What I Learned About MDMA on The Farm
Inside a women's psychedelic gathering at Shulgin Farm, what MDMA and women's health research still gets wrong, and where it's catching up.
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MDMA and Women’s Health: Lessons From Shulgin Farm
What you’ll learn in this post:
Who Sasha and Ann Shulgin were, beyond the psychedelic-culture shorthand
Why Ann’s therapeutic frameworks may matter more to today’s clinical trials than Sasha’s chemistry
What the Shulgin Foundation is building at the Farm now, and why it isn’t a museum
Why “classical psychedelic” is a contested term, and what that has to do with MDMA and women’s health
Where cycle tracking helps women self-knowledge, and where it stops being data
What’s happening with ketamine-assisted therapy for postpartum depression research
A load-bearing takeaway on what these medicines actually ask of the people using them
There is a dusty stone path at Shulgin Farm that runs from the main house down the hill to a two hundred square foot lab. You walk it slowly, not because you’re told to, but because something about the place makes you want to. Cacti along the way and everywhere. The lab is a small building where a chemist named Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin spent four decades synthesizing more psychoactive compounds than any human being in history.
I moderated Psychedelics & the Whole Self: A Gathering for Womxn at that farm this past weekend. I still haven’t fully come down from it, partly because of the specificity of the place, and partly because of the full circle moment that it represents in my life, having been introduced to “Ecstasy” on Valentine’s Day 1998 during my final year of undergrad at the University of Virginia.
Who were Sasha and Ann Shulgin?
Sasha Shulgin wasn’t a countercultural figure who stumbled into psychedelics. He had a PhD in biochemistry from Berkeley, a stint at Dow Chemical, and a DEA license that allowed him to legally possess and synthesize Schedule I compounds for research on the same property where he lived. In 1976 he resynthesized MDMA, a molecule that had existed since 1912 but had never been studied for its psychological effects, and introduced it to a small circle of therapists who believed it could do something for their patients that talk alone couldn’t.
His wife Ann was the other half of that work, and arguably the more consequential half for anyone who cares about psychedelic-assisted therapy as it exists today. She was a lay therapist who conducted, by The Shulgin Foundation’s count, over 4,000 guided sessions in that same house, developing frameworks for how to hold a room, how to prepare someone, and how to help them integrate afterward that predate almost everything the current clinical trials are trying to formalize. Sasha mapped the molecules. Ann mapped what a person does with them once they’re inside the experience. Together they wrote PiHKAL and TiHKAL, two books that read as chemistry logs crossed with confession, and that remain the closest thing this field has to primary source material.
The lab was raided by the DEA in 1994, but Sasha kept working. He died in 2014. Ann died in 2022. Their daughter Wendy Tucker now chairs the Shulgin Foundation, which is trying to do something that sounds simple and is not: keep the property from disappearing while turning it into a place where the next generation of this work will continue to evolve.
🎙️ Listen to this episode featuring Stephanie Karzon Abrams
What it means that The Foundation is renovating Shulgin Farm
Megan Bowers, the Shulgin Foundation’s Executive Director, closed our event with something that stuck with me. She noted that the boards and training programs shaping the psychedelic therapy field right now sat at the farm with Ann and Sasha, learning directly from them, before any of it had a clinical name.
The Foundation isn’t building a museum; rather, it's making the property more conducive to holding gatherings where people doing serious work with these medicines find each other. Reverence without use is how you lose a legacy. Sasha and Ann’s whole method was hands-on, and The Foundation seems to understand that honoring them means keeping hands on the work, not roping it off.
What actually happened in that room
Stephanie Karzon Abrams opened with a mini course on GALILEA, her hormone-aware, psychedelic-informed framework for women’s care, and what struck me was how much of the Q&A that followed circled back to a single problem: women don’t have good language for their own cycles, let alone for how those cycles interact with a nervous system that’s also processing a psychedelic experience.
One woman asked, half joking, where each substance would go if we planted them in a garden. carrots here, ketamine there. I could not understand what she was asking because I got stuck on how to group the medicine - by symptom relief, duration, life phase? Essentially, she was asking for a taxonomy that doesn’t yet exist, one organized by how a compound actually meets a woman’s body and cycle rather than by chemical class.
In attendance was Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose work on giving MDMA to octopus in the room, pushed back on the term “classical psychedelic” itself. Her argument is that the phrase was coined by pharmacologists who wanted to prioritize receptor binding, psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, as the mechanism that matters, while sidelining ketamine, MDMA, and ibogaine, none of which work through the same serotonin receptor. Her point wasn’t semantic. It’s that reductionist language- dopamine is reward, serotonin is social, oxytocin is the love hormone- makes it harder to convince regulators that these medicines require the container, the guide, the integration, not just the molecule. Ann Shulgin, incidentally, was making that same argument from that same property fifty years ago, just without the neuroscience vocabulary to back it up yet.
Melissa Whippo, who runs the KAP clinic at CIIS and founded Deva Collective to research psychedelics specifically in women’s health, shared more about the exciting study that she and Stephanie are moving forward with: ketamine-assisted therapy for post-partum depression. She also spelled out the pros and cons of cycle tracking apps. True, they give us a curve, and are rigorous enough to be self-knowledge, but they’re not rigorous enough to be data. That gap between what we can measure and what we can know about our own bodies is at the heart of GALILEA’s focus on The Wide Body: Without relying on data exclusively, how can a woman begin to feel into her needs?
We closed with an eye-gazing exercise between strangers, and after the first 60-seconds of terror, attendees settled into the beauty of silence and connection.
Why the Farm is the right place for this conversation
Sasha spent his career proving that a molecule’s effects can be studied, cataloged, understood. Ann spent hers proving that understanding the molecule is just the beginning and - for most - likely the least significant detail of MDMA. Every woman in that room, whether she was a neuroscientist, a therapist, or someone hearing the word GALILEA for the first time, was working on some version of the same question Ann spent four thousand sessions sitting with: not what does this substance do, but what do I do with what it shows me?
Take care,
April
Frequently asked questions
What did Sasha and Ann Shulgin actually contribute to psychedelic research? Sasha was the chemist who resynthesized MDMA in 1976 and mapped its molecular effects. Ann was the therapist who developed frameworks for preparing someone for a session and supporting them afterward, running thousands of guided sessions from the same property. Many of the practices now being formalized in modern clinical trials trace back to her work.
What is the Shulgin Foundation doing with the Farm today? The Foundation is renovating the property, adding infrastructure such as bathrooms, a kitchen, and event space, so the Farm can continue hosting gatherings for people actively working in the field, rather than becoming a static historical site.
Why do some researchers object to the term “classical psychedelic”? The term was coined to emphasize receptor binding, prioritizing compounds like psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline while sidelining MDMA, ketamine, and ibogaine, which act through different mechanisms. Critics argue this framing understates how much the therapeutic container, not just the molecule, matters for outcomes.
Is there active research on MDMA or ketamine for women’s health conditions? Yes. Melissa Whippo of Deva Collective and Stephanie Karzon Abrams are developing a study on ketamine-assisted therapy for postpartum depression. This sits within a broader gap in psychedelic research: most trials have not centered women’s hormonal cycles or life stages.
Are cycle tracking apps useful for understanding how psychedelics affect women differently? They offer a helpful curve for self-knowledge, but current tracking tools aren’t rigorous enough to count as clinical data. That gap between personal insight and measurable evidence is part of what frameworks like GALILEA are trying to address.
Wonderful post April!
Great post April / really appreciate the history and where we are today and where we hope to go in terms of research on how women’s hormones play into psychedelic assisted therapy.