The history of drugs and their influence on us and how we view the mind. A super fascinating topic that this book worked out so well. Highly recommend to all Pharmacy-Fans and people who love to learn more about psychedelics!

Psychonauts; Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind by Mike Jay was interesting! I was truly thankful to have gotten to read this before most people! I would like to purchase this one for my physical library!

I found this an absolutely fascinating read, with an excellent balance between science and anecdote. It focuses on the use of mind-enhancing drugs over the centuries, and how so many scientists, artists, writers and philosophers chose to experiment on themselves, usually primarily to expand their knowledge rather than simply have a good time. The section on anaesthetics was particularly interesting. In order to understand a drug’s effect, the giver of that drug is often the best person to discover it, and scientists were especially willing to take enormous risks at times to test their theories out. Quite distinct from the hedonistic drug-taking of the 1960s, and today’s substance misuse, this book explores how drugs are put to use in medicine in the widest sense. It’s comprehensive, scholarly but never dry, examines states of consciousness under the influence of drugs, and whilst never ignoring the dangers, stresses how our well-being has been influenced by so many courageous experimenters.

I absolutely loved this book. This is a subject I've long been fascinated with and the text was very accessable.

I found this to be a pretty good exploration of the study of how drugs affect the mind. There are some really interesting things in these pages but I found the writing to be a little dry at times. Overall, a decent choice for an intro to psychoactives.

Many thanks to Mike Jay, the publishers and NetGalley for this Advance reading copy of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. It's a detailed account of how people in some advanced societies in the west experimented with drugs and used them to stimulate thought and art. It's not an encyclopedic look at the topic – Jay focuses on people in Paris, London, Vienna, and William James in America. He follows the scientists who used self-experimentation to test out properties of drugs, but also to see what they could learn about subjective experience, and for enjoyment (the famous dinner parties of James Young Simpson, where guests would test out the latest chemical synthesised by the doctor gets a mention, as do the 'ether frolics' of medical students at the end of term).

Of course, it wasn't just scientists who were experimenting and the book is full of stories of the artists who used drugs to transcend reality. It also looks at how the use of drugs seeped into culture. Patent medicines were commonly laced with opiates, cocaine, ether or chloroform; in Paris, ether was added to cocktails. Prepared tinctures and pills could be bought from pharmacies, and the ill could self-medicate using pharmacological manuals.

Far from the staid and stuffy image we sometimes have of Victorian culture, Psychonauts gives a picture of open-mindedness and relentless curiosity. The final chapters cover the backlash against drugs in the early 20th century and the discovery of psychedelics. It's a fascinating book – I took lots of notes – but it is quite academic in style, so it took me quite a while to read and digest. If you're looking for a light book on the subject, this may not be for you.

This book covers the history of the development of psychoactive drugs and
anesthesia through the scientists who self-medicated. The book would be more interesting if it was funnier but it’s pretty dry reading. The interesting side of the story is that the majority of the early adopters were affluent white males while women were scorned for abusing drugs because it might make them act inappropriately. Most of the drugs were readily available as tonics, but there was still racism applied to drug abuser as cocaine was seen as a drug associated with Negroes while opium was associated with the Chinese population. Not much has changed as the group with highest probability of drug abuse is physicians with anesthesiologists having the highest rate of abuse. Access to drugs is the number one factor, not race or poverty.

A longer, stranger, trip than previously supposed.

A useful text showing that the search for mind-expansion didn't start with the counterculture. Instead, there had been a long, and often complicated, history of scientific searching and literary dabbling before the likes of Timothy Leary and Howard Marks turned it into a personality-driven freakshow.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

Excellent book on psychedelics and how they interact with our psychology. I think many people would benefit from reading this book and learning more about a misunderstood classification of substances.

A tremendously fun read for anyone interested in history's favorite psychonauts - those who have used substances to alter their experiences of the world in order to see things in a different light - and their respective drugs of choice.

While none of this was really new, it was nonetheless enjoyable to read in Mike Hay's light, witty, conversational style. Definitely a good place to start for anyone curious about the taboo subject of getting high and exploring the inner reaches of outer space.

Thanks to the publisher, the author, and NetGalley for the digital advance reader copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

I overall enjoyed reading this book. The writing ebbed and flowed with holding my interest. Some parts were interesting, while others I skimmed over. I'm not sure if it was just my particular copy, but I didn't like that there were so many large paragraphs of quotes without quotation marks.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

I particularly enjoyed the segments about Freud, I think they provided me an interesting nuance to what I was told about his drug usage in that history of psychology 101 class I took forever ago. It's pretty much the entire point of this book, to revisit (or explore) how we view self-experimentation with mind altering drugs and how our views of the people who partake in said experimentation has ebbed and flowed over time.

The book is pretty accessible, there is little to no jargon and even someone with little to no knowledge of the topic should be able to understand and enjoy it without resorting to extra material. That being said there is a fair amount of names and personally I found that the chronology sometimes got a little muddled.

It was a thought-provoking read for me in some regards so I might revisit this review later on.

Overall, the book was worth reading. The content was interesting and thorough. But I didn’t find the writing style conversational enough for my taste and at times I found the writing stilted and slow-moving. I also would have liked to read more about the scientific and medical aspects of the subject, but that’s a personal taste thing. I think that people interested in the drug culture side of the story will appreciate this book more than I did. Thank you to Netgalley and Yale University Press for the digital review copy.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Yale University Press for an advance copy on the history of drugs and those who chronicled their experiments both for science and for literature.

Humans have always been explorers. The need to know what is behind that rise, where this river leads and what is on the other side, is something some humans need to know, and others want to exploit. Similar to shaking a gift before opening, humans want to know, and if something is frowned on by polite society, or even better people in authority, well to many that is a reason to explore. This holds true for the inner world as well as the outer world. Humans need a reason to believe. This can't be all there is. There has to be things we can't see, secrets that being raised in a society we have been trained even ordered not to see. Drugs can open this inner world. For deep meanings, to finding a way past trauma, and for just getting through the day. Every experience is different, some can try and move on, some try to find out why, some try and want more, more tries, more experiences, more on top of more. Psychonauts by Mike Jay is a look at those tried drugs for a variety of reasons, science, art, theology, boredom, what they learned, and what happens when governments and puritanical thoughts get in the way of learning, and experimenting.

The book begins with an interesting take on two scientists who tried a long thought lost drug, experimenting on it themselves, based on an old underground newspaper, and written for an academic audience. These two men were roundly denounced by scientists, ethicists, and of course government lackeys for being improper, unethical and wrong. This was in 1995. Within a few years this lizard drug would be feted and talked about for all the great things it could do to help people. From this slight past, readers are brought back further, to Sigmund Freud and his buying of cocaine to help him deal with this tiredness, and problems being around people. Cocaine to Freud was wonderful, and he became quite the apostle, until it became embarrassing, and a part of his life that he would tend to skip over. From there readers learn of other experimenters, writers, artists, and common people, who tried, and wrote about their experiences on drugs, the rise of literary movements, and strides in medicine and philosophical thought. Also the rise of the War on Drugs, and how the benefits of these pharmaceuticals have been ignored and devalued for so long.

A fascinating book that covers quite a lot of subjects. Mike Jay is not only a good writer, but can balance a huge cast of famous, infamous and unknown people, and a huge cast of drugs, without ever losing the narrative, or making it seem like a lecture. Art, science, music, laws, philosophy, and more are discussed and not in a hey kids I am rapping with you kind of way. This is a serious history, with lots of stories, both good and bad. Some stories are kind of humorous, such as the chloroform party, where a group opened up a jar filled with the gas, smelled a nice smell, than the lead researcher awoke on the floor, under his table hearing the sound of bodies falling around him. In fact many of these early psychonauts seemed to do everything wrong, and yet their research are still of value. Jay explores both the artists who found their gifts via drugs, and the changes in politics that artists began to create, and the government enforcement that made us a nation that said no, without knowing why.

A very good book, something that will appeal to literary scholars, hipsters, and historians. A book that will be appearing on quite a few podcasts as there is quite a lot to be learned from reading. One of my favorite new histories of this year.

The index to the book got me interested and it is not often the case with a table of contents! Then the book itself was full of fascinating snippets, that are probably not widely known, such as Freud and his experiments with cocaine. This was a well researched book, probably the best I have read on the subject, although I have not read many books on drugs. It was interesting that self experimtation was once considered normal. So many facts, the book is absolutely stuffed with them, and they all make for a brilliant read. I would certainly recommend this book to all readers who are interested in the subject of drugs, if only slightly. It was a real series of revelations.