Why Scientists Need to Get High

It’s remarkable how fast psychedelics have gone mainstream. It’s not just the craze for microdosing or the enthusiasm for mushroom grow kits. After years of shunning this research, major universities are now racing to set up their own psychedelic institutes, with psilocybin and MDMA being touted as the most promising treatments for depression and PTSD in decades.

But this is not the first time psychoactive drugs have been hailed as miracle cures. Over the past two centuries, morphine, heroin, and cocaine were also considered wonder drugs until doctors discovered their addictive properties. Today, what’s striking is how the public conversation about psychedelics tends to ignore this deeper history of psychoactive drugs.

The one place we can’t accompany our patients is over the threshold into madness.

Historian Mike Jay is out to challenge this narrative of psychedelic exceptionalism. Through a series of books on the history of intoxicants, he’s traced the lineage of various drug cultures. His new book, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, focuses on the 19th century’s rich history of psychoactive experiences, spanning the worlds of science and literature. In some ways, this era had a more expansive and nuanced view of drugs and the exploration of consciousness than we do today, where the medical model dominates the public discourse on psychedelics.

Jay is upfront about his own psychedelic experiences. “I’ve experimented thoroughly with all these drugs over a long period of time now,” he said when I reached him in Cornwall. His tripping led him to recalibrate his own image of reality, but he doesn’t gloss over how challenging these experiences can be. In his earlier book on the history of mescaline, he writes about one encounter with the psychoactive cactus San Pedro: “As pleasure and discomfort mingled and intensified, it was easy to understand how