Nullius
in Verba—Nothing on authority. In 1660, on the eve of its founding, The Royal
Society of London took this defiant Latin phrase as its motto. For the United
Kingdom’s main scientific body, it announced a new way of thinking that came to
dominate the scientific revolution: Classical and scholastic authority could
prove apocryphal. Only direct evidence, generated by experiment and
first-person observation, revealed scientific truth.
Evidence
was everything, and leading scientists of the era, including Isaac Newton and
Robert Boyle, developed a system for classifying it. Qualities such as size,
shape, or weight, which were directly measurable, were referred to as “primary”
evidence. Texture, taste, or feelings that described human sensations and
responses were considered “secondary.” While primary evidence was easier to
collect and test, sensation and perception were considered legitimate fields of
inquiry, and certain classes of data could only be demonstrated by
self-experiment.
In a
famous and graphic example, when Isaac Newton wished to establish whether a
change in the curvature of the eye would present a distorted image to the
perceiver, he took a large needle, or bodkin, and stuck it as far into his eye
as he could. He then described in detail the colored circles that appeared to
him. It was not possible to present direct evidence for these shapes, since
they only existed in Newton’s mind, yet his fellow philosophers were not
obliged simply to accept Newton’s word
for them. The experiment was described in such a way that any skeptic, if they
so wished, could try it out on themselves.
This was
also the case for drugs that acted on the mind. Like the circles in Newton’s
vision, the changes in thought, mood, sensation, or perception they produced
were secondary qualities, but this did not mean they were delusions. There was
no correct or perfect way to present them, yet they offered unique insights
into mental functioning. The language that offered itself most plausibly for
describing them was that of medicine, in which the physician could only report
the patient’s sensations and state of mind at second hand, but could add
judicious glosses and interpretations suggested by their professional learning
and experience of similar cases.
Robert
Hooke, curator of experiments at the Royal Society, provided some of the
earliest testimony, describing in detail the effects of the many drugs he used
for overlapping purposes: verifying medical claims, managing his pain and
moods, and “refreshing” himself during social and business meetings in the
coffee houses he frequented in the afternoons. Hooke documented impressions not
just of alcohol, chocolate, tea, coffee, and tobacco, but also of cannabis. On
Dec. 18, 1689, as part of a lecture he delivered at the Royal Society entitled
“An Account of the Plant, Call’d Bengue,” or cannabis, Hooke detailed his own
experience with the drug, in the third person:
“This
Powder being chewed and swallowed, or washed down, by a small Cup of Water,
doth, in a short Time, quite take away the Memory & Understanding; so that
the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth, heareth,
or doth, in that Extasie, but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable
to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and
speaks Words without any Coherence, not knowing what he saith or doth; yet is
he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances and sheweth many odd Tricks; after
a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when
he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry …”
Such
perceptual and bodily experiences—of the kind elicited by doctors with the
question “how do you feel?”—were not able to produce the kind of replicable
results generated by vacuum pumps or thermometers. But in its place an informal
criterion of expertise emerged, dubbed by the historian of science Simon
Schaffer “the Cartesianism of the genteel”: the assumption that trained or
educated observers were capable of using their minds to assess the evidence of
their bodies—or, in the terms established by the philosophy of John Locke, of
separating the intellect from the passions. As in Hooke’s case, it became the
convention to relay such evidence in the third person or passive voice favored
by physicians, with the confessional first person confined to diaries and
private records.
As
pharmacology developed through the 18th century, this language of quasi-medical
reportage became firmly entrenched. Self-experiment with drugs was common
practice, for ethical as well as practical reasons: Physicians were obligated
to treat the sick according to the Hippocratic oath, doing no harm, and
experimenting on them was the mark of an unscrupulous quack.
Practicing
physicians were also aware that responses to drugs could vary widely between
individuals. The growth of physical observation and measurement revealed that
mind and body influenced each other in mysterious ways, and that even directly
experienced phenomena could be proven false. One famous example was the
committee set up in 1784 by the French Royal Academies of Science and Medicine,
under the aegis of Benjamin Franklin, to investigate Anton Mesmer’s theory of
animal magnetism or mesmerism. “There is no proof of the existence of the
Animal Magnetic fluid,” the committee’s report concluded. The lesson for
self-experimenters was that hypervigilance to one’s own sensations could
overinterpret the evidence of the body or generate symptoms based solely on
expectation.
For the
generation that followed, however, subjectivity was the new frontier of
scientific knowledge. The inward turn emerged from the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, whose treatise of 1781, Critique of Pure Reason, made a primary
distinction between the “phenomenal” world—reality as revealed by sensation and
perception—and a “noumenal” world of ideas and categories, including God, that
existed prior to and independently of human experience. According to Kant’s
distinction, the world as received via the senses was not the accurate
reflection of an external reality but a construct, shaped by the human senses
and limited by the parameters of the human mind.
This
theory was strikingly corroborated in a series of drug experiments by the young
chemist Humphry Davy. In 1799, at the age of 20, Davy was hired as the chemical
assistant at the Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, an experimental
project initiated by the pioneering physician Thomas Beddoes for synthesizing
and testing gasses in the treatment of lung conditions. One of the first
compounds Davy created in the laboratory was nitrous oxide, a recently discovered
gas that was believed to be highly toxic. Davy suspected this belief resulted
from a confusion with a related compound, nitric oxide, a red-brown gas that
was a powerful irritant. “I made a discovery yesterday which proves how
necessary it is to repeat experiments,” he wrote to his and Beddoes’s friend
Davies Giddy in April 1799; “The gaseous oxide of azote [nitrous oxide] is
perfectly respirable when pure.”
Excited
to have established a virgin field of inquiry, Davy and Beddoes heated ammonium
nitrate crystals in an alembic and collected the escaping gas in an air holder,
from which Davy inhaled through a breathing tube. As he filled his lungs, he
noticed an unexpected sensation, “a highly pleasurable thrilling in the chest
and extremities.” As he continued, “the objects around me became dazzling and
my hearing more acute,” and the sensations built toward a climax in which “the
sense of muscular power became greater, and at last an irresistible propensity
to action was indulged in.”
Beddoes
recorded that Davy leapt violently around the laboratory shouting for joy. For
his own part, Davy retained only vague recollections of these ecstatic moments,
and were it not for the scrawled notes he discovered the following morning, “I
should even have doubted their reality.”
Unlike
the speculative animal fluids of Mesmer, there was no doubt about the material
cause of this paroxysm of pleasure. Nitrous oxide—first isolated by Joseph
Priestley, who had named it “dephlogisticated nitrous air”—was a chemical
substance with a known synthesis, and the experiment could be replicated and
verified in any home laboratory. The effects of the gas, however, could only be
captured in first-person testimony.
Davy was
quick to elicit such testimony, and was perfectly placed to do so. The
Pneumatic Institution was a hub for Bristol’s freethinking writers,
philosophers, and physicians, and over the summer of 1799 dozens of them came
to visit and experience the gas which the poet Robert Southey, the first of his
friends to whom Davy had offered it, described as “the wonder-working air of
delight.” After his first dose, Southey wrote to his brother that “Davy has
actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” Exploring it
further was an invitation and a challenge that the keenest minds of Bristol
were eager to accept.
As the
experiments progressed, Davy realized that a new “language of feeling,” as he
called it, was required to describe the effects of the gas. The standard
question of medical description, “How do you feel?,” was tested to its limits
by a torrent of sensations that encompassed dizziness, tingling, a sense of
mental exhilaration, and onrushing cosmic epiphany that rapidly dissolved into
incoherence and, frequently, hysterical laughter with no obvious cause. Davy
and Beddoes attempted a few trials on patients with lung diseases; one
responded to the question with, “I do not know, but very queer.” Another
responded, obliquely but suggestively, “I feel like the sound of a harp.”
During
the evenings they experimented further on healthy volunteer subjects. When Davy
set the chemical reaction bubbling and offered a new subject a green silk bag
of the gas, he often began by giving them a dose of ordinary air to rule out
any elements of suggestion or expectation. Once they had recovered from a
lungful of the real thing, he asked them to write a brief description of their
experience. As one of the volunteers, the surgeon Thomas Hammick, wrote after
his intoxication, “We must either invent new terms to express these new and
peculiar sensations, or attach new ideas to old ones, before we can communicate
intelligibly with one another on the operations of this extraordinary gas.”
Nitrous
oxide, for Davy and his circle, collapsed the distinction between the intellect
and the passions: It stimulated both, with equal intensity. It was a profoundly
embodied experience, susceptible to external measurements—for example, the
amount of gas that was inhaled, or had dissolved into the bloodstream—but not
reducible to them. It asked profound questions about the relation between mind
and body: How could inhaling an artificially created chemical affect not merely
the breathing and the pulse, but the emotions, the sense of wonder, and the
imagination?
Those
who sipped or sniffed ether and chloroform in the 19th century experienced a
range of effects from these repurposed anaesthetics, including preternatural
mental clarity, psychological hauntings, and slippages of space and time. Mike
Jay explores how the powerful solvents shaped the writings of Guy de Maupassant
and Jean Lorrain — psychonauts who opened the door to an invisible dimension of
mind and suffered Promethean consequences.
First
routinely employed as surgical anaesthetics in the 1840s, diethyl ether and
chloroform were no longer confined to operating theatres by the century’s
close. Now widely available in pharmacies, these powerful solvents were inhaled
as soothing vapours for chest and lung conditions, as an analgesic for aches
and pains, and as fast-acting tranquillisers for panic attacks and other
nervous conditions. Doctors and journalists commented disapprovingly on
chloroform’s “luxurious” use in tea rooms, and on the occasional public
sightings of groups of young women giggling and swooning under its influence.
At the same time it developed a sinister reputation, thanks to a handful of
sensational criminal cases such as that of Henry Howard Holmes, who used it in
the murders of an unknown number of people in Chicago during the World’s Fair
of 1893. By the late 1890s it was conjoined in yellow journalism and the
popular imagination with addiction, suicide, rape, and murder, and with the
enduring misconception that a chloroform-soaked rag held over a victim’s face
produces an instant loss of consciousness (in reality, this requires continued
deep breathing).
The
strands of medicine, consciousness expansion, intoxication, addiction, and
crime were tightly entangled in fin-de-siècle Paris, where ether and chloroform
circulated among bohemian demi-mondaines alongside morphine, opium, cocaine,
hashish, and wormwood-infused absinthe. These solvents were often carried in
small glass vials and medicine bottles by the asthmatic, tubercular, and
neurasthenic, added to patent tonics and syrups, and, on occasion, to
cocktails: an ether-soaked strawberry floating in champagne produced a heady
rush, the fruit preventing the volatile liquid from evaporating too quickly.
Literary references to ether abounded, either as a signifier of decadence or as
a literary prop to shift a realistic narrative into the landscape of dreams and
symbols, where its dissociative qualities became a portal to strange mental
states, psychological hauntings, uncanny doublings, and slippages of space and
time.
This
long-lost account of one man's attempt to engineer the perfect balance of
intoxicants in the British colonies of South Asia stands alone in drug
literature, says Mike Jay.
Until I first held a copy of The Underworld of the East in the British Library sometime in the late nineties, I had my doubts about its existence. I knew it only from an extract in a collection of drug writings from a New York underground press (The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960, 1991) where it was included alongside the usual suspects – Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley – and introduced with a short and scabrous rant against the War on Drugs by William Burroughs. Though the extract was presented as the memoir of a British mining engineer in the South Asian colonies in the 1890s and 1900s, it read suspiciously like a modern pastiche. As various aficionados of the genre had pointed out, its plain and amateurish prose was quite unlike the better-known examples of fin-de-siècle drug-literature; its progressive social attitudes towards non-Europeans, as well as its gung-ho frankness about drugtaking, seemed incongruously modern; and it was odd that nothing seemed to be known about Lee in real life. Some observed knowingly that ‘Lee’ was the maiden name of Burroughs’s mother, and his nom de plume for the first edition of Junky in 1954.
Any suspicion that it was a modern forgery was convincingly rebutted by the frayed and faded cloth jacket and yellowed, foxed pages of the British Library’s copy. When I opened the covers, James Lee had me at the title page: The Underworld of the East: Being Eighteen Years’ Actual Experiences of the Underworlds, Drug Haunts and Jungles of India, China and the Malay Archipelago. It was dated 1935, twenty years after the end of the episodes it related, and it was essentially a travel memoir, offering some of the armchair thrills expected by readers of the genre: a village in the Indian jungle stalked by a man-eating tiger; close encounters with murderous Thugs and dacoits; adventures on one of the first motorcycles in Calcutta in 1903. But its distinctive theme, most unusual for its strait-laced times, was Lee’s voracious drug experimentation. ‘A man deeply learned in every kind of narcotic drugs…among them being opium, hashish, morphia, cocaine, bhang, ganja and many others’, the dust jacket blurb announced, ‘For eighteen years he travelled the world investigating the drug habit and the underworld…the strange effects produced are intimately described’.
In the book’s short opening chapter, ‘About Drugs’, Lee sets out his stall: ‘The life of a drug taker can be a happy one; far surpassing any other, or it can be one of suffering and misery; it depends on the user’s knowledge’. I had recently been commissioned to edit an anthology of drug literature and had been working my way through reams of flowery, decadent 19th-century prose without ever coming across this obvious statement of fact. The doyen of the genre, Thomas De Quincey, had famously insisted that the pleasures of drugs were inseparable from their exquisite pains; his great admirer and translator Charles Baudelaire declared that drugs were a ‘forbidden game’ in which base instincts for self-gratification would always triumph over noble ambitions of self-transcendence. Publishers embraced this trope, which allowed them to sell immorality while absolving them of the charge of promoting it, and De Quincey and Baudelaire’s legion of successors and imitators were happy to encourage the conceit that the ecstatic pleasures they described were only accessible to the elite few who were equally prepared to plumb the depths of hell.
By James Lee’s time, these tropes had hardened into the clichés that still define the tabloid ‘My Drug Hell’ narrative: what goes up must come down; anybody who thinks they have their habit under control is deceiving themselves; drugs are a one-way street to perdition. But Lee, from the opening pages of his book, was having none of it – perhaps because he hadn’t read any of it. He was born in Redcar to a family of colliers and iron merchants and employed in factories from the age of seventeen; his writing makes no reference to the canon of drug literature, or indeed any literature. His style is precise but artless: short, factual sentences, eccentrically punctuated, the work of someone more used to turning out structural engineering reports. His turn of mind is restlessly practical: the proper use of drugs is a problem to be solved. Their pleasures can, with careful attention to doses and combinations, be wonderfully intensified; their pains, with knowledge and self-discipline, can be more or less eliminated.
Until I first held a copy of The Underworld of the East in the British Library sometime in the late nineties, I had my doubts about its existence. I knew it only from an extract in a collection of drug writings from a New York underground press (The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960, 1991) where it was included alongside the usual suspects – Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley – and introduced with a short and scabrous rant against the War on Drugs by William Burroughs. Though the extract was presented as the memoir of a British mining engineer in the South Asian colonies in the 1890s and 1900s, it read suspiciously like a modern pastiche. As various aficionados of the genre had pointed out, its plain and amateurish prose was quite unlike the better-known examples of fin-de-siècle drug-literature; its progressive social attitudes towards non-Europeans, as well as its gung-ho frankness about drugtaking, seemed incongruously modern; and it was odd that nothing seemed to be known about Lee in real life. Some observed knowingly that ‘Lee’ was the maiden name of Burroughs’s mother, and his nom de plume for the first edition of Junky in 1954.
Any suspicion that it was a modern forgery was convincingly rebutted by the frayed and faded cloth jacket and yellowed, foxed pages of the British Library’s copy. When I opened the covers, James Lee had me at the title page: The Underworld of the East: Being Eighteen Years’ Actual Experiences of the Underworlds, Drug Haunts and Jungles of India, China and the Malay Archipelago. It was dated 1935, twenty years after the end of the episodes it related, and it was essentially a travel memoir, offering some of the armchair thrills expected by readers of the genre: a village in the Indian jungle stalked by a man-eating tiger; close encounters with murderous Thugs and dacoits; adventures on one of the first motorcycles in Calcutta in 1903. But its distinctive theme, most unusual for its strait-laced times, was Lee’s voracious drug experimentation. ‘A man deeply learned in every kind of narcotic drugs…among them being opium, hashish, morphia, cocaine, bhang, ganja and many others’, the dust jacket blurb announced, ‘For eighteen years he travelled the world investigating the drug habit and the underworld…the strange effects produced are intimately described’.
In the book’s short opening chapter, ‘About Drugs’, Lee sets out his stall: ‘The life of a drug taker can be a happy one; far surpassing any other, or it can be one of suffering and misery; it depends on the user’s knowledge’. I had recently been commissioned to edit an anthology of drug literature and had been working my way through reams of flowery, decadent 19th-century prose without ever coming across this obvious statement of fact. The doyen of the genre, Thomas De Quincey, had famously insisted that the pleasures of drugs were inseparable from their exquisite pains; his great admirer and translator Charles Baudelaire declared that drugs were a ‘forbidden game’ in which base instincts for self-gratification would always triumph over noble ambitions of self-transcendence. Publishers embraced this trope, which allowed them to sell immorality while absolving them of the charge of promoting it, and De Quincey and Baudelaire’s legion of successors and imitators were happy to encourage the conceit that the ecstatic pleasures they described were only accessible to the elite few who were equally prepared to plumb the depths of hell.
By James Lee’s time, these tropes had hardened into the clichés that still define the tabloid ‘My Drug Hell’ narrative: what goes up must come down; anybody who thinks they have their habit under control is deceiving themselves; drugs are a one-way street to perdition. But Lee, from the opening pages of his book, was having none of it – perhaps because he hadn’t read any of it. He was born in Redcar to a family of colliers and iron merchants and employed in factories from the age of seventeen; his writing makes no reference to the canon of drug literature, or indeed any literature. His style is precise but artless: short, factual sentences, eccentrically punctuated, the work of someone more used to turning out structural engineering reports. His turn of mind is restlessly practical: the proper use of drugs is a problem to be solved. Their pleasures can, with careful attention to doses and combinations, be wonderfully intensified; their pains, with knowledge and self-discipline, can be more or less eliminated.
By the
1890s, when Lee began his drug career, a chorus of expert medical opinion had
ready diagnoses for the new figure of the ‘drug addict’ or ‘narcomaniac’. The
condition might be hereditary; the subject might be a criminal ‘type’, a
neurasthenic or mental defective, or someone who had acquired by social
contagion the ‘degenerate habits’ of ‘inferior races’. Lee would presumably be
an example of this last category, since he was introduced to drugs through
contact with Asian cultures, but he explained his motives in simpler terms. ‘I
was getting fed up with life in England’, he wrote, ‘where one had to do just
as the next fellow did…to wear the same kind of clothes, with a collar and tie,
and talk about football or horse-racing or be considered no sport’. He took up
drugs for the same reason that he exchanged his early career as a draughtsman
in the steelworks of Sheffield and Teesside for a post as a teaching assistant
in London, and then applied for a job as a mining foreman in Assam: to have a
more interesting life.
This first overseas assignment took him to a small settlement in India’s remote north-east frontier, where British influence gave way to the territory of the Naga hill tribes. The mine for which he was responsible was a tunnel through solid coal, which was hacked into tubs and barrels by the male workers and carried away by the women on their heads. He noted with interest that the workers chewed betel nut and were often high on bhang, or "Indian hemp", and was curious to learn more. (It would become his habit to seek out solitary postings where he could immerse himself in local society and avoid his fellow Europeans, who distanced themselves from the natives, "affecting to consider them as inferiors".) One day, speaking to one of the female workers, he learned that she had fled an arranged marriage in the Central Provinces for a life of hard labour in this remote outpost. Her name was Mulki; they eventually married, and she accompanied him to England on his visits home.
Before long, he found himself suffering the chills and fevers of the endemic malaria and paid a visit to the local doctor, a ‘fat and jolly’ character whom he refers to as ‘Dr. Babu’. The doctor had a remedy to hand: an injection of morphine that left Lee ‘simply purring with content’. Dr. Babu sent him home with a syringe kit and a tube of morphine tablets, and he took to spending the heat of the day luxuriating with his new ‘hobby’ and ‘dreaming rosy dreams’. After a while he noticed that he was chronically constipated and decided to quit the habit, but he found it harder than he expected. So this was ‘addiction’: in most drug literature the inevitable destination, but in Lee’s narrative only the beginning of the journey. ‘Sir’, Dr. Babu informed him, ‘morphia is a very strange medicine…it is very difficult to give up but it can be done’. So saying, he injected Lee with half a grain (about 30mg) of cocaine. The new drug dealt promptly with the constipation and removed the morphine craving, but it gave him insomnia in exchange. The ever-resourceful Dr. Babu had a solution for this too: ‘perhaps because I treated him differently from the way most Europeans treated the educated Indian’, Lee was invited back to his home to smoke a few pipes of opium, which ‘procured a profound and refreshing sleep’.
This first overseas assignment took him to a small settlement in India’s remote north-east frontier, where British influence gave way to the territory of the Naga hill tribes. The mine for which he was responsible was a tunnel through solid coal, which was hacked into tubs and barrels by the male workers and carried away by the women on their heads. He noted with interest that the workers chewed betel nut and were often high on bhang, or "Indian hemp", and was curious to learn more. (It would become his habit to seek out solitary postings where he could immerse himself in local society and avoid his fellow Europeans, who distanced themselves from the natives, "affecting to consider them as inferiors".) One day, speaking to one of the female workers, he learned that she had fled an arranged marriage in the Central Provinces for a life of hard labour in this remote outpost. Her name was Mulki; they eventually married, and she accompanied him to England on his visits home.
Before long, he found himself suffering the chills and fevers of the endemic malaria and paid a visit to the local doctor, a ‘fat and jolly’ character whom he refers to as ‘Dr. Babu’. The doctor had a remedy to hand: an injection of morphine that left Lee ‘simply purring with content’. Dr. Babu sent him home with a syringe kit and a tube of morphine tablets, and he took to spending the heat of the day luxuriating with his new ‘hobby’ and ‘dreaming rosy dreams’. After a while he noticed that he was chronically constipated and decided to quit the habit, but he found it harder than he expected. So this was ‘addiction’: in most drug literature the inevitable destination, but in Lee’s narrative only the beginning of the journey. ‘Sir’, Dr. Babu informed him, ‘morphia is a very strange medicine…it is very difficult to give up but it can be done’. So saying, he injected Lee with half a grain (about 30mg) of cocaine. The new drug dealt promptly with the constipation and removed the morphine craving, but it gave him insomnia in exchange. The ever-resourceful Dr. Babu had a solution for this too: ‘perhaps because I treated him differently from the way most Europeans treated the educated Indian’, Lee was invited back to his home to smoke a few pipes of opium, which ‘procured a profound and refreshing sleep’.
Lee embarked on a systematic process of self-experiment to rid himself of his inadvertent habit. He reduced his intake of morphine and cocaine in turn with carefully calibrated doses, and developed a detox regime that he spells out in detail, grain by grain. ‘These two drugs’, he discovered, ‘are in a certain way antidote to each other’: each could be used to reduce the cravings for the other, and both gradually watered down. He took to using this cure on his return trips to England: the six weeks of the voyage was just enough to allow him to step off the ship at Portsmouth healthy and drug-free. The broader insight to which this led him was that ‘one drug alone spells disaster’: only with combinations of different drugs, interspersed with periods of abstinence, could their desirable effects be maintained.
More assignments across India, then Sumatra and China, turned up more drugs, which generated ever more interesting experiences. ‘I was now able to use large quantities of any particular drug for a time without harming my health in the slightest’, he wrote, ‘in fact I seemed to benefit by it in every way’. He added bhang and hashish to his repertoire, and found he could produce ‘strange waking dreams’ by eating hashish and injecting cocaine through the night. With this combination his reveries materialised before his eyes in visionary trances lasting for many hours, in which he was surrounded by spirits and saw the future evolution of humanity spread out before him in a vast panorama.
On his travels he took to asking the locals about medicinal and magical plants, and offering to pay for any samples. During a long assignment in Sumatra, where he supervised the construction of a goods railhead on the jungle coast, he discovered two which he believed to be unknown to western science. ‘Drug No. 1’, as he called it, produced not inner visions but true hallucinations, in which his wooden hut became an enormous space populated by ‘spirit-like faces and forms of many nations’, many in the advanced stages of leprosy, which hovered around him, along with ‘faintly luminous globes, which some instinct told me were the souls of unborn children’. ‘Drug No. 2’ was in its way even more remarkable: it restored him swiftly to perfect sobriety and health from even the most extreme intoxication, and was a panacea for any minor ailment. He reduced the plant to a concentrated brown powder that he took to carrying it with him everywhere on his travels, and referred to it as ‘The Elixir of Life’.
After my visit to the British Library I sourced my own battered copy of Underworld online and mined it for passages to include in my anthology (Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader, Penguin 1999). In the process I established that any copyright for the text had been lost over the decades through a succession of publishing mergers, and I found a small press who were prepared to reprint it (Green Magic, 2000). This cost me my prized copy of the book, which had to be chopped up for scanning, but I found another one quickly enough, better and slightly cheaper. The reprint generated a small but interesting postbag. A death certificate turned up, revealing that James Sidney Lee had made it to the age of 77, succumbing to liver carcinoma in Dulwich Hospital in 1951; with this I was able to locate his will, which left his modest estate to his sister in Redcar. I was contacted by a surviving relative, his great-nephew, whose mother dimly remembered him from her childhood in the 1930s, though his reputation for drugs and ‘living in sin’ meant he was rarely invited to family gatherings.
The publisher also received a letter from an elderly gentleman named James Gilman who had spent many years on Lee’s trail, and specifically on the hunt for Drugs No. 1 and 2. He had, apparently, joined a botanical expedition to Sumatra in the 1980s where he had found the spot where Lee had stayed, located the overgrown remains of his railhead in the jungle and spoken to an old man who remembered him from his childhood (‘the Dutchman’, he called him, as all Europeans were known to that generation of Indonesians). James had collected plant samples, and believed he had identified Drug No. 2, but it had either rotted in transit or been purloined by other botanists. His files and records from the expedition were stored in a garage somewhere that he was now too old and frail to dig through.
James did, however, come through with one astonishing document: the coroner’s report into the death of Mulki, in London in 1915. Lee mentions this in the book, in a curiously vague aside: ‘Poor girl, she died suddenly in London, while we were staying at a small private hotel in Bow Lane, Cheapside, from an overdose of some drug, I think morphia’. The coroner’s report, which includes Lee’s testimony, is much more specific. The couple had just arrived in London, where the wartime Defence of the Realm Act had recently prohibited the sale of morphine and cocaine; Lee had nonetheless managed to acquire some from one of his old haunts, a pharmacy named Ray’s in Holborn. He returned to the hotel, where he and Mulki both took a normal dose, but she suddenly lost consciousness. He rushed her to Bart’s Hospital where, to his horror, the duty doctor injected her with further shots of morphine and cocaine. In his deposition Lee testified that Mulki was ‘alive and breathing’ at this point, but ‘after that the doctor said she was dead’, The doctor, however, recorded her death as misadventure, and its cause as ‘heart failure – her habit of injection of these drugs cocaine and morphine would quite account for it’. I found a short report in The Times of the following day that repeated this verdict, adding: ‘Like nearly all Indians, she was in the habit of taking drugs’. Even twenty years later, Lee was evidently unwilling to re-litigate the incident in print.
A while later I was contacted by a small French publisher who wanted to put out a French translation and asked me to write an introduction. This was a chance to assemble an outline of Lee’s life, and to include the tragic story of Mulki’s death. After its publication (Les Tribulations d’un Opiomane, 2009) I received a courteous email from New York from a most unexpected source, the writer Nick Tosches. I was aware of his interest in the subject – his longform feature piece, ‘Confessions of an Opium Seeker’, was published in Vanity Fair in 2000 to wide acclaim – but had no idea that his search for the vanished world of opium dens had set him on Lee’s trail.
We exchanged notes, and Nick kept me scrupulously updated on his findings. Witnessing him at work was a privilege and an education. He was resolutely old-school in his methods, with a home reference library that seemed to cover everything (the Liddell & Scott English-Greek lexicon was always at his elbow) and a mastery of official records, from 19th-century parish registers in Middlesbrough to turning Lee’s name up on ships’ passenger lists. He used Mulki’s full name on the coroner’s report to deduce her family origins and their caste profession (cattle herders) and somehow, without leaving Lower Manhattan, identified her unmarked grave in Manor Park cemetery on the edge of Epping Forest. He traced Lee’s family back through two generations of iron and coal workers in North Yorkshire and Teesside; as he worked you could feel the industrial grit and grandeur of the Victorian north-east rising into existence as vividly as the 1930s Steubenville, Ohio from which Dean Martin emerged in the unforgettable early chapters of his Dino (1992).
We met once in person, in 2012, when he visited London. He was staying at the Dorchester Hotel on a confidential assignment, and was in a wry and elegiac mood about the publishing business. Sleuthing after James Lee was, in his mind, what real writing was all about; but gone were the days when he could simply follow his nose on an absorbing story, moored to his publisher only by an annual lunch with a trusted editor. He refused to pitch glib book proposals to ignorant sales and marketing departments, and had no interest in the digital future: as he wrote later, ‘Nothing good will come of this vapid, postliterate new tweet-text-twaddle world’. He recalled ‘the wondrous vanished bookshops that brought us such discoveries and made us what we were!…Over, all of it, over the hills, dying or dead. But so be it. Onwards in the dark of night like tomb-robbers of the XXth Dynasty into the Valley of the Kings.’
The following year Nick sent a final dossier, closing the case. He had filled in the background to James Lee’s world in often staggering detail, but the man himself had left no personal traces that could anchor his book to the rest of his life. ‘Attempts to locate letters, papers, notebooks, and diaries of Lee, often retracing the trails of the indefatigable James Gilman, have proven futile’, he wrote. The minor errors of date, place and fact he had found throughout Underworld suggested that Lee wrote it from memory rather than referring to notebooks or journals. Alleged photos had failed to materialise, and no surviving relatives had an old suitcase in their attic containing dusty vials of powder labelled ‘Drug No. 2’. There were still a few official records to chase down – passport applications, perhaps a military service number? – but these seemed unlikely to change the big picture. James Lee was real beyond doubt, and his travels had certainly taken place, but the private man was lost to history.
In 2019 I was visiting New York and picked up the thread. Nick was keen to meet despite grumbles about his health, but the week before I arrived his email went dark, and his death was announced a few days later. I crossed his path at that time in the vaulted art deco reading rooms of the New York Public Library, where I had ordered up from the William Burroughs archive the box containing Burroughs’s fragmentary writings on James Lee from the early 1970s. The paper slip on which previous requests were scribbled in pencil contained a single word, ‘Tosches’. The typewritten pages included a filthy, proto-Wild Boys routine about a polymorphous orgy in a Chinese opium den, and an unpublished preface to Underworld of the East, which had clearly lulled the ‘hard man of hip’ into an unusually genial and unguarded register. Lee’s book, Burroughs wrote, was ‘conjured from the unpolluted air of the 19th century’, when drugs were pure and legal and the Elixir of Life was on hand to negate any ill effects. ‘And so we leave James Lee’, he concluded, ‘in his quiet bungalow after a day’s work in the open air, judiciously selecting and rotating his drugs. A happy and nostalgic book’.
Despite its hard core of admirers, The Underworld of the East seems destined to remain, at best, a minor pulp classic. Lee doesn’t really fit with the current vogue for psychedelics in exotic cultures: he was too interested in white powders and needles, too unsentimental and too dismissive of spiritual flim-flam. In an era where film and TV reboots of Sherlock Holmes are still obliged to find ironic and non-threatening substitutes for his cocaine injecting, I’m not holding my breath for a James Lee movie. Yet his solitary book retains a peculiar power. It may be no great work of literature, but there’s a world inside it that can’t be accessed from anywhere else, and still has plenty of secrets to give up.
Orient Excess: James S Lee’s Drug Memoir Underworld Of The East. By Mike Jay. The Quietus, January 17, 2022.
It’s remarkable how fast psychedelics have gone mainstream. It’s not just the craze for microdosing or the enthusiasm for mushroom grow kits. After years of shunning this research, major universities are now racing to set up their own psychedelic institutes, with psilocybin and MDMA being touted as the most promising treatments for depression and PTSD in decades.
But this is not the first time psychoactive drugs have been hailed as miracle cures. Over the past two centuries, morphine, heroin, and cocaine were also considered wonder drugs until doctors discovered their addictive properties. Today, what’s striking is how the public conversation about psychedelics tends to ignore this deeper history of psychoactive drugs.
Historian Mike Jay is out to challenge this narrative of psychedelic exceptionalism. Through a series of books on the history of intoxicants, he’s traced the lineage of various drug cultures. His new book, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, focuses on the 19th century’s rich history of psychoactive experiences, spanning the worlds of science and literature. In some ways, this era had a more expansive and nuanced view of drugs and the exploration of consciousness than we do today, where the medical model dominates the public discourse on psychedelics.
Jay is upfront about his own psychedelic experiences. “I’ve experimented thoroughly with all these drugs over a long period of time now,” he said when I reached him in Cornwall. His tripping led him to recalibrate his own image of reality, but he doesn’t gloss over how challenging these experiences can be. In his earlier book on the history of mescaline, he writes about one encounter with the psychoactive cactus San Pedro: “As pleasure and discomfort mingled and intensified, it was easy to understand how some subjects feel themselves transported to the realms of the divine while others retire miserably to their sickbeds.”
Jay also wades into the contentious question of whether the scientists and doctors studying psychedelics should talk openly about their own experiences. “The analogy I use is travel writing,” he says. “You could write a book about Venice without going there because you can read all the other books about Venice, but it’s hard to argue that your book wouldn’t be better if you had actually been to Venice yourself.”
We seem to be at a crossroads in how to think about psychedelics. There’s a strong push to medicalize these substances, but psychoactive experiences have always been unpredictable and wild. What do you make of the current psychedelic moment?
MJ : I think what we might call drugs—or more specifically, psychedelics—sit on a kind of cultural fault line that we’ve inherited from the 20th century. There are two words that emerged during the 20th century. The first is “drugs” in the sense that we’re using it. That word is a product of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. From the very beginning, it had a whole bunch of negative connotations baked into it. There were dangerous drugs, addictive drugs, criminally illicit drugs. Think of “the war on drugs.” When I was growing up, I assumed it had been going on forever, so it was surprising to discover that it’s actually a creation of the 20th century. Then in the mid-20th century, there was much more interest in mystical experience and the possibility of using drugs for personal growth or healing. That was the point at which the word “psychedelics” emerged.
The psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined this word because he didn’t like the word “drugs.” The literal meaning of psychedelic is “mind-revealing,” which has a much more positive ring to it.
MJ : Osmond and Aldous Huxley came up with that term together. They were really talking about LSD and mescaline then. Huxley was very keen that it should be connected to mystical experience and higher consciousness. I think one reason the word “drugs” became so handy at the beginning of the 20th century was to separate substances into good and bad. The good you would get in your pharmacy or from a doctor; the bad you’d have to get from the street, from criminals. That distinction has broken down in the 21st century, when cannabis is for sale everywhere and the potential for psychedelics has only gotten stronger.
Weren’t many drugs that we now consider dangerous, like heroin and cocaine, once easily obtained?
MJ : That’s right. It’s why our modern category of drugs wouldn’t have made any sense in the 19th century because they just sat on the shelves alongside other stimulants and sedatives and analgesics that we now call drugs. One thing that fascinates me about this period is how widely drugs were used in science and medicine, and how interested people were in the experiences they produced. There’s a rich literature back then because doctors in the 19th century were very good at describing things. You had to be. There were no tick-box diagnoses. If somebody had a cough, you couldn’t just say they had a cough. There might be 50 adjectives to describe that cough.
Another reason doctors and scientists were so good at describing these experiences is they often took the drugs themselves.
MJ : Yes, and I’ve taken that as the central theme of my book. If you’re studying a drug which affects the mind and alters consciousness, the experience itself is really what you’re looking at. And if that’s the focus of your investigation, why wouldn’t you start by experiencing it yourself?
The word “psychonaut” is often used to describe people who take hallucinogens for self-exploration. The word was coined in 1949 by the German writer Ernst Junger, who is a fascinating and problematic figure. He was the mentor of Albert Hofmann, who synthesized LSD, but Junger was once a Nazi sympathizer.
MJ : He later resisted Nazi efforts to recruit him, but he also refused to submit to de-Nazification in postwar American-occupied Germany. During that time, he wrote a futuristic novel called Heliopolis, in which a cadre of scientists synthesize new psychoactive drugs and use them to explore their consciousness. These scientists are called psychonauts. Junger was the great hero and mentor to Albert Hofmann, and through Hofmann, the word psychonaut made its way into the psychedelic counterculture. It meant someone who was a rebel or renegade or was working outside of science. Because in our modern era, institutional scientists don’t self-experiment with their drugs.
At least they don’t talk about it publicly. I’d bet that most scientists who study psychedelics have tripped themselves, even though it’s usually illegal. I mean, can you actually understand these experiences if you haven’t had them?
MJ : I think it’s enormously valuable to have direct personal experience because what we’re studying is a sensation that’s only available to the subject. Otherwise, you’re just studying its correlates. I wanted to reclaim the word “psychonauts” and take it back into the 19th century, where it describes not only renegades and rebels, but also establishment scientists, doctors, and pillars of the literary establishment. The word that was used at the time was “self-experimenter.”
There is no perfect or correct way to do self-experimentation. Part of you is an observer and part of you is a subject, and you’re trying to find the right point between objective data and a fuller sense of the subjective experience. So maybe you end up with a hybrid of science and literature. If you look at the psychedelic literature today, most of it is composed of very dry papers on neuroscience and receptor chemistry, but then you look at the towering bestseller of the psychedelic renaissance, Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, and he’s using lots of metaphors about our minds getting stuck in ruts and psychedelics connecting different areas of the brain. But I think what really attracted people to his book were his descriptions of his self-experiments. What does it feel like? What might it do for me?
You can see this cross-fertilization between science and literature at the beginning of the 19th century, when the English chemist Humphry Davy discovered the mind-blowing properties of nitrous oxide and then recruited some of his poet friends to join in these experiments.
MJ : Humphry Davy went on to become the president of the Royal Society and the great scientific hero of his generation. When he was 20, he was one of the first scientists to synthesize nitrous oxide, which was believed to be toxic. But in the heroic self-experimental tradition, he found out that not only was it not toxic, but it produced a wave of euphoria. He inhaled a bit more and eventually found himself in this disembodied universe composed of thoughts and ideas, and he came back absolutely fascinated.
He was very fortunate to have a group of friends in Bristol who were ideally suited as volunteers, including the young Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Davy was looking for a language of feeling, but it’s incredibly hard to find words for it. In a way, it was rather like the Romantic poets’ own project of finding words to describe new feelings and sensations. So from this point on, the study of drugs was still about pharmacy and chemistry, but it also became about poetry and philosophy.
One of Coleridge’s protégés, the Romantic poet Thomas De Quincey, later wrote his own book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. What was distinctive about this book?
MJ : He was doing something very original. The book is not actually about opium. It’s about the opium eater. So he’s using opium to open up a new form of autobiography. He writes about how he takes opium and wanders around London at night, losing himself in the theater crowds and having reveries. And suddenly these childhood memories will pop up that he hasn’t thought of for ages. Extraordinary dreams will appear, and he has the sense that on opium he can wander the labyrinth of his mind and connect all these different visions and memories and sensations.
By the mid-19th century, many people were using psychoactive substances. Can you tell me about the French physician Jacques-Joseph Moreau?
MJ : Moreau was what we would now call a psychiatrist. He often accompanied his wealthy patients on rest tours, so he went to Egypt, where he was fascinated by the absence of alcohol and the prevalence of hashish. People who took hashish would talk about their dreams and visions and their encounters with jinn and other supernatural entities. He got fascinated enough to take large oral doses of hashish and was unable to move or speak for hours.
As a psychiatrist, he believes in walking as far as you can in your patients’ shoes, but the one place where we can’t accompany our patients is over the threshold into madness. But with hashish he noticed in himself so many of the phenomena that he was treating in his patients—hallucinations, deliriums, and paranoid ideation. And just as Humphry Davy had done with the Romantic poets, Moreau started a literary hashish salon in Paris. Many of the great figures of mid-19th century French literary culture—like Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, and Baudelaire—passed through its doors.
One of the most intriguing cases of self-experimentation was Sigmund Freud, who became obsessed with cocaine early in his career. Why did he think cocaine was so promising?
MJ : The great disease of the late 19th century was neurasthenia. It’s not a term we use anymore, but when we’re talking about anxiety or depression or autoimmune conditions, these would often have been diagnosed as neurasthenia. There was a feeling that society had started to run on the rapid time of the machine, and a lot of people were having nervous breakdowns or suffering what we’d now call burnout. So everybody was looking for a stimulant that could magically provide more energy, and Freud thought cocaine might be the thing that would bring us up to speed with modern life. In the mid-1880s, he was often referred to as the world’s leading medical expert on cocaine.
Did he take much cocaine himself?
MJ : It’s often assumed that he took huge quantities, but my feeling is that the opposite is the case. He was a sober and cautious fellow, and he took it in very small doses. I think the problem with his self-experimentation was that he only ever took a small dose, usually dissolved in water. So a few years later, when people discovered that you could inject enormous quantities of cocaine and then almost immediately go into manic states of collapse and nervous breakdown, Freud was blindsided by this. It wasn’t that he’d taken too much cocaine. He’d taken too little. It was around this time that our modern medical notion of addiction was coming into focus.
Didn’t Freud then try to erase his early work on cocaine from the historical record?
MJ : There’s maybe one sentence about it in his short autobiography, but when his collected works were finally reprinted, the cocaine papers weren’t in it. And his first biographer, Ernest Jones, minimized it and described it as the “cocaine episode.” He just dismissed it as a juvenile aberration, and that’s the line that his followers have tended to follow ever since.
William James was another late 19th-century psychologist who self-experimented. Why did he take nitrous oxide?
MJ : Like Freud, he diagnosed himself as neurasthenic. He took nitrous oxide in the early 1880s, and I think it was an experience that really stuck with him because he’d always been interested in mystical experience, but he’d never really had one himself, and he’d felt that he was kind of a cold, rational soul who was never going to have one. So James’ nitrous oxide experience was a revelation for him personally as well as professionally. He saw introspection as central to the study of the mind. He was in a world, as we are now, where the mainstream science of the mind was very positivist. James thought the mind was much more complicated than that. He described it as a “blooming buzzing confusion.” He was trying to find ways of exploring the mind in broader terms that verged on literature and philosophy within a paradigm that was becoming more and more rigid.
Why did drugs become so stigmatized in the early 20th century?
MJ : I think there are many components to it. If you look at the word “drugs” that emerged at that time, you can see there are medical concerns that drugs are addictive and bad for your health and should only be used under the supervision of a doctor. This is also the Progressive Era, when all kinds of grassroots campaigns were starting to increase the scope of government, leading up to alcohol prohibition. At this time, alcohol is regarded as the most problematic substance. How can we possibly have a civilized society in the 20th century where people are allowed to get drunk all the time? Psychology itself is moving away from introspection. This is the beginning of behaviorism, so we’re going to be more productive running our laboratory rats through mazes than listening to people pontificating about their drug experiences.
What can this long history of psychoactive drugs tell us about our current psychedelic renaissance?
MJ : It gives us a very different way of thinking about where we are now. The prevailing assumption is that this kind of drug experience suddenly emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and was summarily squashed by mainstream science and medicine, and we’re now just beginning to recover it. But the story I’m telling about the 19th century shows a rather different picture. It suggests that the things we’re interested in today—the power of drugs to be therapeutic and to open up dimensions of thought and experience that we wouldn’t otherwise discover—go all the way back to the Scientific Revolution. Many of the questions we’re asking now are exactly what scientists and writers and doctors were asking in the 19th century, but they weren’t using DMT and ketamine. They were using ether or nitrous oxide or hashish. What happens when we take drugs that disembody us and take us into realms of pure experience? Is it simply white noise produced by a drug-addled brain? Or do these experiences connect us to other dimensions of mind that we can’t normally access?
Where do you hope the current psychedelic movement will go from here?
MJ : I would like to see a thousand flowers bloom. A lot of people who are now interested in psychedelics would use them privately. You might describe that as self-medication or recreational or spiritual. Some people will want to have shamanic or mindfulness guides for this experience; others will doubtless want state-approved clinical psychotherapists. It seems to me the entire conversation at the moment is on this very tricky question of how the medical profession manages and licenses this.
All those questions are important, but I’d like to see more attention being paid to the fact that there are other models beyond the medical and beyond the therapeutic. We’re starting to see this with the first steps of decriminalization of plant psychedelics in Oregon and Colorado, what I might call a bottom-up model, which I hope might complement the top-down medical model.
Why Scientists Need to Get High. By Steve Paulson. Nautilus, May 23, 2023.
Mike Jay's latest book, Psychonauts, is published today by Yale. Here he talks to
John Doran about what we can learn by studying the pre-60s history of drugs,
followed by an extract on the early 19th century nitrous oxide craze.
Sexual
intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban
And the Beatles' first LP.”
Philip Larkin – ‘Annus Mirabilis’
The
flavour of Philip Larkin’s ironic ode to the sexual revolution of the sixties
is triggered synesthetically by the subject matter in Mike Jay’s excellent new
book Psychonauts, way before it turns up as an actual literary reference in the
closing chapters. Such is the deathless, bony grip of the boomer on the public
imagination – still – that it’s hard to even consider the modern history of
narcotics without subconsciously arriving directly at the period where the
beatnik counterculture of the 1950s gives way to the hippie counterculture of
the 1960s. And this is understandable. Despite the stories of the rise and fall
(and more recently the rise again) of mescaline, psilocybin and LSD, to name
but three psychoactive substances, being retold to the point of feeling
slightly threadbare, there is actually still much to say on the subject.
Recently,
I have enjoyed and gained much from Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind:
What The New Science Of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying,
Addiction, Depression, And Transcendence – especially in its clear-headed,
engaging summary of how LSD actually works via the Default Mode Network – and
Matthew Ingram’s Retreat, an incredible piece of research showing how the
counterculture essentially paved the way for the billion dollar wellness
industry of today. Both books are great, yet still represent a kind of reboot
of the head books a lot of us came of age with… Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of
Perception, Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD And The American Dream, and so
on.
Psychonauts,
published this week by Yale, offers a vigorous corrective to the casually
accepted vibe that “drugs began” in 1963. A science and history writer by
trade, Mike Jay has written original-research-heavy titles about such varied
topics as schizophrenia and military history in the past but has notable form
when it comes to drugs and is responsible for the excellent Mescaline: A Global
History Of The First Psychedelic among other titles. There is a sense, however,
of this being his ‘greatest hits’ – pun intended – and possibly represents him
drawing a fat line – you feel me? – under his documentation of the subject. In
short, he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the early
discovery/synthesis/industrialised refinement of such various substances as
cocaine, nitrous oxide and ether, injecting – I’ll stop now – a wealth of
well-sketched anecdotes into proceedings.
What we
are presented with is the portrait of an age where scientists were keen to
experiment upon themselves and how these experiments sometimes led to
flashpoint moments of advancement in science, philosophy and art; and at other
times led to accident, illness and early death. And in these descriptions of
travelling medicine shows, rowdy music hall acts, 19th century laboratories, the
birth of psychoanalysis, the advent of modernism, the uncharted frontier of
analgesia and anaesthesia and the demi-monde of Paris, we sense times which
were in many ways wilder, more exciting and more revolutionary than the 1960s.
The
book, of course, has one laser eye trained on the landscape of 2023, and is
organised in a way that allows the reader to easily draw useful links between,
say, the convoluted origins of nitrous oxide as an aid to dentistry and the
current ‘hippie crack’ driver of red top newspaper sales. (Although we have to
infer how Jay feels about Cocaine Bear.) It is structured around many of the
questions we ask ourselves today, so one section deals with the idea of
cognitive enhancement, while another concerns the journey to the outer edges of
consciousness, which suggests that some who use DMT and ketamine today are
perhaps not so different to those who used nitrous oxide and chloroform
generations earlier.
The term
“psychonaut” was initially coined by the German writer Ernst Jünger in his work
of speculative fiction, Heliopolis (1949). That Jünger survived World War 2 to
write the book is surprising given his ambivalence to the Third Reich. While
stationed in Paris, he befriended Picasso and Cocteau and passed some
intelligence to the resistance – and his relative proximity to the Stauffenberg
bomb plot. In his novel set in a future city state in the Mediterranean he
describes a cadre of scientists – psychonauts – who synthesise new drugs and
experiment upon themselves in order to investigate the hidden recesses of the
mind. Jay, who is speaking to me from his home in Cornwall, laughs: “It’s
handy, as that’s pretty much what my book is about, it’s just that these real
characters I’m writing about existed many decades earlier.”
Jay says
that he first encountered the term in relation to the psychedelic
counterculture, a tag that tended to be awarded in a process of
self-identification. “It was always loaded with this assumption that the person
[saw themselves as] a rebel, a renegade or an edge lord, working far away from
institutional science,” he explains.
“I
wanted to reclaim the word. So if you go back before the 20th century, then
yes, these characters were still rebels and renegades and all of that, but they
were also institutional scientists, doctors, and pillars of the establishment.
And pretty much everyone was a self experimenter, as this was an age when
scientists used to self experiment with everything. They passed massive
electric shocks through their bodies, or inhaled toxic gases. Drugs were the
least of it, really.”
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban
And the Beatles' first LP.”
Philip Larkin – ‘Annus Mirabilis’
A
provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and
philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.
Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments—in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.
But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear.
From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as 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.
Mike Jay Interview on Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. Kinokuniya, May 2, 2023.
Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments—in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.
But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear.
From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as 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.
Mike Jay Interview on Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. Kinokuniya, May 2, 2023.
"You do it to yourself" sang Radiohead. Well that was certainly true of some of the subjects of this episode.
Historian of the mind Mike Jay returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists, artists, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with psychoactive substances and recording their experiences in the Victorian age and onwards. But the notion that researchers might partake of drugs if they were going to have something valuable to say about them became unacceptable.
And we hear about the first British psychedelic experiences of Aleister Crowley, W B Yeats, Havelock Ellis and Maude Gone along with some of the lesser known London Psychonauts huffing ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide in the pursuit of knowledge during the 19th century counterculture.
The London Psychonauts. By Stephen Coats. Bureau of Lost Culture, April 30, 2023.
Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.
Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as 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.
Mike Jay
talks with Claire Clark, a medical
educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of
Kentucky’s College of Medicine.
Psychonauts : Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. Yale University Press, 2023.
New Books Network, April 2, 2023.
More
than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
dreamed up cocaine. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was
increasingly dependent on opium, a “free-agency-annihilating Poison,” as he
called it, which sapped his will and made him despondent. “A Gymnastic Medicine
is wanting,” he wrote in his notebook during the winter of 1808-09, “a system
of forcing the Will & motive faculties into action.” The medicine he envisaged
would be a kind of anti-opium, a tonic to kick-start the nerves, restore the
mind’s athletic powers, and repair the broken link between volition and
accomplishment. It would be a second, health-giving “poison” to work on the
first.
Coleridge’s hope was a characteristic expression of the drug culture he belonged to. He was intimately acquainted with how drugs shaped his inner life, and his habit of self-interrogation, the minute attention he paid to his states of mind, was shared by his friends and collaborators. Thomas De Quincey, his former secretary, turned his own, unconquerable opium addiction into a wildly popular autobiography, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), in which he mapped the buried palaces of the mind. The young chemist Humphry Davy, whom Coleridge befriended, experimented with the psychoactive properties of nitrous oxide, administering it to willing subjects and logging their descriptions of heightened imaginative capacities. And Charles Lamb, the poet’s former schoolmate, placed alcoholism under the microscope in “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1822), an essay in which he considered, under the guise of his alter ego, Elia, the perverse dependence of his reasoning abilities on intoxication. In each case, drugs figured not only as sensory agents, sources of pleasure or pain, but as a kind of education: tools you could think with, or try to think against.
Mind-altering substances were available in the West long before De Quincey’s opium voyages or Davy’s gas experiments. During the sixteenth century, the stimulants that arrived in Europe from other continents—coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco—were valued chiefly for their physiological virtues: tea was believed to remove headaches, coffee to help the circulation of fluids. (Not everyone was convinced: a London pamphlet published in 1674, purporting to speak for “several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women,” complained that coffee, by “Drying up the Radical Moisture” of the body, had “Eunucht” their husbands.) But drugs were also known to affect the workings of the mind. In 1608, the philosopher Francis Bacon took purgative pills to address “a symptom of melancholy”; the scientist Robert Hooke, who, as the scholar Lisa Jardine has argued, developed a “regimen of regular drug-taking” to manage stress, observed in his diary how particular substances seemed to influence his intellect. (“Took Childs vomit [. . .] Slept little at night. My fantcy very cleer.”) Drugs with psychoactive properties were part of a larger quest to fine-tune the human condition, making the business of living more pleasurable or more bearable.
In “Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind” (Yale), the cultural historian Mike Jay argues that the post-1800 use of mind-altering drugs was nonetheless qualitatively different from the experiments of previous centuries. What set someone like De Quincey apart, Jay writes, was that he used opium “as a device for exploring the hidden recesses of his mind,” dosing not merely to self-medicate, or to escape the world, but to access mental spaces unreachable without it. De Quincey was a “psychonaut,” plumbing the depths of his consciousness, embarking on fantastic inner quests. His work, like Davy’s, “marked the beginning of the modern understanding of the drug experience”: a pattern of pioneering inquiry into novel states of mind and the limits of “objective” truth.
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. The upstarts of the counterculture, Jay notes in “Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century” (2000), had their reasons for claiming to be “the first generation to discover drugs.” But, in doing so, they obscured a culture of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic experimentation that predated the emergence of “drugs” as a problematic category, and of the “drug addict” as a pathologized type. Recovering that culture requires venturing inside the worlds that each substance opened up. When a psychonaut breathed ether or injected cocaine, where was he hoping to travel?
The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.
This tension defined the psychonauts’ project. Davy experimented under the aegis of Thomas Beddoes, a physician who believed that the new science of pneumatic chemistry—the study of gases—could supply a revolutionary cure for lung diseases such as tuberculosis. At Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, in Bristol, the pair administered nitrous oxide to consumptives and palsy sufferers, assessing the miraculous way in which one patient, who had been unable to walk without crutches, responded to the surging “muscular pressure” that the drug seemed to supply. But their experiments soon took a less therapeutic turn. Davy’s “highly pleasurable” experience of the gas, coupled with Beddoes’s own—under its influence, he felt “bathed all over with a bucket of good humour”— indicated that it might benefit healthy subjects as much as ill ones. It produced ecstatic sensations, but also seemed to stimulate the intellect and the imagination.
The team began to study healthy volunteers, among them Coleridge and the poet Robert Southey, who described their intoxications in a richly metaphorical style: a “language of feeling,” as Davy put it. One subject, a local doctor, compared the gas’s revelations to “reading a sublime passage in poetry when circumstances contribute to awaken the finest sympathies of the soul.” Davy himself enjoyed walking alone beside the river on summer nights, “sipping away” at a bag of nitrous oxide and occasionally losing consciousness. In late 1799, having exposed himself to huge quantities of the gas in an airtight chamber, he reported that he “lost all connection with external things,” which had ceased to possess their own reality. “Nothing exists but thoughts!” he blurted out, coming down from his high. In the chamber, for a brief moment, the gas had transported him to a place that was constructed entirely by his individual consciousness.
Such revelations, impossible to communicate, were easily mockable. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Davy and his circle were satirized as a bunch of dreamy, self-important metaphysicians, “blown up” with their own pomposity. By mid-century, the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide had been mostly forgotten; along with ether, a volatile compound with similar effects, it was firmly entrenched in the sphere of medicine, as a path to painless surgeries. Meanwhile, a fresh generation of scientists had begun to challenge the practice of self-experimentation, which they considered an unreliable, romantic approach to the study of the mind. “Subjective experience was being pushed to the margins,” Jay writes: the new, “objectivist” science distrusted personal observation. A true study of drugs, its exponents believed, would require precision instruments, stress the analysis of external data—dosage, symptoms, times of onset—and record the results exclusively in notebooks, not essays or poems. It would thereby avoid “introspection,” which, as Jay writes, risked shaping “mental phenomena into narratives pleasing to the self-observer.” Such creativity might inspire great art, but it produced bad science.
Coleridge’s hope was a characteristic expression of the drug culture he belonged to. He was intimately acquainted with how drugs shaped his inner life, and his habit of self-interrogation, the minute attention he paid to his states of mind, was shared by his friends and collaborators. Thomas De Quincey, his former secretary, turned his own, unconquerable opium addiction into a wildly popular autobiography, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), in which he mapped the buried palaces of the mind. The young chemist Humphry Davy, whom Coleridge befriended, experimented with the psychoactive properties of nitrous oxide, administering it to willing subjects and logging their descriptions of heightened imaginative capacities. And Charles Lamb, the poet’s former schoolmate, placed alcoholism under the microscope in “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1822), an essay in which he considered, under the guise of his alter ego, Elia, the perverse dependence of his reasoning abilities on intoxication. In each case, drugs figured not only as sensory agents, sources of pleasure or pain, but as a kind of education: tools you could think with, or try to think against.
Mind-altering substances were available in the West long before De Quincey’s opium voyages or Davy’s gas experiments. During the sixteenth century, the stimulants that arrived in Europe from other continents—coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco—were valued chiefly for their physiological virtues: tea was believed to remove headaches, coffee to help the circulation of fluids. (Not everyone was convinced: a London pamphlet published in 1674, purporting to speak for “several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women,” complained that coffee, by “Drying up the Radical Moisture” of the body, had “Eunucht” their husbands.) But drugs were also known to affect the workings of the mind. In 1608, the philosopher Francis Bacon took purgative pills to address “a symptom of melancholy”; the scientist Robert Hooke, who, as the scholar Lisa Jardine has argued, developed a “regimen of regular drug-taking” to manage stress, observed in his diary how particular substances seemed to influence his intellect. (“Took Childs vomit [. . .] Slept little at night. My fantcy very cleer.”) Drugs with psychoactive properties were part of a larger quest to fine-tune the human condition, making the business of living more pleasurable or more bearable.
In “Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind” (Yale), the cultural historian Mike Jay argues that the post-1800 use of mind-altering drugs was nonetheless qualitatively different from the experiments of previous centuries. What set someone like De Quincey apart, Jay writes, was that he used opium “as a device for exploring the hidden recesses of his mind,” dosing not merely to self-medicate, or to escape the world, but to access mental spaces unreachable without it. De Quincey was a “psychonaut,” plumbing the depths of his consciousness, embarking on fantastic inner quests. His work, like Davy’s, “marked the beginning of the modern understanding of the drug experience”: a pattern of pioneering inquiry into novel states of mind and the limits of “objective” truth.
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. The upstarts of the counterculture, Jay notes in “Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century” (2000), had their reasons for claiming to be “the first generation to discover drugs.” But, in doing so, they obscured a culture of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic experimentation that predated the emergence of “drugs” as a problematic category, and of the “drug addict” as a pathologized type. Recovering that culture requires venturing inside the worlds that each substance opened up. When a psychonaut breathed ether or injected cocaine, where was he hoping to travel?
The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.
This tension defined the psychonauts’ project. Davy experimented under the aegis of Thomas Beddoes, a physician who believed that the new science of pneumatic chemistry—the study of gases—could supply a revolutionary cure for lung diseases such as tuberculosis. At Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, in Bristol, the pair administered nitrous oxide to consumptives and palsy sufferers, assessing the miraculous way in which one patient, who had been unable to walk without crutches, responded to the surging “muscular pressure” that the drug seemed to supply. But their experiments soon took a less therapeutic turn. Davy’s “highly pleasurable” experience of the gas, coupled with Beddoes’s own—under its influence, he felt “bathed all over with a bucket of good humour”— indicated that it might benefit healthy subjects as much as ill ones. It produced ecstatic sensations, but also seemed to stimulate the intellect and the imagination.
The team began to study healthy volunteers, among them Coleridge and the poet Robert Southey, who described their intoxications in a richly metaphorical style: a “language of feeling,” as Davy put it. One subject, a local doctor, compared the gas’s revelations to “reading a sublime passage in poetry when circumstances contribute to awaken the finest sympathies of the soul.” Davy himself enjoyed walking alone beside the river on summer nights, “sipping away” at a bag of nitrous oxide and occasionally losing consciousness. In late 1799, having exposed himself to huge quantities of the gas in an airtight chamber, he reported that he “lost all connection with external things,” which had ceased to possess their own reality. “Nothing exists but thoughts!” he blurted out, coming down from his high. In the chamber, for a brief moment, the gas had transported him to a place that was constructed entirely by his individual consciousness.
Such revelations, impossible to communicate, were easily mockable. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Davy and his circle were satirized as a bunch of dreamy, self-important metaphysicians, “blown up” with their own pomposity. By mid-century, the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide had been mostly forgotten; along with ether, a volatile compound with similar effects, it was firmly entrenched in the sphere of medicine, as a path to painless surgeries. Meanwhile, a fresh generation of scientists had begun to challenge the practice of self-experimentation, which they considered an unreliable, romantic approach to the study of the mind. “Subjective experience was being pushed to the margins,” Jay writes: the new, “objectivist” science distrusted personal observation. A true study of drugs, its exponents believed, would require precision instruments, stress the analysis of external data—dosage, symptoms, times of onset—and record the results exclusively in notebooks, not essays or poems. It would thereby avoid “introspection,” which, as Jay writes, risked shaping “mental phenomena into narratives pleasing to the self-observer.” Such creativity might inspire great art, but it produced bad science.
To a stubborn handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in the Middle East. Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.” When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely educative in the psychiatric context. Each of the effects he experienced could be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.” “Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”
The science of private experience inspired explorations beyond hashish. Benjamin Paul Blood, an American philosopher and mystic, observed that the revelations he received while on ether were impossible to achieve in the “normal sanity” of the mind. Like Moreau’s heightened grasp of mental illness, their profundity depended on a certain derangement. The Harvard philosopher William James, who read Blood’s work, was prompted to self-experiment with nitrous oxide in 1882, recording an “intense metaphysical illumination” akin to Blood’s own. The truth of this illumination, James believed, lay in its incommunicability. Like the mystical states of mind he described in his landmark study “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902), it had to be “directly experienced,” and this was what made it significant. That the rational mind could not access it proved that human consciousness was not singular but shifting, multiple, many-layered. “Rational consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different,” James wrote. He called this vision of reality the “multiverse.”
Moreau was careful to clarify that hashish, by generating the symptoms of mental illness, had not really driven him mad. During his intoxication, he had remained aware of himself and where he was, finding that he could “observe calmly,” Jay writes, “as a procession of impossible phenomena marched through his mind.” Other hashish users reported a similar feeling of self-splitting, of being both absorbed in the drug’s visions and conscious of their unreality. In his Middle Eastern travelogue “The Lands of the Saracen” (1855), the American writer Bayard Taylor recounted being transported, in his imagination, to the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which was constructed of “huge, square plugs of Cavendish tobacco.” Even at the height of the drug’s influence, Taylor wrote, he knew he was “really” in a Damascus hotel. Moreau called this form of double consciousness an état mixte, a strange commingling of waking life and dream. Using hashish to treat his mentally ill patients, he theorized that it might enable a form of constructive therapy, in which hallucinations could be understood in the light of reason.
This idea helped reframe the psychonaut as a rational, composed observer, not merely exploring new worlds but ferrying some benefit home. Later in the century, those associated with the occult revival sought to instrumentalize drug use in a different way. In 1855, the French mystic Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, who maintained that hashish could act as a portal to parallel worlds, passed his secrets to a travelling American, Paschal Beverly Randolph: a “Black Rosicrucian sex magician,” Jay writes, who specialized in “marital problems,” and who found in hashish his “defining magical aid.” “Cahagnet, myself, and others, have been enabled to pass through eternal doors, forever closed to the embodied man save by this celestial key,” Randolph enthused. He believed that the drug’s état mixte allowed for insights that would “leap the world’s barriers.” He also believed that such insights could be bottled and sold. In 1862, when he returned to the U.S., he created a range of hashish-based elixirs promising clairvoyant powers, which he priced at four dollars each.
Spiritualists saw other possibilities in a drug-induced double consciousness. The London-based Society for Psychical Research, with which James was affiliated, was founded in 1882 to study questions “outside the boundaries of recognised science”: apparitions, mystical experiences, life after death. Two of its members, Edmund Gurney and Frederick Myers, developed theories of multiple consciousness related to James’s, proposing the existence of the “secondary self,” or “subliminal self”—buried strata of being that could be harnessed via hypnosis, séance, or drugs. Their fellow-spiritualist George Wyld, a physician, described inhaling chloroform for pain relief, only to see his soul, “clothed,” “standing about two yards” away. Wyld theorized that anesthetics eliminated pain by literally expelling the soul from the body. (In H. G. Wells’s short story “Under the Knife,” from 1896, a chloroformed patient feels his spirit drawn upward and outward, soaring into the stratosphere.) Maud Gonne, who undertook occult experiments with the poet W. B. Yeats, sought similar effects in hashish, hoping to free her spirit and have it travel, “quick as thought,” into astral dimensions.
Gonne, at the start of one trip, visualized a “tall shadow” at the foot of her bed. The apparition instructed her to go where she wished, but to remember the way back: “You must always keep the thought of your body as a thread by which to return.” Among psychonauts, getting back—holding on to the thread that connected them to the world—mattered because it was what separated the voluntary hallucinations of drug use from the involuntary ones of madness. The British poet Arthur Symons, a prodigious hashish user, published his major critical work, “The Symbolist Movement in Literature,” in 1899. Five of the French poets he discussed—Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine—were hashishins, and he used their work to sketch a vision of literature as numinous, immaterial, gesturing toward an “unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness.” De Nerval had eventually lapsed into madness, and Symons argued that this was because he had let go of the thread that anchored him: “Leaving the concrete world on these brief voyages, the fear is that we may not have the strength to return, or that we may lose the way back.”
In the last decades of the century, using mind-altering drugs wasn’t always about trying to escape the world. Sometimes it was a matter of adaptation, calibrating the brain to cope better with reality’s demands. Freud’s experiments with cocaine in the eighteen-eighties—first on himself, then on volunteers—centered on the possibility of a cure for neurasthenia, an increasingly diagnosed condition whose symptoms included headaches, anxiety, brain fog, and chronic fatigue. According to the disease’s first theorist, the American neurologist George Miller Beard, neurasthenia was a distinctively modern ailment, its effects caused by civilization itself: the rapid growth of business and industry, the punctuality demanded by pocket watches and train timetables.
Freud, who self-diagnosed as a neurasthenic, had been struck by the medical literature on coca, the South American plant from which cocaine had been isolated, in 1860. Early reports suggested that it might boost the nervous system’s energetic capacity; Paolo Mantegazza, an Italian neurologist who had consumed the drug, noted a sense of being “drenche[d]” in a “new strength,” “as a sponge soaks itself with water.” Freud began to take small doses, and reported feeling “more vigorous and capable of work.” (The tone of his accounts, Jay writes, flitted between fervid reflection and restrained appraisal: a “carefully modulated solution to the paradoxes of self-experiment.”) Cocaine, Freud thought, was a miracle drug that would help the mind keep pace with the world’s accelerations. Under its influence, neurasthenics might continue being neurasthenic, working harder and faster than was healthy, but with fewer obvious symptoms of breakdown.
And yet breakdown was increasingly apparent. Cocaine was soon available in pharmacies, and new, more efficient methods of consumption, such as subcutaneous injection, led to high-profile reports of wild behavior, excess, and dangerous metamorphosis. In 1887, the American neurologist William Hammond described injecting himself with a large dose of cocaine, “becoming an irresponsible agent,” and waking up to find his library trashed. (The year before, Robert Louis Stevenson had published “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in which a mysterious white powder prompts a monstrous transformation.) In 1884, Freud prescribed a cocaine regimen to Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, one of his senior colleagues at the Institute of Physiology in Vienna. Fleischl-Marxow was in the grip of an advanced morphine addiction; Freud hoped that the new drug would act as an antidote, lessening withdrawal symptoms. Within weeks, Fleischl-Marxow had a cocaine addiction to match his morphine one, developing insomnia and paranoia. He began using the drug self-destructively, lying to his friends, trying to hide his habit. It was as if, Jay writes, he “had been taken over by a second self, an alien or demonic force.”
The process by which drugs were stigmatized, at the end of the nineteenth century, is the subject of Jay’s final chapters. In his telling, it is a story of loss. In the eighteen-eighties, when Fleischl-Marxow was suffering, drug addiction was a new concept. The Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety, led by members of the British medical profession, was founded in 1884; in 1885, cocaine addiction was identified as a novel condition. Gradually, even milder psychoactives were placed under the now ominous category of “drugs,” and assumptions about the people who used them hardened into orthodoxy. Drugs were reconceived as antisocial—a means by which egotists avoided shared responsibilities—or as the preserve of those believed to lack self-control: the poor, the “mentally unfit,” the criminal classes. Between 1914 and 1916, new laws were passed in the U.S., Britain, and France to ban or restrict the drug trade, turning psychonauts into delinquents, voyagers beyond the bounds of civil society.
If their work endures, it’s because it had less to do with substances than with the self. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the rediscovery of psychoactive experimentation involved new drugs and techniques, but it drew on older stories about human consciousness. William Burroughs praised the British engineer James Lee’s writings on morphine and cocaine, describing them as “conjured from the unpolluted air of the nineteenth century.” Both Aldous Huxley (experimenting with mescaline) and Robert Graves (mushrooms) quoted Wordsworth’s poetry to convey the tenor of their experiences. In one sense, their imitative approach echoed their predecessors’. Psychonauting, from Davy’s science of the sublime to Symons’s numinous readings, had always been referential, metaphorically framed. The quest was for narratives of self-actualization, rather than for scientific models. “From fountain to fountain I danced in graceful mazes with inimitable houris, whose foreheads were bound with fillets of jasmine,” the twenty-one-year-old American Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote in 1857, weaving his hashish dreams into the familiar tapestry of “The Arabian Nights.” Telling their stories was partly what brought the psychonauts back down to earth.
Published in the print edition of the April 24 & May 1, 2023, issue, with the headline “High Achievers.”
The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century. By Clare Bucknell. The New Yorker, April 17, 2023
Before
writing this review, I got hold of some tiny canisters of nitrous oxide, filled
a balloon or two and, watched by my bemused wife, breathed in the gas. It gave
me no more of a buzz than smoking a cigarette. I must have been doing it wrong
because, according to Mike Jay’s compelling history of narcotic
self-exploration, it was when the chemist Humphry Davy began inhaling this
newly discovered gas in Bristol in 1799, sometimes in the company of the poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that he started a revolution. While high, Davy
declared that “Nothing exists but thoughts!”
This insight wasn’t new, of course. Bishop Berkeley had made it the cornerstone of his philosophy. Yet for Davy, it felt transformative. Another laughing gas lover, the psychologist William James, later observed that there are two types of people: the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born accept the world as it is and get on with it. The twice-born have a life-changing insight or vision. Some become questing, drug-ingesting “psychonauts” as a result – and it is they who form the focus of this fascinating book.
The medical applications of drugs have sometimes become clear only after their use in less formal settings. After Davy’s experiments, for instance, nitrous oxide first became a staple of vaudeville turns. Volunteers would breathe the gas, then caper about, while onlookers tittered. Then in Connecticut in 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells, who happened to be in one of these audiences, saw a participant injure himself but experience no pain. Wells introduced nitrous oxide into his work and thereby helped inaugurate a new era in anaesthetics. Similarly, after Sigmund Freud’s self-experimentation with cocaine in Austria in the 1880s, one of his colleagues adopted the drug as a numbing agent in eye surgery.
The reputation of drugs and their ability to shock has ebbed and flowed. Jay smartly signals one of the sea changes with reference to Sherlock Holmes. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle presented his detective’s cocaine habit as the exotic eccentricity of a bohemian. Then, in 1904, he said primly that Watson had “weaned” the great man from his “drug mania”. One reason for the shift in tone was that Collier’s, the company publishing Conan Doyle’s stories in the United States, was in the midst of an anti-drugs crusade. Broadly, Jay presents the 19th century as “the age of the individual”, in which almost everyone had a jolly time trying out new substances, and the 20th century as “the progressive era”, when things got serious.
Jay also believes that drug experimentation facilitated the birth of “the modern mind”. But there’s no rigorous analysis of what this might mean. Jean Lorrain’s ether-fuelled stories in the 1890s, we’re told, “anticipate” the stream of consciousness approach to fiction. Cubism and surrealism arose within a generation. But was this coincidence or influence? Certainly, Jay can name artists who were inspired by drug-taking. Many, of course, weren’t. Later he asserts: “The modernist art and culture of the generation to come, with its fractured and unfamiliar perspectives, dedicated itself to breaking through the veil of everyday reality to a world of pure experience.” But this wasn’t all modernists tried to do, nor did all modernism try to do it.
Nevertheless, the author’s central point, that the history of experimentation is more venerable and complex than many assume, is clearly right and not something you get taught at school. The complexities continue: the UK government recently announced its intention to criminalise possession of nitrous oxide. On the other hand, recent research into various drugs traditionally seen as illicit shows their promise in treating a range of mental-health conditions. Some even talk of a “psychedelic renaissance”. If that’s so, it won’t only be the psychonauts who have been twice-born, but the drugs themselves.
Psychonauts by Mike Jay review – the drug-takers who changed history. By Thomas W. Hodgkinson. The Guardian, May 10, 2023.
This insight wasn’t new, of course. Bishop Berkeley had made it the cornerstone of his philosophy. Yet for Davy, it felt transformative. Another laughing gas lover, the psychologist William James, later observed that there are two types of people: the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born accept the world as it is and get on with it. The twice-born have a life-changing insight or vision. Some become questing, drug-ingesting “psychonauts” as a result – and it is they who form the focus of this fascinating book.
The medical applications of drugs have sometimes become clear only after their use in less formal settings. After Davy’s experiments, for instance, nitrous oxide first became a staple of vaudeville turns. Volunteers would breathe the gas, then caper about, while onlookers tittered. Then in Connecticut in 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells, who happened to be in one of these audiences, saw a participant injure himself but experience no pain. Wells introduced nitrous oxide into his work and thereby helped inaugurate a new era in anaesthetics. Similarly, after Sigmund Freud’s self-experimentation with cocaine in Austria in the 1880s, one of his colleagues adopted the drug as a numbing agent in eye surgery.
The reputation of drugs and their ability to shock has ebbed and flowed. Jay smartly signals one of the sea changes with reference to Sherlock Holmes. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle presented his detective’s cocaine habit as the exotic eccentricity of a bohemian. Then, in 1904, he said primly that Watson had “weaned” the great man from his “drug mania”. One reason for the shift in tone was that Collier’s, the company publishing Conan Doyle’s stories in the United States, was in the midst of an anti-drugs crusade. Broadly, Jay presents the 19th century as “the age of the individual”, in which almost everyone had a jolly time trying out new substances, and the 20th century as “the progressive era”, when things got serious.
Jay also believes that drug experimentation facilitated the birth of “the modern mind”. But there’s no rigorous analysis of what this might mean. Jean Lorrain’s ether-fuelled stories in the 1890s, we’re told, “anticipate” the stream of consciousness approach to fiction. Cubism and surrealism arose within a generation. But was this coincidence or influence? Certainly, Jay can name artists who were inspired by drug-taking. Many, of course, weren’t. Later he asserts: “The modernist art and culture of the generation to come, with its fractured and unfamiliar perspectives, dedicated itself to breaking through the veil of everyday reality to a world of pure experience.” But this wasn’t all modernists tried to do, nor did all modernism try to do it.
Nevertheless, the author’s central point, that the history of experimentation is more venerable and complex than many assume, is clearly right and not something you get taught at school. The complexities continue: the UK government recently announced its intention to criminalise possession of nitrous oxide. On the other hand, recent research into various drugs traditionally seen as illicit shows their promise in treating a range of mental-health conditions. Some even talk of a “psychedelic renaissance”. If that’s so, it won’t only be the psychonauts who have been twice-born, but the drugs themselves.
Psychonauts by Mike Jay review – the drug-takers who changed history. By Thomas W. Hodgkinson. The Guardian, May 10, 2023.
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