Temperance movement

• Whether seeing the world through the eyes of a toad is an experience worth having is an open question.
• Toad juice (or bufotenine, its active ingredient) is currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit usually in smokable form.
• Mike Tyson, Hunter Biden and Joe Rogan credit it with life-changing insights that years of amphibian-free therapy could not provide.
• Review: Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind – Mike Jay (Yale University Press) Psychedelics are back in the news.

The early psychonauts

• Jay excavates a much deeper and more interesting history of early chemical adventurers.
• In the 1880s, for example, Sigmund Freud self-administered cocaine to test whether it could induce euphoria and recharge the cerebral battery as earlier psychonauts had suggested.
• Chastened by his colleague’s descent into a vortex of abuse, he set cocaine aside and airbrushed it from his life story.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: peyotes in suburbia – the secret world of Sydney's psychoactive cacti growers

Substances and society

• Much of Jay’s book lays out an absorbing history of psychoactive substances, but it is also rich with insights on the broader societal implications of substance use.
• Once an expansive category, it contracted when “medications” escaped into therapeutic legitimacy, leaving the remaining substances stigmatised and criminalised.
• More recently, psychedelics have attempted the same manoeuvre, trying to shed the taint of abused drugs to become seen as morally impeccable.
• Psychedelics have been stereotypically whiter than the substances against which the American war on drugs has primarily been fought, disproportionately targeting minority communities as a result.

Psychonautics and psychology

• Many early psychonauts were artists, writers and philosophers, but influential psychologists and neurologists were also well represented, notably Freud, James and, decades later, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, a buttoned-down academic researcher before he turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
• These three writers all found inspiration in their experiences of intoxication, although Freud backed away from his own.
• Their explorations were supported by approaches to psychology that centred the study of subjectivity.
• William James worked at a time when subjective experience was central to the nascent field of academic psychology.
• New psychoactive substances – such as amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD – were synthesised during this period, but the tradition of self-experimentation had died within psychology.