As part of the Psychedelics and the Future of Religion series, the Center for the Study of World Religions presented an interview with author Mike Jay about his two most recent books, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, and Mescaline: A Global History of the First Pychedelic. Mike Jay has written widely on the history of science and medicine, with a specialist interest in the mind sciences, mental health and psychoactive drugs. Alongside Mescaline and Psychonauts, his books include High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture and This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond, both of which accompanied exhibitions he curated at Wellcome Collection in London. He writes regularly for New York Review of Books and London Review of Books and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Humanities, University College London. More can be found at his website, https://mikejay.net.
Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Mescaline and Psychonauts with Mike Jay
JEFFERY BREAU: My name is Jeffrey Breau, and I'm a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, and a researcher with the Center for the Study of World Religions, where along with Paul I convened the psychedelics, sacred and subversive reading group. Today's event is part of a very popular series on psychedelics and the future of religion, which is now in its third year.
This series is part of the center's larger, ongoing, and evolving initiative called Transcendence and Transformation, or T & T for short. If you're interested in T & T, we'll put a link to the T & T page in the chat function. As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing at the center and its programming, is to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which you can do at the center's landing page. As has been the case with all of the psychedelics in the future of religion talks this year, our psychedelics sacred and subversive reading group engaged with Mike James writing in advance of today's conversation.
The richness of Mike's work led to an energized and sweeping conversation among the 25 graduate students and faculty who are part of the group. It was a conversation that broached questions ranging from the conceptual, what is a drug? How did that label come about? What are the ramifications of how psychedelic history is told?
And it also covered the more concrete questions like, what are the ideal approaches to decriminalization and legalization? And what moral imperatives do religious practitioners and scholars have to aid in undoing the harms wrought by the war on drugs? We expect that today's conversation with Mike Jay will cover just as wide a range of topics and be just as exciting and generative. In a minute, I will turn it over to Paul, who will introduce our speaker and kick off today's conversation.
We are fortunate to have the full 90 minutes to be in dialogue with Mike Jay today. And Paul and I will be moderating with a mix of our own questions, those that arose during the reading group, and the questions from all of you in the audience. With that, I will turn it over to Paul to introduce himself and Mike Jay.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Hello everyone. Welcome again, I'm Paul Gillis-Smith, a grad student at Harvard Divinity School and researcher here at the Center for the Study of World Religions. It's been an absolute delight working with my comrade Jeffrey here on all things psychedelia at the center and beyond.
Our conversation a few weeks ago on Mike's book and our reading group has been front of mind as we thought through today's event, and hope that any of our reading group journeyers in the audience here, and I see a few of you, who had a burning and unanswered question from our discussion a couple of weeks ago might post it in our virtual forum today. Without further ado, let me introduce our interlocutor Mr. Mike Jay. Mike Jay is a museum curator and longtime freelance writer, getting his start by writing on drugs and how drug knowledge of all kinds was shared on early internet forums of the '90s, well before my own time on the internet.
And it was during a time when academic writing on drugs was largely limited to studies of addiction and drug abuse control. Jay has since written and edited over a dozen books, including, This Way Madness Lies which is a history of madness through the prism of the asylum. Blue Tide: The Search for Soma, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, and most recently, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind.
Our discussion today will focus on Jay's two most recent books, Mescaline and Psychonauts, which I have here today, both published by Yale University Press. Jay's newest volume, Psychonauts puts the phenomenon of self-experimentation as a first mover in the role that drugs have played in the history of consciousness research over the last 200 or so years.
Particular relevance to our series today through the cultural history that Psychonauts lays out, Mike Jay offers a broader taxonomic category than the term psychedelics often permits when we think of the plants chemicals and admixtures that provide transcendences towards our own transformation. Jay's history brings cocaine, nitrous oxide, amphetamines, anesthetics, and a multitude of forms of cannabis into the frame for how many have sought transformation, and in which laboratories one might find an unexpected transcendence. So Mr. Jay, the floor is yours for any introductory remarks that you might have for us.
MIKE JAY: Thank you very much indeed Paul, and thank you Jeff, it's a real pleasure to be here. Yeah, thought I'd start just with a brief introduction of how I got to this point because it's a strange and circuitous route. I am as Paul said, a freelance writer. But I have benefited from academic scholarship and fellowship throughout my career.
I started writing about drugs in the 1990s, originally as a journalist. And then got interested in the questions of where drugs came from and the history of drugs. And it was very hard to find anything kind of before the 1960s. So that led me first of all to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, here in London. And it's a fantastic library and archive.
And then, through that to its academic unit at the time that was teaching and researching there in affiliated with University College London. That was the unit was led by the incredibly, prolific, and brilliant Roy Porter, with other figures like William Bynum and Michael Neve, who I worked closely with.
They'd been historians at Cambridge in the 1970s and their mentors had been from the postwar school of history from below, and that's really what they brought to the Wellcome when they came there. It was quite transformational for the history of medicine, I think, which at that point was a little bit of an academic backwater. A lot of the work that was being produced was retired medical professionals writing their career memoirs.
Even though actually, from its very foundation from Henry Wellcome back at the beginning of the 20th century his-- he had been-- his maxim had always been, don't trust the doctors to tell you their own story, you need to study them like you'd study any other group in society, or any other tribe, or whatever.
And this was what Roy and Michael and the Wellcome academic unit did. They paid a lot of attention to the role of Medicine in the wider society, the way that the medical profession was seen, the changing social status of medical professionals, for example. And particularly, the doctor-patient relationship. And they looked very closely at patient testimonies which had tended to be ignored up to that point.
So that was really where I took off with on the history of drugs. I discovered in the Wellcome archives, and library, and elsewhere, just this absolute treasure trove of subjective reports of drug experiences often by doctors and scientists, first person accounts, and reportage. And discover that very, very little of this had been looked at by academics. And that the ones which had, had been often kind of glossed over, the history of drugs at that point was quite small and specialized.
And it was very much a top-down history, it was about drug control regimes, and drug policy, and addiction studies. And there had been very little attention paid to the phenomenology of the drug experience or the cultural context in which drug experiences occurred. So I started to write about that.
And I also started to draw on psychiatric patient testimony to write about the history of madness and psychiatry from that sort of bottom-up perspective as well. And then, I guess, in about 2007, the Wellcome's collection and exhibitions approached me to curate a big exhibition about mind altering drugs in history and culture called high society, which I did and I wrote the book that went along with that.
So I guess, from about that point on, I was sort of recognized as a specialist in the history of drugs and particularly in this approach to it. I had already, around this time written a book for Yale University Press, called The Atmosphere of Heaven, which is about the discovery of nitrous oxide by Humphry Davy and Thomas Beddoes, and the circle in the 1790s.
And that's really, I think, the very beginning of what we would now call psychedelic science. So then, as we went through the 2010's, I guess, and the psychedelic Renaissance started to build, then Yale started to talk to me about, maybe we should do a book about the history of psychedelics. And I really wanted to do that. And I thought that the history of mescaline would be a great way of doing it.
And some episodes of which I had written about previously and studied, but others were fairly unstudied. And unlike LSD, or MDMA, or whatever, which there are lots of drug biographies nobody had done one for mescaline before. So that was what I wrote, I guess, published it about five years ago. And after that, I started to talk to Yale about a follow up to that.
And I thought what I'd like to do was, mescaline has a huge sort of panoramic time span, going from the pre-hispanic America through to the 21st century. I thought what I'd like to do in the follow up was to pick one particular time and place, one sort of era. And that was really the late 19th century, and sort of Western medicine and science because it seemed to me that so many strands of this story go through that moment.
And of course, it's the moment of the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, our ideas about the modern mind coming into incredibly fruitful contact with this much longer established practice of self-experiment in science, particularly self-experiment with mind altering drugs. So that was Psychonauts.
JEFFERY BREAU: Phenomenal, that's-- it's in hearing all of your work sort of together, it's amazing how almost perfectly positioned you were for to be writing and thinking about the psychedelic Renaissance. And taking an approach to psychedelics that doesn't just limit what we think of as the category of drug, but rather as sort of an expansive category.
As sort of maybe a first question into the work, specifically, the work on mescaline, one of the tensions that seems to be present in a lot of your work is, what are the frames by which we should be thinking of these substances? Who gets to tell the history and whose story sort of reigns supreme? In Mescaline, we really see this starkly between Indigenous understandings of these plants and these substances versus scientific frames. And I'm curious if you could elaborate on as you were doing the research, how you were constructing these competing narratives and viewing them in your research and ultimately your writing.
MIKE JAY: Yeah, that's a great question and that's one of the things that really drew me to mescalin as a subject is, that it's a substance with two histories really, a Western one and a non-western or Indigenous one. And I was more familiar when I started with the Western history, which is incredibly rich in the sort of personal experiences and self experimental accounts that I was talking about.
And I'd used mescaline in previous works as an example of how this emerged. So we've got all these figures from Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis in the 1890s, through to Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves, and through to Alexander Shulgin, and so on.
And from the very beginning of this Western history, there's a kind of protocol that's established that we all recognize, 10:30 AM at three buttons of peyote dissolved in water. 11:15 AM started to notice slight violet and green hues around white notepad that I'm writing on. And so this is kind of a very forensic approach and it's about separating out as cleanly as possible the effects of the drugs from normal consciousness.
And it's very much focused on the visuals, and that's because these are partly because they're so striking, but also partly because they use as a sort of shorthand for identifying a level of intoxication. So we still when we have the word psychedelic and in general parlance, it refers to these very vivid visual styles.
And when people are trying to talk about their psychedelic experiences, they kind of gauge the intensity of them by how intense the visual distortion were. And it was fascinating turning then to non-western and Indigenous traditions. And one looks in vain for anything like this. There are very few first person accounts and of peyote or San Pedro, the Guatemala, the mescalin containing cacti in the Indigenous literature and the ones that there are usually have been prompted by a Western anthropologist.
And I discovered as I went on that it was not simply that these weren't available, it was that this was really not how these plants were experienced. Whereas the Western experience is very much about the I, the Indigenous one was much more about the we, these are communal experiences. And in fact, the obsession with visuals that we have in the West is not really there in Indigenous culture.
And there's quite a sort of a presumption against talking about the visions that you might see partly because they're private, and they are given to you directly, and they're for you, and why would you share them, what would be your motive for doing that? But also, as both in which whole, for example, traditions under in the Native American church tradition, there's a kind of cautionary note that if you're getting hooked up on the visuals, then you're being distracted, you're missing the point.
They're a bit of a snare and a bit of a temptation. And really, you should be if you find that happening to you, then you should pop out of that and you should become present again in the group ceremony which is what's really going on.
So it's very-- in mescaline, I suggest that if you look at the transition from orality to literacy, that maybe kind of gives us some idea of the shift between the sort of non-western and the Western experience. But really, as I went on, I realized that the Indigenous, the non-western history is very much-- it's the history of a culture, and it's the history of a people. Whereas the Western history is essentially the history of a kind of concatenation of individuals.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Thank you so much, Mike. I am curious about-- so you remarked that the journey into writing this book was a request for writing a psychedelic history. And that the choice of mescaline, I found was an interesting one to argue as the first psychedelic because as there are so many other psychoactive plants and compounds that have since been discovered as perhaps potentially, predating the use of mescaline or peyote.
But the argument for mescaline as the first psychedelic does still seem to stand as its extraction and synthesis sparked the coining of this specific term for this loose cluster of drugs. And so I'm curious, what it is about mescaline then that you see as continuing to operate as a ground zero for the etymology of psychedelic? Or put differently, how does mescaline's legacy as the first psychedelic endure even with the sort of popularity of other psychedelics kind of running the show now?
MIKE JAY: Yeah. So I mean, the first psychedelic is a big sounding claim of the kind that publishes like-- the question of, what was the first psychedelic to be used in deep prehistory? Seems to me, a kind of moot and slightly incoherent question. I mean, first of all, how can we know? And secondly, are we limiting that question to things that we today categorize as psychedelic?
I mean, what if it turns out to be alcohol? Is it very likely was would we disqualify that? So I just mean, the first psychedelic and a more narrow but more specific sense that when the term psychedelic was coined by Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond in 1956, it was coined as a sort of SQL to Aldous Huxley's mescaline experience.
And at the time when they coined the term, they were really talking about psilocybin hadn't quite yet been isolated, it was really about mescaline and LSD. And of those two, LSD was the recent one that was the one that would not found in nature that had been synthesized in a laboratory quite recently. Mescaline by contrast, was the one that had a history that went way, way back.
I mean, way back in Western science to the 19th century, and then way back millennia beyond that in Indigenous cultures. So I think, in that sense, it's the first psychedelic and it always will be. But the paradox of it, which intrigued me was that, even at that moment in 1956 when the term psychedelic was coined, mescaline was being overtaken by LSD.
It was already starting to be preferred for scientific research because it was so, so much more concentrated. Thousands of times more active than mescaline. So that not only meant that it was cheaper, but also that it was more likely to be kind of working on some specific key in the brain, on some particular neurochemical key. Whereas mescaline had been conceived for decades by that point as a kind of neurotoxin that sort of generally washed over the brain.
So you can see why LSD took over for both logistic and theoretical reasons in science. And then in the 1960s when the psychedelic counterculture started, it was LSD rather than mescaline that took over for precisely the same reason when the first underground chemists started producing something. I mean, why produce a gram of mescaline, which makes like three doses, when you could produce a gram of LSD that makes thousands of doses.
So mescaline was kind of already on the way out at that point. So it was an interesting subject to pick because all its history sort of really went back before that moment when the concept of psychedelic originated rather than forwards. And it had more or less disappeared by the end of the '60s, and had become, at least, kind of a legendary substance that was still could never be forgotten because everybody always remembered, everybody had a dog eared copy of doors of perception on their shelves, everybody would always remember where that story started.
And as we go forward into the 21st century, actually, mescaline has never really kind of got going in the psychedelic Renaissance for exactly the same logistical reasons. It's a 12-hour trip, it's a very large dose, it's got lots of somatic effects, if you're trying to find something that's short acting, and containable, and manageable, then it's never going to be your first choice.
But what, of course, has happened in the 21st century is that the cacti in two very different ways, the peyote cactus and the Huachuca, the San Pedro, are probably now being used by both cases by more people on the planet than they ever have been in history. So one can't in that sense say that mescaline has disappeared. And I think, the cacti may well have important roles in the future of psychedelics. But I think, really the legacy of mescaline is that it's the origin story and it always will be.
JEFFERY BREAU: Yeah. I love thinking about these, sort of long histories. And even in your response there the idea of what exactly is a psychedelic was sort of coming to mind because it's as a term, it's somewhat slippery. We use it to mean so many different things, and it means different things to different people, and there's sort of, I think, maybe we'll turn to this after we spend a little bit more time with mescaline, but this is such a key question in Psychonauts is, what is a drug and who gets to decide?
Maybe, before we turn there one question that's coming to mind as you were talking about the history of mescaline and mescaline use now, and more people using the cacti than ever before. I'm curious if you-- what your thoughts are about the way that there are being so many extant Indigenous traditions that are using or new or new-ish traditions like the Native American church that have done such a good job at solidifying the Indigenous history of mescaline.
I'm curious how you-- if you think that, that is changing the way that science is viewing this substance. And I'm thinking specifically here about maybe like Michael Pollan's work on, this is your mind on plants saying, we shouldn't touch peyote at all as a scientific community. Have you seen that discourse in what we would call the Western psychedelic Renaissance?
MIKE JAY: Definitely, I mean, we've got a huge rights clash, I think, between groups like decriminalize psychedelics on the one hand and the Native American church on the other. And I think, these are two very different understandings and it'd be good to talk about the term drugs and the term psychedelics later. But I think, in this context it's, you don't find a lot of Indigenous people using the word psychedelic.
And I think, that's partly because baked into it in ways that we don't always appreciate is a narrative that these plants contain chemicals that are psychoactive, and these chemicals in these plants affect the neurochemistry of our brains, which alter our states of consciousness. And needless to say, none of this narrative has any relevance in Indigenous contexts.
So the word psychedelic-- I think, it's interesting when you move into this context and the word psychedelic doesn't really work. And then you have to think about, well, how would we paraphrase it? What do we mean if we don't have this handy term? And then the other thing I've picked up in Indigenous cultures is that, they don't like to refer to their practices as psychedelic because in a way they see the term psychedelic as kind of co-opting them without their consent into a Western cultural movement, with which they may not actually have very many affinities.
So yeah, I think, it's a problematic term, and I think, it works very well for in a Western context, in context of Western modernity after the point where the term was coined, it doesn't work so well in other contexts. As to whether that term affects the science or not, I have worked with a couple of startups who are interested in using mescaline in therapy and drawing on Native American church practices, particularly for treatment of alcoholism, which was something that the Native American church kind of came to specialize in during the 20th century.
And I think, more so than MDMA, or LSD, or any of these unambiguous creations of the laboratory, I think, people in psychedelic science are aware that mescaline has a legacy and a legacy that needs to be acknowledged. Possibly, I think, this is true of mushrooms as well, but Indigenous mushroom cultures are, they are sort of fewer and more isolated.
And I think, what we have with mescaline cacti is the extraordinary phenomenon of the Native American church, which is essentially in terms of its use of peyote a new religious movement from the late 19th century. And then much more recently in the Andes and on the Pacific Coast of South America, the use of what tumor or San Pedro which was very marginalized, not very much studied even by anthropologists because it was always regarded as being a kind of Mestizo culture that wasn't authentic, or pristine, or ancient.
So there's very, very little literature on it through into the 1960s, and even into the 21st century. And now it's become this phenomenon with notional South American roots and lineages of practice kind of often once, or twice, or three times removed. But something that you're as likely to encounter in Goa, or Ibiza, or Thailand, or California, as you are in Peru or Colombia.
So I think, that's become a genuinely global phenomenon. And it's very interesting to see how or whether scientific psychedelic science will engage with that because so far that engagement has happened outside the medicolegal scientific gaze.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: To situate ourselves in the title of the series psychedelics in the future of religion, I think, we could just as easily title this panel, this event today psychedelics in the history of medicine or psychedelics in the history of psychopharmacology, rather than the future of religion.
And I think, psychedelics point to a really interesting juncture point or friction between science and religion that we're sort always kind of stumbling our way into whether it's a dark history of Darwin or something like that, we kind of have this same tension or I think, friction is the best word of how science and religion are coming together around these substances. And taking them for various uses.
And I'm curious what you make then of what the future for this relationship between scientific and religious use of these chemicals plays because at least in the history we have mescaline gives a great study of a long, Indigenous history that we could describe as religious, perhaps that's not even the best term. I find a lot of times our categories of religious medical recreational aren't particularly relevant in Indigenous contexts. It's both and, or it's neither nor.
But now as we set off into the future, the Native American church setting itself up as a kind of religious entity, and many other religious communities organizing themselves around psychedelics, and the legalization of their use structured through a religious rights prism. And then a parallel path of we need to legalize and pharmaceuticalize. What do you make of the future that this long standing relationship between science and religion has been on, on psychedelics?
MIKE JAY: Yeah. I think, that's absolutely right. There's a lot of that, that I agree with entirely. I think, medicine and religion in that sense of Western categories much more than they are non-western or Indigenous categories. I think, as you say, they're kind of really the same thing in Indigenous cultures. And I think, this confused both some anthropologists and doctors, looking at Indigenous practices of this kind which seemed from a Western perspective to be a mixture of proper medical science and superstition.
So people would go well, this is about physical healing, so that's obviously medicine. But then there's this other bit that's about clairvoyance and that's kind of superstition. In Indigenous terms, they're the same thing if we think of these plants as something that enable you to see things that are normally not visible, or to communicate with non-human persons you can't normally communicate with. Then the information that you get might be that, this is the cause of your sickness or it might be that, this is where your lost object is located. It's really the same thing.
So in that sense there's no distinction. I was very struck looking at one of the few points where, Western and non-Western cultures engaged very directly around this, which was in the 1890s when in the early days of the peyote religion the plains Native American religion. And the first encounters with Western science, particularly, James Mooney who was an ethnographer from the Smithsonian, who was the first white person to participate in a peyote ceremony.
And the Chief of the Comanches, Quanah Parker, who he got this big sack of peyote buttons from in 1893 in Oklahoma, which then kind of ended up being taken by William James, and sort of the first being used in the first scientific trials in Washington. So you've got a real interface there. And so James Mooney and Quanah Parker, were the sort of two great advocates for peyote religion at that point. One white and one Indigenous, but talking to similar groups of people, missionaries, federal bureaucrats, the House of Representatives, and so on.
And both of them presented peyote to these audiences in exactly the same way. I don't think they conferred on this at all. Both said, first of all, this is a medicine, it's a very important medicine, it's a very valuable medicine, it should be researched by Western medical science, it should be part of the Western Pharmacopeia. And then the second thing that they said was, it's also-- this is a religious experience, this is not as the missionaries are saying, just the kind of drunken orgy of stupefaction and intoxication.
This is a genuine religious experience, it's Native American analog to the Christian church. And reading all these accounts, I was very struck by how similar this is to the conversation we have today around psychedelics and the public mainstream. So is it that psychedelics are intrinsically a medicine and a spiritual experience? Or is it as, I think, more likely that actually if you're trying to sell psychedelics to an uninitiated and possibly hostile white majority, then those are the two ways you go in.
First of all, you talk about its medical utility, and second you talk about its spiritual value because those are two things that are validated by the dominant culture. And I think, we're seeing that again, and I've been very struck in the last year or two in America much more than in Britain about how the psychedelic conversation has kind of been shifting away from medicine towards religion.
That it's clear that the process of having psychedelics validated as medicines is going to be very lumpy, and very expensive, and it's people are not going to wait with bated breath forever to see whether this substance after that substance jump through this or the next FDA trial whoop. So then when you see someone like Rick Doblin at the MAPS conference this year presenting the future of psychedelics to a huge crowd of 10,000 people.
And he's wearing his white suit and it's the hot gospel of psychedelics. And what we're looking forward to in the psychedelic future is net zero trauma for humanity. You can see that this is escaping its kind of strictly medical confines. And that maybe it's going to find a natural form, not the only natural-- not its only natural form, but one of its natural forms in a religious context.
And that's very noticeable from here in Britain where we're much more kind of restrained, and post-christian, and secular, and our trials of psychedelics over here at Imperial College and so on are much less about the mystical experience, and much more about the default brain network. So yeah, I think, there's the medical understanding and the spiritual understanding are both kind of modes of Western understanding. And I think, they're going to be in tension as you would say or maybe in dialogue in the future in all kinds of ways.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah, in some ways that, what I hear you saying is that, the medical approach will at moments sort of dip into a religious tone. And perhaps also religious and spiritual approaches will dip into medical or healing language. And that in a lot of ways, the future might look a lot like the history with cases like James Mooney from the Smithsonian.
MIKE JAY: Yeah. I think, that's right. And I think, more broadly as a culture, whether secular or religious, we look to science and to medicine to validate our sense of contested substances like this. The question we want to know is, what does science say? And the story is, oh, science used to say that this stuff drove you crazy and made you jump out of windows. But science now says that this is going to be incredibly useful for all kinds of mental health conditions. So science and medical science acts as a referee here very broadly in ways that, I think, can be useful for religion as well.
JEFFERY BREAU: Yeah, certainly. And I think, also it's your comments are pointing to the fact that psychedelics and the term psychedelic has been a political-- has been in a political context from the very start, and has been in some ways sort of a political project, whether that project is medicalizing these substances and moving towards legalization through a medical route or moving towards legalization through a spiritual route.
And then another space that, I think, is even less studied, but I know is a space that you have thought about and we're even gesturing towards with your comment about Ibiza, which is the recreational space. And in my research is focused specifically, on the recreational space, and the way that people use psychedelics at Burning Man and in other recreational settings.
But what I see from the general psychedelic discourse is that, the recreational is used as the foil upon which the medical and the spiritual can be justified. Oh, we are not doing drugs like people in Ibiza. We are not taking MDMA and going to a rave, we're doing it in either a medical context or a spiritual context. And therefore, it is OK.
I'm curious as somebody whose history has really covered, what I would say is all three of these domains, the recreational, the spiritual, and the medical, are you seeing-- how are you seeing sort of the recreational entering into this conversation and being a part of the history of psychedelics, the history of mescaline, and maybe of drugs more generally?
MIKE JAY: Yeah, all these terms are difficult, they make a lot of assumptions. I think, the term recreational makes a lot of assumptions. I think, the fundamental distinction here is medical and non-medical. And then, the way that that was framed through the 20th century was, non-medical was drug abuse, and then people decided that this was a little moral and a little judgmental, and the term recreational appeared because people thought, well, that's kind of softer and less judgmental.
And then people who took their drug taking a bit more seriously than that went, hey, this isn't recreational, this is entheogenic. So you see all these categories emerging from there. And I think, this is just to run through the etymology history, which I think is very important. The word drug doesn't really emerge in the context that we're talking about it until the 20th century.
Before that point, the word drug just means any kind of medication. We still have that in words like drugstore, for example. And when it took on this particular meaning of drug in the early 20th century, that was well, it kind of meant mind altering or psychoactive drug, but it obviously not all psychoactive drugs, we didn't start talking about a cup of tea or a bottle of beer as a drug unless we were trying to make a deliberate point.
So drug means mind-altering, but it also means that if you look at the first examples of it, it's a kind of shortening of something like dangerous drug, or addictive drug, or generally, a drug that should be used only in a medical context, and in a non-medical context it's a drug. And we still have that odd thing. I mean, something like say morphine or nitrous oxide, it's not a drug if it's being used in surgery, it's only a drug if it's being used as we would say, recreationally.
And then on top of that, I think, the word drug also has always baked into it early on was the idea that it was something foreign. We tend not to call things in our own culture drugs, we don't call alcohol and tobacco drugs. A drug tends to be something that's come from somewhere else. And you find that in non-Western contexts as well, traditional uses of ayahuasca or Coca, are appalled at the idea that they might be drugs.
But they have the word drug in their vocabulary like, oh, drugs those are those bad things that people in the cities take. So there's always something about culturally alien about drugs. And then, of course, from the early years of the 20th century, and drug prohibition, and criminalization drug also has this sense of illegal or immoral, illicit baked into it. So there's a kind of medical, and a cultural, and a legal, a whole set of negative pejorative associations around the word drug.
And you can see how this started to become a problem in the 1950s, when people were starting to take LSD or mescaline and have mystical experiences or experiences that they found very valuable, and also starting to find that this experience might have therapeutic benefits, and so on. And you can't really use the word drug to say that, you can't say kind of drugs is a kind of word that you can only use to describe bad things.
So and you see Aldous Huxley in his writings around that time dancing around the word drug until the word psychedelic is coined. And that was specifically as an alternative to the psychiatric terms for LSD and mescaline, which were psychotomimetic, or hallucinogen, or things that connected it to psychosis, and schizophrenia. And so it was specifically about connecting the experience to mystical or religious experience.
And Robert Graves is very interesting if you look at his very first experience with mushrooms. He says, you can't call this a drug, this is the opposite of a drug. Drug means something that's stupefies you and dumbs you down. And this is obviously, for Graves' the model was the initiation into ancient mystery religions. So a new word had to be found.
And psychedelic from the very beginning had these very positive associations that were in a way the mirror image of the word drug. The word drug forged in the Progressive Era, the era of temperance and prohibition in the early 20th century. 50 years later, the word psychedelic emerging in the context of positive psychology and the valorization of inner experience and mystical experience.
So yeah, I think, that's what the term psychedelic brings with it, is something that's very specific of that moment, but it's also a way of presenting what were formerly known as drugs in a completely different light, so that they step out of-- that they lose that stigma that they would otherwise have attached to them.
JEFFERY BREAU: Yeah, it's certainly telling that it's the war on drugs and not the war on substances or even mind altering. We alter our minds in all sorts of ways and yet, the word drug as you so beautifully trace means something specific. I want to note to the audience that we have a number of really great questions here, which we will turn to in the last bit of our time after Paul and I ask a couple more just general questions about these two works.
But if anybody in the audience has additional questions, please send them through and we'll try to get through as many as possible. I wanted maybe to, on this point about the history of drug and thinking about what it comes to signify. You end Psychonauts with a really beautiful discussion about psychedelic exceptionalism, and the way in which this term, the term psychedelic has been used at times to combat. To set it apart from drug sort of more generally. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about psychedelic exceptionalism and how that then sort of came to inform the work of Psychonauts in particular.
MIKE JAY: Yeah. I mean, it's a term I don't know if it originated with Karl Hart. I certainly associate with him and he writes very eloquently about it. I think, it's very, very obvious from his perspective, not just as a Black neuroscientist, but as somebody who's studied all kinds of drugs, and has seen all kinds of beneficial and negative consequences arising from all of them.
That this attempt to separate the psychedelic discourse from the wider discourse of the war on drugs is kind of-- you see quite often the assumption that the psychedelic Renaissance or the medicalization of psychedelics is sort of the beginning of the death knell of the war on drugs. And this is the crack in the armor. And there is a case as Karl Hart points out, that it's the opposite.
That actually what's happened is that, the educated and sort of predominantly middle class white elites drug of choice is now kind of operating legally or semi legally. And meantime, in terms of drug courts and people losing custody of their children, and all that kind of level of the war on drugs is still kind of grinding on much as the way it did through the 20th century, and I think that's the case.
I don't think that analysis tells us much about psychedelics per se because it's also true that psychedelics do objectively have very different properties from other drugs, and that doesn't tell us about that. But I think, the same logic kind of works within the field of psychedelics in the way that you've identified, that because psychedelics are drugs and drugs are illegal, it's important to escape from this prohibitionist discourse.
And one way of doing that is through medicine and another way of doing that is through religion. And in both cases, it's kind of necessary to haul the ladder up after you've done that. So I think, predominantly, from the medical and if we can call them corporadelic forces, we hear this thing that psychedelics should only be used under medical supervision, otherwise, it's very dangerous and very risky to use it on your own.
And that's kind of consigning psychedelics without their exclusion to a continued existence in the war on drugs. And I personally would advocate for legal regulation that reaches beyond just simply medical uses with licensed pharmaceuticals and looks at-- we're starting to see that with the decriminalization, more of a bottom-up model. I think, there are all kinds of other models that are starting to emerge in different places around the world of membership clubs, as well as starting to look what's happened with the retail sale of cannabis and so on.
I think, we're starting to see how psychedelics could be legally regulated in non-medical contexts. But we are currently in a situation where 99% of that conversation about regulation is happening with regard to licensed medical use, which is kind of 1% of all use. And at some point, I think, we're going to have to turn our minds to the other 99% of psychedelic use.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah. Speaking of that 99% of other use, there is a point at the beginning of Psychonauts that I might just quote here, where you-- it's very close to the beginning, and along the lines of the focal point is this 19th century history of medicine that you were sort of wrestling with. There are other voices, there are the 99% of other folks besides this medical establishment that's using drugs.
And yet as you say, the early Psychonauts remain of their time in some obvious respects, they're almost all educated white males, a reflection of that group's domination of 19th century science, for which reason I have made the most of female working class, non-white, and non-western voices where I've found them.
In other respects, however, their diversity is striking and their endeavors amount to remarkable and remarkably understudied episode in Western history. I'm curious if you could share about how you are grappling with representation, and the approach that you took in the end as far as 19th century history of medicine and history of psychopharmacology being like a charged, like a connected point in the history of drugs, while also trying to wrestle with as you say, the 99% of other use that falls outside of this sort of particularly pivotal point in history.
MIKE JAY: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is no way getting around the fact that 19th century science and 19th century medicine were both effectively entirely white male enterprises. And you can't rewrite that. What you can do is flag it up very early on as I did. This is something that we can't-- there's no point in from our contemporary standpoint criticizing the 19th century for this. But on the other hand, you do want to share with the reader that, yeah, this is a limitation that we're very aware of.
And as you say my solution really was to make the most of other voices where I could find them. So I spent quite a lot of time in the book with Pascal Beverley Randolph, who is a Black or mixed race, self-identified, spiritual figure in the early 19th century, who's used hashish for clairvoyance, and astral traveling, and marketed it as such as well, who is very unusual figure.
Then in terms of female voices, there female participation in this is one thing. Female writing for the record about personal experience is something completely different, that's a very, very high hurdle to jump, not many women did. I've spent a bit of time with someone like Maud Gonne, who was a political activist, and spiritualist, and extraordinarily fearless woman, love object of W.B. Yeats for a long time, and she wrote about drug use in her memoirs.
But the problem you have with these figures is that, yes, they do escape, they do show you other genders and ethnicities, but you're also dealing with very, very exceptional figures. So it's very hard to generalize out further into that gender or that ethnicity from them. The great source I've been available-- I've been sort of familiar with for a long time and engaged with previously is a character called James Lee, who was a British, northern, working class, mining engineer who found life in 1890s Britain.
Very dull, and conformist, and went off to work in the colonies, and became particularly, fascinated by kind of underworld city encountered mostly in South and Southeast Asia. And particularly, with drug use and became dedicated himself to investigating drugs, ranging from the Western ones like morphine and cocaine through to opium and cannabis, hashish, and other sort of local drugs that still haven't been identified.
And he's a fascinating and tantalizing figure because he's working class, he's a non-scientist, but he's very smart, he's an engineer, he writes very, very directly. The interesting thing about him is you can't tell how many James Lee's there were. But the fact that there is one, he's that kind of black swan that makes it very clear that self-experimentation, and self-experimentation not just as casual as we might say recreational drug use, but as people systematically trying different drugs on themselves and recording the results was not an exclusively white elitist practice.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Yeah. If I could quote a bit of James Lee that you share in the chapter Prosthetic Gods. Lee's history as I was reading it, reminded me so much of one of Cambridge's locals here, Lisa Bieberman, who took a very hands on how to approach to drug knowledge. This wasn't just something to keep in the lab for the people with letters after their name to experiment upon themselves. But it was something that all of us could take into our own hands as it were.
And Lee writes, I quote here, "The life of a drug taker can be a happy one, far surpassing any other, or it can be one of suffering and misery. It depends on the users knowledge. The most interesting period will only be reached after many years, and then only if perfect health has been retained." He is as you put, a rational and practical approach that you often don't find in some of the more flowery language of the reports of self-experimentation.
And if I could turn to one of our questions in the audience that, I think, gets to this point of the role of self-experimentation in clinical research and medical research, it's played such a big part of your book, it's sort of this guiding thread of the first mover role of self-experimentation and setting out on these new paths of research.
I think, exemplified better than anybody else in Sasha Shulgin, for sure. But our audience member here is wondering why self-experimentation has sort of been backgrounded so much in contemporary research. I'm curious what you make of this, leaving behind of this legacy of self-experimentation that you note so well in Psychonauts.
MIKE JAY: Yeah, I think, it fell out of favor very fast in the early 20th century for various reasons, partly because of drugs becoming seen as a social problem and stigmatized, but also because of a change in the focus of psychology, less interest in introspection, more behaviorism. And then once you had things like EEGs, which were kind of proxies for brain activity, the idea of getting people to take drugs and pontificate about their experience just seemed less scientific than kind of doing EEG work and so on.
The scientific self-experimentation didn't entirely disappear. The areas where it really hung on were in psychopharmacology where people were studying and formulating new drugs. And there people carried on experimenting on themselves. So that's why Albert Hoffman, for example, in 1943 it was not that strange for him to be self experimenting with his new compound LSD 25.
And then, when the psychedelic era started in the 1950s, and you were dealing with drugs with these remarkable effects on consciousness that had to be experienced, you had a great Renaissance. I mean, we talk about the psychedelic Renaissance now, but I'm sort of attempting to suggest that the 1950s is really-- was in itself a psychedelic Renaissance of a previous era the 19th century.
Then you started to get a great flurry of it. And I think it really disappeared in the 1960s, in the conventional narrative. It's all about well, Harvard and Tim Leary, and all that the psychedelic counterculture frightening the horses. But I think, another equally significant was the amendments to FDA protocols the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962, which set up everything that we're familiar with now with double blind trials against placebos, and the idea of a quality drug being something that had the same effect across a large cohort of people.
And that really kind of once that was in play, if you were trying to license and make money out of your drug, then that was really the end of self-experiment because what established whether a drug jumped through all the obstacle courses of FDA licensing was, whether it had produced similar effects in large cohorts of patients, and whether you could show a biomedical cause and effect between the chemistry of the pill and the effect.
And all those things kind of made self-experiment a bit marginal. And so it more or less disappeared. And I think, we're now in this curious position in the psychedelic Renaissance or maybe the second psychedelic Renaissance, if you take a deep historical line on it. Is that where studying these. What's really interesting to us is the phenomenology of these drugs, the subjective effects that they produce.
And yet we're stuck with a model of science which can only study this at one remove from, by looking at brain scans or whatever. So what's the position of self-experiment in this discourse? And I think, there probably are good reasons why if you're doing trials of psychedelics for medicines that you want to be licensed, that those trials don't involve self-experiment.
There is a study which I refer to in my book, which shows that people are less likely to believe a scientific study if they know that the people who did the study were experimenting on themselves. But I think, we have this curious hybrid-- I think, self-experimentation has always been a hybrid form with one foot in literature and one foot in science, and that's what's so fascinating about it. And it's so interesting for tracking bigger changes like the sort of balance between objectivity and introspection in the mind sciences.
And I think, where it finds its home now is, I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why Michael Pollan's first book was such a huge towering bestseller was that, he told us what the scientists were saying, he told us about 5HT receptors, and default brain networks, and all this kind of stuff. But he also told us the things the scientists couldn't tell us which is, what these experiences were like, and what they felt like which he described beautifully.
And I think, there are huge mainstream audience of people who are really here for that bit and they weren't getting it from the science. And so I think, we do get it now, but it kind of doesn't quite exist within the science itself, so it's a kind of outrider to the science.
JEFFERY BREAU: I love how the-- you're almost again, sort of pointing to what are the languages that these different spaces are using to give legitimacy and to make sense of the world. And Sasha Shulgin is such a great example of somebody who was able to-- was clearly speaking the language of medicine, but yet was doing so with poetic license, and self-exploration, and introspection. And is an example of blending that.
Another example of blending that comes to mind is something like the mystical experience questionnaire, which we're trying to-- science is trying to say, OK, this is what it means to have a spiritual experience. And we can prove it with this psychometric set of 50 questions. Turning to this religion and science feel like maybe they're particularly, not at odds necessarily, but they're different ways of making sense of the world and of explaining.
And pointing to one of the questions from the audience. The Stephanie's question is, is there a way that you see that these two approaches, science and religion, science and spirituality, can be reconciled in the study of psychedelics? That there can be, as she says, not a perpetuating of the categorical demarcation between science and religion or psychedelic and drug but rather bringing both the empirical and the qualitative experiential together. Do you see a path forward for that?
MIKE JAY: Yes. And I think, they'll continue to be we might see it as being in tension or we might see it as being in dialogue. But I think, those two languages, I think, Sasha Shulgin is a great example just to return to him because that's exactly when the FDA are setting out these new protocols. Shulgin didn't have to obey them because he wasn't trying to make money out of this, he wasn't trying to patent or license his drugs. So he didn't have to jump through the FDA hoops.
And it's fascinating to me in tickle and pickle to see how he proceeded. And he was very explicit about this. That drug discovery, there are two parts of it. One part is the synthesis of the chemical, but then you've just got a white powder and you really have no idea. There's no way of just like looking at the molecular structure and saying, this is going to be psychoactive, let alone what it's going to do.
So he also wrote his subjective extensions and commentary. And I connect that back to what I'd say is the very, very beginning of this story, which is Humphry Davy and his nitrous oxide experiments. And his first write up of that in 1,800 is exactly the same. The first section of his book is the chemistry, and the synthesis, and then he goes on to look at the animal experiments, and what we can tell about how much of the gas is absorbed into the bloodstream.
And then he goes on and finishes with the subjective accounts of people, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert southey, and the romantic poets. So we have these two languages which are mutually unintelligible, they don't inform one another at all, but you have to put the two of them together in order to have the whole picture.
And I think, something analogous is probably true of religion and science, they're not looking for meaning in the same places, they're not following the same protocols, they're not trying to achieve the same results. But they both hit their limits in different ways, and in ways in which the other one can then be adduced to kind of fill in a bigger picture.
So I don't see a grand synthesis of religion and science emerging from this. But I do see psychedelics maybe bringing them together in ways that they haven't been brought together before. And I do see that as being sort of prudentially very productive.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: I think, one of our audience members is getting at what you mentioned about with Michael Pollan's best selling book, and why it was such a popular volume because he brought in so much of his personal experience into the text, it's like a third of the book. And one of our audience members asked very plainly, what is Mike's experience of using psychedelics personally? Which I think, I don't want to put that to you directly, but I am curious if you might speak to personal investment you may have in the material that you research.
MIKE JAY: Yeah, I think, that's absolutely fair and it may be revealing. I mean, I think, it's no surprise to say that I've been taking psychedelics occasionally for a very long time. I would have been ended up reading about them now if I hadn't had very formative psychedelic experiences in my youth, in my late teens, my early 20s.
I kind of came to-- my coming of age, in terms of psychedelics was in a sort of odd period that's thought of as a kind of interregnum. I mean, I was by the time I was interested in them and sort of late '70s and early '80s, the hippie thing was done and gone. I was of that punk generation that never trust a hippie, was my motto.
And it was-- and the idea that you didn't really look to authority, it was a sort of DIY culture, you did things yourself, and work them out for yourself. So I did that at that time with LSD and mushrooms in a very haphazard way, incredibly poorly informed. This is why it was so exciting for me when things like erowid came along and there was actually good drug information out there because I was working pretty much in a vacuum.
And so I came to my own understanding of psychedelics and my use of them. And I would say that, probably the ones that really informed my experience and kind of shook my view of reality were the first few experiences. And Alan Watts famously says, when you've got the message, hang up the phone. And my response to that was always, yeah, but what if you're enjoying the conversation?
So I've continued to take them since. But for me, they kind of really more like the sort of quintessence of all the things I like, I take them in nature with people I love, and they're just great peak experiences. And that's kind of where I am with psychedelics personally. So it may be that, I'm personally not very interested in the guided trip that feels a bit odd to me.
And I think, that's because probably, I'm used to figuring this stuff out for myself. And whatever understanding I've reached, I've reached on my own. So yeah, that's I guess my personal background and that may or may not inform the work that I've done.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: I often wonder what James and Freud would think of a site like erowid today. I think, in a lot of ways it'd be sort of the dream of or a culmination of all their work as far as what self-experimentation was to them. I could ask a follow up question, this is something that I turn over in my mind a great deal. You see in the '60s, a kind of split between the psychedelic movement of the '60s, and the sort of political militancy movement of the '60s, often moments of conjoining.
And then, I think, it was in the '80s, the history of Greenpeace very tied up with people being turned on by LSD, or mushrooms, or something along those lines, and then starting Greenpeace as a result of that. But I'm curious when you think-- when you're talking, you're describing never trust a hippie in the '70s and '80s, what was it that you saw? We're there any sort of moments of synthesis between a interest in psychedelics as alongside a sort of punk political militancy? Or did the two still seem kind of separate to you as I see ran the tides in the '60s?
MIKE JAY: The two definitely were meshed. And in things like the squatting movement, for example. There was a whole kind of large scene of people who were living kind of more or less alternative lives on next to no money, and of whom it would have been hard to say whether they were punks or hippies.
I think, by that time when I say hippie, I mean people who at that point in the late 1970s were still kind of unreconstructed believers in the sort of '60s hippie dream. And the ones of those who were left, they were a noticeable scene. And certainly, in Britain they had their bands like Hawkwind, and Gong, you could still go along to places where you kind of smell of patchouli oil and cannabis hit you before you wandered in through the door.
They still existed, but I think, nobody in that kind of alternative scene was expecting the hippie dream to happen. I think, thinking back to it I found, that was one of the things I found so appealing as an inspirational text about Hunter S. Thompson's, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it was a kind of deep phenomenal engagement with the drug experience, but it was like no, that hippie dream is gone. We're now in a different age.
And that very much spoke to me at that time. But I think, a lot of people-- I mean, I think, it's a little hard to talk about because a lot of people took psychedelics a few times and were extremely influenced by them, and then stopped taking them, and moved on. So what do you call those people? So in America, I guess, the commune movement, which you think of as a hippie movement, that was probably largely composed of people who had, had their psychedelic moment in the late '60s.
And then, as the '70s rolled around, kind of had families and wanted to set up an alternative lifestyle. And would you call that a political movement, or a hippie movement, or a post psychedelic movement? So yeah, lots and lots of crossover, of course. And I guess, my main encounter just finished on that with, if you wanted to buy LSD in Britain in the late '70s, and that was when you had to spend time with unreconstructed 1960s hippies.
JEFFERY BREAU: Perfect. To just pass on a comment from the person who asked that question, thank you for your candor. And I would echo that, it's as you mentioned, there are pros and cons to being open about or experimenting with these substances, and as a researcher or as somebody who studies them. And yet I feel the shadow of prohibition, it really is what is shaping these conversations.
As researchers, we would be having very different conversations about substance use if there wasn't this shadow of the war on drugs and prohibition. So thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to make sure we got a chance to ask Steven's question, which is changing gears slightly. But is thinking about-- maybe not changing gears that much, thinking about a fourth category of psychedelic use beyond the three pillars of recreational, medical, and spiritual.
And the fourth being aesthetic or maybe creative. Stephen is curious how your research has thought about that. And maybe especially in light of the Western influence you were talking about, or the Western focus on visuals. What do those visuals mean? How could we think about them as maybe a creative or aesthetic experience that has value in its own right?
MIKE JAY: Yeah. I've found that's absolutely right. The aesthetic approach has kind of disappeared. I've found it incredibly generative, and productive, and interesting to study. And you get it right at the beginning with that sort of Humphry Davy and the nitrous oxide experience, and the romantic poets. That although we're looking at the intersection of drugs and spirituality, a lot of the history of drugs is actually movement away from spirituality.
It's creating experiences which previously would have been described as spiritual, but now have other possible material explanations. But one of the ones that came up at the nitrous oxide experiments, this is around 1800, was the category of the sublime to describe the psychedelic experience, which I a lot actually, because it seems to me to introduce a very creative ambiguity.
It's not a materialist explanation. The sublime is something that is outside of reason, beyond reason, and not constrained by reason. But also, at the same time, it's not positing a spiritual or divine cause or meaning. It's kind of sitting in that ambivalent territory, where the effect is the product of both the observer and what they're observing.
So and it's associated with awe and can be associated with terror. It's as Edmund Burke said, it's the state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, which I've always really liked as a description of the psychedelic experience. And you find this throughout the 19th century, a lot of people who come to psychedelics, their frames of reference are aesthetic or poetic in ways that we've forgotten about.
It's really interesting how many people seize straight on poetry of Wordsworth in particular. And Havelock Ellis says, if this stuff catches on, Wordsworth is going to be the poet who everybody's going to read. And then it's fascinating to read Alexander Shulgin's first experience, where he doesn't reference Wordsworth specifically but he says, as I had my first dose of mescaline, I felt it coming up my first thought was, I know this state. I've been here before, this is how I used to see the world when I was a child, when everything was fresh, and when I was part of it all. And there was no alienation or separation between me and the world.
And that's exactly what everybody meant when they talked about Wordsworth. So I think, there's been a long and productive engagement with the aesthetic approach. And I don't think it's necessarily tied to any particular visual form or visual representation. I mean, I'm interested in the way that the image that comes to mind when people says psychedelic or if you kind of searched psychedelic images on Google, what you would get is something that's very different from anything that well, certainly, that I personally experience on psychedelics.
It comes from somewhere else and it has all kinds of other meanings to it. But yeah, I think, in the same way that a psychedelic, we have the-- as Westerners, these don't come with a frame that's ready made, we have to find our own frame, and we can say this is a medicine I'm going to take this and heal myself, or we can say this is a sacrament I'm going to take it and have a spiritual experience.
But we can also say, I'm going to take this and I'm going to create art, and there's quite a lot of that through the early half of the 20th century with masculine. And it's interesting to me that that's disappeared as a pillar. And I'm really glad to hear it referenced and brought back into the conversation.
JEFFERY BREAU: Yeah, certainly. And for anyone in the audience who's interested the CSWR does a Pop Apocalypse podcast, which is talking about some of the-- as you're noting, some of the much smaller threads of visionary art around altered states which are still exist, but as you note have a different, seemingly different flavor perhaps than they did in the past.
And as you were speaking about Wordsworth and these other towering figures, it almost struck me as what you were pointing to was less aesthetic and was almost mystical. Or what a lot of people would sort of refer to or point to as mystical. And this gets to another question and actually, a concatenation of a few questions in the audience around, what do you make and what does your research make of this idea of the psychedelic induced mystical experience?
And do you see from this discussion and discourse around mystical experience, do you see a way that psychedelics could be communicated to religious practitioners effectively? The person asking the question was specifically asking about say Buddhism that has restrictions on intoxicants. Do you see a way that the psychedelic experience could be made legible to different religious traditions?
MIKE JAY: Yeah. I mean, this engagement happens already. I'm sure, we're all familiar with the zig zag zen collection of writings about psychedelics and Buddhism, even though Buddhism has these kind of-- yeah, I mean, even smoking tobacco is kind of problematic within Buddhism for all kinds of reasons. I think, that's true. I think, what's interesting in the history, as I said briefly before was that, it opens up the mystical experience to more interpretations.
If you look at, say William James' Melia and the Society for Psychical Research who in the late 19th century were interested in, what to do about these experiences with hashish, but particularly, with chloroform and ether and nitrous oxides these brief sort of anesthetic revelations as Benjamin Blood called them the person who communicated them to William James.
And of course, what was interesting about them was that they could be experimented on systematically. So you get these figures within the Society of Psychical Research, trying to understand out-of-body experience or psychical phenomena, and using drugs for this purpose. And they come to such a range of different conclusions. You have figures like William Ramsay, great gas chemist and Nobel Prize winner who inhaled ether, and nitrous oxide, and chloroform dozens of times.
And was absolutely fascinated each time, absolutely convinced that this was actually reality, and what he'd lived his life in was sort of the veil of Maya that had now been torn aside. And then coming back from that state to his everyday reality and trying to work out what this meant, and reading transcendental philosophy, and reading everything he could.
And at the end, kind of being unsure and thinking, well, these are extraordinary experiences, but could this just be what happens when the brain gets disconnected from the body? Could it just be a materialist phenomenon? And then at the same time, alongside him in the Society of Psychical Research a figure like William Wilde, who's a doctor, but also a spiritualist, and a mesmerist, and a theosophist for whom this kind of experience on chloroform or ether was a genuine spiritual experience.
It was the fading away of the material and the rising up of the spiritual. And this was the journey of the soul to the astral plane. And he was absolutely convinced of a spiritual explanation. And also believed that any serious rationalist or materialist should just have this experience, and then they would understand it themselves.
So you get, the more spiritually inclined figures just kind of arguing for rational and material demonstrations of this. So I think, what happens-- what drugs have brought to this is a diversity of possible understandings of these states of which the spiritual is one, but then there are also others.
PAUL GILLIS-SMITH: Brilliant. Yeah. A set of profane illuminations to borrow Benjamin's phrase on this. I think, this is a great question to bring us to a close here from Mark. Mark is curious what topics might be in mind for future books? And if a future book is not in the works as this one just came out this year, I'm sure the year has been taken over by Psychonauts I am sure.
Where people might be able to find you and your work, if we might expect something in the future. And a third question of my own curiosity, in this trajectory of the history of medicine from the perspective of drugs from high society, to mescaline, to the nitrous oxide book, to Psychonauts, what profane illumination might you suggest that we all pull away with from this trajectory in your work?
MIKE JAY: That's a great set of questions. I always think it's hard to come up with a takeaway from the psychedelic experience. And that the psychedelic experience also doesn't necessarily need to be validated by a takeaway. One book that's come out recently, I don't know if it's on your radar is Ten Trips by Andy Mitchell, a British colleague of mine who thought about this very well. And I'd recommend that for your reading list.
As far as my future output is concerned, I think, I'm going to move towards a parallel, cultural history which doesn't involve drugs but has a lot of the same things. I think, is where we'll go next, I won't say much more about that. But the other thing I've engaged on at the moment actually is, a new edition of high society.
And what's fascinating about that is that, that was maybe 12 years ago, I guess I wrote it. And going back over the text and seeing what revisions would have to happen. Well, there's no psychedelic Renaissance in that book. It was even-- I mean, it feels to me like it was very recently, but even if it was like 12, 13 years ago, there's none of that there was no such thing as legal cannabis, I'm writing about that as something that might happen in the future.
Only the 12 years ago, the term opioid crisis had not yet been coined. So that has been a real eye opener for me in terms of how fast the landscape has changed in the last 10, 15 years. And it's made me excited for how much it's going to change over the next 10 or 15.
JEFFERY BREAU: Yeah, certainly. Well thank you so much, Mike, for all of this. I am excited to see where your non-drug future takes us. And also just grateful for the work that you've done to reframe these conversations and make that progress that you're noting happen. So thank you for taking the time to join us and for all of your work.
Thank you also to the audience for joining us today and for your wonderful questions. We will pass all of those on to Mike. I also want to take a moment to briefly thank Dr. Professor Charles Stang, who is the Director of the CSWR, and helped make all of today possible. And I also want to thank Laurie for her technical expertise, helping manage everything behind the scenes. And also to all of the CSWR staff for their help today.
And of course, thank you to Paul for everything today and beyond. We will have one more psychedelics and the future of religion event coming up before the winter holiday. This will be a conversation with Erica Dick and Christian Elcock about their brand new book, which is titled Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, I believe it came out a day or two ago.
And it fittingly ends with an essay by our very own Mike Jay. So it will be a beautiful extension of the conversation here, and a chance to really dig into the long history of psychedelics. That conversation will be on Thursday, December 7 from 2:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern. That will also be on Zoom, and a link will be available in the chat, and also on the CSWR website. We look forward to seeing all of you back here then, and wish you well until then. Thank you so much.
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