design of new drugs. I don't want to launch into a lecture in chemistry, yet I truly want to share the magic of the "4-position."

  Chemistry is a maddeningly discontinuous art. Things can only change by whole atomic jumps.

  There are no smooth, continuous variations. A compound (drug, chemical, solvent, gas, smell) is composed of unimaginably large numbers of molecules, all of them identical. If you looked at just one of them through some alchemist's microscope, you would see, maybe, 35 atoms all hooked together in some cohesive way. Some would be carbon atoms, and others would be hydrogens. In the case of TMA, you would find one nitrogen atom and three oxygen atoms as well. The identity of a compound depends on exactly how many atoms there are in that invisible minimum piece of it, and on exactly how they are hooked together.

  The number of atoms must change by a whole numbers; this is what is meant by the absence of any continuous variation. One cannot make a molecule larger by a little bit of an atom. You can add an entire oxygen atom, but there is no meaning to adding 17% of an oxygen atom. A homologue of a given compound is a new compound that has been made bigger (or smaller) by the addition (or subtraction) of three atoms, one carbon and two hydrogens. Nothing can ever be created that lies part way between a drug and its immediate homologue.

  Or, if one were to keep the number and identity of the atoms the same, a new compound can result simply by changing the way that they are hooked together. Move an atom or a bunch of atoms from here to there. An isomer of a given compound is a new compound that has an identical weight (at the molecular level) but the atoms have been reorganized.

  My earliest manipulations of molecular structure had concentrated on making isomers, on rearranging the locations of atoms rather than adding or taking away specific atoms. The ring component of TMA (called a benzene ring) has five different positions where atoms can be located. The count starts at the one-position, where the rest of the molecule is attached. Thus the second is identical to the sixth position (both at 2 or 10 o'clock), the third is identical to the fifth (both at 4 or 8 o'clock) and the fourth (at 6 o'clock) is as far from the rest of the molecule as you can get. This is the 4-position.

  TMA (like mescaline) has a bunch of atoms (called methoxy groups) at the 3-, the 4-and the 5-positions. I synthesized isomers, with these three bunches in all the other possible locations.

  There were two patterns that really boosted the potency of the resulting amphetamine. One was when the groups were in the 2-, 4-and 5-positions (TMA-2) and another when the groups were in the 2-, 4-and 6-positions (TMA-6). TMA-2 was the new and most satisfying discovery, being some ten times more potent than TMA. Settling for a while on
this particular ordering of groups, why not try using the homologue argument and add a three atom chunk to each of these methoxy groups? Thus, one has ethoxy homologues, with the ethyl group at either the 2- , the 4-or the 5-position. If one were to call a methoxy an "M", and an ethoxy an "E", and if one were to name a compound around the ring as the groups appeared (from the 2-to the 4-to the 5-positions), one would have EMM, MEM, and MME as code names. The middle letter is, of course, the group at the 4-position.

  I had completed the teutonic discipline of preparing all the three possible ethoxy homologs of TMA-2 at just about the same time that I decided to leave Dole and go to medical school.

  Suddenly, I didn't have a worried administration looking over my shoulder as to the chemistry and its patentability but also, by this same argument, I had no base of operations from which I could begin to document pharmacology, and especially psychopharmacology.

  Since much of the synthetic work, at least of the M's and E's, had been done while I was still at Dole, I supposed that all this chemistry was still their property. But I also concluded that they were undoubtedly so relieved to be rid of me - especially as the parting had been friendly and at my own request - they probably wouldn't mind at all if I were to assume the synthesis and ownership of the M's and E's. So this would be my first solo flight, and I would not only publish from my home address from now on, I would do the chemistry there as well.

  The early trials of the mono-ethoxy compounds, EMM, MEM and MME, showed no mental activity. EMM was inactive in the twenties-of-milligrams, and I took it on up to 50 milligrams, still with no effects apparent. MME was also inactive in the twenties-of-milligrams, but at 40