It seems that legal high inventor Dr Z wasn’t the first person to dabble in drugs they made in the lab. Here are some other psychonauts who did the same. Philippa Skett
Read more in our interview with Dr Z: “My recreational drugs can defeat organised crime”
Alexander Shulgin
This American psychopharmacologist died on 2 June 2014 at the age of 88. , Shulgin synthesised and tested more than 200 psychoactive compounds, many of them on himself. Despite working for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he would synthesise many of the compounds in his own makeshift lab behind his home in California.
(Image: Brian Snyder/Corbis)
Correction, 13 August 2014: When this article was published yesterday, it stated that Shulgin was still alive.
John C. Lilly
Another veteran of the tried-and-self-tested method of research, Lilly was particularly interested in the nature of consciousness, which, oddly, he investigated using a combination of dolphins and psychedelic drug use. After obtaining a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942, Lilly began using isolation tanks to induce sensory deprivation – testing them out on himself first, of course. And by the 1960s he was taking LSD and ketamine while in isolation tanks, or in the company of dolphins. Perhaps he thought this was a good strategy for starting conversation: he was especially , and hoped to build a “future communications laboratory” where humans and dolphins would chat in a floating living room.
(Image: Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis)
Humphry Osmond
A psychiatrist, Osmond is , and also for , a hallucinogen produced in the brain, that .
After serving as a surgeon-lieutenant in the British navy during the second world war, he worked as psychiatrist in Saskatchewan, Canada, where he co-authored the , the theory that increasing the levels of adrenochrome within the brain can induce schizophrenic symptoms. He then went on to experiment with LSD and hallucinogenic treatments to help rehabilitate alcoholics.
(Image: Ed Maker/The Denver Post, MediaNews Group)
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy, a chemist from Cornwall in the UK, is best known as the inventor of the miner’s safety lamp, although he also dabbled in electro-chemistry to isolate many novel chemicals. In the summer of 1799, he began experimenting on himself to , or laughing gas. Soon he had started a trend in his social circles of inhaling the stuff at parties. Nitrous oxide was later found to be a powerful and effective anaesthetic.
(Image: Wellcome Library, London)
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary was an American psychologist and writer who was a . While lecturing on clinical psychology at Harvard he led the Harvard Psilocybin Project with his colleague Dr Richard Alpert, which involved them and others , such as those found in magic mushrooms. Some people raised concerns about the legitimacy and safety of the trials, and Leary and Alpert were fired. Never one to toe the line, Leary was arrested during the 1960s and 1970s enough times that he reportedly saw the inside of 29 prisons, with President Nixon at one point describing him as
(Image: Mark J. Terrill/PA/AP)
Albert Hoffman
Albert Hoffman was a Swiss scientist, who, by accident, was the first person to synthesise, ingest and experience the effects of LSD and the magic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin. In 1943, while working in a laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, he accidently absorbed some LSD through his fingertips. He then went on to perform further self-experiments to determine the effects of LSD, modifying the doses to determine just how much can be taken safely.
(Image: Keystone/Getty)
Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner
A pharmacist, back in 1805. When other chemists expressed disbelief at his report, he decided to persuade them with a public experiment on himself and three other friends, proving that the morphine he had isolated was indeed the chemical that gave opium its properties. Soon after this display, morphine became widely used.
(Image: DNB)
