When reading widely in a specialist field, in my case drug writing, one often reflects that a particular subject or topic really ought to have a book written about it—something that’s missing from the oeuvre or which requires a more thorough treatment. As a historian, this occasionally reveals itself as a eureka moment and becomes the kernel of thought that mutates into a project. At other times, feeling oneself ill-equipped for the job, it’s the hope that some other much more able individual turns their pen to the idea so that, quite indulgently, I might just sit back and enjoy reading it.

The latter is undoubtedly the case with the newly published Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna by Graham St John—a book I have long wanted to read and, now that I have, am very grateful for. Excellent scholarship, eloquently written, and deeply illuminating of its subject.

I first became aware of Terence McKenna in the years after he died in April 2000. He had, I feel sure, already woven himself into my sub-conscious through some of the music that sampled his famous drawl, especially throughout the Nineties. However, it was through internet forums, message boards and alike that I eventually became acquainted with him, especially through listening to his many recorded talks. Then, working in a secondhand bookshop in 2005, a copy True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise turned up too—I quickly devoured it.

McKenna was, I believe, a far more loquacious speaker than he was a talented writer—yet his subjects in The Invisible Landscape, Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival are always tantalizingly thoughtful. He also provokes interesting reactions from people. From those who treat him with the kind of reverence reserved for holy teachers, through to others derogatorily denouncing him as a guru or false prophet. Somewhere in between is an entertainer who not only riffed on subjects taboo in the mainstream, but who still inspires others to think deeply about psychedelics.

Such myriad reactions do of course give rise to the question: Who was this person really? Who was Terence McKenna? We got a very partial answer with his brother Dennis’ Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which was first published in that very auspicious year for McKenna fans, 2012. However, it always felt like a proper biography would be a difficult task—not least because of several fires that have destroyed much of Terence’s writing, correspondence and library.

However, with Graham St John, who has previously authored such great books as Global Tribe and Mystery School in Hyperspace, the right person for the job came along. Thanks to St John undertaking extensive interviews, archival research, and God knows how much listening to McKenna’s voluminous back catalogue of talks that a very thorough biography has now appeared. Obviously a fan of McKenna, and the McKennaverse, St John has managed to walk the tight-rope of an apparently fair assessment. Terence McKenna was a complex individual.

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Accusations of guru-ism would have bemused McKenna. Terence’s childhood stories, especially those related by himself later in life, reveal a kind of father figure rebellion manifesting against all authority. This underpins not only his own character, but arguably much of his generation too. He was someone who was essentially afforded every opportunity and comfort in life, especially compared to prior generations, but this then manifested as a radical individualism defined by a rejection of anything vaguely resembling authority. Not only politically, but right down to rejecting shamanistic oversight in ayahuasca ceremonies—he even disdained ritual as a ‘substitute for the mystery’.

As McKenna told a crowd in Esalen in 1997, ‘I discovered that that was the path of wisdom: a total rejection of the culture I came up with.’ ‘Culture’ he also famously said, ‘is not your friend’. He was taking part in the great mythology of his generation—that they had liberated themselves, and were the great liberators of society. This is of course nonsense, but on some level McKenna did appear to recognise this too—not only with wry irony in his talks but also in his desire to remove himself (some would say retreat) from everyday culture.

As St John notes, McKenna was paradoxical so far as he wanted to live as a ‘cave man’ but was also someone who desired to be the centre of attention. Bridging these psychological desires was his intellectual life—a bibliophile who enjoyed nothing more than smoking weed (which he did habitually) and quietly reading books, and also wishing to share what he understood with the world. Carl Jung, Mercea Eliade, and Marshall McLuhan all had an important impact on McKenna, and St John does an excellent job at tracing his intellectual influences in the woven fabric of his talks—the public face of quiet reading.

There are several key moments for Terence that came to dominate the trajectories of his personal and public life, including: his failure to see his mother before she died while he was on the run from the law; the events at La Chorrera; the discovery of a method to grow magic mushrooms at home; and his so-called ‘terror trip’ in 1988 (which was deeply wrapped up in his increasingly troubled relationship with his then wife Kat Harrison)—all of which are described and handled with great care by St John.

In particular, the story of the infamous ‘Experiment at La Chorrera’—related in True Hallucinations—is grounded and enigmatic in St John’s retelling. Yet it is the aftermath that is most revealing. McKenna worked maniacally on the ideas the experiment generated, all the while with friends seriously questioning his state of mind and wondering if they needed to intervene. This was a period of expansive, creative thinking for McKenna yet with a sense he was just burying himself away from the paranoia-inducing reality of being on the run for hash smuggling.

While the situation with the authorities was finally sorted in 1972, as St John observes, ‘McKenna spent the remainder of his life coming down from La Chorrera, toying with the “eschatron” and its successors, while contending with the reaction of his peers.’ Indeed, it is through the documentary and oral evidence of his friends, family and peers that one gets a real sense of McKenna’s notably obsessive pursuit of ideas and novelty, conversely coupled with a kind of inflexibility in his personal worldview. It conjures a complicated depiction.

Strange Attractor charts well these two interwoven trajectories of public intellectual and private individual, drawing out their mutual paradoxes and contradictions along with the way in which they were so inextricably linked. McKenna entertained without acting, which is to say, he appears to have rarely knowingly pretended to be someone he wasn’t. St John often describes him as a ‘trickster’, but I must confess to seeing little of this archetype in him—McKenna lacks the cold manipulation of a psychedelic trickster figure like Michael Hollingshead, instead being confessedly aware of his own flaws and limitations.

However, of McKenna the entertainer, St John writes, ‘As his unique style was cultivated in daytime workshops at Esalen and at nightclubs in New York, and perfected on an international circuit, McKenna became a bard for multitudes, his raps showcasing an ability to seed an ecosystem of ideas terraformed for unique audiences.’ Ultimately, for those who did not know him personally, this will always be McKenna’s lasting legacy. But at least now it is possible to see the complexity of the man behind the raps.

You can read an extract here.

During the Victorian period microscope technology developed in leaps and bounds. It afforded many more people the chance to examine the minutiae of the natural world in ever greater clarity, fueling their imaginations. In keeping with the era’s fancy for fairy literature and artwork, it was not unusual for naturalists to describe what they saw in these terms. As the writer and science educator Arabella Buckley wrote, ‘the slime from a rock-pool teems with fairy forms darting about’. These devices were quite literally revelatory.

This discourse neatly illuminates how technology has the power to simultaneously enchant and disenchant. In one sense, microscopy reveals the previously unseen and unexplored. The hitherto mysterious realm of the very small has a light shined upon it as the mechanisms of the natural world are revealed in ever more spectacular detail. In another, however, this new domain raises many more questions as people realise that this world, ordinarily hidden to our senses, teems with life and strange, new forms.

Capturing an image of fairy world is no mean feat, but in respect of microscopy this has become an ever more detailed and curiously stunning endeavour as we have developed the tools to do so. It is a borderland of science and art that fascinates as much as it teaches. In Microcosms: Sacred Plants of the Americas, Jill Pflugheber and Steven F White have given us a glimpse into the inner botanical workings of some of world’s most enigmatic plants.

Microcosms originally began life as an exhibition at St Lawrence University’s Brush Art Gallery in March 2020, titled A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas. However, it was forced to close after only two weeks due to the pandemic. The book greatly expands on the exhibition with images and context, and is also an extension of two other exhibitions, both curated by Professor Luis Eduardo Luna, called Visions that the Plants Gave Us and Inner Visions: Sacred Plants, Art, and Spirituality.

Plants that are sacred to various indigenous peoples throughout the Americas are the subject of this book then. These include those famous for their psychedelic properties such as Banisteriopsos spp. (the vine used is ayahuasca), Lophophora williamsi (peyote), and Salvia divinorum, along with notably famous plants like Erythroxylum novogranatense (coca), Cannabis sativa, Nicotiana rustica (tobacco), and many, many others too. Indeed, almost fifty plants are discussed and shown in beautiful, microscopic detail.

The stunning images are created using confocal microscopy, also called confocal laser scanning microscopy, which is a ‘specialised optical imaging technique that provides contact-free, non-destructive measurements of three-dimensional objects.’ This technique creates ‘optical sections through layers of biological samples.’ Basically, naturally occurring fluorescent chemical compounds release photons which are gathered over a period of time, constructing the image.

Microcosms also includes a thoughtful discussion of its antecedent practitioners, from Robert Hooke (1635-1703) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) through to the modern day. This is useful for the reader in order to understand how the threshold of art and science has shifted over hundreds of years, as changes in technology, styles and ideas jostle with one another. It lays the ground work for what Alexis Rockman has described as ‘a hybrid language that is natural history psychedelia’—a phrase aptly describing this book too.

The inner botanical worlds revealed by ‘Microscopic Phytoformalism’ are beautiful, ethereal and, in some respects, liminal worlds. The authors quote artist and professor György Kepes (1906-2001) in this regard, that ‘a pattern in nature is a temporary boundary that both separates and connects the past and the future of the processes that trace it.’ The captured images are thus inhabited by a kind of Whiteheadian process that persists in consequence of what we see, threading a kind of living memory through the captured aesthetic.

Wonderfully presented in a large format, Microcosms gives apt justice to the incredible imagery it displays. Together they teem with an spectral array of blues, greens, and occasional warmer colours, in myriad forms—each with a different sense of movement. The sacred plants themselves have a diverse range of effects and uses in the Americas, and their inner worlds are equally as fantastically different. Coupled with discussion and ordinary botanical photography, one gains a real sense of each plant in the fullness of its being.

As an example of the space in which science and art meet, Microcosms is an excellent and thoughtful contribution. As with any decent ‘coffee table book’ it will be worth revisiting many times over. It is shot through with inspiration, both artistic and otherwise. As a kind of architecture of sacred plants, the imagery teaches us that other worlds, be they fairy-like, microscopic, or DMT-induced, often have a mysterious and enchanting logic all of their own.

Well, what is it like?

Andrew presented zany graphics that resembled space invaders from 1980s arcade games. Strange gremlin figures in a Tron-like reality grid that contrasted splendidly with Jack’s folkloric vision trailing the witchy fog of the Welsh valleys. I was mesmerized by his illustration of the processes of brain chemistry – of neurotransmission and neuromodulation and the neuronal networks and firing synaptic pathways. Clear, coherent and simple (enough) for layfolk like myself.

I then spent deep and quality time with Andrew later that same year at a gathering at Tyringham that he describes in the opening pages of Death by Astonishment. An extraordinary assemblage of natural philosophers and magicians, sages and mages, wizards, witches and warlocks, explorers and cartographers of hidden worlds. Four days that I still cannot fully fathom.

Andrew was especially considerate to join me with a bottle of cold beer on a walk through the parkland to the handsome stone bridge over the gentle river to discuss some rather urgent metaphysical questions that the experiences in the temple the night before had rather violently thrust upon me.

He was already developing the argument that would become central to his ongoing work: ‘Your brain,’ he explained, ‘is very good at building a world. In fact, your brain builds your world, your consensus model of reality, as a default.’

Think about it: we inhabit a functional model of reality constructed by the fantastically complex machinery of the brain. Whatever state of consciousness – whether driving a car, climbing a mountain, reading a book, drinking beer, hallucinating monsters or asleep and dreaming – our brains construct the realities we experience. We think we inhabit the real world, but we know nothing of this real world that is not mediated through the neural processing function. As such we cannot really talk of external reality at all, but only of the internal construction of external reality; and from an evolutionary perspective the model needs to be functional, coherent and consensus or we would face challenges of survivability.

This makes sense, however Matrix-like it sounds.

The implications are huge. Alter brain chemistry and alter perception. Perturb the reality-building mechanism and perturb reality. At Tyringham, Andrew developed this position as axiom: ‘If a world appears to the consciousness, it must have an informational representation in the brain.’ And from this he suggests that hallucinations should perhaps not be called ‘false perceptions’ but instead ‘nonadaptive perceptions.’

Reality-build an angry bear when there is no angry bear and you live in unnecessary fear, anxiety, paranoia. Fail to reality-build the angry bear when there is an angry bear and you get eaten. But, Andrew asked: ‘When you introduce DMT into the brain, something different happens.’ And that is why we were gathered in that big house with the strange temple. Something seriously different happens.

‘It’s not like the brain shifts from building the consensus world to building a slightly different version of the consensus world. It shifts, the channel switches, and it starts building a world that has no relationship whatsoever to the consensus world. […] it’s as if the brain is switched to a completely different mode, as if a different connectivity pattern has been adopted, such that the brain now builds with a beautifully effortless manner this extremely complex, extremely coherent, crystalline, beautiful, rich, bizarre world, that has no relationship to the consensus world. And for me that’s kind of confounding.’

Damn right. It is kind of confounding. It is baffling. It is astonishing.

This is the bedrock of Andrew’s work for the ensuing decade. What the fuck is going on with DMT? If the brain is modelling a reality, what the fuck is this reality? Really, what is it? Well, not one to shirk the challenge, in 2019 Andrew published the first of his DMT trilogy of books to explore these questions: Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game.

What a book! A typographic marvel (and presumably a typesetting nightmare). Text like a dot matrix print from the late 90s (minus the perforated tear-off margins) infused with blocks of coding and the same arcade-game gremlins we met back in 2015. Meticulous step-by-step explanations of the mechanics of world-building; through the areas of the brain that correspond to different functions down to the cellular, the molecular, the atomic, the sub-atomic. And up to the organism, the ecosystem, the global, the solar, the galactic, the cosmic. The book is astonishing. The book is quite scary, but why?

ON OFF. That’s how the book opens. This is the Grid. This is the synaptic potential. ON OFF. This is the nature of reality. It is summed up in the penultimate chapter before the even scarier discussion of THE GAME. I’ll cite just the first of a series of extraordinary axioms:

‘We live in a reality constructed from digital information instantiated by a Code programmed by an alien hyperintelligence [other Other].’

‘The Code programs the structure of reality as a digital object constructed as one of a vast number of lower-dimensional slices – Grids – of a structure known as the HyperGrid.’

This Code, he explains, is not metaphorical: it underpins the structure and behaviour of reality. Our Universe is a simulation or digital machine designed to cultivate sentient, intelligent life, possibly as part of a greater evolutionary trajectory. Humanity’s increasing entwinement with technology is seen not as alienation from nature, but as a deeper expression of the natural order, fulfilling the purpose of the Code. DMT is a ubiquitous molecule, which hints at its evolutionary significance, something Dennis McKenna has also explored. It is not simply a drug, but a key, an interface, a portal, that allows humans to access hyperdimensional realities, to communicate with non-human intelligences inhabiting those realms and to gain experiential insight into the hidden structure of reality.

‘The task of the Game is to realise the nature of our imprisonment in the Grid and to find our way out. But a game it is.’ Am I imprisoned on the Grid? Am I? Is Andrew Morpheus? Am I Neo? Do I want to be Neo? Perhaps I’m Cypher, who’d rather return to the Matrix, eat the steak and forget the whole business… But I’m not Cypher. Too late for that. But what is this Game?

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‘The Game has six levels, the final being resolution which involves the transcription of the brain complex and permanent – irreversible – transference into the HyperGrid.’ Irreversible. Pay attention to that. Level V Realisation is where, Andrew explains, ‘Target-controlled intravenous infusion represents the pinnacle of modern psychoactive drug administration technologies.’ This allows lengthy visitations to the DMT realities. But it doesn’t end there. The goal of the Game, as I understand it, is to reach Level VI, which means achieving permanent transcription of consciousness into the higher-dimensional container universe.

‘Once transcription is completed – by a specific set of intelligences within the HyperGrid – your original brain complex will likely be dissolved. This means, to anyone observing you from outside the DMT space – from the consensus world, the Grid – you will appear to have died. But, in reality, you will continue to exist as a hyperdimensional entity inside the HyperGrid. And, when DMT voyagers from the Grid burst into your marvellous hyperdimensional domain, you will be amongst the thronging elfin crowds cheering and welcoming them home.’

And there the book ends.

True, I can’t deny that I was a little alarmed that Andrew had envisioned some weird technodaimonic suicide cult. After all, you can only appear dead for a while before you are, really, dead. And from my experiences there is no way I would want to be plunged for cosmic eternity into the thronging elfin crowds cheering and welcoming me home. That ain’t heaven. It’s more like hell.

So, with trepidation I unwrapped ’s second book, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds (2022). Again, a typographic marvel, this time infused with a funky manual-like Japanese techno-aesthetic.

Following his previous talks and writings, the book presents psychedelics not merely as mind-altering substances or therapeutic agents, but as precise neurotechnologies – tools for switching the brain’s reality channel. Not distorters of reality but replacers of reality. The old screen is swept aside and a new screen appears. A reality jump cut. A cosmic jump cut. Andrew explores how these molecules interact with specific neural systems to allow access to alternate, structured, and often alien ‘World Spaces.’ Psychedelics, especially tryptamines, open a new frontier: not outward into space, but inward into the architecture of consciousness.

Mercifully, the edgy aspiration-to-elfin-godhead conclusions of his first book were now tempered into a more seasoned technical manual (hence the aesthetic) for voyages of discovery. How to prepare the journey. What to expect. How to interact with the inhabitants and how to treat them with respect. But importantly, how to return to share the knowledge and integrate back into consensus reality. He even warns that prolonged exposure to alternate world models may remould neural connectivity, creating long-term effects that require structured reintegration.

Blast off, explore, return, and recalibrate. This seems a more balanced approach than blasting off never to return.

I also found less emphasis on the binary nature of reality than in his previous book. Yes, the base of reality is still information, and binary coding is a key mechanism for encoding information (something he explains in great detail), and, as Andrew points out, neuronal firing or not-firing can ultimately be considered binary code… But, upon deeper reflection, I cease to worry about whether I do or do not (see what I did there?) consider reality as built of binary coding, as ultimately broken down to bits and bites. Does it really matter?

Does it matter to me whether light is wave or particle? Does it affect my own metaphysic, my own relationship with reality? Not at all. So why should I mind whether Andrew does or does not present reality as binary coding? What matters is the exploration, the experience, the astonishment…

And so now, finally, we reach the shores of Andrew’s third book: Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug.

Conventional typeface and formatting. Just a handful of simple illustrations, including tryptamine molecular structures. An excellent Foreword by Graham Hancock and regular chapter sequence. Not the artisanal artefacts of the previous two books. A work for a wide readership, specialist and non-specialist alike. There is no need to have read the first two books to reach the third (sorry Andrew!) The third is a different beast. It is a great book.

This book takes a broader cultural, geographical and historical trajectory. Yes, there’s still the emphasis on neurochemistry and neurocircuitary, but it’s set within a wider narrative space. It is a great story. For example, it is commonplace to talk about the complex pharmacochemistry of the ayahuasca and yagé brews: you know, one ingredient inhibiting the enzyme in the gut that metabolises DMT, thus allowing DMT from the other plant to cross the blood-brain barrier and produce psychoactive effects. It hardly needs repeating as it has been articulated thousands of times, so that even those of us with no training in biochemistry can repeat it. Generally, though, it is simply stated and stated simply. Not here.

Andrew explores cultural use of certain tryptamines across histories and geographies, and introduces the earliest European explorers of the Americas to report and investigate the various brews and snuffs. From there the long history of isolation, extraction and synthesis, and the identification of hitherto unknown admixtures. The simple statement about the brews’ complex pharmacochemistry is not simple at all. It took a long time to work out, and the process is intertwined with the isolation, extraction, synthesis and bioassaying of other psychedelic molecules. Even though parts of the story have been told before, especially by Graham St John in his tremendous 2015 book Mystery School in Hyperspace, the story is so rich that each telling is unique, and Andrew’s is a great companion piece to Graham’s.

We move to Andrew’s central axiom: ‘Your brain is a builder of worlds.’ To illustrate this, he tells a cool little tale of stumbling across a mantis in a Tokyo alley, which he carefully lifted and placed in the shrubbery. A real mantis, not a hallucination, and yet, he explains, it is the mental simulation of the mantis. It is information encoded in mantis form interpreted and reconstructed as mantis.

From here Andrew explains how the brain performs this fantastic trick of reality-building, where it takes place in the wetware of the cortex, how the microcircuitry fizzes and pops (my words, not his!) in such staggering complexity. As with his previous books, his explanation is clear, coherent and sequential. As with his previous books, this central axiom leads to the puzzling questions about how the brain reality-builds the DMT space.

‘The central question then is not whether these bizarre worlds and their inhabitants can be modeled by the brain, but whether or not the brain can fabricate them entirely independent of some external source of sensory information.’

If so, fine. It’s a hallucination. An aberration. A dream (or a nightmare…): ‘If not, then we need to sincerely consider the possibility that they represented something far stranger and far more difficult to explain.’

But what of the hallucination or the dream (or the nightmare)? Can they be dismissed so clearly? Yes, Andrew suggests. And he explains why. This takes a couple of chapters. He is very thorough. Unhooked from sensory data inputs, the reality-building capacity of the brain is let loose; and that, he explains, would account for the unhinged quality of the dream state: the oddness, the incoherence, the screwy sense of time: ‘The world your brain constructs in the dream state is the world it learned to construct in the waking state. The waking world and the dream world are built from the same stuff.’

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I want to disagree. I do disagree. I want to suggest that the dream state allows interdimensional interaction, cosmic communication, faster-than-light voyaging across the vast grid of space-time. After all, I am a reader of Swedenborg, for whom dreams and visions were truly hypergalactic… But, confronted with the complexity and seeming autonomy and the sheer, total, complete and utter alienness of the DMT state, I can follow Andrew’s logic: ‘In constructing the DMT worlds, it’s almost as if the brain is using a language it never learned to speak, building models it never learned to construct – and doing so flawlessly.’

The experience is not a dream. The experience is not a hallucination. The experience is not the eruption of Archetypes from the Collective Unconscious. Here again Andrew presents a logical, sequential and ultimately compelling argument, even though, as with the dream argument, I want to disagree because I envisage the Collective Unconscious as deep and wide as the cosmos, but I can follow his logic.

The entities are just too weird. Too alien. Too outlandish. Too Other. Too autonomous in their own existence to be archetypes arising from the museum of our ancient past. ‘The idea that these are relics of our shared evolutionary history embedded in our collective neural architecture already seems to stretch the Jungian model well beyond anything Jung himself ever conceived.’ I’m not so sure.

I’ve studied Seven Sermons to the Dead. The Dead are independent in their own existence and arise from the Collective Unconscious. I’ve studied The Red Book. Jung himself questions the autonomy of Elijah and Salome, who rebuke him for doubting their existence. Whilst that does nothing to prove their autonomous existence neither does the seeming autonomy of machine elves prove their autonomy. In fact, Elijah quips that his existence is no more nor less secure than Jung’s himself.

Andrew, however, takes it deeper, continuing the dream/hallucination argument. The DMT world transcends archetypal form. So alien. So other. As such, the brain tries to make sense of the experience by translating the perception into some archetypal form: the Insectoid, the elfish, the reptilian, the Trickster.

‘The DMT state, at its deepest levels, is the apotheosis of the alien. It is a world that the brain should not know how to build. It is a world that should not exist and yet there it is, irresistible in its construction and undeniable in its presence. To smoke DMT means to confront not merely a different world, but one that is, frankly, impossible.’

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Herr Doktor Jung! As with everything in this book, it is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with specific ideas. These are hypotheses for further exploration. So it’s not a dream. It’s not a hallucination. It’s not an Archetype of the Collective Unconscious. It’s not even a drug. It’s a reality switch. That’s what Andrew calls it.

How best to express this notion of sudden reality switching – instantaneous journeying – than by the metaphor of the radio first used by Henri Bergson over a century ago, and updated by Andrew (and many others) to the television. The radio and the television do not generate the content. They receive it and present it. Change the channel and change the show. Turn the dial of consciousness and tune into a different reality.

‘After more than a decade of studying, writing, speaking, and thinking about DMT, I’d finally found myself compelled to reach a conclusion I’d never have thought possible when I began – that DMT was allowing us to interface with some kind of intelligent agent external to the brain. […] I couldn’t make sense of DMT without such an agent.’

An agent. An autonomous, self-aware, self-defined, self-selfed agent. I have been here before, and my response for years has been to evoke the imaginal, which I interpret as the buster of Aristotelian logic. Is it A or B? Yes! Is the entity autonomous in its own existence or did I just imagine it? Yes! But here Andrew presents a scenario that is truly nuts – something I had no idea before reading this book – which does challenge my simple evocation of the imaginal. Lock-out!

These agents control the experience to the extent that they can expel the tripper. Literally slam the door in their face. Andrew rules out simple drug tolerance. That’s to say, it is not that some fellow has been hitting the pipe so much that he now cannot get the hit without upping the dose. No. He’s kicked out of the hyper-room. Barred from returning until the time comes when access is permitted again. The agents control the experience, which leads to Andrew’s question at the end of Chapter 14: ‘Who are they?’

Now we enter the deepest, wildest, craziest, most dazzling ontological questions. And this is what I have been exploring all these years too, and the reason I was invited to share a panel with Andrew, Dave and Jack at BC in 2015 and share the grand house and its strange temple a few months later.

Andrew’s explorations in the remaining chapters of the book and my explorations over the years share many features. Ancient and indigenous reports of other-than-human entities. Fairy-lore and elf-lore. Shamanism. UFOlogy and alien abduction experiences, especially with reference to Jacques Vallée and John Mack. And in my case, I have also explored mediumship, mysticism, cryptozoology, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the works of Swedenborg. Many explorers of many crazy places. Crazy stories.

And what are my conclusions? That we live in a populated universe. That the universe is filled with consciousness, with conscious beings, with discarnate entities who are invisible most of the time. We are not taught that. Maybe kids are taught that in Sunday school about angels and demons. I wouldn’t know. Our dominant cultural worldviews – scientific, social, cultural – do not teach us that. Ok, maybe there’s extraterrestrial life somewhere out there. This is what Carl Sagan was working on. But interdimensional-hyperdimensional critters all around us? Sorry pal - we’d be told - you’re mistaken, deluded, insane.

Graham Hancock concludes the Foreword to Andrew’s book with a simple statement in response to this critique of delusion or insanity: ‘I know! It still sounds crazy. But here’s a glass pipe…’ So that’s the gnosis-noesis. But, really, who are they? Are they to be trusted?

The stories that WB Yeats collected about fairies are full of cattle-thieves and baby-snatchers. Whitley Strieber’s accounts of Greys and Kobolds are scary. This is no Disney cartoon of doe-eyed cuddly critters in a flower-filled landscape. Especially not the cattle mutilators nor the emotionless abductors with anal probes. They’re horrible. Shamanic accounts are as full of beings that harm as beings that heal. And so on…

And who are we? Are we to be trusted? Who is making the trips? Who are our ambassadors? Are we to assume that only the most lovely members of the human race are making these journeys to hyperspace? What power-hungry fuckwits? What dark Sith Lords might be in training? What unholy alliances? I don’t fucking know. Who or what are we dealing with in these breakthrough landscapes?

What are Andrew’s conclusions?

‘Whatever our future might hold, whether we call them gods, spirits, aliens, or post-biological superintelligent agents, there are discarnate intelligences of unimaginable wisdom and power, accessible right now to anyone and everyone who wishes to reach them, using one of the simplest and most common molecules on the planet. And if that alone isn’t the most remarkable, important, and truly astonishing discovery in the history of our species, then I can’t imagine what might be.’

Hard to argue with that.

Are they really of ‘unimaginable wisdom and power?’ Do the trip reports bear this out? Maybe. I certainly agree with Andrew that we are on the threshold of deeper discovery, especially given the results of the DMTx explorations. The first threshold has been crossed, and this is what Andrew (and Yeats and William James) has so compellingly articulated: that there is a universe teeming with beings. That is an important threshold to cross, and one that many will struggle to accept. Beyond this is contact, communication, interaction, information transfer, relationships.

And so I sense that Andrew’s trilogy may not yet be complete. The next book might be a cartography and ethnography of these hyperdimensional lands, these antipodes of the mind. An account of the interactions, of the gnosis, of the noesis. And what will we find? Only one thing is certain: ASTONISHMENT.

What else?

Big thanks to for this review. Psychedelic Press is reader-supported. For full archive access and to help with our digital and research costs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber:

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LSD has played an outsized role in the cultural life of America and much of Europe. Some drugs, like penicillin, have arguably had a more profound impact on human existence, others have slipped routinely into our everyday lives such as ibuprofen. Yet symbolically, LSD plays an iconic role that has hardly been matched. It has stood for a great many things, to a great many people, not only for those who have undertaken experiences with the drug, but in the discourse of wider society itself.

When one begins to tease out the role of LSD in the social and cultural life of the past, one is confronted by a complex negotiation, a dialectic, through which the drug is used to articulate trajectories of thoughts, ideas and behaviours. Just as a psychedelic experience always remains partly hidden in our mind and body, so the LSD dialectic provides only a partial perspective on deeper political and historical trends, yet, if carefully approached, it may be very illuminating. In Acid Dialectics, author attempts to reveal some of these trends.

By ‘acid dialectics’, note the plural, Rado refers to the multiplicity of dialogic frames that people have used to construct LSD discourse. There are four distinct, but necessarily overlapping, frames Rado explores (while also noting the existence of others): mystical experience, mind control weapon, revolutionary pharmacology, and neoliberal commodity.

It is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, with its emphasis on ‘the experience of the dialectic’ itself, which Rado feels suitably addresses the question of LSD, and influences his own approach. This allows the author to range across evidence in history, literature, trip reports, and philosophy, which is to say he develops a multidisciplinary approach to dialectics that allows him to draw out the aforementioned frames, with special attention being placed on their political significances—especially in regard to the nature of power and the State.

Chapter 1 is concerned with ergot perennialism in mystical discourse—some of the root historical suppositions that also underpin the entheogen paradigm. He utilizes several trip reports, including Dr Frank Dudley Beane’s description of ergot and Albert Hofmann’s famous LSD trip in My Problem Child (1979). Moreover, he examines Hegel’s often overlooked take on the mystery cult, and neatly exposes some historical problems with the Eleusis-ergot hypothesis. He also problematizes the cult’s reliance on State power, secrecy on pain of death, and this underscores the book’s narrative arc.

That this myth promotes a connection between state power and drug use is key. Hofmann, who promoted the myth, ‘wanted humanity to move backward intellectually, back to superstition, myth, and religion, and he hoped psychedelic drug use would function as a mechanism to catalyze this.’ The anti-rationality that Rado accuses Hofmann of having is an interesting spin on the chemist’s later writings; how that sits within the context of his professional life as a chemist, however, is less clear. Nevertheless, the promotion of ergot perennialism seeds the idea of LSD as a tool of the State.

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Shifting from mystical experience to mind control weapon, Rado uses this question of drugs and state power to segue, briefly via the Nazis, into the CIA’s experimentation with LSD, utilizing Plato, some Allen Ginsberg and the book Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism (1972), edited by David Felton. This latter book provides the first instance of the term ‘acid fascism’, which for Rado ‘captures something real’. For him, that means describing the entwining of LSD and state power in acid discourse.

Yet the term itself, ‘acid fascism’, hardly seems immune to the dialectic. Mindfuckers is about several small cults and communes that emerged out of the psychedelic Sixties in the United States, such as the Lyman and Manson families. Leading on from the mystery cult thread of Eleusis, one can clearly see why the drugs/power nexus here demonstrates a thematic continuity for Rado, yet there are some points not clearly addressed that undermine this narrative in regard to State power.

Fascism is used by Felton in that sixties New Left sense to mean any authority over the individual (which can easily morph into ‘anything I don’t like’), rather than something resembling a political lineage from fascismo italiano. It is kind of a petty name-calling—not uncommon then, or now—that has a tendency to obscure the historical particulars. While the CIA certainly had a big hand in spreading LSD, communes and cults were hardly new in the American religious landscape. Fascism is surely more than a personality cult or Frankfurt School-inspired psychologizing—systemic rather than individual.

The objects of Felton’s analysis were counterculture; not State power. Therefore, to go from Mindfuckers to, ‘Acid fascism has many iterations today’ and calling out LSD chemist William Leonard Pickard for sitting on the board of a venture capital firm is a slightly disingenuous leap. Felton’s and Rado’s uses of ‘acid fascism’ are clearly different; one psychological and religious; the other Statist and economic. This reveals the term as not in fact capturing ‘something real’, but rather, its role as a convenient shorthand.

While Rado quotes liberally from the book’s introduction, he does not critically engage with its contents to any large degree. I would suggest that describing Mindfuckers’ role in the development of acid dialectics itself, as an active participant, would be both narratively useful and, theoretically-speaking, insightful. In short, it would be a better used as an object of analysis, rather than adopted as part of the theoretical framework developed in Acid Dialectics.

In Chapter 3, ‘Acid as Revolutionary Pharmacology’, Rado discusses Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and Mark Fisher. It begins by showing the relationship of the former two with the CIA, and moves to arguing that Leary and Huxley were more alike than is usually admitted in regard to authoritarianism. For Leary, he preached one thing, anti-authoritarianism, yet simultaneously had relations with the CIA. While Huxley, Rado says, never posed as an ‘anti-authoritarian’.

If one is familiar with Huxley’s lifetime of writings then this could perhaps be a hard soma pill to swallow. Rado rightly observes that, for Huxley, ‘oligarchy is simply taken as fact’. Consequentially, LSD is indeed not about overcoming power. It is, as I’ve suggested in Cobweb of Trips, a way of Huxley exploring and negotiating the relationship between a population and its elite. However, to believe that this ‘fact’ makes Huxley authoritarian himself is to profoundly misconstrue his position.

Huxley’s is a realist position. One would first need to demonstrate, as counterpoint, a functioning society that has not had an elite or oligarchy in some manner. Huxley believed, after a great deal of research, that such elites were a given. However, elites are not made equally, they are in fact more or less authoritarian, and populations have more or less ‘freedom’ as a result of the elite’s ability to govern—thus for Huxley, drugs, any drugs, were about a measure of this situation. In other words, they are a measure of power, rather than a power in and of themselves.

Now, I understand Rado here. As an anarchist, he equates any hierarchy with authoritarianism. Yet, it is difficult to follow this line of thinking about Huxley without tackling the aforementioned question of whether such a non-hierarchical society can or has ever existed in the first place. Without dealing with this point more explicitly, Rado risks falling foul of his own (very excellent) criticisms of Mark Fisher and his unfinished work on acid communism—a kind of pop utopianism that points only to vague ideas rather than the practical, the historical, the real.

Chapter 4, ‘Acid as Neoliberal Commodity’, is to my mind the strongest. It traces this notion from Frank Dudley Bean’s trip report, which was incredibly used as a kind of promotional material for the company Parke Davis in the nineteenth century, through the pharmaceutical development of LSD from ergot, to covering large corporate and oligarch interest in the drug and its influence on the emergence of Silicon Valley tech firms. It reminds us that whatever the LSD experience is, it is wedded in some degree to the markets in which the material circulates—‘acid liberalism’.

There is, however, some less convincing theory here too. It follows the ‘liberalism leads to fascism’ school of historical thought—which is based on universalizing interwar Germany into a historical rule that functions across cultures at all times. There is plenty with which to criticize whatever today’s ‘liberalism’ is on its own terms, without doing so on what one assumes it is turning into. When history, and the particular conditions that determine it, is reduced to a linear formula, the present is obscured not illuminated. It is, I suggest, a relic of nineteenth century historical determinism—and speaks more to a sorely outdated Hegelian view of history.

Acid Dialectics is, as the author’s Preface notes, part of an ‘ongoing project of mine which examines how power structures affect drug markets and the discourse about them.’ Using some excellent sources, Rado constructs a historical dialectic of acid—a narrative in which LSD discourse is shown to be often centred in Statist perspectives. It is indeed a valuable work on the nature of drugs and power, and one that I hope presupposes a more detailed historical analysis in the future. This is an area ripe for investigation, especially from an anarchist position, and Rado makes some fascinating steps into this realm here.

After a night of light rain, it is a crisp autumn morning and the sun is emerging from behind some greyish-white clouds. It is quiet as I gently close my front door and wend my way into the countryside on some metalled farm tracks. A knapsack, with only an empty tub inside, hangs over my shoulder. After an hour of scanning some fields I notice a small, nippled, conical mushroom, then another, and another. A small troop emerges. I bend down to pick one. Who am I?

Am I a self-identified psychonaut or mycological enthusiast? Am I an Englishman, or Briton, picking as several generations have done before? Or a colonizer, appropriating a foreign culture? A human being driven by instinct to alter my brain chemistry? Or perhaps, a mere agent of the cosmic play, playing a joke on itself? Am I all or none of these things? And who am I, or indeed you, to decide?

These may be intellectual, thought-provoking questions. They may also be signals, allegiances, or declarations of fealty. Either way, they are designed to make us consider our place in the world and our experience of it—and they can be inherently political given one’s outlook or culture.

The late twentieth century was an individualist era in North America and Europe. It was quintessentially liberal—whether your liberalism is flavoured with economics or society matters little. Either way, the point was to liberate yourself from constraints. There are arguments within this; is one method or another better or worse at achieving liberation—but this is, for all the perceived difference and vitriol, a cultural infight. Explicitly ‘us’-orientated people were typically pushed to the political margins (left and right).

Liberal democracy, or at least the ideological version exported by the United States, was ascendent in consequence of the Second World War and Cold War hostilities—arguably reaching its narrative apotheosis in the 1990s, sometime between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Economic and social individualism were wedded to notions of liberation. As one exponent, Margaret Thatcher, said of society, ‘there is no such thing!’ In other words, we are interconnected individuals, and nothing is more than the sum of its parts.

Yet, this liberal individualism was at best an aspiration, at worst a fantasy. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ lurks as the reality of social creatures—through subcultures, ethnic groups, competing elites, collective identities and so on. The political question is about how such groups are managed for the best advantage (be it of gods, peoples or ruling classes.) The ideological battles of this advantage are what society calls a ‘culture war’—perhaps more accurately a type of civil war.

One particularly successful ideology in the twenty-first century has gone by, or been criticized through, various names: intersectionality, cultural Marxism, woke, social justice, grievance industry, progressivism, etc. I’m not going to reiterate definitions or histories here, suffice to say it centres on an oppressor/oppressed framework, and the equitable correction of historical wrongs based on this schematic outlook. You are, no doubt, aware of it.

This ideology has undoubtedly been very successful in marching through universities, trade unions, education, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations. Government and corporate bureaucracies have also adopted swathes of its thinking—especially through the ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ mantra—first in the US, then in Britain and Europe too. Like all such social and cultural outlooks, it uses mechanisms of power to favour its client groups.

This top-down transformation from educated classes went mostly unnoticed by the general public. Yet once the subtle nudging in education, and through social lobby groups, inured more public institutions, there was a cultural push-back. Books were written to explain its ideological origins, methods, and perceived dangers, such as The Madness of Crowds (2019) by Murray; Cynical Theories (2020) by Pluckrose and Lindsay; The New Puritans (2022) by Doyle; and America’s Cultural Revolution (2023) by Rufo.

For want of a better phrase, the ‘anti-woke’ is now a mini-industry in itself. Great hay has been made by authors propounding what tends to an individualist corrective. They explain their nemeses in terms of emerging from, or tactically mimicking, groups such as Christian puritans, postcolonialists, the New Left, or Frankfurt School Marxism—traditions of ‘us and them’ stemming in this instance from the margins of the political left.

Psychedelic discourse has of course not been immune from this culture war. Questions I asked earlier have political consequences: cultural appropriation, reciprocity, privilege, etc. And these ideas are receiving some push-back.

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In Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance, historian Thomas Hatsis joins the cadre of voices in the aforementioned books that aim at challenging what he terms ‘Critical Social Justice’ (CSJ). He is specifically interested in how it muddies the progression of the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’—a term we shall return to at the conclusion of this review.

Hatsis’ argumentation draws out three dominant narratives—namely, the Decolonize, Racist, and Gender narratives—in order to explain what they are, and how they work. Using a historical approach, he examines their narrative claims, centred on the oppressor/oppressed schema, exploring the logic in regard to outcomes; identifying contradiction or falsity. He does not argue that, say, racism is absent from the United States, but that these narratives distort the truth of the matter.

The author identifies three particular groups as pushing CSJ within the psychedelic discourse space: the nonprofit media organisation Psymposia; Chacruna, an ‘Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines’ and their publications such as Psychedelic Justice: Towards a Diverse and Equitable Psychedelic Culture (2021); and a variety of individuals he refers to as ‘psychedelic social justice warriors’, who, he suggests, tend to be less ‘radical’—they are also, I might add, overwhelmingly institutionalized in universities.

The book covers numerous topics. Some are strictly historical—for instance, the extent to which cannabis laws were explicitly introduced in America as a result of racism, or not; or, how Europeans also have a long relationship with psychedelics, sometimes less ‘problematically’ than some past indigenous folk in the Americas. Other times, Hatsis critiques current episodes, such as the furore over Martin W Ball’s 5-meo-DMT methods, or the meme culture of María Sabina. His over-arching point is that a priori narrative assumptions have distorting effects—hiding truths, both factual and moral—that he ultimately sees as needlessly divisive.

The author also places his criticisms in amongst the wider body of Social Justice critiques in America. This means he goes into some depth on, for instance, crime and gender statistics, with some detailed discussion of specific cases, how race is reported in the news, or the problems of cultural relativity in bodies of knowledge. For disinterested observers, none of these arguments will be new, and is perhaps over-indulged in certain chapters.

Nevertheless, the argument Hatsis makes is undoubtedly well-researched and cogent. I also have no doubt that the people he challenges will in turn have detailed counter-arguments. As such, perhaps Psychedelic Injustice will spark a great deal of debate—and I suspect Hatsis will relish this. Then again, outside a few individuals, perhaps it won’t. There is a sense that this ship began sailing some time ago, that perhaps even the book itself is appearing some years after it would have been most effective as a riposte. There is a lethargy setting in, but also a shift in the winds.

Hatsis argues from that tradition of liberal individualism. Take, for instance, his ‘core values’ of the Psychedelic Renaissance: ‘mental health, cognitive liberty, and spiritual autonomy’. These values, to varying degrees, are core facets of individualism—one should be free to heal oneself, alter consciousness, and practice whatever spirituality however one so chooses. Yet it amounts to a reaction of sorts, a kind of willful return to the 1990s. Granted, this was not a time of psychedelic freedoms—but these liberal values were then a dominant narrative.

Yet individualist fantasy persists. The author also wishes to see a ‘unified Psychedelic Renaissance’—a kind of collective identity revolving around the values he suggests. Indeed, he concludes, ‘May ours be a revolution of radical unity. A revolution of radical love’. Insofar as individuals need to be liberated for a collective good or purpose, this echoes the civil infighting of a culture war. These values may be noble, but they are utopian, and reality waits around the corner.

From left to right, from paupers to billionaires, from patients to tribes, there is really no terribly obvious way to delineate ‘psychedelic culture’ other than some ‘we’s and some ‘I’s like to trip, and for myriad reasons, across cultures, across times. It has no overarching and explicit ideology or social group—just discrete pockets that are more or less popular at any given time.

During the last popularizing of psychedelia in the 1960s, socio-political fault lines asserted themselves in its discourse. This happens in early and late majority adoption stages in trends—what has recently, and cringe-inducingly, been called ‘mainstreaming’. And as we have seen, this cycle of history has returned.

The ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ as a collective identity may simply be a description of an increase in scientific research, or of a cultural energy that brings some friends and like-minded people together in some places at some times. It may also be an empty slogan on which ideological fault-lines are drawn, and certain client groups are favoured. Nevertheless, trippers were certainly tripping before it, during it, and will no doubt continue to do so after.

The one thing the Psychedelic Renaissance definitely is then, is a product of its time, and will necessarily entail the variety of (competing) values that invested people choose to ascribe it, and the culture war these necessarily imply. It ultimately reflects our society’s era—the science, the culture, the power dynamics and prevailing trends. And what has emerged?

‘Who am I?’—in the past fashionably answered in a personal revelation or universal oneness—has in fact become more commonly asked politically as a ‘Who are we?’. The winds of ‘us’ have already blown in, no longer hidden under ‘I’ or pushed to the margins, but loudly articulated—not only in psychedelia but society-at-large, of which it is ultimately but a small articulation.

Psychedelic Injustice manages to be at once a throw-back to a yesteryear and a window into tomorrow—a kind of Boomer individualism hitched to a collective identity. Aside from the historical value of truth, which is a very commendable pursuit and well argued, the book also implicitly asks you to consider your own values, and under which narrative you wish to pick your mushrooms.

It seems to me that criminality has been the one identity people in this part of the world shared as trippers. As this is slowly eroded (in North America at least), then precisely how trippers depict themselves, through values, identities and groups, will become increasingly diverse, and as such potentially more divisive. Yet, it must be remembered, this doesn’t reflect the psychedelic experience, but the state of society itself, and boils down to a question about how we treat one another.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy was first conceived of in the late 1980s by its founder Dr Francine Shapiro. While walking in a park, Shapiro noticed that negative emotions she associated with distressing memories were reduced with eye movements, and she hypothesized that this behaviour had a desensitizing effect. Coupling this idea with cognitive components in order to facilitate longer term therapeutic results, she began conducting studies dealing with PTSD—and with positive results.

With what was then still being called EMD, Shapiro began teaching it to other researchers, notably in Israel and the United States, and an Institute was founded in 1990. Reflecting on what she had learnt, Shapiro renamed the therapy EMDR and, through workshops and networks, continued facilitating the technique’s adoption. A form of psychotherapy, EMDR focuses on the processing of traumatic memories while engaging in bilateral stimulations, such as eye movement, and today has developed an international network of practitioners.

Meanwhile, the re-emergence of psychedelic-assisted therapies has being growing apace over the last twenty years. While various therapeutic techniques have been utilized, EMDR could be said to have something of an unexplored lineage in this respect; Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville’s Dreamachine for instance, and the stroboscope being employed by neurophysiologists and cyberneticists like Dr William Grey Walter, often in conjunction with LSD. Therefore, therapy involving both psychedelics and the manipulation of the visual cortex is an intriguing possibility—enter Hannah Raine-Smith and Jocelyn Rose.

Raine-Smith and Rose, psychotherapist and psychotherapeutic counsellor respectively, first met in 2022. Both were fascinated by EMDR and together developed a protocol for psychedelic-assisted EMDR therapy. Alongside, they’re members of the Drug Science psychedelic therapies working group and facilitate harm reduction and training initiatives using an AIP framework. Their new book Psychedelic-Assisted EMDR Therapy: A Memory-Consolidation Approach to Psychedelic Healing (Routledge 2025), explores how EMDR may enhance the effects of psychedelic medications.

The book’s introduction reviews existing therapeutic approaches using psychedelics, including indigenous, underground and approved models. While the authors note that all therapies can be seen as potentially useful modalities, ‘PsyA-EMDR therapy’ has several specific development goals. These include, strategies for managing uncomfortable emotions, stabilizing adverse reactions, and a more cohesive integrative and theoretical framework, one that might be fruitfully used alongside harm reduction, psychoeducation and community-based integration strategies.

Central to this method is the adaptive information processing (AIP) framework. This approach suggests ‘that impairments to the information processing systems of the brain under stress cause memories to be stored in an unprocessed, state-specific form that is not connected to adaptive information that is necessary to calm the nervous system’ (24-25). The aim, therefore, is to re-process these traumatic memories so that they become adapted and integrated successfully in the patient. EMDR then facilitates this process, in part, by emotional regulation.

The PsyA-EMDR protocol is described in Chapter 3, which begins with phone calls and preparedness, and moves through treatments and integration. EMDR is used in this process to facilitate the emergence of adaptive information. For practitioners who may wish to utilize this method, the authors have written a comprehensive set of treatment pathways and phase-by-phase sections, along with additional considerations and supervision. The following chapters provide a breakdown of key areas, such as ethics, preparation, stabilization and risk reduction, and integration.

Chapter 7 also examines EMDR is relation to psycholytic therapy—the largely European model developed in the 1950s and 1960s that entailed regular small doses of a psychedelic alongside traditional psychotherapy (as opposed one high dose session). In respect of the psychotherapeutic treatments involved in EMDR, this model seems quite pertinent, and the authors note that, ‘Subjective reports from experimental practice of psycholytic PsyA-EMDR indicate that large doses of psychedelics are not necessary to facilitate long-term positive change’ (149).

In conclusion, Psychedelic-Assisted EMDR Therapy is a comprehensive appraisal of the techniques and possibilities of this therapeutic method. The authors, obviously very knowledgeable in their fields, provide a clear protocol and discussion, and conclude with a lucid appraisal of the potential future development of PsyA-EMDR. Ultimately, therapy is a results game, so in what is becoming a very crowded therapeutic space for the ‘psychedelic-assisted’ prefix, building an evidence base is of the utmost importance—and this book is an excellent groundwork for this endeavour.

When Humphry Osmond coined ‘psychedelic’, he famously did so in order to find a word that would infer the myriad multidisciplinary nature of the kinds of altered states of consciousness that certain drugs create in people. In an age dominated by psychotherapeutic and psychological language, Osmond wanted philosophy, the arts, literature and alike to be integral to the conversation. In this, it seems to me, he was very successful and ‘psychedelic’ has traversed the medical, cultural and social spheres in the intervening decades with fluid ease.

Attempts to simply demarcate psychedelic are bound to fail, or at the very least will restrict the utility of the word, consigning it to more rarefied, technical discussion. In an age today where specialization demands focus on detail and the specific contours of one’s own field, it is very easy to fall into the trap of missing the wood for the trees. It is both useful and insightful, therefore, to occasionally take a step back and survey the landscape—to place the details in a larger context and, more importantly, to take philosophical stock of precisely what that context is.

In Altered Perspectives: Critical Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness (2024), writer Sam Woolfe does precisely that. For many years, Woolfe has been writing essays on a variety of aspects in psychedelic studies, and this collection brings them beautifully together. In many respects, ‘psychedelic consciousness’ is the context, not only in the narrow theory of mind context but, more importantly, as the philosophical core of psychedelia; the transformer through which intellectual and creative powers manifest psychedelically.

The topical breadth of Woolfe’s analyses is impressive: ‘The psychedelic phenomena I attempt to interpret through these various lenses include seeing the self as an illusion, noetic experience (feelings of profound insight), alien abduction-type experiences, the sublime (fear mixed with wonder), visions of alien symbols/writing, meetings with jester entities, the feeling of receiving messages from spirits, déjà vu, and existential joy.’ It is also, in the finest exploratory traditions, a collection that does not aim at definitive answers, but instead a thorough, intellectually grounded discussion.

Woolfe’s essays often surprise in their comparative analyses yet always prove fruitful. In his opening essay, ‘Mescaline Revelations’, he uses his own experiences with the classic psychedelic to explore the ‘illusory self’ using the ideas of Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume and certain tenets of Buddhism—a connection less obscure than one may at first assume. ‘I have since tried to think of this mescaline experience in terms of the principle of non-attachment, which does not mean a lack interest in positive or negative experiences or giving up those experiences; it means not allowing these experiences to own you.’ There remains, as such, a practical grounding in these essays.

Philosophically-minded, Woolfe’s real strength is in developing is argumentation. He is clear-minded enough to make certain theoretical tangles accessible, yet never allows them to be dumbed down. An excellent example of this is in ‘A Profound Feeling of Familiarity: Bergson, Déjà Vu, and DMT’. French philosopher Henri Bergson can be quite a tricky thinker to get your head around, let alone on DMT, yet Woolfe neatly explores his theories around memory to argue that the DMT experience has the power to reveal the mechanics of memory and perception.

Sometimes the psychedelic field can feel like a large therapeutic monocrop, yet in truth it’s a patchwork of varied fields connected by hidden footpaths and byways in wooded boundaries and winding country roads. In this respect, Altered Perspectives is a field guide of sorts, one which records Woolfe’s amble through this countryside, providing learned insight into not only the flora and fauna he has encountered, but the very philosophical structures of the psychedelic field system itself. All ten essays are a valuable contribution to psychedelia, and I highly recommend a read.

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The human DMT study conducted by Rick Strassman in the early 1990s stands out in the history of psychedelic research for several reasons. Firstly, his work helped slowly reignite a fascination with these substances in the scientific world. There had been a virtual absence of human research in the United States for several decades—at least officially sanctioned ones. Also, having tended to use experienced users in his study, Strassman’s approach reconnected a well-established underground to the world of ‘respectable’ research. In short, psychedelics were put back on the official map.

Secondly, as recorded in The Spirit Molecule (2001), was the strange and otherworldly effects that the subjects in his study reported. Along with Terence McKenna waxing lyrical about elves to underground crowds, entities were now in the lab too, and their untold story was thrust front and centre. Therefore, along with Strassman’s popularization of the pineal gland theory of endogenous DMT, there was plenty of publicity for the molecule’s weirdness. In many respects, DMT (and ayahuasca) are today’s iconic psychedelics.

However, not all of the publicity was welcomed, especially among Strassman’s own religious community. The psychiatrist had been a practitioner of Zen Buddhism since his early twenties, but his research with DMT put a strain on his affiliation, leading him to turn more explicitly to his Jewish roots. This resulted in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (2014), in which he comparatively explores prophetic states with those described under the influence of DMT.

Strassman’s interest in religious practice and his desire to explain the biochemical basis of spiritual experience has its roots in his young adulthood. In his latest book, a memoir entitled My Altered States: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth (2024), the psychiatrist recounts some of the early episodes of his life that led him down these aforementioned intellectual paths. It provides not only a very personal snapshot of himself, but also a picture of the kind of milieu that foregrounded his research.

My Altered States then is a series of chronologically ordered vignettes. In the preface, ‘Research is Me-Search’, he writes, ‘I found these states to be so compelling—either positively or negatively—that they inexorably steered my career into psychedelic drug research’. Furthermore, they are also what first led him into Zen Buddhism. In recounting the episodes, Strassman relies on his experiences of undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy, along with his religious and psychedelic interests, and each one is followed by a ‘Reflection’ section.

The book is split into two primary sections; a shorter one dealing with early childhood, and the other when aged between 17 and 22, which makes up the bulk of the book. The former includes memories, moments of realization (like when he discovered meditation during a classroom punishment), and visions of childhood received as an adult during altered states, ‘which may be memories of real events’. This caveat is very interesting and raises questions about how childhood is narrativized. In psychoanalytic terms, one could say that childhood is more present than past in the concern of an adult.

The main section, ‘Finding My Way’, recounts his years at ‘The College’ during which he wished instead to be attending Stanford University. In many respects the vignettes reveal the quite ordinary social anxiety of a young adult—questions of sex and sexuality, fitting in with friends, exploring new experiences, and finding one’s feet. They are tinged with a kind of socio-religious consciousness in which other students are described as Protestant Boston Brahmin types, fellow Jews, and one particularly nasty character is even described as ‘Aryan’.

This anxiety and exploration is filtered through new (and varied) experiences with alcohol, cannabis and lots of LSD. There are embarrassing moments at parties and with girls, great beauty seen and felt on trips in the wilderness, self-doubt, and intellectual curiosity. The narrative necessarily cuts the reader off from the inner feelings and thoughts of other students in the stories, and this gives the memoir an overall tinge of loneliness and self-imposed isolation. The story culminates in a kind of messianic fervour in Strassman’s intellectual desires, mirrored by difficult emotional states, leading to his engagement with Zen.

So far as memoirs go, My Altered States describes college experiences, and personal travails, that are without doubt shared by thousands of other people. For this reason, the ‘reflection’ passages, while providing an insight into Strassman’s own personal reading of himself, sometimes miss the mark with the reader—they needlessly over-intellectualize common experiences. Nevertheless, within the context of a life of fascinating research, My Altered States grounds Strassman’s research very elegantly in the post summer-of-love era of the very late 1960s and early 1970s.

The link between memory and the psychedelic experience has always fascinated me. Whereas short-acting, acutely transformative substances like DMT tend to bring about an all-encompassing (albeit otherworldly) presence, mid-range doses of psilocybin and LSD—and even (perhaps especially) ketamine—thread a fresh layer of translucence through the veil between past and present. For good or for bad, they blend into one another in myriad ways.

Sometimes this meshed sense of time is barely yet eerily perceptible, a haunting or deep recollection making itself known through the environment, while other times it smashes you in the face like a bolt from the blue, as if you find yourself simultaneously in two places at once. This interplay with aspects of time is, out in the field, precisely a playfulness—one with joys and challenges. It is also, in many regards, a fundamental premise in psychedelic therapy that stretches back to its earliest development.

In literary form, the most famous example of recovered memory from the 1960s is Myself and I (1962) by Constance A Newland (a pseudonym for Thelma Moss). Her account of taking LSD with Freudian and Jungian therapists is a psychosexual narrative that culminates in recovering the memory of a painful enema, which she then connects with her present issues around sex, thereby resolving them. Today her health issues would be described in terms of trauma—and trauma might be understood as the shadow side of the interplay of time.

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Trauma and Ecstasy: How Psychedelics Made My Life Worth Living (2024) by Alex Abraham is an account of undergoing underground psychedelic therapy in the renaissance years which follows a similar, although much more harrowing, journey than Newland’s. Abraham’s therapeutic journey is spliced together with his reconstructed autobiography as his memory of childhood sexual abuse is brought back to light and then pieced back together through the narrative.

The story begins with Abraham biking around the Netherlands in his mid-twenties. He develops a discomforting feeling around his perineum area. What begins, he believes, as an injury caused by biking develops into life-changing symptoms, with erectile dysfunction, an inability to control his bladder and chronic pain. Unable to develop relationships and his confidence crumbling, his life takes a turn for the worse, as numerous doctors and therapists are unable to relieve his symptoms.

Slowly turned onto psychedelics through the desperation of his situation and the writings and podcast of Tucker Max, Abraham sets out to find an MDMA therapist in New York City, and begins to unravel the psychological reasons for his physical trauma. What follows is him trying several medicine-based therapists alongside talking therapy. This shift of therapist is in part because of moving to Austin, Texas, but also in trying to find the right interpersonal dynamics.

As his sessions progress, Abraham’s longstanding psychological defences weaken, resulting in more fractious dynamics with his therapists alongside more extreme reactions to the drugs. He eventually settles with ‘Katrina’ who is bold enough to hold space for him, and it is she who helps him root out the long-blocked memory that was the foundation of his physical trauma—the serious sexual abuse he received at the hands of his music teacher over several years in grade school.

Through the use of MDMA, and later psilocybin and LSD, Abraham’s memory begins to reconstruct itself. The autobiographical chapters dealing with his recovered memory of sexual abuse are, to say the least, distressful and difficult to read (notwithstanding the compelling writing style). Questions about how his own family and the school missed the signs trouble Abraham in his journey as much as the reader, and says something implicit about how a reality must be recognized to be remembered. Without consensus such horrific experiences must more easily be submerged below consciousness.

By the book’s end, which covers not only Abraham’s continuing therapeutic journey, and the emotional and relational steps he takes with those around him, but also his attempts to bring his abuse to the attention of the authorities, he can be said to have taken crucial steps. Yet the physical symptoms of his trauma continue, albeit eased. While his life has more purpose and focus, he says; ‘I don’t believe I will ever be fully “healed,” in the same way I will never be perfect.’ There is, I believe, some great wisdom in this observation.

Reading Trauma and Ecstasy made me realise the interplay and meshing of past and present is as much a feature of the psychedelic experience as it is trauma. When the balance of time is misaligned, our present is haunted not only psychologically, but potentially physically too. We may find ourselves forced into trying to live in two places at once. Conversely, in contrast to their ability to creatively produce precisely this type of divided experience, when skilfully employed psychedelics may also reconcile such matters and lead our way back to an integrated state.

In the beginning was the Code, and the Code was with the Alien Other. This may be chanted by a future band of Gallimoreans, eager to spread the word so eloquently revealed in Dr Andrew R. Gallimore’s book, Alien Information Theory.

The book begins with Terence McKenna’s line that ‘we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art’,1 and it is no exaggeration to claim that the book itself is a work of art: a hard, heavy block full of Gallimore’s own twentieth-century EGA-like retro block graphics, interweaving pixelated fonts that combine to express a pixel-like pixie reality. The fact alone that a computational neurobiologist also has the skill of a professional graphic designer and typesetter is indicative of the masterful mind of this Japan-based Englishman.

If we move beyond the physical aesthetic of the book, what is immediately novel is the fact that its cosmology is simultaneously, paradoxically, both deeply theological and radically reductivist. One could call it a cyber-spiritualism, a techno-faith, or a computational theology. This originality pushes the work yet further towards art but—further away from truth. To state that the alien information theory is wrong, as I shall argue, is not to say that it is of no value. In the words of AN Whitehead, ‘it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true’.2 Not only is there much to be learnt about information theory and neurobiology within these resplendent pages, as the topics are so clearly set out, but the deep issues that are addressed are inspirational to further thought. In what follows I shall summarize the thrust of the book, then offer critique primarily on the concept of information and mental emergence.

Here is the Gallimorean cosmology in a paragraph: At the fundamental base level of reality lies pure Information, the Code that processes that information, and the Other: an alien hyperintelligence that created the Code. The Code generates the physical three-dimensional reality that we humans perceive, which is called the Grid—which is actually a cross section of the HyperGrid: an overarching reality of more than three spatial dimensions (Hyperspace). Physical brains, like all physical objects, emerge from the Code, and consciousnesses emerge from brains. By the intake of the common and potent psychedelic chemical dimethyltryptamine (DMT), our brains are transformed so as to be able to allow access to hyperspatial realities and the beings that reside therein (as foetuses we also had such access). The meaning of life is to discover all of this so as to be able to play the Cosmic Game: ‘to realise the nature of our imprisonment in the Grid and to find our way out’ (p. 202). To win the Game, one’s consciousness must become permanently transcribed to the HyperGrid so that one becomes a hyperdimensional entity oneself, welcoming newbie players popping temporarily into the hyperdimensional realm. In other words, the meaning of life is to die and pass over into a hyperreality becoming an alien, angel, devil, elf, pixie or the like.

As far as new religions go, I find this one more enticing than others, even though it first appears to be some kind of computer game invented by a high priest. Gallimore in fact makes frequent reference to John H. Conway’s Game of Life: a simulated world where there are a few rules (codes) determining whether a cell (a square in the onscreen grid) lives or dies (represented by its being black or white). These few rules result, in time, in surprisingly complex structures that can move, replicate, shoot, etc. It is not made secret that Alien Information Theory is the Game of Life writ large, where the two-dimensional screen cells are transformed into our three-dimensional real selves, and where the programmer becomes the great Other: God Himself.3 In fact, the whole theory can be theologically correlated thus:

Who the Devil is, I cannot say—but I will play his advocate. So let us start at the beginning, to see how it is argued that our worldly realm, the reality we perceive around us, is in truth some sort of simulation4 or instantiation of codified information. More concisely, it is claimed that information generates matter and mind. In this sense, the theory is more reductionist than even materialism: reality is not reduced to mere matter, because matter itself is reduced down further to information. What is information?

Information has been understood in a variety of ways, but Gallimore offers this description: ‘Information is generated when a system selects between a finite number of possible states’ (p. 11). A ‘system’ is ‘any thing (concrete or abstract) that can exist in any one of a distinct number of states at any point in time’ (ibid.). He gives the example of the system that is a coin, one that can offer two possible states: heads or tails. Learning about which state this binary system occupies (lands on) increases one’s information by the unit of information known as a bit. Rather than heads-tails, bits are generally represented by 1-0, the preferred tongue of contemporary computer parlance. This is all accepted and acceptable, the trouble starts when it is written that ‘we will find nothing at the ground of reality other than information’ (p. 15).

Now begins the descent from the standard model of physics to digital physics. For Gallimore all particles are fully definable by finite quantity alone, by a limited set of numbers, values. He gives the example of the electron, ‘which can be defined in its entirety by a set of four numbers called QUANTUM NUMBERS’ (p. 18). These are N (energy level), L (angular momentum), M(L) (direction of angular momentum), and M(S) (spin angular momentum). He emphasizes that there ‘are no other properties that an electron can possess’ (p. 18). And now we encounter an essential condition for the alien information theory:

‘And since, of course, all matter is composed of these particles, this means that all matter can be defined by a finite amount of information. In fact, everything within the Universe is nothing more than quantised—digital—information.’ (p. 19, my italics)5

But this claim is an obvious non sequitur: the conclusion does not follow from the premises. This is where the fatal flaw of the theory smuggles itself in. There is an invalid transition from definition to existence. The definition of something is not itself the existent reality of that something. One could define a person by numbers representing their height, weight, age, and IQ—but to claim that this information (e.g. 180:80:40:130) itself was the person, would be to mistake the representation for the reality, the map for the territory,6 the sign for the city. Likewise, our numerical representation of a particle does not at all mean that the particle is its representation. The information about a particle should not be confused for the reality of that particle—even if we accepted7 that such information was finite—just as the information you receive about a planet should not be confused for that planet itself. This error is a typical example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness:8 mistaking an abstraction (a part) for the concrete actuality (the whole). The great astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington warned against such mistakes by use of the term pointer readings, by which he meant that we should not conflate the reality of something for the reading, the quantities, it gives:

‘Whenever we state the properties of a body in terms of physical quantities we are imparting knowledge as to the response of various metrical indicators to its presence, and nothing more. … The physical atom is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings. The schedule is, we agree, attached to some unknown background.’9

The reading a thermometer gives neither is, nor generates, the heat. Applied to Gallimore’s examples, if we, for instance, analyse what the energy level (N) of an electron is, we realize that it is a reading that merely points to the actual reality: energy. The energy is represented by information, but the information is not the reality—just as the thermometer reading is not the heat. Energy is not a number; in fact, its concrete reality is still unknown us.

Information itself is merely abstraction. It can only exist in relation to: (i) the object for which information is acquired, (ii) the data that the object emits, (iii) the interface that can convert that data into varieties of information,10 and (iv) the recipient or subject that becomes informed. If there is no object, there can be no information about it, and the same object can provide infinite information according to the interface.11 Moreover, we should not assume that the data emitted extrinsically by an object is a sufficient, complete description of that object. As Bertrand Russell states,

'A piece of matter is a logical structure composed of events ... but [its] intrinsic character is not known.'12

That our pointer readings of a particle provide certain numbers does not mean that the particle itself is fully described thus. As Eddington puts it, the mass of an elephant, given as a number, tells us very little about the actual reality of that creature. Furthermore, via pessimistic induction, we should realize that particle physics is constantly changing, so that we should be hesitant to accept the current state of knowledge as complete. That there is this specific finite number of numerical representations of a particle may be a belief soon superseded. Further still, we know that the Standard Model of physics is incompatible with the theories of Relativity, so we must caution prudence against any dogmatic assertion that this current state of physics conveys the absolute truth.

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Time to move on to time. In line with the desire to chop matter into bits of information, now time gets thus chopped. Gallimore writes,

‘Since the entire Universe updates in parallel, changing from one state to the next, there is no “in between” state of the Universe, which means time itself is discrete. Time doesn’t flow like a river, but is simply the sequence of updates of the Universe from its current state to the next, edging forward one click at a time.’ (p. 24)

This again reflects the framework of the Game of Life—but not real life. No reason is given for the claim that time exists in independent instants, except that it would make it easier to consider the Universe as completely grid-like in terms of both space and then time, so that computation could take place with the numbers t₁, t₂, etc. in tandem with the aforementioned particle quantum numbers. But the issues against such a convenient view—especially Bergson’s distinction between time and duration13—are not touched upon. Breaking time into separate units causes many further difficult problems such as explaining the direction of time, the width of the specious present, the denial of motion, the denial of direct interaction, Zeno’s paradoxes, how parallel universal updates conflict with issues of succession and simultaneity in Relativity theory, etc. How one instant of time follows another, if they are separate units, is ultimately explained by appeal to the great Other: it is He who set in motion the Code. But this is an obvious appeal to miracle that seems to be motivated by a desire to fully comprehend reality by throwing a conceptual net of numerical parts thereover. Alan Watts cautioned against such modes of thought:

'Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for the purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.'14

But what cosmology should one expect from a computational neurobiologist with a sharp insight and imagination fuelled by serious psychedelics? We all see the world according to our own perspectives, tainted by our (mis)fortune, nature, nurture, and culture. In this post-Christian Information Age through which we pass, it is not surprising to find the Universe reflected in such a way. Moreover, the experiences that DMT provides do force a person to revolutionize their whole worldview. As Gallimore puts it,

‘DMT is a 100% reality switch: the DMT worlds bear no relationship whatsoever to consensus reality.’ (p. 112)

‘DMT … [makes you feel] awestruck, and grateful for the most horrifyingly beautiful and astonishing experience you could never have imagined.’ (p. 179)

This experience is a great mystery for which no one has any adequate answer. It is almost equal in mystery to the relation of mind and matter, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.15 For Gallimore, mind is ‘generated’ through the information expressed via the neurons of the brain, an organ itself which, as a material object, is the product of encoded information:

‘[Each] neuron can only generate a single action potential at a time—a single “bit” of information—the massively interconnected network of billions of neurons, each connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, are capable of generating and processing colossal amounts of information.

It is this information, generated by trillions of action potentials per second, that manifests as your phenomenal world. … [Your] visual world is this information being experienced from your subjective perspective—from within.’ (pp. 74–75)

Generally speaking, when one reads about the neural correlates of consciousness, one must always be wary of words such as ‘generates’, ‘manifests’, ‘emerges’, ‘produces’, ‘constitutes’, or even the verb to be. These words mask an unknown relation. A neuron’s action potential is the pulse that occurs through the axon (branch) of the cell. In more detail, it is the flow of sodium ions into the axon from the cell body to its synapse (extremity), resulting in the ability to then signal to other neurons. But how sodium ions, i.e. charged metal atoms, in unison manifest subjectivity, consciousness—such as thoughts, emotions, colours, and sounds—is the profound mystery, despite observed correlation. Moreover, how information about such pulses (e.g. a pulse as 1; non-pulse as 0) actually is, or manifests,16 consciousness would be a greater mystery still. Making metal into mind is modern alchemy; making information into mind is modern madness. To jump from quantities to qualities is to give a completely inadequate explanation, this correlation alone is merely indicative, not explanatory, of the relation. Furthermore, much neuronal pulsation is not correlated to human consciousness17 (breaking the identity); and the additional data of neurons (e.g. their incredibly complex factory-like inner processes) are here completely abstracted from, leaving mere extracted barren pulses or bits, which through codification are then strangely assumed to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. One cannot derive mind from matter, let alone mind from information.18

One can simulate (in part)19 matter from information (e.g. computer-game bricks) and one can simulate (in part) mind from information (e.g. computer-game characters), but the simulation should not be conflated for the reality that is simulated. As philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim writes,

‘No one will confuse the operation of a jet engine or the spread of rabies in wildlife with their computer simulations. It is difficult to believe that this distinction suddenly vanishes when we perform a computer simulation of the psychology of a person.’20

Though we must distinguish reality from a simulation thereof, we can agree with Gallimore that the reality which we perceive is but a fractional representation of the whole that is out there. Gallimore here uses Kant’s distinction of the world as we perceive it—phenomena—and the world-in-itself—noumena.21 We do not perceive the world as it really is. On the basic level, we do not even see infra-red or ultra-violet, as certain other creatures do. Kant is known for saying that even space is a projection of our minds and as such is merely phenomenal, not objectively real. Less known is the fact that Kant was the first to claim that the tridimensionality of space was not necessary:

‘[That space] has the property of threefold dimension… is arbitrary... A science of all these possible kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake.’22

A space of more than three dimensions is known as hyperspace. After Kant’s proposal, mathematicians showed that the idea is not paradoxical, notably Bernhard Riemann in 1854. Thereafter the idea of a fourth dimension of space was popularized by writers such as Charles Hinton and Edwin A Abbott in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century the Kaluza-Klein Theory proposed that a fourth spatial dimension (in addition to time) should be assumed to exist to make Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity cohere with electromagnetic theory. And since then String Theory and M-Theory in physics have proposed that ten or eleven dimensions exist, respectively.23 An interesting question is how such hyperspace may relate to the mind. This question was considered by philosophers such as PD Ouspensky, HH Price, CD Broad, and the neurophilosopher John R Smythies (all within the intellectual psychedelic circles of the first half of the twentieth century). Now Gallimore is suggesting a new psychedelic response to this metaphysical question.

‘[In] the presence of DMT, the brain re-emerges from Cell states sensitive to the HyperGrid’s orthogonal dimensions. [The] brain is transformed into a higher-dimensional processor within the HyperGrid. … [The] brain is itself constructed from this information … . As DMT floods the brain, the profound changes that occur in the information it generates are observed from a completely unique subjective perspective.’ (pp. 159.…163)

DMT is a molecule structurally similar to endogenous serotonin and thus is a key that fits the synaptic lock that is the serotonin, 5-HT_2A receptor. For Gallimore, not only does DMT allow the brain to receive information from orthogonal (right-angled) dimensions to our own consensus three, but the brain itself changes to become a hyperspatial object within the hyperspatial HyperGrid, as the brain for Gallimore essentially is a sum of information, a sum that is now extended. Though we do not gain extra sense organs for gazing upon these orthogonal dimensions, we do now receive direct input therefrom to our (augmented) brains. Gallimore reminds us that we can perceive things without sense organs, such as the objects within our dreams, and so hyperspatial realities can reveal themselves directly through brain stimulation rather than indirectly through the sense organs.

Gallimore continues that DMT differs from other psychedelics in that:

‘DMT … exerts a more specific effect: rather than simply rendering the [cortical] information more random, DMT shifts the intrinsic information from one pattern, the consensus world pattern, to another pattern: the DMT world pattern.’ (p. 172)

That is, DMT switches on a latent structure of the brain (the DMT world pattern), whilst it switches off the dominant structure of the brain that generates our consensus world and allows modification from the common senses. DMT allows information from the greater HyperGrid to enter and change the brain and thus the mind:

‘the brain re-emerges from the HyperGrid as the hyperdimensional brain complex, and the tripper becomes part of that higher-dimensional reality. This is when the elves welcome you home.’ (p. 177)

This hyperstate does not last more than a few minutes (of our time), as endogenous serotonin molecules soon return to take over their hijacked receptors. Part of the Cosmic Game in Gallimore’s theology is for a species to gain enough intelligence to isolate and synthesize DMT so as to be able to move on to the next level of cosmic realization. The next stage:

‘involves a continuous infusion of DMT, maintaining a stable breakthrough DMT brain concentration, perhaps over several days or even longer (p. 210).

This will allow a full transcription of one’s brain to the hyperspatial realms. Finally, winning the Game occurs once,

‘transcription [of mind to hyperspace] is completed … your original brain will likely be dissolved. This means to anyone observing you from outside the DMT space—from the consensus world, the Grid—you will appear to have died.’ (p. 210)

I must admit that this is not a game that particularly appeals to me. I generally prefer chess, in part because checkmate is not accompanied by brain extermination. The seeming exception to this befalls the knight who plays chess against Death himself to forestall his demise, in the classic Swedish film, The Seventh Seal. But this game of chess is not real because the world in which it is played is not real. Likewise, one wonders whether the Cosmic Game is real considering the proposed cosmos in which it is located.

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There are two immediate issues that confront the idea that DMT allows one access to, and existence in, a hyperspatial world (leaving aside the previous problems facing the world as information). These are (1) whether reality actually has more than three dimensions, and (2) whether DMT causes a hallucination rather than a veridical perception. With regard to the first, to be brief, we can say that the fact that hyperspace is logically and mathematically consistent does not itself mean that it is real. Though logical impossibility implies non-existence (e.g. a four-sided triangle), logical possibility does not per se imply existence of course. Secondly, the aforementioned hyperspatial theories of physics have not been verified. In fact, it is hard to say how they could be verified. At present they are based on an inference to the best explanation: i.e. if we assume n dimensions, then Relativity and the Standard Model of physics cohere. The logical problem of course is that other hypotheses may also conduce to such coherence, and so we cannot be certain that hyperspatial dimensions have actuality. There are additional philosophic arguments for the reality of hyperspace from, for instance, the aforementioned HH Price and John R Smythies (a friend, incidentally, of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond who coined the word ‘psychedelic’), but these arguments are certainly debatable.24

For Gallimore, it is the Other, the Code, and Information that are fundamental rather than space. Therefore, the dimensionality of space is simply a matter of its encoding (as in our own hyperspace computer simulations). But that other sentiences (DMT entities) exist within orthogonal dimensions to our own relies upon the theory that information can make matter and mind, which, as above, appears rather implausible. Furthermore, it also relies upon the existence of the hyperintelligent, transcendent, computer-game creator god: the Other—an existence for Whom evidence and reason is non-extant. If we do not place our faith in such a god, then we must look elsewhere for faith in hyperspace.

Even if we were to believe that more than three dimensions of space do exist, the question still arises as to why DMT induces a veridical (objectively real) perception of that objective hyper-reality rather than inducing a hallucination of such a reality. I feel Gallimore could have explored this question in depth, especially considering the fact that he alludes to (non-veridical) dream worlds produced by the brain. If the brain can produce dreams which are not veridical, then why can it not produce DMT worlds that are not veridical? There are some minor suggestions relating to the feeling of familiarity and the perception of regularity, but these alone are not particularly persuasive.

However, there is no doubt that DMT breakthrough experiences are vastly different to dreams, and so cannot have identical causal explanations. It is certainly possible that these could be in part explained by positing hyperspatial dimensions. But such an explanation need not be conditioned upon an information theory, which is, I have submitted, infected with logical error.

We arrive then at the realization that alien information theory does not compute. Yet the tome contains elements of truth that may be further fruitfully examined. I was enthralled when reading the book, and it certainly lit a blaze of thoughts that have fastened my understanding in certain directions. Its aesthetic presentation and surprising novelty cannot be overstated, qualities that are perhaps themselves symptomatic of the creative powers that psychedelics can bestow.

A deeply psychedelic experience will change one’s world, the question is to what. If it is, after all, to Gallimore’s alien world, then I have lost the game—“Game over, man, game over” to quote from Aliens. But one hopes there are other equally-phantastic games to play.

Here’s Andrew and Peter having a further chat about this discussion:

What is the psychedelic community? I have on occasion asked people this question and the answer is usually vague; a variation of ‘people who trip’ or ‘people who get together to talk about tripping’ (often both). The former doesn’t make much sense. What relationship does the acidhead in northern England, the Siberian shaman, and the Mazatec curandera really have? They may share some similar drug practices, using music perhaps, but nothing that constitutes community—neither in the sense of a communal life nor a religious communion.

If, however, we consider the psychedelic community to be those who gather to discuss tripping, then it’s still not that simple. Between the nineteen sixties and renaissance, events and conferences were often inhabited by the same small crew of characters, yet now, post ‘mainstreaming’ there’s so many events, and so many people (like endless variations of the therapist archetype) that to talk about the psychedelic community makes little sense. Instead, we must consider the fact that there are, like the trippers, many discrete groups.

Perhaps then it has nothing to do with the traditional notion of community. What about an ideological community? Or shared attitudes? Is there a worldview that is shared by participants? If such a thing exists then it is to found in the media that such a community produces. David Jay Brown has been publishing interviews with notable psychedelic thought leaders for many years, and his latest book of interviews, Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity, is in some sense a window into how a psychedelic culture articulates itself today—at least one iteration of it.

Brown’s introduction propounds a particular worldview. Anxiety, he suggests, is a core facet of human experience—death being the primary mover. He argues that ‘for generations that stretch back into our prehistory’ a sense of reassurance was found in the continuation of our offspring and the world. This idea, he goes on, is now shattered in the face of ‘climate crisis, global mass extinction, the Covid pandemic, the impending perils of advanced and weaponized robots’ and such like. Yet, is this apocalyptic moment unique?

Given that the reassurance of life continuation was also tempered with scriptural and oral histories of linear and cyclical apocalypses, afterlife, and warrior castes glorifying death, one must recognise a close psychological interrelation of anxiety and religion. In this respect, Brown sees modern culture as finding itself in a polarity between apocalyptic disaster and utopian tech dreams of becoming ‘all-powerful and immortal superhuman masters of space and time’. It is a Californian iteration of a ubiquitous human religiosity.

The ‘world’s leading experts’ and ‘cultural innovators’  that Brown interviews are men (with the single exception of neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge) who represent a range of professions, from journalists and comedians to scientists and cultural commentators. Considering the dichotomous (and ecologically bleak) framework that Brown sets up, I was pleasantly surprised at the present optimism of many of the interviewees. It’s often a question of point-of-view. As Duncan Trussell responded on being asked about the chances of the human race:

‘I think that the problem right now is that people are just ahistoric, and so because of that, the things that are happening in the world right now seem apocalyptic. It feels to me like somehow people think that, like, reality started in the eighties or something.’

Elsewhere, answering a similar question, Julia Mossbridge (with the benefit of precognition of course) says: ‘I have a fairly relaxed perspective about the future of humanity. I think we’re making positive changes, and I know it can seem dreadful, because there are pendulum swings that occur in response to positive changes. These are difficult. But it’s okay; it evens out as we go, as far as I can tell.’ In short, many of the people showcased in this book seek to shift contexts on our ‘cultural moment’. Is this itself psychedelic?

Interestingly, Europeans tend here to try to be optimistic compared to their American cousins—there’s perhaps something else to be said about their own context, so far as civilizational cycles go! Yet, on the whole, there’s more than just stoicism in answers. ‘I have a, maybe very Hollywood, romanticized version of how this will go,’ says Vince Kadlubek, ‘where the end of one paradigm coincides perfectly with the dawn of the next’. Or, Jeffrey Kripal, ‘I just think hope and optimism produce better futures than despair and pessimism.’

Brown’s interviews, however, are at their very best when the meta-questions take a back seat and the interviewees are able to wax-lyrical about their fields of interest. Whether it’s Hamilton Morris on chemistry, Grant Morrison on archetypal mythology in comics, or Erik Davis on the cultural history of psychedelics, there’s a genuine enthusiasm and insight that weaves its way through Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity. This to me is an excellent approximation of a psychedelic community: complex rather than singular; intellectually multilinear.

As David Luke (you know him, right?) responds when asked about psychedelics and connectedness: ‘On a sociological level […] there’s also a synergy there with group psychedelic experiences of communitas, which also enhance well-being’. And the thing about communitas is that it is fleeting; a sociological state which individuals pass through. It is both the psychedelic experience and the occasional communion of optimistic enthusiasts enthralled by the trip.

A psychedelic community then, if anything, is an occasional space of (usually enthusiastic) cross-disciplinary discussion and/or experiences that re-blossoms across generations and cultures—each individual one a passage ultimately taken thanks to a shared love of tripping, but which starts and ends in a multitude of different places. And above all it is this rich palette that comes out beautifully in Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity.

The way in which humans aesthetically express their relationship with drugs is like looking out upon shifting sands; it is constantly reforming with the winds, expressing sometimes stark, sometimes subtle new vistas, depending on your viewpoint. Time and place intersect, creating a cultural milieu, through which individual and social drug experiences refract. The relationship between the individual experience of a plant, fungi or substance and its aesthetic/artistic expression is rarely fruitfully understood as a simple binary; they are to some extent mutual symptoms of a milieu.

What then is psychedelic art? Answers to this question might range from objects that have been created by someone under the influence of a particular class of drug; an aesthetic style associated with a 1960s subculture; art that expresses the otherworldliness associated with the psychedelic experience and which, psychologically speaking, is accessible to humans across times and cultures; or, indeed, anything that manifests from the mind. In short, it is a question that first requires you to define your context, your evidential milieu, before it can be answered. 

‘Psychedelic drugs with their roots deep in human culture,’ writes Paul Farmer, ‘have been eaten, drunk, snorted or smoked through almost the entire world and for the whole of human history.’ In Drug Culture: A History of Psychedelic Art, Part 1, Farmer has selected a wide-range of imagery from the corpus of human artwork. Some of it is clearly drug-inspired, either positively or negatively, others are windows into drug-using cultures or symbolic representations. The mind-altering agents in question are neither pharmacologically-strict, nor necessarily visible for the viewer.

Drug Culture (Part 1) casts a very wide net in approaching the question of drug aesthetics, taking in cultures from around the world up to the post World War Two era of psychedelia. In regard to the ancient and prehistoric, Farmer looks at a number of interesting artefacts. The tattoos of Scythians, a people who Herodotus noted used hemp smoke in vapour baths, and which recent archeological excavations have confirmed, are a less obvious example. While Tantric art and the Eleusinian Mysteries are far more well-known ones.

Without doubt these cultures used psychoactive plants yet the manner in which their art reflects this relationship is more interpretive, more esoteric in their potential meanings. Shifting to late medieval witchcraft, with which certain solanaceous plants such as belladonna are connected, woodcuts emerge that apparently depict the experience of those who use ‘flying ointments’. Given that this narrative is so readily embedded in contemporary critical approaches, the art is a kind of construction of fearful imaginations, which neatly brings to mind twentieth century anti-drug propaganda.

The manner in which the interpretation of drug aesthetics is construed brings to light interesting questions. ‘Was Hieronymus Bosch a psychedelic artist?’ Farmer asks. The link between Bosch and ergotism, or St Anthony’s Fire as it was then called, has been made before, although Farmer also looks at the possibility that a mushroom may have been involved. He does concede that systemic magic mushroom use does not appear in Europe until more recent times, and that ultimately, his work is best analyzed through ‘its actual context rather than a fanciful one’.

Other cultural geographies that this book is concerned with include Persian art, the Mughal dynasty, and Siberian shamanism. The images of paintings and artefacts provides a clear differentiation between the stylistic approaches of such disparate groups of people. Through this, it is possible to see how any association with drugs is completely subsumed into unique ritual, social and aesthetic preferences. What emerges is that the fact of drug use is more fruitfully understood as a window into the being of such cultures, rather than other way around; the cosmologies of altered states.

The final third of Drug Culture shifts into a more Western, post-Enlightenment focus. It begins with Orientalism and the Western engagement with the East, particularly through the prism of opium and hashish. Indeed, through these substances, Farmer drives his narrative into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Images of hookah smokers and opium pipes users in exotic clothing precede a shift into John Tenniel’s hookah smoking caterpillar, designed for Alice in Wonderland, and the arch-mage and poly-drug user Aleister Crowley in robes.

Concerning Crowley, Farmer writes, ‘As a practitioner of ceremonial magic, his legacy is negligible. Very few people dress-up and perform elaborate rituals today, but his association of sex, drugs and magic survives him’. I would suggest that no-one can understand ritual, ceremonial magic from the twentieth century to the modern day without some recourse to Crowley – it is far more widespread now than then. His influence is pervasive. Nevertheless, ultimately he bequeathed to, what Adam Curtis has called, the ‘century of the self’ with its core radical individualism; the remaking of identity.

Farmer ends Part 1 at this point, noting that Hofmann was simultaneously discovering LSD. It is, to my mind, a fitting place to do so. The aesthetics of psychedelia, so much concerned with individual and social transformation, seem as much a legacy of Crowley as it is Freud or Jung. Drug Culture does not, nor does it try, to definitively answer the question, what is psychedelic art? What it does, and admirably so, is explore the limits and ideas through which one might approach the question as a meta-cultural aesthetic founded upon the ubiquity of psychoactive substances.

For a long time, the history of psychedelics was a domain that existed largely outside the academy. In the 1980s, excellent, popular histories began appearing intermittently, concentrating largely on America, and paying particular attention to the dissemination of LSD and mushrooms in scientific, military, and countercultural contexts. Although a broad, complex picture emerged, it still remained somewhat isolated from wider historical forces. This was also true for the odd article that did appear in the academy, when psychedelics were typically wrapped up within ‘The Sixties’™.

There remains a great deal to be said, and unearthed, about the role of psychedelics in the postwar West. Over the last few decades, the focus of the ‘psychedelic community’ and the hallowed halls of the academy has also widened its geographical contexts. Not only have people been travelling the world in larger numbers to partake in psychedelic ceremonies, but this has been mirrored by the interest of the humanities, as scholars have sought to give more attention to cultures other than their own. Where anthropologists and ethnobotanists first trod, historians have begun to follow.

It goes without saying that the renaissance in psychedelics has been driven by scientific research and therapy. So far as popular culture goes, this is where the glossy splashes have landed. While the humanities has been relatively slow to pick up on this trend, there have been notable exceptions, including the brilliant Psychedelic Psychiatry: From Clinic to Campus (2008) by Erika Dyck. Indeed, Dyck (and others) have been instrumental in bringing more historical focus to psychedelics and, along with Chris Elcock, she has recently edited the mammoth Expanding Mindscapes (2023).

Noting the predominance of the United States, Timothy Leary and the Sixties, the editors write, ‘psychedelics have a much deeper and broader history that challenges both the chronology and geography of that particular location and time frame’. The essays in Expanding Mindscapes cover Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia, and can therefore claim to be a global history. There are of course limitations to this approach, it can easily be spread too thinly and lack substance, yet these 20 essays are an admirable introduction to a labyrinthine global story.

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Ian A Baker opens the collection with a classic discussion around the identity of soma in the Rg Veda, and the author’s investigations into a ‘living tradition’ of soma in India. This neatly sets the book’s overall outlook—navigating existing questions, current trends, and new contexts. It also opens the first section, ‘Evaluating Evidence/Experience’. This includes two chapters dealing with France, delving into the scientific context of Sartre’s mescaline experiments, and ‘Women, Mental Illness, and Psychedelic Therapy in Postwar France’, plus several on early LSD cultures.

The following section (7 chapters) is subtitled ‘Global Networks of Psychedelic Knowledge’. Excellent examples of the mycelium-like spread of information can be found in Timothy Vilgiate’s analysis of how a ‘transnational imagination’ has understood Voacanga africana seeds; Julien Bonhomme’s history of Tabernanthe iboga; and the ‘transnational’ research of mushroom aficionado Roger Heim. In many respects, this is a stand-out section of the book and really gives a compelling impression of the extent to which psychoactive plants and substances are threaded through the life of the planet.

‘Psychedelics as Cultural Phenomena’ contains the final 7 chapters and deals with such different topics as the shared conceptual relationship of electronics and psychedelics as technologies of consciousness; three chapters on the impact of LSD and other drugs in the Netherlands, Brazil, and Israel respectively; ayahuasca use in China; queerness in Pakistan. As you might imagine, there is something of a shared perspective in regard to the proliferation of both therapeutic and indigenous psychedelic techniques—these two worldviews jockey and vibe across the global landscape.

There are 4 chapters dealing with the question of psychedelics in Britain, two of which, on Dr Frank Lake and the acid anarchism William Dwyer, deal with subjects that long-time readers of the Psychedelic Press are already very familiar with. Wendy Kline describes the work of Dr Ronald Sandison, and is particularly interesting for testimonies she gathered from people who remember Powick Hospital where he worked. The LSD Unit was something of a closed, almost secret, part of the hospital, shutting out other members of staff—fuel for other questions.

The final chapter on British psychedelia, ‘Did the Master’s Tools Dismantle the Master’s House?’ by Mark Gallagher, also touches on acid anarchism, bringing in the question of anti-psychiatry, plus game theorist and frequent mental health patient Robin Farquharson. A South African, anti-apartheid activist, Farquharson wrote Drop Out! about his experiences doing just that in London. Gallagher writes an excellent exploration of the many social tracks LSD trod in the 1960s and, in regard to the British-centred pieces, it is a stand-out chapter.

In conclusion, Expanding Mindscapes is essential reading for anyone interested in psychedelic history. Its overall breadth is a reminder that psychedelics have touched upon and influenced lives in myriad ways, and that while users may always be deemed as marginal characters—especially in regard to their legal or medical status in society—their history reflects and animates crucial changes. It’s a book I shall definitely be revisiting and will enjoy chasing up its historical threads.

Since its inception and global adoption, the internet has brought with it a great deal of change in human society. Some of this has been malign, but its fundamental premise of providing a space to connect people from across vast geographical distances has transformed what we once understood by the notion of community. No longer only bound by our physical locale, our interests and individual identities are now able to establish networks hitherto either impossible or incredibly slow to develop. What’s more, those networks are now able to organize and effect change in ways previously unimaginable.

One such community was established in 1998: clusterheadaches.com. The cluster headache is an incredibly painful, life-destroying condition that has received little medical attention. It is uncommon enough to make it unlikely that one would ordinarily come across another sufferer in one’s daily life, thereby exacerbating its tendency to isolate people. However, on the internet, clusterheads, as they often refer to themselves, are able to share their experiences, along with discussing the medicines and treatments they may or may not have found useful.

Joanna Kempner followed what became known as the Clusterbusters patient community for a decade between 2013 and 2023. Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Medicine is the fruit of her research. In it, she discusses the ‘social mycelium’, a counternarrative to the nineteenth century notion of the lone, scientific genius, that mirrors the networked pattern of modern scientific discovery. It also aptly describes the underground/overground relationship of psychedelic research that began proliferating in the latter half of the last century. Clusterbusters sits neatly in this picture.

In late July 1998, a Scotsman called Craig Adams, or ‘Flash’, left a message on the cluster headaches website saying that he used small doses of LSD to treat himself. What ensued were jokes, questions, and an increasing number of discussions between posters. With LSD more difficult to come by, Adams turned to using magic mushrooms, which grew plentifully in his neck of the woods. The result was that he avoided his usual cycle of cluster headaches that fall. Other clusterheads also began having some successes; they began researching effective dosages, and sharing their findings.

This experimental underground network was essentially carrying out the work of science, albeit in a limited sense. The benefits being the speed at which they could work (outside the regulatory world) and, more importantly for those who found success with treating themselves, finding some relief after many years of suffering. What’s more, they were able to share knowledge about how to grow mushrooms themselves, thereby sidestepping the dangers of engaging with illicit drug networks. Proper citizen science. Yet, subsequent attempts to engage with ‘overground’ science proved a very different prospect.

According to Kempner, Clusterbusters ‘is helping people with cluster headaches survive a medical system that too often fails to provide adequate care.’ While science has produced several drugs and treatments over the years, a great deal is off-label, and due to a lack of research many doctors were either ignorant of correct approaches, or even in some cases quite hostile to their patient’s needs. Kempner does an excellent job at framing this within overground research processes. The Clusterbusters necessarily needed to enter this fray armed only with their anecdotal data, a category not favoured by mainstream researchers.

Kempner attended numerous conferences, and has conducted some excellent interviews, in the course of her research for this book. A central figure in the story is Bob Wold; a clusterhead and one of the principle organizers of the Clusterbusters community. Kempner writes, ‘Wold’s celebrity at Clusterbusters meetings is, at least, partly driven by the countless people who attribute their survival to his interventions, many of whom thank him for saving their lives.’ And this is important because what lies at the heart of this story is the suffering and the relief of the people involved.

Wold and others were instrumental not only in establishing the new Clusterbusters group in the early 2000s, but also in gathering and compiling all the data that they had developed thus far. It was time to venture overground, as ‘Wold knew he needed a scientist to help him develop a pharmaceutical option to reach more patients in need.’ Rick Doblin’s MAPS and several research scientists at Harvard University took up the reins—for those familiar with psychedelic history, this was the context for what became known as Halperngate, which Kempner astutely navigates.

Suffice to say that aside from a few articles, there were many false starts to this attempt at an early collaboration to get more precise, regulatory-friendly data, on the use of psychedelics to treat cluster headaches. Nevertheless, it did help to raise awareness, and promising collaborations have emerged more recently. Kempner does a fantastic job at telling this complex research element in the story, which involves strong-willed doctors and the relationship between themselves and their institutions. The measure, very often here, is the extent to which the plight of clusterheads remained foremost in their minds.

Psychedelic Outlaws is an incredibly well-written book, lucid and full of deep learning, and does an excellent job at keeping the clusterheads at the centre of its narrative. The story itself is, at turns, frustrating, heartwarming, gut-wrenching and touching. Kempner has aptly situated the Clusterbusters within the wider contexts of not only psychedelic history, but the history of science more widely. It is also, I must add, a story that is still unfolding—the sufferers of cluster headaches continue to extend their social mycelium, and fresh fruits are still popping up above ground.

In her new novel We Were the Universe (2024), Kimberly King Parsons renders the psychedelic experience whimsical, feral and queer.

Parsons’ narrator Kit, a young Texas mother coping with the death of her sister, insists LSD prepared her for childbirth. “I’m so glad I’ve done acid,” she thinks. “Nothing prepares you for childbirth more. The violent weirdness, how LSD lasts and lasts. You’re done with it long before it’s done with you. Just like childbirth.” Startling comparisons such as Parsons’ would never show up on Erowid or Reddit. How to Change Your Mind neglected the topic of childbirth, even though there’s evidence for feminine uses of psychedelics going back thousands of years. Peyote is still used today to aid childbirth, induce lactation, and ease the discomfort of menopause.

Parsons’ narrator continues, “Psychedelics prepare you for the craziest thing imaginable on this earth: a new human tunneling through an older human’s body. Somehow, my extensive recreational drug use led me to a completely unmedicated delivery. I turned out to be one of those women who refuse the epidural, who call contractions ‘rushes,’ who insist pain isn’t painful.  Trips taught me how to sit with discomfort. You can’t leave, so you might as well soak in it. In many ways, I found labor to be even easier than LSD…”

Compared to Parsons, the male-dominated popular depiction of the psychedelic experience is sour milk. As someone who spent more than four years in underground psychedelic therapy, I find Parsons’ account to be truer to the psychedelic experience than the over-intellectualized and masculinized chatter of the current so-called renaissance. In truth, the psychedelic experience is sensual, and although often derided as unserious, engaging with sensuality is so much more fun than staring at your wool pants during a drug trip. Plus, almost no one comes to psychedelics in the idealized and highly scripted ways the old men of the renaissance describe. Most of us have experiences more like Kit’s.

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The narrator Kit comes to psychedelics the way many people do: outside of a ceremony and without access to the strange, dissociative clinical model touted by organizations like Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, now a private company called Lykos Therapeutics. Kit goes on her first trips as an adolescent, without much consideration for set or setting. A pink rug, a young man named Big Large who doubles as a trip sitter, and the narrator’s sister, help her through her first trips. “We sat on the screened-in porch and let our identities touch,” Parsons writes of using psychedelics with her sister, Julie, who becomes an addict and dies. “We comingled and passed the dessert between us, understanding that whipped cream was a gift from a cow, that strawberries were magic, something to hold in your hand, contemplate and savor, every seed a different rainbow color.” The sensuality in Parsons’ trip descriptions is palpable, and although fictional, more realistic.

In today’s popular accounts of psychedelics, addiction is rarely if ever mentioned, and never connected to the human desire to experience altered states and the sensuality they provoke. The grandpas of psychedelics tout them as panaceas, squashing alternate perspectives to achieve their aims of decriminalization and wealth. Some of these people want to control the narrative and access to psychedelics in a way that, according to We Were the Universe, can’t really be done because the substances themselves control the plotline. “Psychedelics squash shame and guilt, help you make sense of things that make no sense,” Parsons writes. “A trip is a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end—a narrative that unfolds perfectly, a plot tailored for you, telling you exactly what you need to hear.”

The sensuality of Kit’s drug trips undergirds the feral universe of the novel. Parsons never depicts psychedelics as cure-alls or scientific breakthroughs. Instead, We Were the Universe pushes against pop spirituality’s claims about healing in ways that are funny and true, refusing to eschew the mess, blood or sex. “For me, psychedelics have always been beneficial, therapeutic—and I’m referring to obliterative macrodoses, not those barely-feel-it micro-tinctures people blab about on public radio… Dropping acid was this magnificent clearing, a long white hand swiping layers of chalk from the blackboard of my brain. I could do it and come back clean, focused.”

Kit repeatedly lies to her sliding-scale therapist until the woman dumps her, proclaiming the narrator healed in one of the novel’s funniest moments. Meanwhile, Kit is binge-watching porn and wishing she could still use drugs and have sex with strangers, coping mechanisms from her younger years. In fact, it seems Kit doesn’t heal in the novel—that healing in the contemporary pop spirituality sense is not even desirable. It would mean living a life denuded, numbed out, rife with unfortunate language like manifesting and intentionality. Instead of healing, Kit combines and creates. Instead of healing, she cracks jokes.

“Rich people travel when they get depressed, but there are much cheaper solutions,” Parsons writes. “My coping mechanisms used to be psychedelics and/or sex with strangers, though marriage and motherhood have wrenched those from me.”

Kit is all too aware that such sensuality appears unseemly to those living in consensus reality.  “My high school guidance counselor called me pleasure seeking and I still don’t see what’s so wrong about that,” she reflects. Kit doesn’t give up porn, and although her husband knows about her habit, she downplays it after she becomes a mother. “Even when I’m alone, I watch my selections without sound, in case a participant says something accidentally or genuinely disturbing. Catchy as a TV jingle, a snippet of dialogue from an early, formative scene haunts me still: ‘All right, boys,’ said one gangbanger to his brethren, ‘let’s get in those guts and bust some nuts.’ Now I’m a muter for life.”

The narrator’s desire is wide-ranging, impossible to blot out, she says. It’s the sort of question that pervades We Were the Universe and the psychedelic experience: Why should we blot out our desires? If we weren’t so busy fitting ourselves into boxes, maybe we’d find, like Kit, that our desires defy categorization. Parsons describes an adolescent relationship with another girl this way: “This girl and I wouldn’t have called ourselves queer. We called what we were doing ‘preparing.’ We prepared for all of ninth grade, half of tenth. We were very, very prepared.” Kit routinely fantasizes about men and women, and everyone in between.

Meanwhile, psychedelics ignite extra-sensory perception in the psychic space of the novel, the sort of thing Rupert Sheldrake talks openly about but that the rest of us are best off rendering in fiction. Kit develops telepathy with her sister while Julie is alive, and sees her ghost after her sister dies. Although frequently misunderstood in ordinary, everyday life, Kit’s fuzzy boundaries also work as superpowers. Parsons depicts enmeshment as sensual, erotic, feral and ecological—in the novel it becomes a fundamental component of motherhood, creativity and the psychedelic experience.

Kit describes herself as a “curious, boundaryless person.” On page 142 she likens herself to an “adrift brain in a jar. I used to try to pour myself into other people’s bodies. Entering a person, being entered, it stops time, bends it. This sounds like hippy shit, but that sensation lasts longer, goes deeper with psychedelics—the total dissolution of the personal body, the safety of being swallowed by a universal one.” She sees motherhood in a similar light. “Once we’ve been inside each other, we’re permeable, we’re mesh, forever.”

Kit describes enmeshment with her dead sister during an acid trip this way on pages 71 to 72: “It was like an open door between adjoining rooms. I flowed into Julie’s space and she flowed into mine.” If there is any healing for Kit in the novel, it comes from her enmeshment with the people she loves, from her ability—borne in psychedelic trips—to experience the love for her sister even after her sister is gone.

Best-selling nonfiction books on psychedelics insist everything between their covers is real and true, but this move collapses the narrative. We Were the Universe shows how much more space is available when we return to sensuality and allow boundaries to blur. Profoundly whimsical, the novel reflects the psychedelic experience in the realest way possible.  

The relationship between modernism and drugs has only tentatively been examined by scholars, with nods to the likes of Walter Benjamin, James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Considering modernism’s emphasis on experimentation, subjectivity, and abstraction, one might consider drug literature as having a positively modernist vibe about it—particularly the psychedelic variety with its embodied psychoanalytic framework. However, this has not translated into much explicit scholarly analysis.

In some respects, however, a historiographical problem emerges in thinking about modernism and postwar psychedelic discourse. The multimedia landscape, an increasing scepticism of ideological and rational thinking, and the desire to break apart notions of cohesive or consensual reality, speak to a more postmodern frame of mind. Historically, one might even go so far as to argue that psychedelics played a cultural and experiential role in the emergence of this mode of cognition.

It was with some interest therefore that I recently received a copy of Psychedelic Modernism: Literature and Film (2024) by Raj Chandarlapaty. The study, while weighted by literary figures and their works, instead centres on analyses of film—documentary and interview for the most part. Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Neal Cassady, and Philip K Dick all take prominent positions, and Chandarlapaty’s loosely critical theory approach renders the era in multimedia conversation.

‘The book’s purpose’ he states, ‘is to build psychological and societal relevance to the initial studies and experiences to derive commentaries, research, and authorial questions as the beginning points for greater studies of psychedelic drugs during the key period.’ In short, I would suggest, to provide social context and elucidate modes of thinking. It should be noted, for a scholarly work, there is a great lack of secondary works cited (less than 20); maybe the inclusion of many of the absent works might have aided this stated purpose.

Huxley, as he so often does, takes a prominent role, especially in regard to providing a kind of theoretical lineage. For Chandarlapaty, Huxley is a thread from interwar modernism, a movement he posits as counterculture, and thus draws a line between this earlier period and the emergence of psychedelia postwar. In doing so, earlier modernist concerns of overcoming Victorian morality (or ‘authoritarianism’) and nineteenth century norms form for him a lineage of activity.

For instance, in analyzing Neal Cassady: The Denver Years, Chandarlapaty writes, ‘this film underscores and relates poor Americans’ meandering spirit as they envision psychedelic drugs to be antidotes to the ills of Victorian social and institutional repression.’ Cassady was born in Salt Lake City in the mid-1920s, growing up in Denver, leaving one wondering if theory is getting in the way of the history here—the American Progressive era surely must have its own nuances compared to the British Victorian era?

To put this question another way: did Neal Cassady and, say, Virginia Woolf really respond to the world they inhabited from a similar cultural place?

There are, to be fair, some interesting angles being drawn out in Psychedelic Modernism, especially in regard to Kesey and his response to the institutions of mental illness. However, the book displays the absolute worse tendencies of critical theory in literary/cultural studies—obfuscation in language, failure to engage meaningfully with the history, and a lack of narrative cohesion in the writing. I was bewildered reading; rendered, I felt, as a postmodern audience.

It is often said that writing is an imperfect art when it comes to expressing the extraordinary visual and sensual altered states brought about by taking a trip with psychedelics. This is not for want of trying, however; reams of words have been produced in attempts to tackle this very task. From the experimental to the technical, writing has at best narrativized the psychedelic experience, and rarely touches upon its phenomenology in a way that empathetically communicates its sense of weird.

Music and the visual arts on the other hand have been lauded as methods by which psychedelic aesthetics, at least the flavour of said aesthetics, might establish the kind of sensual connection that begins to approximate what a tripper has undergone. While obviously still not a perfect representation, these artforms share the ability of psychedelics to play more directly upon the human visionary experience, and thereby communicate something nuanced.

None of these aesthetics, however, are immune from culture. They don’t exist in a vacuum untouched by the beliefs, pretensions, and psychology of the individual and society from which they manifest—which is as true for the experience itself as for its aesthetic. What’s more, psychedelic aesthetics are not only trying to represent an extraordinary experience, they are also cultural and sub-cultural signals, tied in with group communication, technology and the manifestation of taste.

As a result, a question of history, of time and place and kind, emerges from any enquiry into these aesthetics. According to historian Erika Dyck, author of the fabulous Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey (2024), context is key to understanding the dynamics of using psychedelics. In the book, she tracks ‘how representations of psychedelics have revealed power dynamics in the way that psychedelics have been rendered visible, and by whom.’ A framework accompanied here by a feast of imagery.

Dyck’s story stretches from suggestions about mushroom use in ancient Egyptian culture (as interpreted in frieze artwork), Hindu traditions related to Shiva, Mesoamerican mushrooms, and peyote use among indigenous populations in North America, to psychedelic patterns of the present day. Also, perhaps oddly, there’s a short section on ergotism in medieval Europe—something more associated with gangrene and seizures. Nevertheless, it places the psychedelic aesthetic within a global and historical context.

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The term ‘psychedelic’ itself is also taken in its broadest sense of ‘mind-manifesting’, and thus this visual odyssey includes some imagery of Victorian patent medicines that contained opiates and cocaine; ‘Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup’ and ‘Cocaine Toothache Drops’ for instance. These are juxtaposed by Dyck with European exploration and colonialism abroad, and the emergence of Western models of classification in regard to botany and pharmaceuticals.

Following this first quarter of the book, Dyck then goes into ‘psychedelic’ in its more historically-contingent meaning as a particular twentieth century discourse—using ethnobotanist Richard Evans Shultes and others’ explorations as passages into psychedelia in the post-war world (via some dips into absinthe, hashish, and, oddly, Modern Spiritualism). In ‘Huxley’s Legacy’, it is a treat to see the paper, dug out from the archives, scrawled by Huxley on his deathbed asking for LSD.

From this point on we are treated to images of classic book and vinyl covers, war protests, Kesey Acid Test imagery, hippie trail photos, blotter and of course the famous poster art of the era—arguably the quintessential aesthetic associated with psychedelia. There are also several pages dedicated to anti-drug propaganda, a particularly fascinating section which is a reminder, for this reviewer at least, of how they were repurposed by the drug underground as posters in the 1990s.

In many respects, Psychedelic is an archetypal coffee-table book. There is a deep nostalgia factor in the images, which is slightly unsettling so far as I was certainly not alive when the majority of these images, artefacts and photos were created. It is, I would suggest, a sign that they have come to be key signifiers in the spectacle of twentieth century culture. Dyck’s commentary is necessarily piecemeal, but does give the popular context to further appreciate the visual culture the book depicts.

In the introduction, she asks, ‘How can a plant be illegal? How can a mushroom be subject to regulations beyond the laws of nature? Can a toad become a target of prohibition?’ The answer is of course, they can’t. This is not how the legal system works. It is only illegal for a person to import, export, possess, manufacturer or distribute any said plant or chemical. The power dynamics of psychedelics, like their aesthetics, exist in a context, a framework, we have already conjured—and it remains very human.

At the conclusion, Dyck suggests that rushing psychedelics into current medical and economic frameworks risks ‘squandering’ their potential. To this, I would add, the prevalent and often homogenous modes of cultural thinking that exist in the mainstream too—whether in media, academia, or beyond. However, there is something, especially in the smile of Neal Cassady in one photo, that reassures me that an elusive psychedelic aesthetic remains—one transcending frameworks.

In her memoir about psychedelics and Judaism, Madison Margolin, co-founder of DoubleBlind Magazine, argues even the Torah has an acid test: ‘Does it set you freer? Or trap you further?’ This is the question, Margolin suggests in Exile and Ecstasy, we should ask about both religion and psychedelics.

Margolin finds ample connections between Judaism—even its most conservative interpretations—and contemporary psychedelic philosophy, ultimately arguing that Judaism, like many religions, holds keys to understanding altered states of consciousness. ‘The Jewish religion, at least for me, all of a sudden became one giant trip tale, a collective psychedelic journey of a people thrown into the trippiest of all trips—a never-ending wrestling match with the guy in the sky, “chosen” for a struggle that would teach us to strive to thrive, rather than just survive’.

Margolin, the daughter of California cannabis lawyer Bruce Margolin, made her way as a journalist covering the Jewish psychedelic underground, writing for Rolling Stone, High Times and Vice. She hosts a podcast on the Be Here Now Network called Set and Setting and co-founded Double Blind Magazine and the Jewish Psychedelic Summit. Bruce Margolin defended Timothy Leary pro bono because, he said, ‘I thought he was an important icon and represented freedom. Maybe in a twisted way, but it was freedom nevertheless.’

In her memoir, Margolin explains how growing up as a child of one of California’s most famous drug lawyers primed her to rebel, searching for meaning in Judaism and eschewing, for a time, the practices of her father and his hippy friends. Growing up around gurus like Ram Dass helped Margolin retain her skepticism of the psychedelic renaissance as she traveled through the underground in California, New York, Israel and India, constantly asking the people she interviewed what they believe sets humans free and what traps us further.

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Margolin favors traditional Jewish wisdom and interpretations of altered states over popular psychedelic pseudo-philosophy. In Chapter 17 she discusses the eighteenth century—and what she calls psychedelic—roots of the Hasidic movement: ‘I was immediately inspired by the way the core of Chassidis encouraged finding magic within the mundane, infusing everyday activities of the body—eating, singing, making love, hanging out, being in the moment—with a sense of something sacred’.

She finds clues about remaining present during difficult experiences while riding around Israel in a Na Nach trance van in Chapter 20. Among the teachings she shares from Na Nach philosophy include, ‘[I]t’s better to be happy, even if it means being a fool, than to be unhappy and ‘normal” and ‘(T)ake the clothes of the outside world to capture (the) light and make it holy’.

Psytrance musician Tomer Ben Aharon tells her he hasn’t tripped in a decade because he’d seen too much light, leading Margolin to consider psychedelic renaissance ideas about ego death. ‘Too much light, he told me, could shatter one’s vessel—his point being that sober, daily practices, like prayer and keeping kosher, always trumped the psychedelic shortcut to illumination’. She notes Stan Grof believed many forms of psychosis are actually ‘difficult states of a radical personality transformation and of spiritual opening’.

Ego death, Margolin posits, involves a shift in cognition from self-centered to an unbiased, radically connected form of cognition. ‘Scientifically speaking, it’s defined by established brain networks losing localized integrity and increasing global functional connectivity with the rest of the brain,’ which redefines the sense of self, she writes.

She connects this idea back to Ram Dass and enlightenment in the Hindu sense and to bitual or self-nullification in Judaism. She tells the story of three rabbis who experienced God: afterward one dies and one goes crazy, leaving only the third who becomes enlightened. Although each of the Rabbis had spent their life studying the Torah, this didn’t necessarily prepare them for direct experience of the divine, which unhinged them. This shows that spiritual experience can be dangerous and should be undertaken with respect and humility.

The author never settles for current psychedelic lingo, retaining healthy skepticism about the renaissance’s platitudes. ‘I’ve even considered that calling it “work,” and subsequently acting like it can’t be fun on account of it, is a capitalist notion, feeding into antiquated, industrialist, even corporate paradigms of ‘work culture”. Her critiques of the renaissance’s language always land, particularly when set against the much deeper experiences of consciousness she finds expressed in Judaism.

‘So my question to those I’ve observed taking ‘the medicine’ so frequently and seriously that it borders on avodah zarah—idolizing the substance, saying things like ‘Grandmother told me this,’ and treating it as the be-all and end-all, rather than simply what it is: a door to the path that’s outside our habitual ways of thought and feeling—is, why not just lighten up a little?’. The irreverence Margolin speaks of here is, I believe, truer to the psychedelic experience than the secularized scientific seriousness many psychedelic advocates use. Margolin’s type of irreverence requires taking the substances seriously, while taking yourself less seriously.

Exile and Ecstasy critiques psychedelic renaissance language and ideas in other ways, attempting to parse the differences between partying, addiction, ceremonies and psychedelic therapy. ‘On the other hand, I thought to myself, maybe the term ‘medicine’ has just become a mainstream euphemism, and is being thrown around way too much, bypassing the nonchalant or abusive ways people can use drugs’. Margolin comes to this idea by traveling through varied drug scenes, both casual and ceremonial.

‘Often, when drug use is seen as a problem, that perception (or reality) in part has to do with class: the more disadvantaged the community, the greater ‘risk’ that ‘drugs’ seem to pose, and for the heimish fringe, sometimes drugs are indeed a problem—especially among a demographic with no secular education, sometimes little money, English as a second language and those dealing with a great degree of trauma.’ Margolin follows friends who descend deep into the psychedelic scene, finding their way to all sorts of different substances, sometimes becoming addicts, sometimes ending up in psych wards.

Far from merely capitalizing on the fame of the drug titans from her childhood, Margolin writes about how knowing such characters from an early age instilled her perspective with a healthy amount of guru skepticism. She details her adolescent anger at Ram Dass, who officiated her father’s second marriage, and who seemed to allow people to idolize him even while he preached against it. Margolin even admits she flipped him off once, although he got her back. By the end of Exile and Ecstasy, however, she makes peace with Ram Dass, and even her father, and their attempts to find a different kind of spirituality within Hinduism.

It took Ram Dass decades to acknowledge the pain of Jewish trauma, as well as his own pain from having been bullied for being overweight, queer and Jewish. ‘Sometimes, the only way to truly come home is to leave it first: journey for the sake of return. The process of return itself is the path of healing. As season psychonauts often say, the journey is the medicine’.

In Margolin’s view, Ram Dass had to branch out of Judaism and into Hinduism to cure his disassociation from his own identity as Jewish. Margolin took a parallel, but reverse journey to enlightenment. But, for her, the roads led back to the same sense of connectivity and expanded consciousness.

The mythopoetic features of tripping, as an aesthetic, pervade our experience of a drug both prior to, and long after, its effects are felt. It is cultural and exists beyond ourselves for we are simply its manifestation—a mushroom to its mycelial network. Trippers, with very rare exceptions, are explosions within the mythopoetic narrative; they are of the story, not its progenitors, and in this respect, the stories (myth) and the artefacts (poetry) of psychedelia exist in a loopy aesthetic continuum mediated in part through experience. LSD blotter is one filament in this process.

‘Bodies of drugs matter’ writes Erik Davis in Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024). Take, for example, the legendary LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III who, with co-conspirators Melissa Cargill and Tim Scully, produced a large batch of pure acid, then distributed it in five separately coloured tablets. Although the same chemical substance underpinned them all, each acquired their own character on the street—mellow, speedy, spiritual. In short, a varied aesthetic wrapped up with the medium’s form had far reaching disparate and mythopoetic effects.

‘When you print images onto a paper carrier medium,’ Davis notes, ‘you are adding another layer of mediation to an already loopy transmission.’ Blotter is a medium for delivering LSD, it is also art, historical artefact, a media or ‘meta-medium’. Acid blotter swims between the currents of psychedelic aesthetics. As a postwar phenomenon, acid blotter is also wrapped up with an era of increased consumer advertising and the explosion of electronic and digital media. Yet, it exists in a subterranean strand of the era’s culture, a place that traverses danger and outlaw lifestyles.

From its earliest manifestations in late 1950s Britain as a simple blank medium to distribute liquid LSD, blotter was perfected as a method of distribution and artistry across the pond, where it was subjected to the ‘mechanical reproduction required to level up to a properly commercial scale.’ Eric Ghost and a colleague developed a machine with a system of 100 pins in a grid, simultaneously dipped in LSD, then impressed onto absorbent paper. New varieties of systems were developed by Ghost and others and by 1970, the term ‘blotter acid’ was well established in LSD circles.

The production of images in the early years often involved handstamps by dealers who made their distinguishing mark on the product, or else silk screens and lithograph methods were used slightly higher up the pyramid chain of LSD distribution. Really taking off as a method in the 1970s, a myriad of images were employed from the deeply esoteric and occult through to cartoon characters and superheroes. In the late 1990s, blotter imagery also developed into a more distinct artform with ‘vanity blotter’—essentially acid blotter without the acid.

As Davis acknowledges, trying to write a history of an underground culture, which by its very nature is secretive due to the illegal practices with which it is associated, is a necessarily difficult task—much must remain ‘untold’ even in the telling. Aside from a cadre of named and unnamed informants, there are two very important sources that Davis uses to begin to weave together his Blotter story, which is part history and part art criticism.

The first, rather remarkably, is the internal Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) publication Microgram. From the late 1960s, Microgram collated and reported all the information from crime labs across the United States and occasionally beyond, including, in 1987, the LSD Blotter Index. A complete run has been made available by the diligent and always brilliant work of the team at Erowid. Ironically therefore, ‘the agencies tasked with destroying the scourge of LSD were in essence the first collectors of the genre.’

The second is collector, archivist and artist Mark McCloud, founder of the Institute of Illegal Images (III) in San Francisco, and who has done more than any other individual to transform the acid medium into an artform. Starting his collection around the turn of the 1980s, in 1987, through the San Francisco Art Institute, McCloud put on ‘The Holy Transfers of the Rebel Replevin’, a dedicated art show. Small individual or 4-way tabs were shown and visitors were provided with magnifying glasses. More shows soon followed.

During the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium, the DEA and public prosecutors ramped up their efforts to shut down the illegal manufacturing and distribution of LSD. McCloud, collector and blotter producer, was a very public face of these efforts. In 2000, the DEA packed up the contents of the III and McCloud was up in court in Kansas City the following year. The case is well told by Davis and rested on an important question: were images on blotter art? Some were certainly sold as such. The jury deliberated for over 10 hours, and he was thankfully acquitted.

Blotter art as a commercial venture is one aspect, notable in modern ‘vanity blotter’, however it is also something more. Adding images to blotter may sometimes have added some market value to LSD but, as Davis points out, it is not clear whether this justified the added labour involved. People in the main were buying acid not images. ‘In other words, images on blotter are essentially superfluous. Their worth derives from a sort of phantasmagoric excess, an iridescent surplus of signs and patterns that communicate values—beauty, humor, swagger, magic, love—that outrun market logic.’

It is these values, the mythopoetic, that makes Blotter so fascinating. It is a beautifully written book with hard won research that manages to describe an incredibly obscured subject with thoughtful insight, humour, and Davis’s usual flair for storytelling. It includes a plethora of wonderful images with not only the author’s commentary, but a host of other insightful contributors too. I can’t recommend it enough.

In Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, Norman Ohler’s follow-up to Blitzed, a social history of drug use in Nazi Germany, he expands on the Nazi interest in psychoactive drugs such as mescaline for interrogation purposes, linking it to the discovery of LSD in wartime Switzerland and the social and political destiny of psychedelic drugs in general.

Tripped is divided into three sections: Medicine, Weapon and Narcotic. The book begins with the discovery of LSD’s properties at Sandoz in 1943 and the possibility that Nazi scientists had knowledge of it, and then investigates the impact of US secret service interest in weaponising psychedelics post war. Nazi investigations into ‘truth serums’, and other secret scientific enterprises, was a matter that the US army unit ALSOS was tasked with rooting out in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Ohler weaves a complex history of LSD involving US secret services agents, US drug control agency the FDA, employees of Sandoz, and the Nazi search for interrogation tools. The book covers some ground already known in general terms but contains three major historical revelations.

Most significantly of these is the close scientific relationship between Arthur Stoll, director of research at Sandoz, and the German chemist Richard Kuhn, who oversaw Nazi investigations into biochemical weapons during World War Two. The correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn was unbroken during the Nazi period. Secondly, the possibility, because of this special scientific relationship, that the Nazis experimenting with mescaline as an interrogation tool also had access to LSD. And thirdly, the obstruction by the FDA of LSD marketing by Sandoz because of US government agency interest in the drug, and the imperative not to alert the Soviets to an agent that might be used against them.  

Some of Ohler’s research coincides with my own work, particularly the continued operations of Sandoz in Germany throughout the war and the moral compromises involved in both their manufacture and distribution of products there during the Nazi era. However, the close relationship of Stoll at Sandoz and the Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn was entirely new to me.1 It is the details of this relationship that provides for speculation that the Nazis may have added LSD to their experiments at Dachau involving mescaline as an interrogation agent.

Ohler reveals that on November 20, 1943, six months after the LSD discovery at Sandoz, Kuhn wrote to Stoll thanking him for supplying him with Ergotamine, the precursor needed to manufacture LSD—it was enough to make about 2,500 strong doses. It is this and an intriguing reference to ‘other means’ employed besides mescaline in a report by Dr Kurt Plötner on his experiments at Dachau that enable Ohler to ask a series of provocative questions.2 ‘Was one of these “other means” LSD, making its way from Stoll to the concentration camp by way of Kuhn?’ And, ‘Did the Nazis try to make use of LSD, too?’ Ohler assembles a trail of telling evidence and readers will have to follow that and make their own mind up.

While the possibility that the Nazis had access to and used LSD is initially shocking, given its popular association with the psychedelic Sixties, the Nazis were already making use of mescaline, with effects very similar to those of LSD. What is ultimately and fundamentally shocking is the close cooperation of Stoll at Sandoz with Nazi scientist Kuhn.

Although the book treads familiar ground, such as the creation of the MK-ULTRA program and the mysterious death of Frank Olson, it is really about Ohler’s tireless archival research in Switzerland and the US for the truth about the origins and destiny of LSD. Ohler’s research reveals many more hidden aspects of LSD history other than the matters that I have emphasised. For example, the shabby treatment of Hofmann by Sandoz/Novartis at the end of his career and in retirement, by failing to properly acknowledge or to adequately reward him financially for his contributions to the company.

In the end, Tripped is also a very personal search when Ohler finally brings his tale to the present day, and he discusses the potential of LSD and psilocybin as therapeutic agents in respect of dementia. Ohler’s mother is suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s, and he determines to experiment with it, with positive results. He finally clamours for a release of the legal restrictions on psychedelic drugs so that their therapeutic potential can be shared by all.

According to Ohler, our international drug laws, which have heretofore restricted investigations into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, were initially based on those of the Nazi regime, adopted via the US occupation of post-war Germany. Nobody who thinks that they already know the full story of LSD can afford not read this book.