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[Book] Pihkal - Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved

Started by Baxter, January 25, 2005, 06:45:55 PM

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Baxter

Being a tiny bit of a chemist and considering that one of my first posts on CaB was to tell ambient sheep that 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-benzylamphetamine would probably be psychedelically inactive due to electron disruption, I am in the middle of reading a quite excellent book that I really must share with the 'whores it's basically split into two sections one detailing the life of a fictional chemist a Dr. Alexander "Shura" Brodin which is basically a thinly veiled account of the life of the co-author Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, while the second half is his complete notes of the synthesis of some 179 members of the phenethylamine family, their actions at various stepped dosages and some relevant texts taken from various publications.

Aside from the "ooh it's fun to read about mind-bending drug experiences" factor it really is a great read in it's narrative story section as it's not only a great insight into the sort of 50's-60's world of psychochemical academia but also some really contemplative links to human psychology (for instance making me re-consider how mad and baseless my teachers always told me early psychodynamic theory was).

The latter half of the book including extracts from the narrative text when they refer to specific drug experiences can be found for free at
http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml

lordaxil

Thought this thread deserved more attention than it got!

The book looks interesting, although would you trust yourself to take anything synthesised by those routes described in the book? I think it's interesting how they try to correlate psychoactive effects with chemical structure, as if changing the position of a nitrogen here and there will turn a mild euphoria into a religious experience. It seems a shame that such psychoactive 'experimentation' invariably leads people into some sort of bogus state of pseudo-spirituality, rather than actually thinking more deeply about the links between brain chemistry and mental states.

Baxter

Actually he is pretty thorough in his purification of his end elements, for example he routinely advises on four washing stages for the end-products and always tests the end products via NMR, or IR/UV sprectra and when possible he gives the final mp of all the samples.

Interestingly I do have a real interest in the correlation between structure and action and the book does passingly mention some very interesting research that 'Sasha' did including one where upon theorising that an oxygen atom would be harder to be removed by the metabolism and so added one to a particular compound to find that this increased it's active time and it's potency. Granted that it's not quite as close to having a "bliss group" and a "religious euphoria group" but still one of the things tat emerge from the work is the scientific method of assuming trends and patterns is just as valid when saturating neurons as when plotting electron-negativities.

Sasha seems to have conveniently bypassed the whole weirdo stage the Leary went into and has kept a very academic mindset, I think this is mainly caused by the fact that he never really went underground and always kept publishing in the sort of scientific journals where all that sort of "Embrace the plasma pool" philosophical gibberish won't really fly.

(You see I made good points and even managed to get in a "The Fly" reference)