I'm not claiming that doing what Shulgin did was harmless. I was replying to an anecdote of one with a comparable anecdote of one.

With this kind of super-heavy use of novel psychoactive substances, there really can never be anything but anecdotes. We'll never see double-blind studies of large groups of people taking all the substances that the Shulgins took over their lifetimes, so anecdotes are all we have.