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BEFORE DRUGS
their subjects, seizing on pathological tendencies or hereditary weakness to erode their will-power, health and moral agency. Medical and
political reformers often included them among the ‘degenerate habits’
of ‘inferior races’ that impeded the progress of modern, Western civilisation. By the 1920s, after they were brought under legal controls, the
term ‘drugs’ had taken on the cluster of pejorative meanings –
dangerous, foreign, criminal – with which the term is still freighted
today.
During the twentieth century these associations hardened, re inforced by the steady march of international anti-drug laws; and in
the process, the exhilarating sense of possibility that mind-expanding
drugs had represented in an earlier era receded from view. The ‘drugs’
most frequently recalled from the previous era were opium and its
more potent derivatives, morphine and heroin. These had indeed been
the most widely used in nineteenth-century medicine and the most
commonly referenced in its literature; they were also the most problematic, and the most prominent in the arguments that led to the
twentieth century’s drug control regime. By the late nineteenth century,
however, many other drugs offered expansive possibilities for exploring
the mind: the unprecedentedly powerful euphoria and mental stimulation of cocaine; the cosmic epiphanies of nitrous oxide, ether or chloroform; the visionary intoxication of cannabis and other plants long
familiar in distant corners of the globe.
Much of the self-experimental literature generated by these
substances was forgotten during the twentieth century, but a few
episodes remained too conspicuous to ignore. Why, for example,
had Sigmund Freud been such an enthusiastic champion of cocaine?
And why did William James continue to insist that the insights he
gained from inhaling nitrous oxide – laughing gas – were central to his
understanding of consciousness and mystical experience? In most
twentieth-century treatments of these towering figures in the discovery
of the modern mind, their drug experiments are dismissed with embarrassment (or latched upon with glee by their detractors) as youthful
11
PSYCHONAUTS
escapades or foolish errors of judgement. An admiring survey of
William James’s career published in 1948 dismissed his nitrous oxide
epiphany as ‘the child playing with matches, or irreverently mocking
the devout’, and relegated it to a chapter titled ‘Morbid Traits’.13 Freud
himself suppressed his work on cocaine after the drug was criminalised, omitting his papers on it from his bibliography; his biographer
Ernest Jones followed him in minimising the episode in his authorised
three-volume life and works, and in private judged it an aberration:
‘he was only interested in the magical effect of the drug, of which he
took too much himself’.
14
Retrospective explanations of this kind tell us more about the prejudices of the century in which they were written than about the events
they describe. Freud and James were working in an era where such
experiments were not unusual or eccentric; many of their contemporaries did the same, and indeed considered self-experiment as a mark of
seriousness or professional dedication. I want to restore this missing
context by setting the drug experiences and discoveries of such major
figures alongside those of their less famous contemporaries, both in the
mind sciences and in the wider intellectual worlds – from literature to
art history, philosophy to spiritualism – across which thinkers such as
Freud and James ranged.
This nineteenth-century body of drug writing feels much more
accessible in the twenty-first century than it did in the twentieth. The
lines are easily drawn to today’s fascination with psychedelics and other
mental enhancers, and their promises to free our minds from the overrigid strictures of modern life. The early psychonauts remain of their
time in some obvious respects: they were almost all educated white
males, a reflection of that group’s domination of nineteenth-century
science, for which reason I have made the most of female, workingclass, non-white and non-Western voices where I have found them. In
other respects, however, their diversity is striking, and their endeavours
amount to a remarkable, and remarkably under-studied, episode in
Western intellectual history.
12
BEFORE DRUGS
* * *
In the twenty-first century, the time is ripe for its rediscovery. Over the
thirty years since I began writing about drugs, our attitude to them has
changed beyond recognition. Take the example of smoking Sonoran
desert toad secretions, which has made the transit from the far reaches
of drug-addled degeneracy to become the latest, much-hyped arrival in
the crowded marketplace of psychedelic therapies. Clinical studies
have hailed the promise of ‘the toad’ for the treatment of depression,
anxiety and stress, and earned its active ingredient, 5-MEO-DMT, the
unlikely epithet of ‘the God molecule’.15 Global influencers and
opinion formers, from Burning Man to Davos, have become its evangelists. In 2019 Mike Tyson told Joe Rogan and his 200 million podcast
listeners that smoking the toad had led him to insights that turned his
life around. Rogan himself has hailed it as the equivalent of fifteen
years of psychotherapy. In 2021 Hunter Biden, the son of the US president, published a memoir of his recovery from substance abuse in
which he credited smoking toad, under the guidance of a spiritual
healer at a beach house in Mexico, with keeping him clean for a year:
‘It was a profound experience,’ Biden wrote; ‘it connected me in a
vividly renewed way to everyone in my life.’16 So many self-styled
shamans now offer it as a commercial therapy or sacred medicine across
the deserts of south-west USA and northern Mexico that conservationists and indigenous groups are concerned the Sonoran desert toad
is being exploited unsustainably across its fragile natural habitat. In
response, a process has been developed to produce the compound in
synthetic form for clinical trials.
17
The experience produced by smoking toad is famously ineffable,
but Michael Pollan took up the challenge of describing it in his bestselling survey of the new psychedelic landscape, How to Change your
Mind (2018). The task is the same that nineteenth-century experimenters with nitrous oxide or ether faced when struggling to put into
words a disembodied journey that might equally have lasted for a
13
PSYCHONAUTS
second or for eternity. Pollan relates the overwhelming experience in
carefully considered prose that recalls the classic accounts of Humphry
Davy or William James:
I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto
the mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar
. . . ‘I’ was no more, blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force
I could no longer locate in my head, because it had exploded that
too, expanding to become all that there was. Whatever this was, it
was not a hallucination. A hallucination implies a reality and a point
of reference and an entity to have it. None of those things remained.
18
A generation ago, the same self-experiment by Wade Davis and
Andrew Weil was condemned as an irresponsible breach of scientific
protocol. Today, as billions of research dollars pour into medical psychedelics and cognitive enhancement, it is time to recognise that our
new-found fascination with drugs and the exploration of consciousness has a deeper history than we recognise. Many of its advocates and
practitioners conceive it as entirely novel, a product of twenty-firstcentury neuroscience and perhaps the prelude to a neurochemically
transformed post-human future. For others, it finds a charter in nonWestern cultures: traditional Asian practices of meditation and mindfulness, or the New World’s shamanism and indigenous plant wisdom.
(I have written elsewhere about some of these global traditions, but my
focus in this book is on the modern West.) These narratives are all
underpinned by the assumption that the Western engagement with
drug experiences is shallow, dating no further back than the 1960s
and that decade’s countercultural embrace of transcendence and selfactualisation. A longer view, however, reveals that we are reigniting an
enduring fascination with drugs and the mind that was a hallmark of
Western modernity a century ago, but disappeared from our collective
memory during the drug-averse twentieth century.
14
BEFORE DRUGS
Drugs today are both fetishised and demonised, and our conflicted
attitudes towards them reflect a fault-line between competing versions
of modernity. ‘Modern’ is not a term that can be claimed by one
particular era, or by a single and uncontested set of values. Ever since
the concept emerged during the Renaissance, when it described the
new stage of civilisation that was succeeding the classical world and the
Dark Ages, it has been evoked during periods of rapid change, when
tradition is being eclipsed by new modes of thinking and living. The
velocity of progress in the nineteenth century was unprecedented, and
drugs became potent symbols of both its dreams and its nightmares.
The notion of modernity that rose to dominance in the early twentieth
century was one to which drugs represented an existential threat. Now,
a century later, they are pregnant once more with possibilities for
expanding our minds, restoring them to health and allowing us to
discover our authentic selves.
The long sweep of modernity has been exhaustively surveyed by the
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose work aims to trace the
journey from the medieval worldview, in which we inhabited our
allotted place in a divine scheme, to a secular modernity in which
personal identity is something that we construct for ourselves. In his
most sustained study, Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor attempted to
enumerate the distinctive characteristics of the modern mind: as he
defined it, ‘the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality and being
embedded in nature which are at home in the modern West’.19 This
modern self, according to Taylor’s analysis, sees itself as possessing
inner depths that are worthy of exploration; it prizes authenticity and
originality; it sees nature as benign and restorative. It is striking how
closely these values reflect the attraction of consciousness-altering
drugs in the twenty-first century.
As Taylor shows, however, these are not recent preoccupations: they
are the culmination of a historical process that has been in motion
since the Enlightenment and was firmly entrenched in popular culture
during the Romantic era. It was during the eighteenth century, he
15
PSYCHONAUTS
argues, that Europeans came to valorise inner experience, and to
analyse the mechanisms of sensation and perception that created it.
During the nineteenth century this impulse broadened and deepened
with the Romantic movement, which privileged ‘the reflexive powers
which are central to the modern subject, those which confer the
different kinds of inwardness on him or her, the powers of disengaged
reason, and the creative imagination’.20 In this panoramic view, the
twentieth century’s taboo on the use of drugs to explore the mind
appears as a hiatus in the long pursuit of our modern selves, and the
current revival of interest in them as the resumption of a much older
story.
16
PART I
THE NEW
ACCELERATOR
DRUGS AND MENTAL ENHANCEMENT
17
1. Coca wine, made by steeping the cocaine-containing leaf in burgundy,
was a popular product in nineteenth-century pharmacies, marketed as
‘The Elixir of Life’.
18
CHAPTER ONE
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
n 30 April 1884, Sigmund Freud received his first gram of
cocaine by mail from the Merck pharmaceutical company in
O
3 gulden 33 kreuzer, around ten times what he had anticipated – but
ordered it anyway. As he wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays, he was
only one ‘lucky hit’ away from a career breakthrough, and ‘you know
that when one perseveres, sooner or later one succeeds’.1 In his dingy
student rooms at Vienna General Hospital, he measured out 50mg of
the crystalline powder, dissolved it in water and swallowed it, noting
immediately that ‘it has a somewhat bitter taste and produces an anaesthetic effect on the mucous membranes’.
Freud’s ‘cocaine episode’ is perhaps the best-remembered drug selfexperiment of the late nineteenth century, and the most consistently
misunderstood. From today’s perspective, it seems baffling that the
most celebrated cartographer (or conquistador, to use his own term)3 of
the modern mind should have staked his professional reputation on a
drug that we now associate with egomaniacal excess, wild parties and
Latin American criminal cartels. But in 1884, the twenty-eight-yearold Freud was merely an overworked medical student rather than the
magisterial figure he would become, and cocaine was not yet the
demonised drug of the twentieth century. Though his cocaine researches
ended in disgrace and he subsequently disowned them, he had good
reasons to hope that the drug might be a sovereign remedy for the
diseases of modern life.
Darmstadt. He had been taken aback by the steep price –
2
19
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
2. Sigmund Freud and his fiancée Martha in 1885.
20