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Psychonauts
Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
Mike Jay
Yale University Press 2023
Hb, 359pp, £20, ISBN 9780300257946
In the 21st century we take drugs, prescribed and controlled, for granted. Geographical, political and legal variations notwithstanding, they are a chemical backdrop to our lives, offering healing and entertainment as well as addiction and death. Most psychoactive drugs are controlled by law and it is very difficult for the enthusiastic amateur or professional researcher to test them on themselves and retain any credibility.
This was not always so. Mike Jay explains that when the Royal Society was founded in the 17th century at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, their motto Nul lius in Verba (‘on the word of no one’) was a green light for those early psychonauts who “placed experiment at the heart of the scientific revolution”.
In Psychonauts Jay, arguably the UK’s most erudite writer on drugs and altered states of consciousness, traces the course of these experiments with mindaltering substances, experiments which, he claims, led to the development of psychology and the disciplines surrounding it. Early psychonauts (a term coined in 1970 by Albert Hofmann’s complex friend Ernst Junger) included Humphrey Davy who, after experimenting with nitrous oxide, realised a new vocabulary was required to adequately describe its effect. “I feel like the sound of a harp,” noted one of his friends unscientifically whilst others experienced extreme euphoria or inexplicable paroxysms of laughter. The effects of drugs on the mind clearly deserved scientific study and discussion to examine what light they could shed on the conscious and the subconscious.
But the debate wasn’t exclusvely scientifically orientated and Jay excels in teasing out the psychonauts who experimented as much for pleasure as for what it told them about the workings of the
