Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin spent his career synthesizing psychedelic compounds in a backyard lab near San Francisco, testing many on himself and his wife Ann before writing up the results in notebooks that became the basis for the underground manuals PIHKAL and TIHKAL. The film traces how a Dow Chemical patent bonus funded his independence, how he rediscovered and popularized MDMA before it was criminalized, and how the DEA eventually raided his lab and revoked his license. Interviews with Ann Shulgin, colleagues, and former DEA officials sit alongside archival photographs and lab footage, building a portrait of a chemist who saw psychedelics as tools for psychological insight rather than recreation. The couple's decades-long marriage and shared research partnership run through the film as a counterweight to the legal and scientific controversy surrounding his work. By the end, Shulgin appears less as an outlaw chemist than as a meticulous, self-taught scientist caught between his own curiosity and a drug war that had no place for it.