Welcome to Three Questions, a series where we invite Shulgin Foundation board members, advisors, supporters, and friends to share their reflections on the legacy of Sasha and Ann Shulgin and the work we’re building together. These conversations offer glimpses into the hearts and minds of those carrying this remarkable legacy forward.
In this conversation, we hear from Maria Mangini, PhD, FNP, a Shulgin Foundation board member, psychedelic researcher, and founder of the Women’s Visionary Council who has spent decades studying the cultural and scientific impact of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
1. As the Shulgin Foundation works to preserve the legacy of the Shulgins while building new programs and community, what aspects of their approach to knowledge-sharing and relationship do you believe are most essential to carry forward? What might be lost if we don’t pay attention?
One outstanding aspect of the Shulgin legacy is Ann and Sasha’s unique co-equal research partnership — a combination of expertise in empirical science with extraordinary insight and sensitivity in the humanities.
There are certainly a few other partner pairs who have worked as coequals in this field: the development of Holotropic Breathwork by Stan and Christina Grof comes to mind, as does the joint work of Michael and Annie Mithoefer. Another excellent example is Valentina and Gordon Wasson, whose partnership is not seen as clearly because Valentina unfortunately predeceased Gordon soon after their research and publications started to appear, but it was Valentina’s enthusiasm for mushrooms that catalyzed all of their important work.
With Ann and Sasha, partnership is more visible, as they were able to manifest this mingling of skills and talents by producing PIKHAL and TIKHAL. Their love story became an enduring attractant for those of us who might not otherwise search out the richness of Sasha’s chemical knowledge exhibited in these books, while those who would research the chemistry details are also introduced to the way that affection, kindness, and sensitivity animated their lives and life around the Shulgin farm.
2. The Shulgin Foundation bridges multiple communities—researchers, therapists, chemists, artists, doulas, educators, advocates, and so many more. Drawing on your experience in both clinical nursing and visionary community spaces, how do you see the Foundation contributing to conversations about the relationship between medical models and other ways of understanding healing and transformation?
After decades of suppression and derision, it has been almost miraculous to see the discourse around the beneficial potentials of psychedelics be reopened in my lifetime. It is possible that people who did not live through that time don’t appreciate how difficult it was to start this conversation. Emphasizing psychedelics’ therapeutic uses, particularly in highly sympathetic populations (like dying patients or returning soldiers with PTSD), allowed our society generally to get past the closed-mindedness about psychedelics that prevailed during the second half of the 20th century.
That conversation has been remarkably successful, but it does tend to absorb all the attention that is presently being paid to psychedelic use, and it is possible that some people who are aware of psychedelic research and therapy are not acquainted with the potential of psychedelics to enhance creativity, catalyze spiritual transformation, and facilitate community interconnectedness and mutual support. I think it’s important to recognize that there is a multiplicity of contexts, circumstances, and reasons in which psychedelics have been used throughout history in many cultures and communities, so as not to foreclose the possibilities of those uses for ourselves.
3. You’ve been part of intergenerational psychedelic communities for 50 years. This question is about how you see knowledge, ethics, and practices being transmitted—or failing to be transmitted—across time. What responsibilities do you feel the Foundation has in this moment, as both keeper of history and incubator of future work?
As much as I am grateful for the reopening of psychedelic research in environments of academic and regulatory orthodoxy, even the remarkably useful and beautifully designed programs of research that have been done at some of the most forward-looking institutions only involve a relative handful of actual administration experiences. By contrast, thousands of administrations have taken place both as unsupervised self-experimentation and with support and guidance from individuals who are understood to be part of the “underground.” As we move forward toward a time in which the beneficial uses of psychedelics are better understood, the wisdom and experience that exists in the so-called underground is a vast watershed of information and guidance for the future. We have an opportunity to develop respect for this body of knowledge in the form of a modern and contemporary lineage of psychedelic teaching and practice that is passed down across generations and communities. For those of us who had the advantage of being part of the community around Sasha and Ann Shulgin, the nucleus of this legacy is already in place.