Topics

Ether, chloroform, and the history of surgical unconsciousness.

Ethnographers and anthropologists who studied psychoactive plants in ritual, healing, and social life.

Ayahuasca, yagé, caapi, and their alkaloids, from Amazonian practice to laboratory chemistry and court cases.

Cannabis and hashish in medicine, psychiatry, literature, and self-experiment.

Synthesis and structure of psychoactive compounds.

Hospital case notes and medical trial records.

The 1960s and 70s psychedelic movement: its leaders, publications, churches, and quarrels.

DMT in snuffs, brews, and clinical research.

The botanical study of psychoactive plants and the people who use them.

Drug research, investigations, and reports produced by governments.

Indigenous practice and knowledge of psychoactive plants, including the outside records that describe it.

Intelligence agencies and the behavioral research they funded.

Kava, Piper methysticum, in the Pacific and in pharmacology.

Trials, testimony, and the regulation of psychoactive substances.

LSD from its first clinical studies in 1947 through therapy, military testing, and the counterculture.

Mescaline, the alkaloid of peyote, in self-experiments, pharmacology, and psychiatric research.

Military testing of psychedelics as incapacitating agents, and its later investigation.

The CIA's MKULTRA program and the investigations that exposed it.

Nitrous oxide from Humphry Davy's experiments to William James's metaphysics.

Chemistry, isolation, and physiological study of psychoactive substances.

Psilocybin mushrooms in ritual, laboratory, and clinical use.

Psychoanalysts who used LSD and other drugs in treatment.

Drug-assisted treatment of war trauma.

Clinical use of psychedelics in treatment.