PiHKAL
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Image:Pihkal.jpg
PiHKAL is a 1991 book by Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin about psychedelic phenethylamines.
The full title of the book is Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved: A Chemical Love Story (ISBN 0963009605). The book is widely regarded as a pioneering and much respected work on the subject.
The book is arranged in two parts. The first part is a fictionalized autobiography of the couple. The second part contains detailed synthesis instructions for over 200 psychedelic compounds (most of which Shulgin personally invented), including dosages, subjective experiences, and other commentary.
Shulgin's choices of synthesis procedures in the second half of the book are themselves perhaps a small act of subversion: While the reactions are beyond the ability of people with no chemistry education, they tend to emphasize techniques that do not require difficult to obtain chemicals. Notable among these are the use of mercury-aluminum amalgam as a reducing agent (an unusual but easy to obtain reagent) and detailed suggestions on legal plant sources of important drug precursors such as safrole.
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 to this day.
The second part of PiHKAL is available through Erowid.
See also
- Phenethylamine
- TiHKAL, a 1997 sequel by the same authors, about tryptamines.