An Overview of Pikhal: A Chemical Love Story

An excellent review of the same title that those who are interested in our complex relationships
with chemicals will love.

PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story is a book by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, published in 1991.
The subject of the work is psychoactive phenethylamine chemical derivatives, notably those that act as
psychedelics and/or empathogen-entactogens. The main title, PiHKAL, is an acronym that stands for
"Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved".

The book is arranged into two parts, the first part being a fictionalized autobiography of the couple and
the second part describing 179 different psychedelic compounds (most of which Shulgin discovered
himself), including detailed synthesis instructions, bioassays, dosages, and other commentary.

The second part was made freely available by Shulgin on Erowid while the first part is available only in
the printed text. While the reactions described are beyond the ability of people with a basic chemistry
education, some tend to emphasize techniques that do not require difficult-to-obtain chemicals.
Notable among these are the use of mercury-aluminum amalgam (an unusual but easy to obtain
reagent) as a reducing agent and detailed suggestions on legal plant sources of important drug
precursors such as safrole.

Contents

1 Impact and popularity

2 Notable compounds

2.1 Essential amphetamines

2.2 Magical half-dozen

3 See also

4 References

5 External links
Impact and popularity

Through PIHKAL (and later TIHKAL), Shulgin sought to ensure that his discoveries would escape the limits
of professional research labs and find their way to the public, a goal consistent with his stated beliefs
that psychedelic drugs can be valuable tools for self-exploration. The MDMA ("ecstasy") synthesis
published in PIHKAL remains one of the most common clandestine methods of its manufacture to this
day. Many countries have banned the major substances for which this book gives directions for
synthesis, such as 2C-B, 2C-T-2, and 2C-T-7. In the United Kingdom, all but phenethylamine are
illegal.[citation needed]

In 1994, two years after PIHKAL was published, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided
Shulgin's lab and requested that he turn over his DEA license. Richard Meyer, spokesman for DEA's San
Francisco Field Division, has stated in reference to PIHKAL "It is our opinion that those books are pretty
much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have
raided, they have found copies of those books," suggesting that the publication of PIHKAL and the
termination of Shulgin's license may have been related.[1]