To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Luminous: A Brief History of Getting High

Hey, it's Steve, and this is luminous, a podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics from to the best of our knowledge. It's remarkable how fast psychedelics have gone mainstream. Just look at how so many major universities are racing to set up their own psychedelic institutes. Silicidebin and MDMA are now considered the most promising treatments for depression and PTSD that we've had in decades, but this is not the first time psychoactive drugs were hailed as miracle cures. Heroine and cocaine were also once considered wonder drugs, and today what's so striking is how the public conversation about psychedelics ignores this deeper history of intoxicants. British historian Mike J. wants to challenge this narrative of psychedelic exceptionalism. In his book Psychonauts, Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, he digs into the 19th century's rich history of psychoactive experiences. He tells the story of seminal figures like Humphrey Davy, Sigmund Freud and William James, and lots of other people I've never heard of. Mike is also up front about his own

psychedelic experiences, he's had plenty of them, and he believes the scientists and doctors who study psychedelics should talk more openly about their own mind altering experiences, which is definitely not the case for most of them. I reached Mike at his home in London, and we had a really fascinating conversation. Hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Well, Mike, it seems like we are at a crossroads right now in how we think about mind altering drugs, especially psychedelics, and on the one hand, there is this really strong push to medicalize these substances, to make them safe enough for FDA approval. And yet for most of human history, there has been something very unpredictable and kind of wild about psychoactive experiences. So what do you make of this psychedelic moment that we're in right now? I think what we might call drugs, or we might be more specific and call psychedelics,

sit on a kind of cultural fault line, and I think there are two words which emerged during the 20th century. And the first is the word drugs, and that word is a product of the progressive era of the early 20th century. And from its very beginning, it had a whole bunch of negative connotations baked into it. If you look at its early uses, you can see that the words that are being alighted are dangerous drugs, addictive drugs, foreign drugs, criminal illicit drugs. We think of that now as the war on drugs, and certainly when I was growing up, I assumed it had been going on forever, so it was surprising to discover that it's actually a creation of the 20th century. And then I think in the mid -20th century, another kind of cultural mode emerged that was much more interested in introspection, interested in their experience and mystical experience, an interest in the possibility of using drugs for personal growth or for healing or

therapy or peak experiences. That was the point at which the word psychedelics emerged. In Humphrey Osman, the psychiatrist who coined that word psychedelic, he was very self -conscious about wanting to use that. He did not like the word drug because of the negative connotations and the literal meaning of psychedelic is mind revealing, which obviously is a very positive ring to it. That's right, and he and oldest Huxley, who came up with a term together, they were talking really about LSD and masculine at that point, and Huxley was very keen that it should be connected to mystical experience, to the perennial philosophy, to higher consciousness and so on. So I think we entered the 21st century with both these words and everything they entailed. It art consciousness, and we still have the war on drugs. Drugs are still written into our laws as illegal and criminal substances, but we have a much, much more vibrant conversation around the word psychedelics and the possibilities of these drugs. So coming back to this particular moment that we're in right now, I mean, in the 21st century,

psychedelic research has had this revival now for a couple of decades. Why now do you think psychedelics are so popular? I think it's a very good question. I think it's got many components. Part of it is to do with this old category of drugs within which psychedelics used to be contained, is falling apart in various ways. I think one of the reasons that the word drugs became so handy at the beginning of the 20th century was when they were criminalised, it was very clear what was a drug and what wasn't. The idea was to separate substances into good and bad, and the good you would get in your pharmacy or from a doctor, and the bad you'd have to get from the street from criminals. And I think that distinction's broken down in a 21st century where cannabis, you know, formerly marijuana is for sale everywhere, and people are starting to push forward. There's a lot of interest in psychiatry, which is sort of more or less given up on developing new mental pharmaceuticals for various reasons. And there's just been a steadily growing

subculture becoming now almost a mainstream culture, you know, with the work of people like Michael Pollan, really. So, you know, the idea of drugs and the war on drugs has weakened. He gets a bad press these days, and people are skeptical of it. Meanwhile, the power of psychedelics and the potentials and possibilities that they point to has only got stronger. So you have written a history of psychoactive substances going back roughly 200 years. Why did you focus on this period, and especially the 19th century? I've been interested in the history of drugs in the 19th century for a long time. Drugs are people recognize their dangers. You know, they have a certain amount of stigma attached to them, but by and large, they're part of mainstream culture, not least because so many of the things that we think of as drugs today, you could simply walk into a pharmacy and buy over the counter cocaine or morphine or cannabis or whatever. Which is astonishing

to think about. I mean, a lot of those drugs that we consider so dangerous, so forbidden, were once very accessible and easily obtained. That's right, and that's why I think, you know, our modern category of drugs wouldn't have made any sense in that period, because these just sat on the shelves alongside other stimulants and sedatives and analgesics. One of the things that fascinates me about this period is how widely drugs were used in science and medicine, how interested people were in the experiences that they produced. So as we now get more interested in introspection and the experiential qualities of mind -altering drugs, there's a huge literature back there, a lot of which hasn't really been looked at very much. And it's a fascinating and rich literature, because doctors in the 19th century were very good at describing things. You had to be there were no tick box diagnoses. So description was the best you could do if somebody had a cough.

You couldn't just say they had a cough. They might be 50 adjectives to describe that cough. In one reason why they were so good at describing these things is they often took these drugs themselves. I mean, there was a lot of self -experimentation going on back in the 19th century, among doctors and scientists. Yeah, so that's really, I've taken that as the central theme of my book. You know, I think it is coming at it to it cold. It is the obvious way to proceed. If you're studying a drug which has effects on the mind that alters consciousness in ways that can only be experienced by the subject, why would you not? If that was the focus of your investigation, start by experiencing it yourself. So the word that we often use today to describe people who have this interest in self -exploration is the psycho nuts, the title of your book. And that actually has a very specific origin, that word. It goes back, it was coined by the German writer Ernst Jünger in 1949. And Jünger himself is kind of a fascinating figure, you know, a mentor of Albert

Hoffman, discover of LSD. But he also had kind of a troubling history too. At one point was a Nazi sympathizer, although later he resisted at Nazi efforts to recruit him. But that in itself is sort of this fascinating moment in this history. It is fascinating. As you say, he resisted efforts to recruit him, but he also refused to submit to denultification post -war, you know, an American occupied Germany and was forbidden for publishing for a time. During that time he wrote a novel called Heliopolis, which was a futuristic novel in which a cadre of scientists specialize in synthesizing new psychoactive drugs and using them to make inner voyages into their mind and to explore their consciousness. And this cadre of scientists in the novel are called psycho nuts. And it's a term that looks forwards and backwards. It looks forward in the sense that, as you say, Jünger was the great hero and mentor to Albert Hoffman, who synthesized LSD. So through Hoffman, the word psychonaut made its

way out into the psychedelic counterculture, and which it tended to mean someone who was a rebel or a renegade or working outside of science, because obviously in our modern era, scientists don't self -experiment with their drug's institutional scientists anyway. At least they don't tell us about it. Probably a lot of them actually do, but they don't want to talk about it publicly. No, that's exactly right. And they have reasons for doing that. But I wanted to reclaim the word psychonauts and take it backwards into the 19th century, where it describes not simply renegades and rebels, although there are plenty of them, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the literary establishment. And the word that was used at the time was self -experimentar. Well, let's go back to the very beginning of the 19th century to the English chemist Humphrey Davy, certainly one of the most fascinating historical figures who experimented with nitrous

oxide. What was he trying to figure out? Humphrey Davy went on to become Sir Humphrey Davy, the president of the Royal Society and the great scientific hero of his generation. So it's really what brought him his first flush of fame. He was 20. He was very young. He was working in an institution that was synthesizing and testing gases for medical purposes. And one of the first that he synthesized was nitrous oxide, which was believed at that point to be toxic. But he inhaled a little bit of it just to see in the heroic self -experimental tradition. He found out that not only was it not toxic, but it produced an extraordinarily pleasant sensation, a wave of euphoria and a kind of tingling. He inhaled a bit more and a bit more. And eventually became unmoored from his physical consciousness and earned himself in this disembodied universe composed of thoughts and ideas. And came back absolutely fascinated his mind full of questions about what this meant.

How could it be that some drug that has just been synthesized in a laboratory, not known in nature as far as he knew? How could this affect not just the autonomous physical system, but these higher functions of mind, things like happiness and creativity and the sort of sense of spiritual revelation. This was at this time, this was thought to be by most people to be God -given. So he was fascinated, wanted to explore further and he was very fortunate to have a group of friends in Bristol who were ideally suited as volunteers who included the young romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Sothe. He synthesized the gas and had salons where everybody inhaled it and he asked everybody to describe briefly the sensation. As he said, he was looking for a language of feeling. He said, this is this wonderful extraordinary sensation. I'm like anything else. It's a whole new type of consciousness, but it's

incredibly hard to bring this message back to find words for it. And in a way, it was rather like the romantic poet's own project of finding new words to describe new feelings and sensations. Well, it is very striking that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was one of the founders of the English Romantic movement, got so interested in these experiments with nitrous oxide. And of course later became an opium addict. And it's not an accident. I think that there were these early experiments with nitrous oxide and the birth of the Romantic movement happening right around the same time. Yes. I mean, Coleridge was not proud of his drug use. He was ashamed of it. But this is just the milieu where people are starting to, you know, and the German Romantics getter. And so on, starting to look for something that goes beyond reason, you know, they're developing the idea that great poetry should not be worked over and polished. It should never be revised. It should be, you know, a

sort of uprush from the subconscious mind. And that's the sort of authenticity that we're after. So yes, you can see how the philosophy and the literature and the broader romantic movement all emerge. And you can see why nitrous oxide was so interesting at that point. So one of Coleridge's protege is another romantic poet Thomas De Quincey wrote this book that became a sensation in England, confessions of an opium eater. What was De Quincey's interest in opium? I think he was doing something very original, which was the clue is in the title Confessions of an English opium eater. You know, the book is not actually about opium. It's about the opium eater. So it's autobiography, memoir, but he's using opium to open up a new form of autobiography. He writes about how when he takes opium and he often wander around in London at night, losing himself in the theater crowds and having reveries. And suddenly these childhood memories will pop up that he hasn't thought of for ages. Extraordinary dreams will appear. And

he has the sense on opium, he can wander the labyrinths of his mind and connect all these different dreams and memories and visions and sensations. So it's a new kind of dream autobiography with opium as its light motif. There were plenty of other people in the middle of the 19th century who really took to psychoactive substances. There was a French physician, you're right about Jacques Joseph Moro, who wrote about self -experiments with hashiche. What was he up to? Jacques Joseph Moro was what we would now call a psychiatrist. So he was a physician at a mental hospital in Paris. And he was in the habit of accompanying his sort of wealthy patients on rest tours. So he did some tourism in Egypt where he was fascinated by the absence of alcohol, the relatively low levels of mental illness compared to France, and the prevalence of hashiche and the way in which people who took hashiche would talk about their dreams and their visions and their

encounters with gin or other supernatural identities, things that might get you locked up in France. But you know, it seemed to be a different type of consciousness that he got fascinated by and fascinated enough to take hashiche himself. At that time in Egypt it was usually eaten and usually eaten in quite large doses. So Moro's experiments were very gung -ho. He takes large oral doses of hashiche and is frustrated and I'm able to move or speak for hours and wrapped up in hallucinations that are unfolding too fast for him to record. So his first interest is as a psychiatrist, he believes in walking as far as you can in your as much as you can in your patient's shoes. You know, that's why he was in Egypt in the first place. But as he points out, the one place where we can't accompany our patients is over the threshold into madness. But with hashiche, he noticed in himself so many of the phenomena that he was treating in his patients,

hallucinations and deliriums and errors of time and space and paranoid ideation. So he really felt that the great use of it would be for doctors that they should take it themselves that they would then understand a little bit more what was going on in their patient's head. That's fascinating because it wasn't that the argument 100 years later when Stan Graf was, for instance, doing some of his early experiments, his own use of LSD as he thought this would help him understand his patient's possibly schizophrenia. That's right. When the model of psychotomymetics emerged from what we now call psychedelics in the 1950s, I guess you could say that Joseph Moro was the father of that. But he was more broadly interested, I think, in the relationship between this kind of the hashiche experience and dream and madness. So just as Humphrey Davy had done with the romantic poets, Moro started a literary hashiche salon, which

his fame outgrew his and it's remembered much more widely than he is today. It was called the Club Hashishah, the Hashiche Club. The salon was held in this beautiful old Baroque room in a hotel and the medieval center of Paris. Many of the great figures of mid -19th century French literary culture like Carb Bolesac and Dumas and Floubert and Bodelaire and passed through its doors taking them into this world of dreams and magic and madness. Well, and you say that these mind altering substances also had a big impact on English literature. Robert Lewis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Sherlock Holmes, the great character of Arthur Conan Doyle, who was apparently addicted to both cocaine and morphine. I mean, there was something in the air about why these writers kept going back to this territory. Yes, I mean, Brits were later than the French. It was really in the end of the 19th century, a generation later that

we kind of caught this fascination. Drugs were fascinating in many ways to these writers. Partly as a literary trope, if you wanted to take somebody out of a mundane world into a world of fantasy or science fiction or horror, they could stumble upon some strange drug. But people were also at that point living in a culture which was saturated by sort of drugs that are very commercialized, consumerist pharmacy, where people were being offered drugs like cocaine all the time with all kinds of miracle cures. And then there'd be other voices and other parts of the medical professions saying they were very dangerous and they seem to be transforming life, transforming the human experience. And there was a great appetite, I think, for fictions that took these ideas and worked with them and developed them. I'm talking with Mike Jay, the author of Psychonauts, Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. You're listening to Luminous, a series about

the philosophy in history of psychedelics. Well, certainly one of the most fascinating examples of self -experimentation was Sigmund Freud, who became obsessed with cocaine early in his career. It didn't really think that this was going to be the great new miracle drug. Yes, he did. And he was in the early stages of cocaine being taken up by the pharmaceutical industry in the mid -1880s. He was often referred to as the world's leading medical expert on it. He published several papers on it. He was very ambitious for success and for money. At this point, he'd been a medical student, extremely hard working, really working on two different tracks and quite impoverished and unable to afford to marry. So there was an element of opportunism here. But I think his work on, certainly his early work on cocaine is fascinating. It unites two different forms of self -experiment. He's working in Vienna with very strictly sort of mechanist and

materialist psychologists who are trying to drill down and find the mechanisms in the nerves and the brain for all this. But of course, Freud was also romantic. He loved on humble and girter and he was fascinated by this richer self -experimental tradition. So he becomes identified with it for better or worse. And as it turns out, very much for worse, because this is the point. Wait, but early on before he turned against it, why was he so gung -ho about cocaine? What did he think it could do for people? The great disease of the age in the late 19th century was neurothenia. It's not a term that we use anymore, but I think if we talk about a lot of the time when we're talking about anxiety or depression or autoimmune, you know, a lot of the diagnoses we have now are things that would have been people who would have been diagnosed with neurothenia. And there was a feeling that society had started to run in the rapid time of the machine. Everybody was working long hours, working in factories.

A lot of people were having nervous breakdowns or suffering what we'd now call burnout. And there was a feeling that the human mind and, you know, the human metabolism was just not geared up for this kind of bluing. So everybody was looking for as stimulant or something that could magically provide more energy. And Freud diagnosed himself as a neurothenic. And he believed cocaine was the sort of sovereign treatment for this, because it had many components. It gave you more energy. It was also an antidepressant and euphoric. And he wondered whether it wasn't sort of simply like a drug that stimulated the nervous system and gave you a short term boost of energy. He wondered whether the mental state that it produced, the euphoria, might not kind of operate a switch in the mind that allowed us access to more energy than normal. So he thought that cocaine might be the thing that would bring us up to speed with modern life. And he took copious amounts of cocaine himself, didn't he? I mean, Sigmund Freud was not then the Freud of today.

He was a young medical student and cocaine was not the cocaine of today. It didn't have that reputation. I think since Freud and cocaine now have that reputation, it seems very shocking that Freud took cocaine. And it's often assumed that he took huge quantities of it or was addicted to it or his judgment or balance were affected by it. My feeling is that the opposite is the case. He was a very sober and cautious fellow. And he took it in very small doses. And I think that was the problem with his self -experimentation, because he only ever took a small dose, usually dissolved in water. He never followed it up with another one. So a few years later, when people discovered that you could inject enormous quantities of cocaine and then almost immediately go into manic states of collapse and nervous breakdown, Freud was blindsided by this. It wasn't that he'd taken too much cocaine. He'd taken too little. So, so, so, when did things sour for Freud on cocaine? When, when did he realize, oh, this is a

problem drug? It was around about this time that our modern medical notion of addiction was coming into focus. And it came into focus really in sort of private clinics that nerve doctors were the first people who started seeing patients. And maybe the very first of all these patients was one of Freud's himself, one of his senior colleagues who he worshipped, Ernst von Fleischel, who suffered from terrible pain from an infected amputation and was taking a lot of morphine and Freud recommended him cocaine, which he took and it worked. And during the 10 days that it was working well, then both he and Freud leapt into print to say, here's a cure for the for morphine addiction, but not very long after that, von Fleischel, who was subject to excruciating pain whenever he stopped taking drugs, was soon enough taking large amounts of cocaine as well as his large amounts of morphine. And then Freud tried to bury this whole history, right? I mean, as he became famous, he sort

of wanted to erase this from the historical record as much as he could, you know, and didn't talk about cocaine in his later years. That's right. There's maybe one sentence about it in his short autobiography, but when his collected works were finally reprinted, the cocaine papers weren't in it. And his first biographer, Ernst Jones, minimized it and described it as the cocaine episode, which makes it sound slightly like a sort of episode of mental illness that we should pass over quite quickly and just sort of dismissed it as a juvenile aberration. And that's the line that his followers have tended to follow ever since. You know, when I find so striking about the story of Freud, and then the earlier stories that we talked about, you know, Humphrey Davy and Coleridge's, it seems like the psychoactive substances of their time were responding to something in the culture. I mean, there was something that was missing, something that people were hungry for, and they found these amazing mind -expanding substances almost like they were looking for some sort of salvation in response

to what was going on at that time. Yes, that's a very good point. I think they're also starting to realize that this rational model of the mind was being superseded and that drugs were to use a term of Freud's a royal road to the parts of the mind, the subliminal mind, the unconscious that weren't normally accessible. And doctors or scientists, you know, who were like Humphrey Davy heroic explorers, you know, there was lasting fame and fortune to be found here. These were drugs which produced and had extraordinary effects on consciousness. So I think in their different ways, all these figures believe that there's an enormous discovery to be made out there, if they can be intrepid explorers of these internal region, the unseen region as another psycho -naught William James called it. Well, let's talk about William James, because he is such a key figure in this history, especially in the late 19th century,

another great psychologist and philosopher, William James, who struggled with depression throughout his life, but he was also obsessed with trying to understand the mind and the nature of consciousness. And he had his own nitrous oxide experiences, didn't he? Yes, he did. He also, like Freud, diagnosed himself as neurathenic. He took nitrogen oxide in the early 1880s on the strength of a very eccentric paper that he'd been sent by a kind of amateur psycho -naught, if you like, called Benjamin Paul Blood, who first encountered it as many people did at the dentist and had a very extraordinary cosmic epiphany and continued to experiment and believed that it had led him to the ultimate truth. So this peaked William James's interest and James also had a similar cosmic epiphany, from which he came back with a very strange scrolls and little bits of what he'd say to call the stream of consciousness. But I think it was an experience that really stuck with him, because he'd always been

interested in mystical experience, and he'd never really had one himself, and he'd felt that he was this kind of cold, rational soul who was never going to have one, and he worried that there was this huge obviously important domain of experience that he was never going to have himself, and so I think William James's not just oxide experience was a revelation for him personally, as well as professionally. Well, it makes you wonder if he could have written his great book on religion, the varieties of religious experience, if he hadn't had those experiences with nitrous oxide, if he hadn't had his own mystical experiences. Yes, and he places right at the centre of varieties of mystical experience, and perhaps it's most famous passage, certain it's most famous passage in psychedelic science today, he says that our waking consciousness is just one form of consciousness, and there are all these other forms of consciousness, all you have to do is inhale a gas, or maybe swallow some hashish, and you're suddenly in a different world, where your perceptions are different, your sensations are different, the world

feels different to you, you feel differently about it. So what do we do with these experiences? Do we simply disqualify them because they're drug -induced? And James felt that was unwarranted, experiences experience, you can't disqualify certain types of experience just because they're produced by drugs, and all experiences feed into our lives just as William James's nitrous oxide experience fed into his own life and altered the direction of his work. Well, it seems that William James seemed so contemporary today, because he was wrestling with the same kinds of questions that we wrestle with now. I mean, he was very much a man of science, a medical doctor who cared a lot about scientific proof, but he also had this fascination with mystical experience with the paranormal. I mean, he would go in attend sciences to try to figure out if they were the real thing, and it seems like he really wanted to understand the mind scientifically, if he could, but he wasn't at all sure that science could actually ever really crack the mystery of consciousness. Yes, I mean, he saw the

study of the mind. He saw introspection as central to it, and I think that's partly why he's so interesting to us now, because he was in a world as we are now where mainstream science of the mind was very positivist, by this time psychology had appeared and starting to map the nervous, the structure of the nerves that correlated with this. And James got less, less interested in this, you know, he thought that the mind was much more complicated than that. It wasn't one simple light bulb tension followed by another in a series. It was, as he described it, a blooming buzzing confusion. There are many, many things going on in our minds at the same time. Some of them mundane and trivial others, you know, possibly very profound, and you can't simply put people in a laboratory and extract the contents of their mind in that way. Even if you created the precise same stimuli, then the snapshot that you took of that stream of consciousness would be different. So he was trying to find ways of

exploring the mind in these broader terms that sort of merged into, you know, literature and philosophy. So I think his attempts to that are just fascinating for us today. So what happened then in the late 1800s, the early 1900s? Why did drugs become stigmatized? Why did they develop this very negative reputation? It's a really interesting question. I think there are many components to it. You can see there are medical concerns about them. These are drugs that are addictive and bad for your health and should only be used under the supervision of a doctor. So you're starting to define a population of drug users. And that population also is very heavily tinged with ethnic stereotypes. The Chinese, for example, are well -known opium users. And cocaine is particularly a problem for the black population of the southern states. And this is the progressive era. This is the time when grassroots campaigns are starting to increase the scope of government.

This was the time of also the crackdown on alcohol prohibition in the United States. Yes, this is leading up to alcohol prohibition. And actually, at this time, alcohol is regarded as the most problematic, the most difficult substance. How can we possibly have a civilized society in the 20th century where people are allowed to get drunk all the time? It's simply not going to work. And also psychology itself at this point is moving away from introspection. This is the beginning of behaviorism and what goes on in the black box of the mind of consciousness. We can ignore that. It's got more productive running our laboratory rats around mazes than it is listening to people pontificating about their drug experiences. My guest is Mike Jay, an independent historian based in London who's written a series of books on the history of intoxicants. His latest is called psycho nuts, drugs and the making of the modern mind. So to try to put our current moment

of fascination with psychedelics and some historic perspective, I mean, given this history that you've just been telling us about going back 200 years, what is it that it might reveal about where we are right now with this psychedelic renaissance that we might not realize otherwise if we weren't aware of this history? I think it gives us a very different way of thinking about where we are now. The prevailing assumption in the psychedelic renaissance, as we call it, is this kind of drug experience suddenly emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. It was summarily squashed by mainstream science and medicine, and we're now just beginning to recover it. The story that I'm telling about the 19th century, which goes further back than that, shows a rather different picture. It suggests that the things that we're interested in today, the power of drugs to give us positive experiences to help us understand the mind, to be therapeutic, to open up dimensions of thought and experience and maybe reality that we wouldn't otherwise discover. This has been a fascination that goes all the way back to

the beginning of science and certainly all the way back to the scientific revolution. And the war on drugs, as we call it, which we should sort of thought of as the background all our lives, maybe that's just a brief blip. That's the first half of the 20th century, and now we're back on track on the longer program that we've been pursuing for a long time and have a great deal to learn from its history. There's another thing that's going on now is psychedelics have a very positive reputation right now. I mean, very recently in the last few years, unlike so many other drugs that historically have been used for mind -altering experiences, whether it's cocaine or heroin, morphine, there's a psychedelic exceptionalism sort of like, you know, psychedelics are their own thing and they stand apart from the rest of this history. Yes, I think that's right, and it's partly this business of wanting to escape from the stigma of drugs. But one of the things I noticed that I've organized the book in this way, really, sort of looking at

where we are now and the things that interest us now, things like drugs and the limits of consciousness, you know, what happens when we take drugs that disembodied us and take us into realms of pure experience, you know, is this as a part of the minds that we can't normally access? Is it simply just, you know, white noise produced by a drug -addled brain or do these other dimensions of mind that we can't normally access? Do they connect? Do they connect to other people via telepathy? Do they collect to other dimensions? Are these entities that we meet on DMT or ketamine, you know, these kind of conversations are exactly what scientists and writers and doctors were having in the 19th century, but they weren't using DMT and ketamine, they were using mostly things like chloroform or ether, nitrous oxide or hashish. So I think in this sense, we can see that psychedelics, when the term emerged in the 1950s, it occupied a pre -existing niche, you know, we already had this conversation about drugs in our culture,

and psychedelics have colonized it. So as you say, I think it undermines this psychedelic exceptionism, it points us to looking more at why these particular substances are being used now and what kind of heavy lifting the word psychedelic is doing and separating us from a deeper history or a history that relates to other, perhaps more problematic drugs. So you have talked about all of this wearing your scholarly hat here, hoping you can all of this research, and I'm wondering how personal this gets for you. I mean, you've posed the big questions. Do psychedelics, for instance, you know, tap into some different dimension of consciousness? What do you think personally? Well, I've experimented thoroughly with all these drugs over a long period of time now. I guess like the time I really immersed myself in this subject was the 1990s, and at that time there was quite a small scholarly literature, and to anybody who'd taken any of these drugs, it was quite obvious that the scholarly literature was written

by people who hadn't, you know, you'd really get through the first page without realizing that, okay, this person hasn't actually taken this substance, and it was always a very top -down discipline that kind of drug history, it was always about the construction of the notion of addiction and origin of drug control regimes, and it always was framed in these terms of what shall we do about the drug problem and the assumption that anybody who took drugs was part of the drug problem. So this furrow that I've been plowing for a long time, I've always been foregrounding, you know, the drug experience and trying to create a kind of history from below. Yeah, more recently, like in my last book, which was a history of masculine, I wrote about my masculine experiences, points where it was kind of, I thought, useful for the reader. Were these experiences revelatory for you personally? I think they were. I don't think I'd be writing about drugs in psychedelics 30 years later if they, if they hadn't been, and I think

as William James would say, it's not necessarily what you bring back, you can come back from a wonderful cosmic epiphany with a line that kind of evaporates in the daylight and looks like gibberish, and you can't measure the experience on that basis. But I guess I would have to say of the way in which these drugs really shook my image of reality early on, was just by quite radically recalibrating my sense of how much of the world and how much of reality was actually out there and how much was being constructed in the mind. So I think they sent me in a direction of realizing that there was much, much more of what we thought was reality was going on in here than out there. Well, many other thing that you're writing about as well is this whole history of self -experimentation. Which is a big issue in psychedelic research today. I mean, there are a lot of scientists who study psychedelics who don't want to talk about their experiences. I mean, whether they've had them or not, I mean, I kind of assume that nearly everyone has, I mean, who studies it. I mean, why wouldn't you? I mean, yes,

it's illegal and there are questions of credibility, but on the other hand, you have to wonder, can you actually study these experiences if you have not had them because it's such a different way of experiencing the world and experiencing the mind and it seems like maybe that's something that contemporary science has to come to terms with. Yeah, I mean, I think it's enormously valuable to have direct personal experience because even though it's science, what we're studying is a state of consciousness, a subjective sensation that is only available to the subject. Otherwise, you're just studying its correlates. And I think for some branches of science, psychopharmacology, for example, you're used to studying correlates. You spent decades kind of sectioning up rats brains, you know, and that's what you do. But I think for a lot of people, they are curious about it and it does inform their research. It's a bit like, the analogy I sometimes use is travel writing. Of course, you can write a book about Venice without going to Venice because you can read all the other books about Venice, but it's hard to

argue that your book wouldn't be better if you had actually been to Venice yourself. But I think self -experimentation is a hybrid form. It always has been, there is no perfect or correct way to do it. Part of you is an observer and part of you is a subject and you're trying to find the right point on the slider as it were between objective data and, you know, giving a subjective description. And I think another way in which self -experiment is hybrid is the literary form that it takes. I think it's partly scientific form. You're partly trying to record data and we have all these protocols which go way back into the history of science. You know, this is the time and this is the dosage I'm taking. And 30 minutes later, starting to notice these sensations. And but you also want to give a fuller sense of the subjective experience. So maybe what you end up with is also a hybrid of science and literature. So I think if you look at the psychedelic Renaissance today, most of it is composed of, you know, very dry

papers on neuroscience and receptor chemistry and so on. But then you look at the, you know, the great towering bestseller of the psychedelic Renaissance, Michael Pollan's book. And, you know, he puts this into Lehman's terms beautifully using a lot of metaphors about our minds getting stuck in ruts and being rigid and psychedelics connecting different areas of the brain and so on. But I think what really attracted people to his book was his self -experiments, his descriptions because people are fascinated by these ideas like neuroplasticity and so on. But what they're really fascinated by is what's this like? What does it feel like? What might it do for me? So that's where self -experiment belongs. And I think even though it's excluded from a lot of neuroscientific research, I think it's very present in the psychedelic Renaissance in the areas where the science meets the literature and the broader public understanding. So where would you like this psychedelic Renaissance to go from here?

I mean, it seems like you're saying that maybe it's become overly medicalized and something else needs to happen or another sort of dimension of this needs to surface that we're not seeing so much of these days. Yes, I'd like to see a thousand flowers bloom. A lot of people who are interested in psychedelics now would use them themselves personally and privately and you might describe that as self -medication or you might describe it as recreation or you might describe it as spiritual. It really doesn't matter how you self -describe it. Some people will want to have guides for this experience. So some people will want shamanic guides or mindfulness guides, but some people will doubtless want clinically and medically state -approved psychotherapists. And I think that should be allowed and that should be available, but it seems to me that that's going to be a subset of the future. And that's really where the entire conversation is at the moment. Then this very tricky question of how the medical profession manages this, how it

licenses this. All those questions are important, but I'd like to see more attention being paid to the fact that there are other models beyond the medical and beyond the therapeutic. And I think with the sort of first steps of decriminalisation of plant psychedelics in Oregon and in Colorado, we're starting to see this what I might call a bottom -up model, which I hope might complement the top -down authorised medical scientific model. Do you worry about the dangers, though? I mean, as these substances, psilocybin, other psychedelics become more available, become decriminalised, and a lot of the safe guards come off. I mean, these are very powerful substances that can cause a lot of harm without proper screening. Do you worry about the dangers? I do. I think if large numbers of people start taking psychedelics, particularly against the background of this clipe, where everybody's going into it, expecting that this is going to be a one -off experience that's going to resolve the decades -long, maybe lifelong traumas or mental

health issues, I think that's an unrealistic explanation. I think many, many people are bound to have terrible and traumatic experiences. And I think we haven't really tested the water in terms of litigation here. Do people go to see another therapist who says, what? Your therapist gave you these dangerous drugs in your condition? Are you going to sue them? So I think there's an awful lot to work out. And there is a very optimistic school within sort of psychedelic science, which is, oh, there's no such thing as a bad trip, but that just means we haven't got the molecule quite right or we haven't got the set in setting quite right or wear your eye shades and listen to this music and it'll be fine. I don't believe that's true. I think what we call the bad trip or what we might call this challenging psychedelic experience is always going to be part of the story. It sounds like you're also saying we're still in the early stages of this psychedelic horrendous sense. There's a lot that we still have to figure out. I think that's right. And I think, I mean, I've certainly learned an enormous amount from

talking to and becoming friends with people in indigenous cultures who have a very, very different orientation towards this. And there are many societies around the world that have been using these psychedelic substances for decades, centuries, millennia and have evolved a very stable way of using them, which has mastered all these challenges. And they're still going strong. They've achieved a kind of homeostasis here, a kind of equilibrium. And I think we'd be very, very, foolish not to learn from that. Okay. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much. Oh, it's been a great pleasure, Steve. Mike Jay is the author of Psychonauts, Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. You're listening to Luminous, our series about psychedelics from to the best of our knowledge. You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook .org slash luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the luminous podcast feed. To the best of our knowledge

is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Joe Harkey is our technical director. Sarah Hopefolk did the sound design for this episode. And Mark Rickers is our digital producer. I'm Steve Paulson. Thanks for listening. PRX