The first time she tried a hallucinogen, she was nearly sick. The taste of that witch’s brew—the thick, brown ooze that you get when you mash the peyote plant down—was so bad that she retched the moment it hit her tongue. My God, it was awful. For a long time all she could do was to sit on her bed and try not to vomit. Then the walls of her bedroom started to shimmer. Then time stilled. Then—if there even was a “then” anymore—the dust motes, floating in the air above her, started to sing. It was Ann Shulgin’s first taste of hallucinogens, but not her last, for in her long life she would have around 2,000 psychedelic experiences.
The aim was clear. Not merely to open the doors of perception—to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower—but to step through those doors, and learn. William Blake had done it with poetry. Aldous Huxley, whose writing she loved, had done it with mescaline. She did it that first time with peyote. Later, when she met her beloved husband—the chemist and “Godfather of Ecstasy”, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin—she did it with more or less anything he made in his lab. And he made a lot: MDMA, PMA, PMMA, mescaline. Though she never liked the stoning drugs. And if you couldn’t make love on a drug, as she later said, stretching out her wrinkled hands, then “there’s something not quite right.”
