MICHAEL MARTIN: How did you feel about how you’re portrayed in the documentary?

ANN SHULGIN: I was just very sad that the whole thing wasn’t done after I lost 35 pounds. I think they did a great job. I very much enjoyed it. Of course, Sasha is almost blind, so he couldn’t very well see what’s on the screen.

SASHA SHULGIN: It’s probably just as well.

MARTIN: Sasha, it’s your birthday today. How are you going to celebrate?

SASHA: Live ’til 86.

MARTIN: Are you going to do any experimenting?

SASHA: Oh, no, no.

ANN: No time for that. People are dropping in.

SASHA: Morning, afternoon, the whole thing . . . So no getting into outer space, no way.

MARTIN: In the film, you seem to have a large social circle. Who are those people who are always hanging out at the house?

SASHA: [laughs] You handle that one, Ann.

ANN: There are a lot of people in the world who are interested in the action of these materials. And I don’t know how many people have come up to Sasha, or to both of us, and said, “You’ve changed my life.” Many have found perhaps they were in a state of severe depression, and they’ve taken MDMA.

SASHA: We haven’t changed their lives—they’ve changed their own lives.

ANN: And MDMA helped them gain access to parts of themselves that they hadn’t been able to open up before. It’s a very important experience for a lot of people. We have friends who don’t use psychoactive materials but who are still interested in how the brain works and psychology and spiritual training. It’s a very large and very intelligent bunch of people. We have two big parties each year where people bring food and drink and get to know each other. It makes a very good party.

SASHA: We have two rules: One is that you can’t come before noon. The other rule is you can stay as long as you want.

MARTIN: When you take MDMA, are you still able to discover new parts of yourselves?

ANN: We don’t take it now. It’s a scheduled drug [categorized as a Schedule 1 drug, which, according to the DEA, has no medical use and a high potential for abuse], so we don’t take it.

SASHA: Scheduling of drugs is a government problem, not our problem. They want to schedule something, that’s their problem. My feeling of creation is to make new drugs. They’re new drugs, so they’re unscheduled. They’ve never been made before.

ANN: We don’t have any scheduled drugs in the lab or house. We are always aware that the DEA is very interested and very hostile, and so we have no intention of doing anything that would tempt them to invade us again.