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Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
00:43:43
An interview with Mike Jay
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Book. The New Books Network. I'm Claire Clark. I'm one of the hosts of the network. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Mike J. Who is an author and curator and has got a new book called Psychonauts, Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, which is going to be published any day now by Yale University Press in the US in April and in May in the uk. Mike's most recent book was Mescaline, A Global History of the First Psychedelic, and that was also published by Yale University Press in the US and uk. And he has written in all sorts of other places. The New York Review of Books, Lapham's Quarterly, the Public Domain Review, the welcome Collection, the Literary Review, the London Review of Books, and I could go on and on, but we wanna have time to talk about the new one. So with that, welcome to the show, Mike.
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C
Oh, thanks, Claire. Real pleasure to be here.
- [02:04]
B
I wonder if you could start us out by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the business of doing drug history.
- [02:12]
C
Yeah, sure. It's a kind of picaresque story. It wasn't really planned, but I think the way it worked out was, well, I grew up in London. I went to Cambridge University and I studied philosophy and After I got a philosophy degree, I decided that I was kind of done, not just done with academia, but kind of actually done with books. And it was my youthful certainty I decided that text was the language of the past and the language of the future was going to be visual. So I kind of spent most of my twenties working in film and TV in various jobs as an editor and a researcher. And yeah, by the end of that decade, the sort of very beginnings of digital culture, CD ROM and cdi, if anyone's old enough to remember any of those formats. So I then worked my way back to writing, which in fact I'd always liked doing. And the first stuff I got paid to write really was a few screenplays and bits of journalism, mostly recycling research that I was doing from film and TV stuff and bits of digital writing, non linear writing and so on. And I was also an early adopter of the Internet, so back in the days of, you know, bulletin boards and alt news groups. And the thing that really fascinated me in the early Internet was all the drugs, discussion and conversation. Because in the real world and in the mainstream media you couldn't really talk about drugs, or rather they were always framed as a problem, as a social problem or a medical problem or a crime problem or what should we do about addiction or whatever, you know. And then suddenly online was this world with thousands of incredibly knowledgeable people talking about drug experiences and talking about their history and their sort of culture. And I started to write a little bit about that and do bits of journalism about it. And at that time I happened to meet the person who became my academic mentor, who was called Michael Neave and he was a senior lecturer at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, as it was in those days as a teaching unit taught out of UCL University College London. And Michael worked alongside Roy Porter, who was the best known member of that group. But they'd been doing amazing work on medical history. They were all kind of post war historians from below. And that was the approach that they brought to medical history, which previously had been an awful lot of retired physicians and practitioners talking about the triumphant medical advances during their careers. And Roy and Michael and that circle at the welcome got much more interested in patient testimony, in the doctor patient relationship and the way that, not that the medical profession saw itself, but the way which it was seen by the wider culture. And so I've then had access to all the wondrous resources of the Wellcome Library and I started digging around into the history of drugs and particularly this kind of history from below, the history of the drug experience, drug users. At that point, academic drug history industry was quite a small, narrowly constituted world and it was mostly about, you know, the, you know, the development of theories of addiction and so drug control and you know, it was very much, you know, from the, from the, from the expert non user perspective. So I started assembling all these kind of texts and sources that I could find and was then commissioned by Penguin. I was working with Michael Neave on an anthology for penguin 20th century classics about Fan de Siecler writing and science and culture. And they commissioned me to produce an anthology of drug writings. And that was really, I guess when I started to systematize this sort of hoard that I now had of kind of, you know, drug experiences and drug testimonies and subjective accounts. And yeah, that anthology came out in 1999. It was called Artificial Paradises and that was I guess, the sort of source book from which all this started off. In fact, it has a section in it about self experimentation which quotes accounts from Humphry Davy and Jacques Joseph Moreau and William James and a lot of the people that I write about in this book. And from that point on I've written quite widely across the history of science and medicine, written quite a lot about history of madness and psychiatry for example. But being a freelance writer, it's. There's a kind of feedback loop. If you write about something, then people spot you and ask you to write about some more about that and then you gradually become the go to person. And that happened to me with the history of Drugs. And so, yeah, so I guess about 10 years ago the Wellcome Collection did a big exhibition called High Society about the history and culture of drugs. And I curated that and wrote the accompanying book. And from then on it's been something that, you know, tends to kind of, you know, a topic that comes to me rather than one that I have to seek out. But I'm always happy to do more about it because if you're a freelancer and a generalist and an independent scholar like I am, it's just a great excuse to jump across boundaries and to cherry pick all the most interesting bits of everything from neuroscience to arts and to anthropology, you know, so whatever. So I keep finding great new stories and new angles and that's why I'm still here, I guess.
- [08:41]
B
Well, wonderful. Well, well, could you speed up a bit and bring us, bring us up to, to the present day in Psychonauts and how you came to write this latest book.
- [08:51]
C
Right. Well, this is one of the things that had fascinated me from the beginning, when I started looking into this was the history of self experimentation, which is not that much written about. And also, you know, most of what's written about it is the story of kind of gonzo scientists, you know, putting it passing electric shocks and currents through themselves or from severing their cutaneous nerves to measure how quickly they grew back and all that kind of stuff. And you can see why that stopped in science because there are other ways of doing these things. But what's interesting, I think, about self experimentation with drugs, with mind altering drugs, is that you're generating this subjective testimony that can't really be got in any other way. And so it's a fascinating way of following the history of science. It goes right back to the Royal Society, to the beginnings of modern science and its emphasis on experiment and those questions about how you can prove or demonstrate things like thoughts and perceptions and states of mind experimentally. So that was something that I'd always wanted to explore more fully, and that's really the core of this book.
- [10:13]
B
And what is a psychonaut?
- [10:15]
C
Psychonaut is a word that was coined in a novel in the 1940s by a German author, Ernst Junger. And psychonaut in his novel is somebody who, a type of scientist who goes around collecting these drug induced experiences, as Junger says, like a butterfly collector with a net going around to capture these states of consciousness. And it's a very useful word. It didn't exist at the time, you know, the period I'm talking about, particularly like the late 19th century, these people were described as self experimenters. But you know, as I mentioned, people were self experimenting in all kinds of ways. And you know, drugs were actually, you know, experimenting with drugs is probably one of the sort of safest and least reckless types of self experiment you could do compared to what else was going on there. Then the term psychonaut got picked up by the drugs counterculture because Ernst Junger was a great hero to Albert hoffman who discovered LSD. So he publicized it. And then by the 80s and 90s you had people calling themselves psychonauts. I think really to. Just because, you know, to avoid the stigmatizing terms like drug user and to try and give a sense that people who felt that their experiments with drugs were not simply recreation or self indulgence, there was a kind of program here. They were interested in consciousness and they were investigating it. So in this modern usage, psychonaut is quite well known, but it tends to refer to renegades and rebels operating outside Institutional science. Because of course, if you're a neuroscientist or psychopharmacologist or somebody who's studying the effects of drugs on the mind, taking them yourself is definitely not part of the job description. Quite the opposite, in fact. So psychonauts these days tend to be outsiders and renegades. But I wanted to use the word and take it back to the time when institutional scientists and establishment figures self experimented with drugs just as much as, and alongside all the rebels and renegades.
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B
Well, it's a great title and a great word to be reclaiming. I'm going to ask the kind of general organizational question. So Psychonauts in my reading is a really a work of intellectual history, and it's organized around different psychoactive substances. So there's a. There are three sections, and they deal with cocaine, nitrous oxide, hashish. And then interwoven through these sections are portraits of different historical, important historical figures who've experimented with these substances. People like Sigmund Freud, William James. William James, W.B. yeats. Can you give us an outline of the book's organization and tell us a little bit about sort of its organizational logic, why you organized it this way?
- [13:30]
C
Right. Well, there's always this struggle between chronological and thematic structures, both of which are very appealing. I basically write narrative history, so I need chronology. I need stories about what happened and then what happened as a consequence of that and so on. But I didn't want to do a purely chronological history. So with chapters, as it were, on the 1870s, the 1880s, the 1890s, because there was so much going on in those decades, you'd be zipping backwards and forwards. So, as you say, I kind of picked three. Three themes for the first three parts of the book. And I didn't actually center them around individual drugs specifically. What I was looking for were things that are kind of currently in our sort of 21st century zeitgeist, in this sort of psychedelic renaissance, and with our interest in cognitive enhancers. And so I've kind of picked three themes of interest and three types of research. And yeah, the first one is really about cognitive enhancers and brain boosters and the idea that there might be drugs that increase our energy and our capacity and our intelligence. And that is mostly they're not entirely about cocaine. And I've framed that by starting with Sigmund Freud's cocaine experiments and writings. The second one is about drugs and the limits of consciousness. What happens in sort of, you know, with disembodied consciousness and out of body experiences and These drugs that kind of, you know, separate the mind from the body and leave the mind kind of, you know, navigating this infinite space. And this is the kind of question that people tend to ask today using drugs like ketamine and DMT. But in the 19th century, this was explored very thoroughly with drugs that had been really come up as anesthetics, nitrous oxide and ether and chloroform, and much the same conversations as now. Where do we go when our mind goes somewhere and leaves our body? Is there some other part of the mind that we don't normally have access to? Is it a subliminal mind or is it a of spirit realm or an astral plane? All these questions that are familiar now were being asked at that time. And then the third theme that I picked was Drugs and the creative imagination, which is mostly about hashish, but partly about peyote, which appears at the end. And this is kind of territory that's explored a lot with psychedelics these days. The idea of how you can alter your internal reality and find ways of spending time in sort of dimensions of the imagination that you can't normally inhabit, and how you can turn this to artistic or literary or occult purposes. So these three stories all kind of have parallel chronologies. They all start at different times and places, but they all kind of culminate in the last years of the 19th century. So then what the fourth section does, what the fourth part of the book does, is to really join the dots from there to the present. And that does that in two chapters, the first of which looks at those years around 1900, which are the years of drug control and drug prohibition, and also years in which science becomes less interested in introspection and in subjective experience, more interested in behaviorism and data. And then the. The second part of that jumps forward 50 years and looks at those years in the mid 20th century, the 1950s and 1960s, that we now think of as the psychedelic era, because that's when the word psychedelic was coined. And that where the word drugs is kind of pejorative and has all these negative associations around it. Psychedelics comes along at a moment when people are getting more interested in inner experience and mystical experience, and people are finding that some drugs produce fascinating experiences of this kind, but you can't really call them drugs because that brings so much stigma with it. So the word psychedelics is very helpful in opening up this new idea that drug experiences might be positive. They might be something that helps us to self transcend or self actualize or have valuable positive and mystical experiences.
- [18:25]
B
So these stories, as you mentioned, I'll sort of start in this period in the late 1800s. And you kind of give this period a name. You call it before drugs. And I think what you mean by that is kind of before progressive drug policies really hardened and various psychoactive substances really became kind of vilified and criminalized. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what it was like to consume psychoactive substances in this period. So for the historical actors that you're writing about, what was the context in which their drug consumption was taking place?
- [19:05]
C
Right. I mean, that's. I mean, I've called it before drugs because that is in quite a literal sense the word drugs, in the sense that we're using it now to mean kind of, you know, mind altering substances is it doesn't really appear until 1900. So before that, you know, drugs, the concept of the category that we have now didn't really exist. There were various different drugs that you might describe as intoxicants. Some of them were kind of research chemicals, some of the things that were used in medicine, like anesthetics. Others were things that you could buy in the pharmacy. And of course, during this period, you could go into a pharmacy and buy cannabis and cocaine and heroin and morphine and all these things. So then in terms of the scientists who are using these drugs, they are, I think there's definitely a distinction between scientific use and what we would now call recreational use or use, out of curiosity. But it's very porous, this distinction. It's interesting to look at the writing which is really kind of the centerpiece of this book is the sort of subjective accounts of drug experiences because you realize that what an enormous number of artists, well, of scientists and doctors during this period were also writers. They wrote poetry or they wrote novels. And in the days before the tick box diagnosis, being able to describe a medical condition was a very important skill. And a lot of doctors, doctors were extraordinarily good at it. And people who specialized in diseases of the mind were particularly skilled at it. So these descriptions by scientists bleed out into the wider culture. They're often written in literary terms. Trying to describe an altered state of consciousness is a literary form as much as a scientific form. Quite often they're published in popular magazines of the day. They're very popular with the writing public. Particularly towards the end of the 19th century, when what we now call drugs start to be conceived as more of a social problem, it becomes very important for scientists to make it clear that Their scientific research is not of the same caliber as somebody randomly buying hashish or cocaine in a pharmacy and taking a huge dose of it, although there are plenty of people doing that and getting interesting results. So you kind of have this idea that emerges, but in science of the trained observer who's of course almost always a white male because science is constituted of white males at that point and they're almost all of the sort of professional classes. The historian of science, Simon Schaffer, has a very nice phrase for this. He calls it the Cartesianism of the genteel. So if you're of a certain class of person, you're able to separate your mind from your body, you can separate your intellect from your passions, and you can describe the sensations and perceptions that you're feeling reliably. So that's the context in which doctors and scientists are experimenting. This is not something that's taboo or stigmatized. It's something that can be made to appear reckless or dangerous. But it's also, for many scientists, it is kind of a mark of seriousness. If you look at someone like Humphry Davy, who's kind of right at the beginning of this story with his experiments on nitrous oxide in 1799, that was really what launched him to become the great scientific hero of his generation and the president of the Royal Society was that he'd shown this dedication to science by taking enormous amounts of nitrous oxide and describing his experiences. So there's a kind of heroic quality to it as well as a sort of potentially disreputable one.
- [23:18]
B
One of the things that drew me to this book was the COVID which has got this wonderful picture of William James on it. And I'm a huge William James F. William James and then also Sigmund Freud are really protagonists in the story you tell there. They feature very prominently and they're two figures that are sort of endlessly fascinating for researchers across a variety of fields too. So. But you. Part of your argument is that their experimentation with. With psychoactive drugs has been really wrongly dismissed, or I guess, you know, to use Freud's language, repressed almost by previous biographers. And I wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about the relationship between their self experimentation and their really groundbreaking theories of mind that we're still talking about today.
- [24:20]
C
Sure. Well, they're. I mean, I picked them, I picked Freud and James partly because they are really the two towering figures of that kind of generation of the discovery of the unconscious and the, you know, emergence of the modern mind. And also because they both self experimented with mind altering drugs in very different ways. And, but I don't, I mean they're great motors for my story, but they. What the other thing I really want to do is to show that they weren't kind of doing this in a vacuum. You know, that all kinds of people, their contemporaries and their colleagues and people working in different fields were self experimenting with drugs. So I kind of, rather than heroes, they're kind of exemplars. But I think both their stories are interesting. As you say, they've both been minimized by subsequent historians and biographers and in Freud's case by Freud himself because his papers on cocaine he made sure whenever reprinted they're not included in his collective works and so on. And Ernest Jones, his first biographer, minimized his work on it as a, called, as a kind of juvenile aberration. And nobody really since then has ever had a good word to say about Freud's cocaine experiments because sort of Freudians and psychoanalysts and Freud's biographers have all kind of said as little about it as possible. And the anti Freudians have always jumped on us and gone, look, you see, he was a cocaine addict. I don't think either of these takes are particularly smart. And I think there's an awful lot in Freud's work that's interesting. His first paper on cocaine Uber Coca. I've kind of done a bit of a close reading of that. But just in terms of its literary style because I think it tells us a lot about Freud and where he was coming from. It's very beautifully written, it's written in a style, very literary style in some parts that he doesn't really use again. And it hops in very interesting ways between the first person and the second person and the third person. So the third person writing about cocaine, that's very much the tradition that Freud was being trained in by Ernst Brucker, who was his great mentor, who was a disciple of von Helmholtz, had a very materialist view of mind and this was all about generating objective data. But Freud of course was also very much enthralled to the generation of romantic scientists, of people like Goethe and von Humboldt. And in his reading around on cocaine he read some wonderful first person descriptions by the Italian neurologist Paolo Mantegazza, for example. And he clearly wanted to write himself into the story in that way. So I think he achieves a very interesting fusion of different perspectives. And he unites two kind of strands of self experimentation which are both well developed at that point. And I think he does the same in more practical terms in his second paper on cocaine, where he. It's the only time Freud ever did experiments on humans, including himself. And he gets hold of a dynamometer, which is something that measures the force that you're exerting on it, and another device that measures his reaction times. And he wants to test this subjective perception about cocaine, that it makes you more. More powerful and more energetic. And so he uses the dynamometer to demonstrate that, yes, indeed, people, including him, who've had a dose of cocaine do have more power and energy at their disposal. But then he goes on to make a very interesting leap, which prefigures his later work, which is to consider whether the euphoria produced by cocaine, the sort of positive mood and the happiness that it produces. And he wonders whether that isn't in fact, a primary effect, because he notices that it's when his subjects feel this euphoria, that's the point at which they start to exert more force on the dynamometer. But at that point, most of the cocaine hasn't yet dissolved into their bloodstream. So this sets him on the trail of the idea that it might actually be a state of mind, a change of a state of mind that unlocks this physiological response and gives the organism access to energy which it doesn't have otherwise. So this idea that a mental effect might have a physiological response is clearly something. That's when the Freud that we know picks up a few years later. That's where he comes in.
- [29:24]
B
So can tell us a little bit, what about William James, why he's such a kind of key figure in Psychonauts?
- [29:36]
C
He's a fascinating figure, and I think his experiment with nitrous oxide is a wonderful way into his thinking, because unlike Freud, he sticks with it. I mean, first of all, in the 1870s, he first comes across this pamphlet about nitrous oxide and the mystical experience written by Benjamin Blood. And he writes the kind of slightly quizzical review of it, but it obviously stays with him. And then several Years later, in 1882, he decides to inhale some nitrous oxide himself while he's working on trying to figure out what his position on Hegel is. And he has a wonderful mystical experience which really sends him down a very fertile and productive route. A lot of his work in the 1880s and 1890s on the mystical experience and the stream of consciousness, you can see the presence of that nitrous oxide experience. So then 20 years later, in Varieties of Religious Experience, he puts his experience with nitrous oxide right at the center of that. And it says that, you know, this shows us that our normal waking consciousness is only one form of consciousness. And there are all kinds of other forms of consciousness in which the world and reality looks quite different. And you can't say that they're wrong. You know, they're experience. They're just as valid as any other form of experience. And, you know, this feeds into his later sort of developments. His. In his, you know, his radical empiricism and his view of the reality is a multiverse in which all these different perspectives need to be contained. And the very last piece of writing that he publishes in his lifetime is a tribute to Benjamin Blood, the person who turned him onto nitrous oxide in the first place.
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B
Well, anyway, the book is also just fascinating for folks who might be interested in Freud and James. And I was glad that I saw the COVID and decided to pick it up.
- [31:43]
C
The.
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B
In. In the book, you talk about psychedelic drug research in the early 1960s, and you term it the return of the psychonauts. And this is. You already talked a little bit about how this kind of psychedelic renaissance inspired, you know, your. Your framework and your readings of the older text. I wondered if you. You could talk just a little bit more about how the psychoactive revolution of the 1960s fits into this. This story of the psychonauts.
- [32:17]
C
Yes, absolutely. I mean, we talk now about the psychedelic renaissance, you know, where we are. To describe where we are now, which is a renaissance of what, you know, the 1950s and the, you know, 1960s, when the word psychedelic was. Was coined. But from the sort of position that I'm coming from here, that that original psychedelic era seems itself to be a renaissance. It's a recovery of a program that had been running very effectively of people, you know, using drugs to expand consciousness and to explore and address all the questions that raises, you know, which had been in ways that I think we've forgotten. You know, that was quite a very powerful and influential strand in 19th century science and ideas, interrupted in the early 20th century by the Progressive era and drug control and drug prohibition. So I think you can see the interest in psychedelics that appears in the 1950s and the 1960s as a revival of this 19th century period and indeed, a lot of the great touchstones for it, like William James, enormously influential on Abraham Maslow and the concept of the peak experience and self actualization and all these positive psychological languages in which the psychedelic experience was framed. But I think the other thing that happened, I mean, people talking about this, this period, you then tend to go into the psychedelic drug counterculture of the 1960s and that becomes the main story. I haven't really written about that very much because it's been so well covered and there are still plenty of people around who remember it and are writing about it firsthand. But I do think the story from that period that has been forgotten in terms of what we might call psychonautics is the 1962 federal FDA amendments, which introduced the Cafava Harris amendments, they're called, which introduced randomized control trials and placebo testing and the exclusion of extra pharmacological variables and all these strictures that now govern drug research and drug licensing. And I think that was really the end of the psychonauts because that was the point at which subjective experiences of a drug became irrelevant, at least in medical terms, if you're trying to make this drug into a medicine. Because a safe and effective medicine was defined as one that had been tested against the largest possible cohort of subjects and had demonstrated a really good, solid, repeatable effect with lots of biomarkers, markers. So you could establish what effect it was having at this dose and that dose. And psychedelics just aren't like that. They don't behave like that. People have very different responses to them. The extra pharmacological variables, which we now call set and setting, have an enormously powerful effect on the experience. So I think that was the point at which self experimentation disappeared from institutional science and medicine. And that was also the point at which people started to experimenting informally. And the really interesting figure I think there is Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who synthesized dozens, hundreds of psychedelic and psychoactive compounds, MDMA and 2 CB and so on. He was working independently. He wasn't trying to patent his drugs or get them licensed by the FDA so he could do what he wanted. So he self experimented with them. He was a very principled self experimenter. He said if you're a chemist and you're making drugs, you have to take them to understand what they're doing. And he had a little informal circle of people who self experimented with him. So he's the kind of the model for that sort of type of independent underground chemist who then in subsequent decades started to refer to themselves as psychonauts. And what I think is interesting about Alexander Shulgin's writing is it takes us way back to the beginning of this story, to Humphry Davy, when he first experimented with nitrous oxide. His report had a first section which was about the chemical synthesis of nitrous oxide. And then a section about experiments on animals and on humans and physiological measurements. And then finished with these accounts by all his friends, who included Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Sully, describing the effect, which is obviously, how do you square that with a chemical synthesis? You can't. They're completely different languages. They're not compatible, but you kind of need both. And so if you look at Alexander Shulgin's big doorstopping volumes of his chemical syntheses, he does exactly the same thing. He explains the chemical synthesis and then he gives subjective commentary on the effects and puts the two together.
- [37:54]
B
Well, there's a lot we can learn from this period. And I think that's one of the central kind of arguments or driving force of the book. The conclusion, conclusion of the book argues that, and this is a quote, a post drug, post drug world. The beginning of the book was before drugs. But a post drug world would not need a new language, but the recovery of an older one. I wonder if you could kind of. This is our next to last question, so I wonder if you could kind of wrap up by saying a little more about what you mean by that.
- [38:27]
C
Sure, yeah. I mean, it's quite a. When I say an older language, it's quite a recent one because as I mentioned, we didn't have this word, drugs, as a portmanteau word, only really appears in 1900 in the early 20th century. And it's an odd word if you think about it, because it doesn't quite mean psychoactive drugs. It means some psychoactive drugs, but not others. I mean, when we talk about caffeine or alcohol, we don't say drug. And it's very much loaded with. From the very beginning, it meant it was a shorthand for drugs of addiction or foreign drugs or criminal drugs. It's got all those mean meanings baked into it. So I think if we, if we didn't use that word anymore, what would we say? Well, we'd say things like stimulants and sedatives and psychedelics. We'd be a little bit more, you know, kind of specific in our meanings. If we had a term like stimulants that would include, you know, on the one hand, Adderall and prescription medicines, but also methamphetamine. We can't, wouldn't be able to put those in separate categories anymore. You know, we'd still obviously talk about controlled drugs and illicit drugs and we'd have those terms. So if we didn't use the word drugs, then I think we'd have a language that was kind of less, kind of didn't have that sort of uncomfortable blend of science and morality that the language of drugs and narcotics, which I guess is the sort of medico legal sort of version of that term. If we didn't have those then we'd be a little bit more specific in what we were talking about. And rather than having this small number of mind altering drugs in this illegal silo, we'd be able to patch them in and make sense of them in terms of all those other substances out there like nicotine and caffeine and alcohol. And I think if maybe if we had a level playing field of all those, we could probably devise more rational policies based on minimizing their harm.
- [40:36]
B
Wonderful. Well, well, that brings us to our traditional final New Books Network question, which is what are you working on next? What's the next big project?
- [40:52]
C
That's a very good question. The short answer is I have quite a lot of smaller projects and commissions and assignments following on from this and they may, which, you know, any of which may or may not morph into the next big project. But at the moment this is, this is kind of all consuming. But I'm very much looking forward to a new project emerging and I, I imagine it'll be something. This feels to me a little like a kind of capstone in my work on the history of drugs. It pulls together a lot of stuff that I've written before. So I imagine I'll be launching out into something slightly different next time. Time.
- [41:33]
B
Well, it, it, well it, it was for me it was an introduction to your work and it was absolutely wonderful. I am, I am hooked. So, so thank you very much. Oh, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [41:48]
C
Oh, real pleasure. Well, the holidays have come and gone.
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B
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C
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C
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C
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A
Upfront payment required. $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6.
- [42:25]
B
Months or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes.
- [42:28]
A
Per month when network is busy.
- [42:29]
B
See terms.