The Gotliebs moved frequently: to Sicily, followed by several years in Trieste, Italy; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Santiago, Cuba; and Windsor, Ontario. After Mr. Gotlieb retired, they settled in San Francisco, where Ann took art classes and worked as a medical transcriptionist.
She made her first psychedelic trip in the early 1960s, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. “We stopped and looked around at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something emerge in the sky, something above my head,” she recalls in “PiHKAL.” “It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence.”
Her first three marriages ended in divorce. dr. Shulgin died in 2014. Along with her daughter Mrs. Tucker, she is survived by another daughter, Alice Garofalo; two sons, Christopher McRee and Brian Perry; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
After the success of “PiHKAL”, the couple wrote a second part, “TiHKAL: The Continuation” (1997). The T stands for tryptamines, including psilocybin and other hallucinogens.
While Dr. Shulgin was especially interested in drugs because of their mind-altering abilities, Ms. Shulgin valued them for allowing people to see inside.
Although she had no formal training, she considered herself a lay therapist in the Jungian tradition, incorporating ecstasy and other drugs into her practice as a way to help her clients confront repressed emotions, memories, and self-impressions.
“MDMA is an insight drug,” she said in an interview. “That is its main function. Insight without self-hatred. It allows you to truly love yourself and appreciate who you are.”
