Program Recordings

Discover the untold story of Timothy Leary’s archives and the women who helped preserve psychedelic history.

Recorded live at Shulgin Farm, this conversation features Denis Berry and Maria Mangini exploring the hidden labor, personal relationships, and decades of persistence behind the preservation of one of the most important collections in modern psychedelic history.

As president of Timothy Leary’s Futique Trust, Denis Berry became responsible for helping protect and steward hundreds of boxes containing letters, manuscripts, photographs, recordings, scrapbooks, personal documents, and artifacts from Leary’s life and the wider psychedelic movement. Her work helped bring the Timothy Leary archive to the New York Public Library, where these materials could be preserved and made available to researchers, historians, and future generations.

Berry shares how she unexpectedly met Timothy Leary, her memories of his final years, and her friendship with Rosemary Woodruff Leary, with whom she lived for much of a decade. She also recounts the long and uncertain process of finding an institutional home for Leary’s archive and the extraordinary materials that were almost lost along the way.

In conversation with Maria Mangini of The Shulgin Foundation and the Women’s Visionary Council, Berry examines a larger question: Who preserves psychedelic history when the people doing the most important work were never formally recognized?

This Oral Histories Series event explores:

- Timothy Leary’s personal archives and psychedelic legacy
- Denis Berry’s leadership within the Futique Trust
- Rosemary Woodruff Leary’s life and underground history
- The New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary collection
- Women’s overlooked contributions to the psychedelic movement
- The preservation of letters, manuscripts, photographs, and physical archives
- The historical importance of the Shulgin Farm
- How prohibition and criminalization created gaps in psychedelic history
- Why oral histories from psychedelic elders must be recorded now
- How communities can protect the legacies of researchers, guides, activists, and underground practitioners

Much of twentieth-century psychedelic history was never formally documented. Some records were hidden, scattered, destroyed, or never created because the people involved faced surveillance, imprisonment, professional consequences, and social stigma. Oral history therefore offers an essential way to recover the stories that paper archives cannot tell.

This conversation is part of The Shulgin Foundation’s Oral Histories Series, which documents the missing decades of psychedelic practice and honors the elders, mentors, archivists, and community members who carried this knowledge forward.

Explore the chemistry of LSD, lysergamides, ergot alkaloids, and psychedelic science with chemist Paul Daley, protégé of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin.

In Part 2 of the Shulgin Foundation’s Psychedelic Chemistry Basics series, Daley examines the scientific and historical foundations of lysergamides, the family of compounds that includes LSD and naturally occurring ergot alkaloids.

Speaking from the laboratory at Shulgin Farm, where Sasha Shulgin conducted much of his pioneering psychedelic chemistry research, Daley explains how lysergamides are structured, how they interact with serotonin receptors, and why these compounds have produced both extraordinary medical discoveries and profound chapters in human history.

The presentation follows the story of ergot from its role in historical outbreaks of poisoning to its medicinal use in childbirth, migraine treatment, pharmaceutical development, and the eventual discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories.

Daley also explores the early history of LSD research, its use in psychiatry, the effects of drug prohibition on psychedelic science, and the contemporary study of LSD analogues and related lysergamide compounds.

Topics covered include:

- LSD chemistry and the lysergamide family
- The chemical structure of lysergic acid compounds
- Ergot fungi and naturally occurring ergot alkaloids
- How LSD interacts with serotonin receptors
- Why LSD produces such long-lasting effects
- The history of ergot poisoning and St. Anthony’s Fire
- Historical medical uses of ergot compounds
- Albert Hofmann and the discovery of LSD
- Sandoz Laboratories and early psychedelic research
- LSD-assisted psychotherapy and alcoholism research
- Military and intelligence interest in LSD
- Morning glory seeds and naturally occurring lysergamides
- Ergot cultivation and pharmaceutical production
- LSD analogues, prodrugs, and emerging lysergamide research
- LSD purity, iso-LSD, receptor binding, migraines, and cluster headaches

About Paul Daley

Paul Daley is a chemist, researcher, and protégé of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin. He is the co-founder, Chief Science Officer, and Chemist at the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute. He has managed the laboratory at Shulgin Farm for nearly two decades, preserving and extending an important legacy of psychedelic chemistry, scientific inquiry, and public education.

About the Series

Psychedelic Chemistry Basics is a three-part educational series presented by the Shulgin Foundation.

Mariavittoria Mangini, known to many as Maria, is a nurse-midwife, scholar, psychedelic historian, and longtime advocate for the preservation of underground psychedelic knowledge. Maria’s life intersects with several crucial streams of modern psychedelic history: early LSD culture in the Bay Area and at Millbrook, the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, Esalen in the 1970s, the work of Stanislav Grof, the emergence of midwifery and nursing as practices of care, and the long, complicated passage from psychedelic prohibition into the current renaissance.

In this conversation, we explore:

- Maria’s first encounter with LSD as a teenager.
- The strange mixture of recklessness and reverence that shaped early psychedelic exploration.
- Her years at Esalen and her encounters with figures such as Stanislav Grof, Gregory Bateson, Leo Zeff, and others.
- The relationship between birth, death and psychedelic experience.
- Her doctoral work, Yes, Mom Took Acid, and what long-term psychedelic users told her about social responsibility, and care for the larger world.
- Her work in medical cannabis, and what today’s psychedelic movement might learn from the successes and failures of cannabis legalization.
- The founding of the Women’s Visionary Council.
- Her relationship with Ann and Sasha Shulgin, whose partnership helped shape the modern psychedelic imagination.

Ketamine: The Promise & Peril brings together clinicians and journalists for a thoughtful discussion on one of the most complex substances in contemporary mental health and psychedelic care.

At once an anesthetic, a therapeutic tool, and a substance with real risks of misuse and dependency, ketamine occupies a unique and often poorly defined place in medicine and culture. In this panel, Howard Kornfeld, MD, and Will Barone, PsyD, moderated by Annie Oak, examine ketamine’s clinical promise alongside its medical, psychological, ethical, and societal risks.

Topics explored in this conversation include:

- ketamine’s therapeutic potential in psychiatry, trauma care, pain treatment, and recovery
- the differences between structured ketamine-assisted care and unsupervised use
- addiction risk, dependency patterns, and “therapeutic self-medication”
- ketamine-induced cystitis and other harms associated with frequent use
- prescriber responsibility, overuse, and the risks of low-oversight treatment models
- black market ketamine, adulteration concerns, and harm reduction in social settings
- preparation, integration, frequency, and what responsible ketamine care can look like

This panel invites a balanced and honest conversation about ketamine in its full reality: a substance with genuine healing potential, real peril, and many grey areas in between.

Panelists:

Howard Kornfeld, MD — a Diplomate in Pain Medicine, recognized by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine
Will Barone, PsyD — a Clinical Psychologist based in Oakland, CA who has focused his career on researching and implementing psychedelic-assisted therapies to improve the treatment of mental health conditions
Moderator: Annie Oak — psychedelic journalist and event producer based in San Francisco, CA Q&A.

In Part 1 of our 3-part Psychedelic Chemistry Basics series, chemist Paul Daley offers a rich introduction to the history, structure, and significance of phenethylamines—the compound class at the heart of many of Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin’s most important contributions to psychedelic chemistry. Protégé of Sasha Shulgin and steward of the Shulgin lab, Paul begins with a broad historical overview before exploring the chemistry of phenethylamines, including their relationship to mescaline, their role in the history of psychedelic science, and how structural changes can influence activity, duration, and effects. The session also includes discussion of entactogens, receptor science, and a live audience Q&A.

In this intimate class, Dr. Paul Daley, latter-day colleague and sidekick of the legendary psychedelic chemist, Sasha Shulgin, guides us through the groundbreaking work Shulgin did in the realm of novel tryptamine chemistry, sharing insights into how his discoveries have shaped the field and where they might take us in the future. If anyone has had the pleasure of a whiteboard chemistry lesson from Paul, tucked by the fireplace in Sasha's old lab, you know how special it feels to be an audience to his curiosity and wonder. This is a rare opportunity to learn from someone who learned from Sasha himself.

In this intimate class, Dr. Paul Daley, latter-day colleague and sidekick of the legendary psychedelic chemist, Sasha Shulgin, guides us through the groundbreaking work Shulgin did in the realm of novel tryptamine chemistry, sharing insights into how his discoveries have shaped the field and where they might take us in the future. If anyone has had the pleasure of a whiteboard chemistry lesson from Paul, tucked by the fireplace in Sasha's old lab, you know how special it feels to be an audience to his curiosity and wonder. This is a rare opportunity to learn from someone who learned from Sasha himself.

Many interesting and useful compounds are found in plants. In this session, Dr. Paul Daley addresses basic chemistry relevant to isolating these materials through plant extraction, cleanup of crude preparations, compound separation, and analytical detection. Important concepts include the nature of partitioning between phases (immiscible liquid pairs, stationary and moving liquid phases, and liquid and moving vapor phases), used routinely in cleanup and chromatography.

Much of psychedelic history has been erased, forgotten, or never formally recorded — clandestine out of necessity. At this gathering at Shulgin Farm, we took the opportunity to talk about lost information in the archives, to honor the missing decades of underground practice, and to recognize the women and elders who have carried this wisdom forward. This intimate AMA featured Adele Getty and Maria Mangini, two longtime contributors to the psychedelic movement whose lives and work illuminate the sacredness of community care.

Shulgin Foundation‬ hosted neuroscientist Dr. Gül Dölen and Joe Dolce, author of Modern Psychedelics: The Handbook for Mindful Exploration, for an eye-opening talk on Dr. Dölen’s research, which is changing how we think about psychedelics and their effects on the brain. Her early work showed that even octopuses become more social on MDMA, suggesting these effects go back millions of years. More recent studies suggest psychedelics could reopen "critical periods" in the brain—windows when we’re especially open to learning. They explore how this science could shape new treatments for conditions like depression, addiction, and PTSD, and what it might tell us about consciousness itself.