Mike Jay – Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind

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Don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! 😉 We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950’s. Timothy Leary in the ‘60’s, Hunter S Thompson in the ‘70’s, those two guys who started the craze for smoking cane-toad venom in ‘90’s. Investigators who became their own guinea pigs. But “the heroic tradition of discovery”, as Mike Jay puts it, has a much longer and more interesting history. The second half of the Nineteenth Century in particular saw the introduction of most of the substances discussed in this book, and was perhaps the golden age of getting stoned for science. The problem, of course, is that there … Continue reading →