Psychonauts

“Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and Psychonauts is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the nineteen-fifties and sixties.”—Clare Bucknell, New Yorker

“Psychonauts is a timely reminder that a prohibitive approach to drugs is not the historical norm. Drugs are changing and Jay hopes the term itself will change with them.”—Marcus Ellingham, Financial Times

A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick, 2023

“Fascinating book . . . not something you get taught at school.”—Thomas W. Hodgkinson, The Guardian

“In this richly detailed and frequently illuminating book, Mike Jay argues that Davis and Weil were merely reviving a centuries-long tradition—inebriation in the name of science.”—Rhys Blakely, Times (UK)

“A splendidly curated collection of the accounts brought back from those far worlds by self experimenting travellers; a parade of brave, curious and charismatic character.”—Charles Foster, Times Literary Supplement

“Jay’s book has serious contemporary relevance given our current problems.”—John Quin, The National (Scotland)

Listed in New Statesman’s Best Books of the Academic Presses, 2023

“The history is captivating, and [Jay] does a great job balancing research with vivid anecdotes and fascinating excerpts from cultural figures’ writings. It’s a welcome reconsideration of the role drugs play in life, medicine, and science.”—Publishers Weekly

“Looking for something . . . narrative and absorbing to read this summer? Then pick up Psychonauts.”—Jessica Stillman, Inc.

“Author Mike Jay . . . is among our finest big-picture analysts and popular historians of global intoxicants. . . . [Psychonauts] is [a] wide-ranging and lavishly illustrated account.”—Lucas Richert, Science

“Jay’s been writing for years. . . . This book is like a medley . . . of the earlier works that Jay did looking at the history of drug-taking in modernity. . . . [He] has woven them all together into this remarkable story.”—Erik Davis on The Ezra Klein Show

“Psychonauts is a riveting story of how modern notions of science, morality, and consciousness coalesced under the influence of a range of highly potent potables.”—John Semley, The Baffler

An Inc. Summer Reading List pick, Psychology Books

“Fascinating. . . . Complex and riveting. . . . Readers should anticipate quite a trip.”—Tony Miksanek, Booklist

“Mike Jay has done it again . . . and produced a page-turner of a book. Psychonauts tells a fascinating story of some of the insatiable appetites that have contributed to our modern understanding of drugs and human consciousness.”—Erika Dyck, Journal of Medical Humanities

A Behavioral Scientist “Summer Book List” selection

Received the 2024 James A. Duke Award sponsored by the American Botanical Council (ABC)
 

Winner of the Cheiron Book Prize, sponsored by the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences

“Mike Jay is at the forefront of global research on the history of psychoactive substances. In this moment of renaissance in research on the mind-altering properties of psychedelics, Jay’s Psychonauts offers crucial intel and historical perspective.”—Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess

“A thought-provoking history of the pioneering questers who self-experimented with drugs in the name of science and creativity. Mike Jay’s account of coked-up doctors, hashish-eating poets, mushroom-munching mystics and toad-licking scientists is an exhilarating read.”—Anna Katharina Schaffner, author of The Art of Self-Improvement

“With this rich, nuanced account, Mike Jay posits the War on Drugs as a mere blip on the long, proud, and very influential history of self-experimentation with psychoactive substances by artists, scientists and philosophers—the titular explorers of the mind.”—Carlyn Zwarenstein, author of On Opium

“With elegance and erudition, Mike Jay conveys the fascinating, often quixotic history of scientists, philosophers, and other daring ‘psychonauts’ self-experimenting with a pharmacopeia of substances, exploring the mysteries of consciousness by chemically altering the brain. Jay deftly guides the reader through the most confounding puzzles about our mind’s pictures of reality; about meaning-making, truth and illusion. A gorgeously written, page-turning pleasure to read.”—Brian D. Earp, author of Love Is the Drug

“Breezy and profound, Psychonauts is a wildly entertaining history of drugs through the writings of stoned intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, William James, and Baudelaire. They got high, saw God, tried to articulate the experience, and mostly failed. But their attempts, like this book, are a total blast.”—Ben Westhoff, author of Fentanyl, Inc.