In April 1960, a Dow Chemicals biochemist named Alexander Shulgin consumed 400mg of a compound called mescaline, and had his first psychedelic experience. He saw “hundreds of nuances of color” that he had never seen before. “The world amazed me,” Shulgin later wrote. “I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me.” He found the encounter so extraordinary, that he dedicated the rest of his life to uncovering the secrets that psychedelic chemistry could contain.

“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit,” Shulgin recalled. “We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.” However, it struck him as curious why scant work had been done on compounds, known as phenethylamines, which are similar to mescaline—the psychedelic derived from peyote that was first isolated in 1897. The trip, “unquestionably confirmed the entire direction” of his life, he wrote in his 1991 classic PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. “I had found my learning path.”

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