Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, a biochemist and former Dow Chemical Co. researcher who introduced psychologists to the drug MDMA and became known as "the godfather of ecstasy," has died. He was 88.
He died of liver cancer Monday at his home in Lafayette, California, according to his wife, Ann Shulgin. An advocate of freedom in drug use, Shulgin designed hundreds of psychotropic substances, which he tested on himself and friends, and published books describing the chemicals and their mind-altering effects.
"I have little insight as to how these remarkable compounds do what they do," Shulgin wrote in a 2005 article in MIT Technology Review. "My hope is that psychedelic compounds may be the tools, or may lead to the discovery of tools, that can throw some light on elusive questions about how the mind works."