They came by the hundreds to Berkeley this past weekend to pay their respects to the man they called Sasha—the Berkeley-bred chemist nicknamed the Godfather of Psychedelics. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a controversial iconoclast who pioneered the use of psychedelics for self discovery and synthesized Ecstasy in the 1970s and some 200 variations of it in his lifetime, died of cancer on June 2 at age 88.