Preface to the First Edition

The whole field of psychedelics, including areas of botany, chemistry, and pharmacology, is still in a primitive state. Thousands of potential psychedelics have been synthesized which have not been tested on man, some of the more promising of which are indicated in these pages. Also, anyone conversant with contemporary advances in synthetic methods could devise better ways to synthesize most psychedelics. I have endeavored to gather here all the more useful information on the synthesis and structure activity relationships of the compounds loosely referred to as psychedelics, of which LSD, mescaline, and the active constituents of Cannabis are the most notorious prototypes. In each section, the simplest methods, or those giving the highest yields, are given first. The many synthetic routes contained in the literature, but omitted here, will usually be found to involve greater difficulty, or lower yield. Each synthesis is an abbreviated, reworded, and often translated extract from a longer paper. While I have tried to make them accurate and coherent, a fuller understanding as well as a correction of the inevitable blunders may be achieved by consulting the original papers cited. Occasionally, material will be found which is not contained in the cited work, and which is my attempt to supplement the description. Though possessing little knowledge of chemistry, I have undertaken this task because the only previous efforts of which I am aware are so dismally inadequate. It is my fondest hope that some highly skilled chemist will use the present effort as an outline in producing a thoroughly competent work on psychedelic chemistry. Such a document should significantly accelerate the psychedelic revolution.

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