Sunday, 2. August 2009
Topic: DRUGS - on August 2, 2009 at 11:46:00 AM CEST
The Shulgin Project – 9 minute trailer
Alexander Shulgin - chemist extraordinaire and living legend in underground drug culture - features in this new film on the unexplored potential of psychedelic drugs. Having quit his post as a senior research chemist at Dow Chemical Company in 1965, together with his wife Ann he set forth on a personal quest to design new psychoactive drugs. The lifestyle drugs market is now estimated to be worth up to $25 billion annually, providing legal treatments for conditions ranging from depression to impotence. Why should man be prevented from using other drugs, which alter his mental and physical experiences? Many have been used for centuries and others continue to be applied in therapeutic, creative, religious, exploratory, recreational and military settings. Are these drugs so innately dangerous that people need to be protected from them? Or are there other reasons? Doctors prescribing MDMA for post traumatic stress disorder and terminal cancer, military psychiatrists testing LSD on troops, chemists developing new 'designer drugs,' shamans using psychedelics to heighten spiritual awareness, multiple sclerosis sufferers self-medicating with cannabis, artists using LSD as a creative tool. Such practices are at best restricted and at worst outlawed - but what are the motives behind the regulations? Further filming is planned in the US, the UK, the rest of Europe, and South America.
