Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

a powerful, thorough look inside the intricacies of a relationship between two people, their relationship to psychoactive powers within their universe, and nitty gritty details about the nature of politics and philosophy.
Romance and science coalesce symphonically here.
An encyclopedic undertaking that achieves success on a number of fronts, this work shatters delusions and opens your mind. There is really something for everyone here: an inspiring love story and a challenging counter-culture tome written by geniuses.
Not to mention the fact that you get a lot of pages for a nice price.
A must for any extensive library.

The best book in the field of chemestry for those that are intressted ,very solid and reliable information about drug chemstry .this book has been read over and over in the world's most respetable university's and nobody ever doubt any wrong doing . Dr Alexander Shulgin is (was ) the greatest chemist and farmokologist in the last centurys .he was the genius of our time .

Very rarely would one find a scientific journal worthy of study. This is one. It is jam packed with experiments, observations, thoughts and procedures related to the chemistry of mind altering substances. As I am not a chemist, I glossed over the more technical aspects of the work, but as an Engineer, I was "blown Away" by the methodology and unique perspective. In his own way, he is a trail blazer and a real inventor. A person who like Telsa, Bell, and Howard Huges persued a dream of discovery and exploration. He used his scientific training to forge ahead where other fear to tread, and he makes light of it in such an off hand way. THis book is an INSPIRATION to any BUDDING young CHEMIST. I found myself wishing to take night classes in Chemistry after reading this book. It is that powerful!

What's amazing about the Shulgins is their ability to isolate the nuances that make drugs like MDMA and MDE different from one another. The separate entries at different dosage levels are not only insightful, but essential to the potential experimentor. Reading this will make anyone cautious about buying what is considered "ecstasy" by the current youth culture.
The Chemistry is beyond me, but it's still fascinating. Buying this book is worth being put on any government list. Yes, it's that good.

This book is divided into two halves. The first half is the story of Shulgin's life, from childhood to modern times. It is a moving and beautiful tale of one man's attempt to make sense of the world and his place in it. Intertwined in this personal experience is a budding love affair with a woman who could only be rated as amazing.
The second half consists of Shulgin's recipes and notes on the synthesis of every compound in the Phenethylamine category that he has ever made.
Overall, this book will change the way you feel about psychedelics, and the reasons that people use them. The story is at times inspiring, at times heartbreaking, and always genuine. Highly recommended as an introduction to the spirituality behind psychedelics and some of the issues involved with them.

The first half of this book is excellent. It tells us about the chemists life and how he discovered exciting new drugs. It also tells us about his experiences taking them.
The second half is terrible. It is written by his wife and it is a love story. She has to be the most pathetic person I have ever come across. I don't know how anyone can be so needy and insecure. The amount of times I cringed at her "inner thoughts" (written in italics in the book). Agh. It really ruined the book.
Overall, I recommend this book because the first half is so good. Maybe I'm too cynical and you might enjoy the second half, but I doubt it...

I thought this book very infomative and educational.
It gives great insight to DR.Shulgin & his wifes life work.
A must read for any aspiring chemist.
This book cuts away all the propaganda surrounding many of these recreational compounds and chemicals. The facts and nothing else.
Educate yourself, knowledge is always your friend.

No psychedelic library is complete without PIHKAL. Some day in the future, when it may again be acceptable to use chemical tools to study the mind, this book will be a treasure-house, a sort of sorcerer's book of spells, to delight and enchant the psychiatrist / shaman of tomorrow.

The only useful part of this book is the catalogue of chemical syntheses in the second half of the book. It is important to have this information documented and available, either in a single volume like this book or scattered through the scientific literature. Whether buying this book for the collection of synthesis is worth it to you is entirely up to you.

That being said, I must say that I find this book almost entirely useless and pointless. Yes, I like knowing how to synthesize these substances (and I suspect that I'm in a minority when it comes to those who've read this book in that I understand the syntheses). I also want to know how these drugs work. How are they metabolized? What receptors do they bind to? PIHKAL offers none of that information. There is no useful biochemical information in this book. I think monoamine oxidase is simply mentioned once.

I find this book very disappointing because Shulgin's scientific papers are excellent and this book offers almost no insight into psychedelic drugs. The first and second parts of the book aren't linked together in an interesting way. The collection of syntheses in the second part is just that: a collection of syntheses with some notes on effects when the substance was ingested by volunteers and a few asides.

Shulgin summarizes some of the empirical findings regarding structure and activity (eg. '. . . an ethyl group here makes this compound last longer. . .' or '. . . this analogue is more of a stimulant, while the parent compound is more hallucinogenic . . .') but that's it. There is almost no hypothesizing about why these structural relationships are observed. Not even a guess about how a structural change might result in altered metabolism or increased affinity at one receptor or anything like that. Nothing about how enzymes work on these drugs; receptor binding; the blood-brain barrier; metabolic products; receptor action and secondary messengers.

Reading this book will tell you almost nothing about psychedelic drugs and that is why I think this book isn't very good. You will not understand anything about how or why psychedelics work. You won't even remotely understand the general principles of phenethylamine-derivative synthesis unless you already have a working knowledge of organic chemistry.

If you are looking for a book that will give you some idea of how the brain and psychedelic drugs interact to produce such amazing experiences, then this is NOT the book for you. If you're hoping for a book that might tell the story of how a pharmacologist got interested in psychedelics, trying to blaze the trails into psychedelic research with all his hopes of what these substances might do for us or tell us about the brain then you'll be disappointed. Nothing in this book to shed light on how these drugs produce some of the most profound alterations in consciousness.

Part I could have been very inspiring, but it wasn't. I think that so many of the things that make the chemistry of psychedelic drugs fascinating were overlooked (and I suspect that Shulgin finds many of those things fascinating). Part I (Shulgin's life) and part II (syntheses and tests with compounds) could have been linked in very interesting and inspiring ways. Life and consciousness depend on chemical reactions. Psychedelics alter those processes, sometimes to make us aware of our limited perspectives, the beauty of a simple object, the hilarity of the fact that life is finite and that we worry about the inevitable. I got no sense of wonder from the author - something that might inspire young people to get into chemistry or current chemists to think about psychedelics again. Instead, part I is relatively uninteresting and part II is just a collection of syntheses, with a few interesting facts thrown into the discussions.

Ultimately, the only part of the book that I find valuable is part 2, but even as a drug-using chemist with a long-time interest in psychedelics, the value of part 2 (for me) is simply knowing that I have the information readily available.

PIHKAL contains very little useful or interesting information about psychedelic phenethylamine-derivatives.

After reading this book I felt inspired to take a chemistry class. Now that I have taken one I have decided to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals. After reading this book I was awakened to another world.

Only people who already use psychedelics could actually like this book. The first parts (the story parts) are horribly written. Dr. Shulgin sees fit to add the line, "And he's a good friend to this day" after he introduces anyone. Ann Shulgin's part is no better. The part where she describes her first use of Peyote is so contrived she might as well have lifted the dailogue from a 50's propoganda film. The story they tell could be interesting if they could actually write, but sadly they can't. Each chapter, a chemical is picked, and they write the story about it. Sometimes, Dr. Shulgin even describes its effects. This is so obviously some fan service for the users who read it, because the effects sound in no way enticing. If you're looking for an entertaing read, look elsewhere. If you're looking to learn about psychedelics, look elsewhere. The final part of the book, the recipe collection is quite useless unless you're a chemist who knows how to get those compounds and make them. Don't let anyone say different, he doesn't teach you how to trip off of the nutmeg in your kitchen. If you already do psychedelics, this book will just reinforce all that you believe. This book would've been better if Dr and Ann Shulgin could write, and if they weren't so dogged in trying to convince that psychedelics are good for us.