TiHKAL

TiHKAL is a 1997 book written by Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin about a family of psychoactive drugs known as tryptamines. A sequel to PiHKAL, the full title of the book is Tryptamines I Have Known And Loved: The Continuation.

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TiHKAL, much like its predecessor PiHKAL, is divided into two parts. The first part is a fictionalized autobiography, continuing where PiHKAL left off, but it then continues into a collection of essays. These essays range from psychotherapy and the Jungian mind to the prevalence of DMT in nature, ayahuasca and the War on Drugs. The second part of TiHKAL is a detailed synthesis manual for 55 psychedelic compounds (many discovered by Alexander Shulgin), with dosages, chemical structure and qualitative comments.

Like PiHKAL, the Shulgins were motivated to release the synthesis information as a way to protect the public's access to information about psychedelic compounds, a goal Alexander Shulgin has noted many times.^[1] Following a raid of his laboratory in 1994 by the United States DEA,^[2] Richard Meyer, spokesman for DEA's San Francisco Field Division, stated that "It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books." This attitude emphasized Shulgin's need to release the information to ensure its preservation, and led to the release of TiHKAL and his other publications.

See also

• PiHKAL, the 1991 book by the same authors, on phenethylamines.

Notes