Alexander Shulgin

Behind his house in Lafayette, California stood a small licensed laboratory that Alexander Shulgin called the Farm. Over four decades he synthesised there, and then tested on himself and a circle of trusted friends, more than two hundred psychoactive compounds. A Berkeley native, born in 1925, he took his biochemistry doctorate there in 1955 and bought his independence with a commercial hit: mexacarbate, a biodegradable pesticide he developed for Dow Chemical in the early 1960s. Tihkal: The Continuation appeared in 1997, written with his wife Ann Shulgin and issued by Transform Press, the imprint the couple founded themselves. The title is short for Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. Like the earlier Pihkal, it comes in two halves, a lightly fictionalised memoir followed by a technical section listing syntheses, dosages and recorded effects, and that second half was precisely what regulators objected to. Agents had already searched the laboratory in 1994, taking away his Schedule I licence and imposing a $25,000 fine. He died in 2014, aged 88.