There is a dusty stone path at Shulgin Farm that runs from the main house down the hill to a two hundred square foot lab. You walk it slowly, not because you’re told to, but because something about the place makes you want to. Cacti along the way and everywhere. The lab is a small building where a chemist named Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin spent four decades synthesizing more psychoactive compounds than any human being in history.

I moderated Psychedelics & the Whole Self: A Gathering for Womxn at that farm this past weekend. I still haven’t fully come down from it, partly because of the specificity of the place, and partly because of the full circle moment that it represents in my life, having been introduced to “Ecstasy” on Valentine’s Day 1998 during my final year of undergrad at the University of Virginia.

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