Altered States: Self-Experiments in Chemistry (2012)

- The chemistry of pyrotechnics and explosives

- The chemistry of mind-altering substances

I had both of these bugs in my late teens and early twenties. For mind-altering substances I wasn't personally interested in get-rich-quick or get-high-quick, but drug prohibition offended me on an axiomatic level. I spent a lot of time in the library looking for ideas that would circumvent government precursor control for various drugs, and shared my findings with other like-minded people on the late, great Hive: https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org/forum/forums.pl

I never actually synthesized any controlled substances, but it was a great thrill finding ways to walk up to the line. (Eventually I gave this up and I suggest that others not follow in my footsteps, unless you have really strong incentives. Just collecting literature and synthesizing theoretical precursors to scheduled drugs is a great way to end up in legal trouble in the US, even if you're carefully avoiding making the drugs themselves.)

In terms of mindset, government control of drugs and their precursors is somewhat analogous to DRM for molecules instead of data, with amateur psychonauts playing the role of circumvention software authors. I actually met a few clandestine chemists who had been involved with the Amiga demo scene before they started investigating drugs. I lost contact with the clandestine chemistry scene, even as an observer, about 6 years ago. Like DRM cracking it also unfortunately attracted people who were interested in transforming the discoveries of passionate amateurs into pure profit.

I wonder sometimes if ever-more-draconian government reactions to unauthorized synthesis of explosives and drugs are going to constrict the pipeline delivering passionate chemists, as new generations are born who never knew what you could try before the War on Drugs or War on Terror. But it probably won't come up for a while. When I got out of chemistry and into software it was because the field was dramatically over-supplied relative to available research jobs.

There is a very rich and ancient history of drug use for sacred, ritual, and what could be anachronistically termed therapeutic drug use, and Saks seems to have been either uninformed or not interested in any of that. He seemed to have just used drugs for kicks mostly (or to fall asleep). I find that rather sad.

The closest Saks gets to constructive use of drugs is towards the end of the article, when he says "in the hope of whipping up these intellectual and emotional excitements even further, I turned to amphetamines."

It is interesting that Saks was rewarded in this last experiment with the inspiration for the start of his remarkable writing career.