When the Saskatchewan-based British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond first wrote to his fellow British émigré, novelist Aldous Huxley, he could have had little idea of how the ripples of their private correspondence of the early 1950s would reverberate across the world and into the future. But here we are in 2024, and the term that Osmond coined—‘psychedelic’—is quite literally everywhere, from...
First patented by Merck in the early twentieth century, and reinvented by American chemists in the 1960s and 1970s, MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) has been characterised as a good-time party drug with a dark side. Ecstasy, ‘E’, ‘X’ or ‘molly’ is connected in contemporary parlance with EDM mega-raves and the sometimes lethal consequences of over-consumption. This chapter suggests that...
Book review of Mike Jay, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. £18.99. ISBN 978 0 3002 3107 6.