To understand the influence Shulgin had on the world completely, we must also dwell on the internal shifts he caused in others. With that said, allow me to indulge you in a drug story. Nearly 3 years ago, I was at a low emotional point in my life, perhaps the lowest. I was 22 and imagined that life had already dealt me the cards of introverted misery and resentment that I would carry until my grave. But, one night a young woman sent me a text asking if I would be interested in going to a small rave and experimenting with MDMA. At this point, I knew as much about Molly as your grandmother probably does. It was a goofy new speed which made people dance and hug each other. Hardly my scene, I thought. However, my friend was persistent, insisting that this would get me out of my rut of aggression and despair with the world around me. So I acquiesced.

What happened later that night will never lose its’ full and splendorous meaning to me. This fad party drug had somehow connected me to a room full of people I didn’t know at all or had little acquaintance with, but for perhaps the first moment of my life, I felt open. I felt unashamed. I felt loved. I felt free. If my subjective experience allowed for it, I might have wept for a decade wasted in depression and isolation, but no, I was not capable of regret. I was only capable of embracing this, of embracing my new found friends, who to me were no less than saviors in this moment. On that night, I came out as bisexual to a room full of people, something 5 years prior was literally unthinkable to me and had become more or less a part of me I didn’t feel was worth sharing. That night, it was worth sharing. I was worth sharing.

Alexander Shulgin made that experience, and many more like it, possible. His research liberated me. While the headlines today read that Shulgin as the godfather of “the party drug ecstasy”, Terrence McKenna first described him as the godfather of psychopharmocology. Rather than influencing party culture, which will inevitably take hold of powerful psychoactive chemicals, Shulgin was the first to synthesize MDMA as we know it today and to apply it as a therapeutic agent. Today, MDMA is openly used by psychiatrists in the treatment of PTSD, with often times miraculous results.

While most known for his MDMA research, Shulgin thrived within the realm of more traditionally psychedelic substances, especially phenylethylamines and tryptamines, gracing us with the presence of new powerful agents of self-discovery.

Throughout his research, Shulgin remained transparent and friendly with the government and law enforcement, even sharing his compounds with agents of the DEA and writing manuals for use in the classification of drugs.  However, like all researchers of illegal substances, Shulgin’s research was shut down by the DEA in 1994.  The federal government had had enough of Shulgin’s two sides, one side an obedient chemist and the other a writer of subversive, drug-promoting literature. The DEA declared his more personal writing to be nothing more than “cookbooks” for illegal substances.

Shulgin knew his research would remain mostly isolated for his lifetime. Despite the definitive proof that MDMA and other psychedelics contain within them the solution to many psychological ailments, the U.S government has done nothing to tighten its’ grip beyond allowing strict therapeutic and lab research. The only political victory he experienced was through his testimony to Spanish authorities which had it effectively rescheduled as a substance of minimal danger.

I will not allow this to be Shulgin’s final legacy. He has been nothing less than a personal liberator of thousands, perhaps millions of minds. The drug war and the iron fist of government generally is anathema to a world fully exposed to the influence of Shulgin’s life’s work. I am freer because of him and have made it my own life’s mission to liberate others, to free them from the psychological constraints the drug war keeps us all in. While remaining for much of his life an apparent friend of the State, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin used his position to ultimately undermine the drug war and started many down a path of self-discovery and mental freedom which will ultimately undermine the brutalizing, regressive nature of government power.

Unfortunately, many people living in nations ostensibly governed by “the people” do believe that the government should do exactly what the majority says. Anytime the enormous power of government is controlled by a fickle group of people, it is liable to swing from one extreme to the other, damaging everything it was intended to protect along the way.

That is why, instead of a democracy, where the people have a direct voice in all decisions, they created a republic, where the people elect trusted representatives to make political decisions. In order to make sure even a majority of those representatives didn’t disrespect the rights of the minorities, they created a three-branched government interlaced with checks and balances.

Still, however, despite the best intentions of the Founders, the rights of minorities, even those represented in the electorate, have been consistently ignored with the express consent of the majority, and still are today. Americans are forced to pay for wars they abhor, financial aid to countries that they believe will squander the money, money to the United Nations, a world government that nobody elected, charity to their fellow Americans that they might have given anyways in a form they believe to be more effective. All this follows the will of the majority while blithely denying the rights of the minority.

Is there any way around this problem? Yes, in fact there is — anything that the government can find a way to not do, it shouldn’t do. The fewer things the government does, the fewer minority rights it will be violating, and the closer we will be to a government which truly rules by the will of all the people.

But can any government which has the final say on any issue be trusted to “color inside the lines”? In a system where government can interpret those lines however it likes — which is the situation in every state, past and present — it cannot be. Some special interest group will convince some legislator that only the government can take care if some problem (even though it has been taken care of without government for the lifetime of the nation) and suddenly, the government will have a new power.

This is how, for example, the world’s longest-lasting so-called limited state now regulates under what circumstances one can sell novel chemicals for human ingestion. The United States Food and Drug Administration, Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, among others, now impose the prudish opinions of what is at least a majority in Congress on what individuals may consume.

In essence, those living under the auspices of the government of the United States no longer own their own body. Of course, that is not how it is presented to us — we are being “protected” from ourselves and from drug companies that want our business and therefore…will sell us drugs that kill us. Clearly there have been some tragedies with side effects of drugs, but the recent Vioxx scandal demonstrates that the FDA’s regulations have failed to protect Americans from dangerous drugs. We still must make our own conclusions about what we put into our bodies, based on either our own judgment or the advice of the experts we each select for ourselves.

Some will agree that these regulations clearly constitute a transgression against individual liberty, and that we must work to eliminate it and similar infringements on our inherent rights. But the state is always fallible. Governments will always tend to expand until they are either abolished or face so much effective competition from market-based sources that they are no longer a monopoly of law and security services — and thus are no longer truly a government.