After 14 years to isolate the analgesic substance in poppy resin, the German pharmacist Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner decided to test a promising crystalline substance on himself and three teenagers from down the road, in 1817, to explore the hidden regions of the mind. He run previous identical tests on dogs killing one of them. After a few doses, all participants fell into a stupor and they could  very well have died but for a semi-conscious Sertürner hadn’t groped his way to some extra strength vinegar and poured it down everyone’s throats triggering severe vomiting. He  named the new substance as morphine after the Greek god of dreams although it remains one of the world’s strongest painkillers.

 Jay claims “ the twentieth century’s taboo on the use of drugs appears as a hiatus in the long pursuit of our modern selves”.

In 1869 the US physician George Miller Beard, popularized a new disease called neurasthenia with a typical cause: modern life. The industrial word with its precise deadline was making people ill.  Cocaine, a drug championed by a young Sigmund Freud who received his first gram by mail on April 30 1884, 25 years after it was first isolated by the German chemist Albert Niemann. He later abandoned his cocaine episode for psychotherapy. The history of narcotic enquiry which found its golden age in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was driven by subjective experience. In the confessions of Thomas De Quincey, England’s Opium eater, who chronicled his laudanum addiction for the London Magazine.

With the 21^st century bringing the advent of corporate cannabis and psychedelic drug therapy, Psychonauts is a timely reminder that a prohibitive approach to drugs  is not the historical norm. Drugs are changing and Jay hope the term itself will change with them.

Jay says “If the drugs were to disappear, there would be no need to replace it. A post-drug world would not need a new language, but the recovery of an older one.

Until the twentieth century scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences highlighted in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinating public to make their own experiments- in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.

From Sigmund Freud’s experiments with cocaine to William James’s epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking. Today we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

 Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind by Mike Jay, Yale £20, 520 pages.

ReplyForward