Nomad Codes

decade has seen a small renaissance in psychedelic research, both above and underground. On the official stage, advocacy groups like MAPS (Rick Doblin’s Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and the Heffter Reseach Institute (headed up by Dave Nichols), as well as individual researchers like Rick Strassman and the UK’s Karl Jansen, have done their homework, balancing loopy subjective accounts with the dry, methodical language of protocols, pharmacology, and action studies. Hopefully, these modest research reports are laying the groundwork for a resumption of the kind of official in-depth psychological studies squelched over thirty years ago.
    Meanwhile, in the far margins of legality, small crews of brave, compulsive, and sometimes wacked individuals continue to compile and share fact, anecdote, and lore about exotic and newfangled psychoactives and the even more exotic combinations they allow. Think of these psychonauts as hobbyists of neural R&D. They like to plunge as far as any hippie into the bejeweled halls of hyperspace, but they also bring an almost geeky spirit of investigation to their exploits. They know their chemistry, and understand that the envelope of psychedelic pharmacology is pushed by recombining existing molecular Tinkertoys. They also take this recombinant logic a step further by mixing and matching different drugs from an ever-widening pharmacopoeia in order to craft new highs.
    Even Burning Man veterans may not have heard of many of the esoteric compounds that float around the scene: AMT, 5-MEO-DMT, 2C-T-2, 2C-T-7, 5-MEO-DIPT, 4-Acetoxy-DiPT, DPT, DOB, 2-CB. With a few exceptions, these white powders have largely resisted being branded with cool names. Some have been known for decades, others are relatively new; a few have been scheduled, but many have so far been overlooked by the Feds and remain uncontrolled. However, because the vast majority of these substances are chemically similar to illegal drugs, people gobbling them technically can be snagged under the Federal Analogue Act, which allows individuals to be prosecuted for recreational use of drugs that are “substantially similar” to scheduled drugs. But this rarely seems to happen, especially given the obscurity of many of these drugs and the difficulties involved in proving “substantial” similarity.
    It’s impossible to say how many grams of these compounds are being synthesized and consumed annually, but there’s probably morsels of intrigue all over Europe and America. Though some demand complex procedures and elusive precursors to synthesize, the lion’s share can be cooked up by most anyone with undergrad training in chemistry and access to a lab. There’s really nothing to stop curious amateur organic chemists from brewing up a small batch of AMT or 2-CB in a weekend to share with a small circle of friends, and anecdotal evidence indicates that many do. Some of these modern alchemists even exploit the gray-market status of these compounds by marketing them for nonhuman “research purposes” over the Internet.
    The back-room circulation of these drugs has engendered a looseknit and rather hermetic psychedelic scene devoted less to partying or cosmic communion than to a kind of weird science, where the purple haze is filtered through a knowledge and embrace of methyl groups, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and the value of keeping your eye on the clock. The godfather of this particular psychedelic style is Sasha Shulgin, a cheery, eccentric Bay Area chemist best known for the rediscovery of MDMA, aka ecstasy. With his wife, Ann, he wrote PiHKAL and TiHKAL , two phone-book-size tomes devoted, respectively, to phenethylamines and tryptamines, the two pillars of psychedelic pharmacology. Though Shulgin once had a license to study scheduled drugs, an irritated DEA responded to the publication of PiHKAL by swooping down on Shulgin’s grubby lab and slapping him with 51 violations they then effectively swapped for his license. In reaction, Shulgin simply continued to devote himself to the art of recombination that characterizes the synthesis of novel molecules. “Once they schedule something, I throw away my samples and continue my research in another direction,” he says.
    The creator of 2C-B and 2C-T-7, two drugs popular among psychonauts, Shulgin has described, synthesized, and analyzed scores of substances whose potential for thrills and profit remain untapped. Many of the hundreds of compounds