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Written by Staff Writer
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May 22, 2007 at 07:37 PM |
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. The book is widely regarded as pioneering in the field, and is a 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 (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.
Read the full PDF here
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Last Updated ( May 22, 2007 at 07:39 PM )
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