Drugs Unlimited

Notes

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Prologue: Contemporary Chemical Culture

Chapter 1: Vegetable to Chemical

Chapter 2: The Great Ecstasy of the Toolmaker Shulgin

Chapter 3: The Birth of an Online Drugs Culture

Chapter 4: The Rise and Fall of the Research Chemical Scene

Chapter 5: The Calm Before the Storm, and a Curious Drought

Chapter 6: Mephedrone Madness: the Underground Hits the High Street

Chapter 7: Woof Woof Is the New Meow Meow

Chapter 8: Ready-Salted Zombies and a Chemical Panic

Chapter 9: Your Crack’s in the Post

Chapter 10: Prohibition in the Digital Age

13. Shulgin had a stroke in 2010. His stepdaughter, Wendy, emailed as this book was going to press with news that her stepfather’s health had much improved. ‘Sasha is doing well. He’s had a wonderful sort of comeback from the severity of the dementia, due in part we believe to a medication that he’s taking now which is ergotamine, or hydergine [a precursor for LSD]. That has really helped him. He doesn’t sundown much anymore, he’s clearer and catches all conversation around him, following it, commenting on it, cracking jokes (we know he’s well when he does that!). Between a good change in diet, more exercise, and that medication, he’s really doing well.’ A year before, I had asked Shulgin’s wife Ann if her husband’s illness might have been caused by his lifelong use of drugs. She was adamant it had not. ‘Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have experimented with psychoactive drugs and visionary plants, many of them using them as spiritual tools, there is no medical evidence whatsoever that that would be the case. It’s simply not true,’ she said.

Chapter 11: The End of the Road?

Epilogue