My latest guest is drug-history pioneer David Herzberg. In two important books—Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and the prize-winning White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (Chicago, 2020)—David has put pharmaceuticals at the center of addiction history in the United States. David is also co-editor of drug history’s flagship journal, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.

We talk about David’s fascinating journey through the late twentieth-century United States, heroin, methadone, White Market Drugs, how to talk to your kids about intoxicants, and David’s hope that we can make drugs boring again. It’s a great conversation.

As always the podcast is available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app.

Episode Outline

0:00-4:02: Introduction.

4:02-20:14: Early life, hard times as a Jewish kid in Arkansas, finally being recognized as a good student in Vermont, the possible influence of all of this on David’s scholarship, early interest in history, an eccentric high-school teacher.

20:14-41:35: Miserable at Harvard, dropping out, doing some very hapless wandering around the western United States, Eugene, becoming a tree planter amidst heavy drug users.

41:35-55:34: Getting out of Eugene and moving to Portland (Oregon), returning to Vermont and then going back to college, dumping science and then sociology for history, thinking about graduate school and the history of education.

55:34-1:18:22: Graduate school at Wisconsin, women’s history, getting interested in pharmaceuticals and how they were advertised, Paul Boyer, Judy Leavitt, Ron Numbers, heroin, methadone, drug education, and talking to your kids about drugs.

1:18:22-1:34:09: What David learned when he started researching drugs, making drugs boring again, debating whether drugs are special, the inspiration for White Market Drugs, and the Groundhog Day of prescription-drug epidemics.

1:34:09-end: Outro.

This is the fourth and final installment of Emily Dufton’s guest post drawn from the subject of her new book: Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs. Click the following links for Part I, Part II, and Part III. To hear my wide-ranging conversation with Emily, check out our podcast episode.

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This is Part III of Emily Dufton’s guest post drawn from the subject of her new book: Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs. Click the following links for Part I and Part II. To hear my wide-ranging conversation with Emily, check out our podcast episode.

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This is Part II of Emily Dufton’s guest post drawn from the subject of her new book: Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs. Click the following link for Part I. To hear my wide-ranging conversation with Emily, check out our most recent podcast episode.

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Today we begin a series of guest posts by Emily Dufton, who is also my latest guest on the podcast. There (starting at the 34:45 mark), we discuss the supposed John Ehrlichman quote that was published by journalist Dan Baum in 2016—and has since been widely circulated—claiming that the “war on drugs” was never really about drugs. The quote suggests that the drug war was always just a red herring to disguise the true intentions of the Nixon Administration: to crack down on hippies and Black people. As we discuss in our conversation, few things have quite the whiff of bullshit as that quote, and in this series of posts, Emily takes on that very subject. Enjoy!

-Isaac

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My latest guest is Emily Dufton. Emily is an independent scholar and historian who has written a lot about drugs over the years. Her first book, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017), told the roller-coaster story of the marijuana-legalization movement since the 1960s. Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs (University of Chicago Press, 2026), is about methadone maintenance and other forms of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) during roughly the same time period.

As Emily explains, most addiction researchers will tell you that the best way to treat opioid addiction is medication-assisted, yet this approach to treatment continues to carry heavy stigma and is underutilized in the United States. In her book, and in this conversation, Emily explains why. We also talk about being a writer, growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Nixon Administration, Emily getting hazed by Jerome Jaffe, and more.

As always the podcast is available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app.

Episode Outline

0:00-5:08: Introduction.

5:08-13:15: Academic versus popular publishing, book synopsis and inspiration, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) defined.

13:15-17:24: Allentown, deindustrialization, and opioids.

17:24-21:24: Researching MAT, Michael Massing’s The Fix, getting hazed by Jerome Jaffe.

21:24-29:15: The history of methadone, the Nazis, methadone maintenance in the USA, Vincent Dole and Marie Nyswander.

29:15-38:40: The US in the 1960s, the French Connection, heroin in Vietnam, Nixon’s declaration of “war on drugs,” the supposed John Erhlichman quote.

38:40-48:29: Nixon’s concerns about crime, Jeff Donfeld and Bud Krogh, Robert DuPont, Jerome Jaffe, the advantages of methadone, the very loud critics and methadone’s fall from grace in the 1970s.

48:29-1:10:07: The revival of MAT, the AIDS crisis, COVID-19, the story of Buprenorphine, heroin in the ‘90s, the Drug Abuse Treatment Act of 2000, the launch of Suboxone, Shaun Thaxter, Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals.

1:10:07-1:17:57: Why isn’t MAT reaching more people?

1:17:57-end: Outro.

This is the final installment of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII.

***

The end came suddenly.

On May 22, 1999, after complaining of headaches and exhaustion, Terence collapsed at home in Hawaii. He’d always suffered from migraines, but this was something else. His girlfriend, Christy Silness, dialed 911. As they waited for an ambulance, Terence suffered a seizure, then another. A CAT scan revealed a shadowy growth in the right front quadrant of his brain. A doctor diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme, a malignant tumor, going so far as to describe it as a “fruiting body” that spread “mycelia” through surrounding tissue. Terence was told he likely had less than a year to live. “No one escapes,” the doctor said.

It was something of a miracle he’d made it this far, aged fifty-three, considering how adventurous and mind-expanding his life had been. There were times, in the hash-smuggling days, when he’d had one foot in a hippie grave.

One of the pleasures of writing this book has been to watch him flourish and forge a path to becoming who he was. Not that he ever fell into line. Just that his personal freedom became more important than open rebellion.

It’s about freedom that Terence had so much to tell us. A way to describe his cruelly short life is as a quest for absolute freedom at all costs—freedom from war, oppression, grief, politics, even death. “Freedom on the broadest scale,” he said, at a time when the relationship between freedom and American-style democracy was being challenged on all sides.

You don’t have to buy Terence’s framing of things to see that he was substantially correct in his appraisal of establishment laws and norms that make mincemeat of certain unalienable rights. The war on drugs, the mass incarceration of our most marginalized citizens, and the expansion of American military power abroad and other authoritarian threats at home, were often on his mind. It’s why he wanted us to seize the consciousness-expanding reins. We have an obligation, he told us—to ourselves, to others, our country, the planet—to put ourselves in “control of the machinery that generates reality” and “create a community based on love and tolerance.” Hardly a radical idea, he knew, “yet incredibly difficult to bring into existence.”

A free spirit, freer than most, Terence was also painfully awake to the desolation awaiting each of us just around the corner. In his workshops and talks, through days and years of listening to others, he often repeated these famous lines of Andrew Marvell’s: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” not out of a sense of defeat or despair, I don’t think, but because he knew that whatever time is given to us is never enough. And so he contrived a rapturous new universe where none of it mattered, where we could bend death to our will and live freely, without regret, happily ever after. He wrote and said all he could on the subject, finding few ideas more electrifying than freeing our collective souls from their self-imposed prisons. This transcended tribe and country, politics and class, even the nature of reality, and insisted that all were equally deserving.

Psychedelics marked the beginning of that process. “It seems to me that we need all the help we can get,” he said.

We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, and the growth of plants. Freedom from control by mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. And this idea of freeing ourselves [is] the compass of the human journey. That which doesn’t free doesn’t serve.

In the end, everything’s going to be okay, he once remarked to a friend. “It’s a done deal... We’re going to make it.”

As his illness progressed, Terence wondered whether “a lifetime of recreational experimental drug taking” had anything to do with it. Or perhaps his “messing around with rocket fuel as a kid, or chemicals associated with collecting plants and insects?”

They must’ve been truly dreadful days. But his embrace of his admirers accelerated, thanks in large part to the burgeoning internet. More of his private life filtered into his correspondence. After undergoing a noninvasive gamma knife surgery, which shot beams of radiation at the tumor, he wrote on his website: “I am being taught many things and I welcome this. And I welcome the love and support of friends, this is a mad and wild adventure at the fractal edge of life and death and space and time. Just where we love to be, right, shipmates?”

Dennis, the man of science, grew weary of medical approaches to his brother’s illness. He thought a more radical intervention was required and wanted to perform a “shamanic surgery” with psilocybin and yagé. “I saw the tumor as an evil black spider extending its lethal web through Terence’s brain. He was an insect futilely struggling in that web, desperately seeking an escape.” Terence reluctantly agreed. He took a small amount of psilocybin while Dennis and friends, massaging Terence’s head, made the hypercarbolation scream, to little effect. “My brother obviously distrusted me and held himself back,” Dennis recalled.

In October, Terence underwent a craniotomy operation at the UCSF Medical Center, followed by experimental gene therapy. At first, the combination seemed to completely excise “the malignant spider,” removing all traces of the tumor. In high spirits, he decided to attend an ethnobotany conference in Mexico. But by January 2000, the tumor had metastasized, a rare development for glioblastoma, which tend not to spread beyond the brain. His doctors again gave him little hope.

*

“Alone again, I have gone hunting for those rare places and times, the nodes at which the layers of experience touch and may be fused together.” —TIM ROBINSON

I wondered what it was like for him. The wash of despair. So weakened he could barely walk. I wondered if, after all his talk of exalted states, he was at peace with himself, at peace with his life? There are many ways to think about death: as a pit cold and dark, as a portal to a sublime wonderland, as “a permanent cessation of all vital biological functions,” per Webster’s, as “the black hole of biology,” per Terence.

Proserpina, queen of the underworld in Roman myth, found a commonality among them all, spending half of each year in Hades and half on Mount Olympus, like snowbirds flitting between Beacon Hill and Albuquerque, their sense of home being a permanent state of impermanence.

As Terence knew, Proserpina symbolized the imperishableness of human life, or at least the idea of it, and for that reason was worshipped by initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Moses, never one to be upstaged by his pagan forebears, wanted to extend eternal life to all of us, making him the first truly democratic idealist in the Bernie Sanders mold. It’s said that while ascending Mount Sinai to receive divine instruction, he was awed to discover that “Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright as the sky,” hinting at the wonders to come. This vision of a perfect hereafter was, for Terence, as it is for so many, the most absolute and necessary fiction.

Whatever he was facing, Terence told an old friend, it made life suddenly “rich and poignant.” He could, initially, “see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf...a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.”

When asked what psychedelics had to teach us about death, Terence drew an analogy to Buddhism. “Taking plants and spending your life in esoteric philosophy and taking drugs is basically a meditation on death,” he said. “Buddhism is some form of learning how to die.” How so? “Nothing lasts. That’s one thing I think you learn from life, psychedelics, or just paying attention. Very little lasts. These Buddhists aren’t kidding: you are here for a very brief moment, and you can sit on your thumb and do whatever you want, but in fact the clock is ticking. What are you gonna do about it?”

He spent his final months at a friend’s house in Marin County. In April, Sara Hartley attended a farewell party there—she called it “the death party”—and said good-bye. Everyone knew it’d be the last time they saw him. Silent and remote, Terence, who could no longer walk, was confined to his wheelchair.

“I said, ‘Terry, I forgive you,’” Sara told me, explaining that they’d become estranged after La Chorrera. “He thought I hadn’t supported him enough. He always wanted everyone to get along. He was such a sweet and docile person,” she said. “And I wanted him to know that I forgave him. I don’t know if he heard me.”

On March 28, Terence suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. Dennis, at his bedside, struggled for words. “I love you,” he said finally. “I forgive you. I ask that you forgive me.”

Christy was the only one with him when he died, on the night of April 3. Around 2:00 a.m., Terence stirred suddenly, “lifted himself up from the mattress, and tried to say something. His face was transfixed in an expression of ecstasy. Then he settled back, let out a long sigh, and was gone.”

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This is Part VIII of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII.

***

Here, finally, we’ve reached the innermost Russian doll of this configuration, and it has a name: Brian C. Muraresku.

In his remarkable 2020 book, The Immortality Key, Brian excavates the possible psychedelic origins of Christianity. Early Christians, he reminds us, had a habit of incorporating pagan religious traditions into their new rites and rituals. One of these, more than plausibly, was an ancient sacrament of the Eleusinian Mysteries—a shadowy Greek cult named after a village near Athens—called Kukeon.

That initiates to the Mysteries drank an intoxicating beverage isn’t particularly mysterious. Dozens of pagan religions throughout the Greek and Mediterranean worlds during the time of Jesus drank beer-based or wine-based potions as “a shortcut to enlightenment,” Brian writes. But he also contends, based on recent biochemical analyses of ancient chalices, that Kukeon likely contained ergot, a psychoactive fungus found on wheat and barley that’s closely related to LSD. There’s no hard evidence. But why else, he wonders, would the Greco-Syrian saint Ignatius of Antioch, in an obscure first-century letter, refer to the Christian Eucharist as pharmakon athanasias, or “drug of immortality,” one capable of granting eternal life?

For two thousand years, Greeks and Romans pilgrimaged to Eleusis to ritually purify themselves with Kukeon, have visionary encounters with Demeter and Persephone, and descend to the underworld to die and be reborn. Only those who consumed Kukeon, it was said, could achieve immortality.

This was, to be sure, super-duper top secret stuff (“Whatever happened in Eleusis, stayed in Eleusis,” Brian says). But like every Las Vegas bachelorette, Greeks and Romans were terrible at keeping secrets. Also like Vegas, most of the big names wound up in Eleusis late in their careers: Plato, Socrates, Plutarch, Sophocles, Pindar, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. None was more shaken by the experience than Plato. After just one sip of Kukeon, the “godfather of Western philosophy,” Brians tells us, was “permanently transformed.…The latest in a long line of visionaries, men and women, with exclusive access to cosmic truths.” Plato even drops some not-so-subtle Eleusinian hints in his Phaedrus dialogue with Socrates, about “being initiated into perfect mysteries” where one “forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine,” and “blessed apparitions shin[e] in pure light.”

That, my friends, is how to pry me out of bed for Sunday services! Unfortunately, the killjoy Roman emperor Theodosius, a devout Christian, didn’t see it that way. He banned the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 CE, thereby sucking all the fun out of church. But remnants may endure. The Christian Eucharist, or “Lord’s Supper,” Brian credibly argues, is likely none other than a watered-down version of earlier pagan sacraments; whether these were psychedelic or not remains an open question. Complicating matters further is the fact that founding Church Fathers like Saint Augustine made it their business to stamp out any whiff of pagan idolatry.

There is, however, gobs of literary and scientific support for Brian’s thesis that psychedelics played a formative role in the emergence of Christianity. So much so that famed classicist Walter Burkert, an icon in the field of Greek cults, said back in 1985, “A ritual can persist when the original drug has long been forgotten and replaced by harmless substances. Perhaps the night of the mysteries was not so very different from an Orthodox Easter festival or a Western Christmas.”

Conclusion: Terence McKenna wasn’t the first to get stoned and invent a religion.

(Next time: The final installment and the end for Terence McKenna)

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This is Part VII of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI.

***

“All the home of my instinct, all my inward origin is there.” —RAINER MARIA RILKE

Terence is probably best remembered for his Stoned Ape Theory, which he articulated most forcibly in Food of the Gods. He wasn’t the first to propose a novel theory of human evolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in 1755, argued that humans had once lived idyllically “without history, without speech, without dwelling, without war, without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and correspondingly with no need to do them harm,” a state of pure innocence uncorrupted by property, society, and laws.

Terence wasn’t even the first to propose a novel psychedelic theory of human evolution. Aldous Huxley beat him to it in 1931, imagining an “ideal intoxicant” that would allow mankind to jump to a new cosmic level of consciousness:

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution—then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

What Terence did was turn the story of human evolution into a creative process full of evocative, meteoric, sane-seeming possibilities. In his version, when our remote hominid ancestors first migrated from African forests to savannas about 2.5 million years ago,1 they encountered psilocybin mushrooms growing in the manure of hooved game (presumably protoversions of elephants, elands, hippos, and giraffes). Psilocybin’s psychoactive compounds “directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain’s information-processing capacities,” resulting in “the sudden expansion of the human brain size” and fueling a great leap forward in language acquisition, memory, vision, smell, and sexual prowess.

It took a while, but around 100,000 years ago, thanks to this psilocybin boost, modern humans emerged. Most crucially, the mind-altering effects of mushrooms enlivened us with self-reflection, otherwise known as consciousness, thence our ability to ponder and pontificate and hand wring incessantly for all eternity. Our encounter with “the Transcendent Other,” Terence said, also “gave us the model for all religions to follow.”

Let’s unpack this Russian doll style.

That early hominids encountered and ingested psychedelic mushrooms throughout their evolutionary history is perfectly plausible. As is the notion that psychedelics played a role in the development of human thought. To then claim that this led to an explosion in consciousness and intellection disguises the fact that anthropologists and archaeologists have very little idea about how or when or why such immense mutagenic changes came about in the first place.

Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied human evolution for the better part of five decades and who, I discovered, doesn’t mince words,2 called the Stone Ape Theory “just a story.” “A lawyer can tell a story, but without evidence, it goes nowhere,” he told me. “Maybe it’s a crazy idea, maybe not. But what makes that determination is evidence. In science, we test ideas. The difference between an evangelist and a scientist is an evangelist will take an idea on faith, and a scientist will test it.”

Yes, Tim said, anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa 100,000 years ago, and yes, the brain began tripling in size starting back with Australopithecus about four million years ago. “Those are facts. But it’s a giant leap from those facts to speculating that certain kinds of mushrooms had something to do with it.” Anything beyond that, such as claiming that shamans of the Amazon basin used psychedelics “for thousands of years,” was speculative guesswork about an essentially unknowable past.

During his storied career, Tim has participated in several significant discoveries that have reshaped our understanding of hominid evolution. In 1976, he helped Mary Leakey excavate the Laetoli footprints left by early humans in Tanzania, which suggested that we walked upright long before we became fully human. In 1994, he uncovered Ardipithecus ramidus, or “Ardi,” a 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton (then the oldest known human ancestor) whose foot bones further enriched our understanding of bipedalism. A couple of years later, his team found the 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus garhi, the oldest hominin species known to make stone tools, probably for killing and butchering large animals, and possibly one another.

I asked Tim whether scientists generally accepted the big bang theory—as I’d heard it called—of cognitive development: the idea that a catalytic event (like eating magic mushrooms) set us on the fast train to Netflix and the combustion engine. “No, not anymore. Maybe thirty years ago that would’ve been more accepted. But the notion that there was an innovative breakthrough, a creative explosion, how would we recognize it? We don’t have the soft tissue, we don’t have a time machine, we don’t have video tape. We’ve got stone tools. And when you look at the record of stone tools, you see that it’s a record of intermediate steps, of increased sophistication. There may have been what [paleontologist] Stephen Gould called ‘punctuated equilibria’ across time. But there’s no point at which one would say, ‘Wow, a threshold has been crossed.’ That’s an archaic idea.”3

I was disappointed. I’d wanted Terence to be right about the Stoned Ape Theory—or right about the part he could be right about—which was his baby. As tenuous as he knew it to be, he considered it his one serious stab at scholarly esteem. So I was particularly taken aback by what Tim said next.

“You could test it.”
“Say again?”
“There are techniques now for extracting both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from botanical remains, some going back nearly a million years. Indeed, archaeologists have done it. Now they’re even recovering environmental DNA, not from the bones of people themselves but from DNA shed within cave environments. Hypothetically, if [eating psilocybin] were a practice that resulted in large amounts of mushrooms degrading in just the right environment—especially in places like a cave, where you have a stable temperature, a lack of interference, changes in the deposits through time—well, that’s a hypothesis you could test.”

I then called Laura S. Weyrich, an anthropologist at Penn State who specializes in exactly this kind of thing: analyzing ancient human and other hominid DNA from well-preserved cave environments. Her research is mainly focused on microbes, in hopes of better understanding the evolution of modern diseases, but it occasionally reveals a lot about hominid diets. In 2017, Laura coauthored a paper in Nature called “Plaque DNA Hints at Neanderthal Lifestyle” based on the shotgun sequencing of hardened tooth calculus found in two cave communities, one in Belgium and another in northwest Spain.

Both Neanderthal groups lived about fifty thousand years ago, right in Terence’s Upper Paleolithic sweet spot. And both passed lives of Paleolithic hardship—hunting with finely worked flint blades, scavenging what they could from forests and grasslands—and buried their dead. In addition to reindeer, mammoths, and the ferocious yet adorable woolly rhinoceros, they ate many plants and fungi, Laura found, including some presumably used for medicinal purposes. DNA from poplar trees, which contain salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, turned up in one Neanderthal’s teeth, as did Penicillium, a fungus that’s the source of modern penicillin (Laura thinks this individual was treating a tooth abscess and a stomach bug).

Both groups also ate mushrooms, the Spaniards a spongy, fanlike Schizophyllum commune, or split gill mushroom, which billows and whorls in golden clusters on decaying wood; the Belgians a dainty Coprinopsis cinerea, or gray shag mushroom, typically found in dung or wet soil at forest edges.

Alas, neither species is psychedelic. But Laura’s tantalizing findings are among the first to suggest that mushrooms formed a central part of hominid diets and were perhaps even crucial to their survival. What’s more, she and her team have revealed that our closest human relatives, the unfairly maligned Neanderthals, who Homo sapiens eventually replaced, identified and isolated flora from tens of thousands of other species, selecting plants with unique and complicated painkilling properties to treat specific injuries and illnesses.

From our very beginnings, then, we harnessed the power of plants to overcome our bodily limits and frailties (not too surprising, given the luxuriant pharmacy at our fingertips). It’s a vanishingly short distance, to my eyes, between self-medicating and self-transcendence.

I asked Laura if it’d ever be possible to determine whether ancient hominids ate psychedelic mushrooms? The answer, she said, may reside in our teeth.

“One thing that’s interesting about dental calculus is that it’s a lifelong record of bacteria in the body,” she said.

So, if you knew, for example, that psychedelic mushrooms caused a specific change in bacteria in the mouth, you could go looking for that. But calculus also captures all these other bits and pieces about a past person, like dietary information, or immune proteins that reveal whether they had a disease of some sort. If we had calculus from, say, Homo erectus, there’s a chance we could find plaque DNA that matches to a psychedelic mushroom.

It’d be a shot in the dark. Most organic remains don’t last very long. And finding anatomically modern humans that are even twenty thousand years old and well enough preserved to get DNA from is rare.4 “We have very few hominid remains.5 On top of that, they have to have dental calculus, and not everybody builds dental calculus. There’s no Homo erectus calculus that’s been published, or that’s even being sequenced, as far as I know.”

However, new advancements in proteomics and DNA-sequencing technology, which focus on capturing protein-coding regions of the genome, Laura said, may have more to tell us about early hominid diets.

“Proteins preserve much better in dental calculus and also allow us to go back further in time,” she said, as far back as a million years, according to some analyses. “This has mostly been explored in other contexts [such as dinosaur bones and eggshells], and not yet in human calculus. But let’s say you had a protein that was specific to a psychedelic mushroom, or even a molecule, like a fat or something, there might be double the chance of establishing a linkage. Again, if we had Homo erectus calculus.” That’s a very big “if,” but a plausible one. “It’ll be a hard question to answer, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. And it’s exciting to at least know we have some tools to get at it.”

The evolutionary story, of course, would still be far from over.

“Knowing that ancient humans ate psychedelic mushrooms wouldn’t tell you much about their cognition,” Laura noted. “It would only tell you that they ate psychedelic mushrooms, not that it led to any kind of leap in intelligence. But it’d be fun to speculate.”

To be continued….

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This is Part VI of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.

***

There’s also a question of how much Terence actually believed what he said. At regular intervals he denied believing in anything. “I would entertain any idea,” he once claimed, “but believe in nothing.” Belief, he told an interviewer, was a “stultifying force” that inhibited free-thinking and bred dogma. “The present at hand...isn’t to be believed; it’s to be dealt with—experienced and modeled.”

Of course, these statements themselves cop to a certain kind of belief—believing in not believing. Sometimes in the same interviews, he said things like, “I firmly believe that one of the things psychedelics do is...dissolve cultural assumptions.” “Democracy I believe in.” And “I believe...that history is progressive.” I often have a similar, Dylanesque voiceover playing in my head, whatever or whomever is standing in my way: “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar” (as the voice of a generation told a Royal Albert Hall heckler in 1966). “On second thought, you make a strong point” (as I invariably tell my wife after an argument).

Terence, in the manner of Kant’s ne plus ultra, or “nothing further beyond,” bemoaned the limitations of any organized system of knowledge while admitting simultaneously the impossibility of rejecting any system altogether. His beliefs were malleable, his footing in the world ambidextrous. In this respect, we’re not so unlike him. Our beliefs, characterized by doubt as much as by certainty, tend to shapeshift. Even Mr. Egghead Egg-traordinaire, Ludwig Wittgenstein, widely considered the twentieth century’s most important thinker, generally refrained from making definitive statements about truth or falsity and, by extension, what he did or didn’t believe, sensing it’d lead to theoretical cul-de-sacs. Terence, likewise. Much of the time we know so little about reality, he suggested, that we don’t even know how little we know. But we know enough to know that some of what we know, even if unknowable, we still sorta know, you know? All of us, I’d argue, are caught in the same bottomless, gravitational tug-of-war, both committed and uncommitted—polyamorous, if you will—to our beliefs.

In a 2023 paper titled “A Quantitative Examination of Half- Belief in Superstition,” psychologist Avner Caspi and his colleagues found a large discrepancy between people’s stated beliefs (in this case, that the number 13 or walking under ladders was unlucky) and their behaviors. Of 1,014 study participants, between 30 and 40 percent confessed to not acting in accordance with what they claimed to believe (the authors called them “passive believers”), while a majority said they “practice more than they believe” (these are “half believers”), meaning that while they rejected superstitions intellectually, their behaviors told a different story.1

It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: almost all of us are passive or half believers of one stripe or another. It’s not just that we sometimes fail to practice what we preach. Inconsistency is the norm. Maybe you’ll agree that this might help explain some of our most intractable social problems. As I wrote in my last chart-buster, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, transient beliefs that appear perfectly sane and sensible to one party can seem quite the opposite to another, especially when weighed against variable behavior.

Psychologist Leon Festinger pointed out something similar in his classic book about UFO cults, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956). Human beings, he said, have little trouble making mental adjustments when facts conflict with our most cherished beliefs. We simply reduce the conflict—what Festinger dubbed “cognitive dissonance”—by reinterpreting the facts. “The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

In other words, belief is a moving target, its whereabouts unknown. William James questioned whether we came to any of our beliefs purely by rational means; unreason always played a role: “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?”

Erwin Schrödinger, the brilliant Austrian physicist who calculated the “wave equation” of quantum mechanics, could often be found describing nature’s laws as though he were in the grip of a mystical rapture. We neither seek nor want rational explanations for lots of things, Schrödinger thought, simply because there aren’t any. When it comes to separating fact from fiction, we’re very selective truth seekers. Much of the time, we prefer questions of fact to remain nebulous and unresolved, trusting that faith, in many instances, is a better guide and that the unknown world is more real, or no less real, than the known.

Baseball, as it so often does, provides a neat example. I don’t know if you’ve ever been at a late-inning game, say, bottom of the sixth, top of the seventh, when the folks who’re keeping score begin to realize the pitcher is throwing a no-hitter. There’s the subtlest change in frequency, a little vibration in the air. Have you noticed this? It’s the kind of communal ambience that attends many high-stakes sporting events and is part of their appeal. I know the feeling every time Michigan beats Ohio State: an almost supernatural thrill that’s as illusory as it is real.2

Anyway, last spring my fifteen-year-old nephew, Conor, threw a no-hitter in a high school baseball game in Michigan. I wasn’t there but I saw the videos, and suffice it to say you could’ve sliced the tension with a knife. It was absolutely, imperceptibly electric! But even in bucolic, small-town Michigan, if you’d happened to mention something about a no-hitter while said no-hitter was in progress, if you happened to mention to the folks sitting next to you, in that benign yet nettling Midwestern way, “Hey, did you notice Conor Field is throwing a no-hitter?” or, god forbid, actually start cheering on my nephew while he was still in the process of (potentially) throwing a no-hitter, you’d better watch it, friend-o! Because even in pathologically chummy Michigan, not only will you hear about it, you may very well get publicly shamed and hounded out of your section and back to your minivan where you belong. Which is to say, you might find yourself in one of those odd but ubiquitous situations where a whole bunch of perfectly sane, sensible people— maybe even a stadium full of thirty-five thousand perfectly sane, sensible people—come to believe quite viscerally in the power of the jinx.

The point of this isn’t to make us feel crazy. Or stupid. Or both. It’s just to underscore how we sometimes fail to notice the inconsistencies in our belief systems, and how that makes it hard to discern actual reality. I’m including myself in this assessment. And Terence. Irrationality comes quite naturally to us, as naturally as our intermittent stabs at reason. It’s at least half the price of being human.

There’s not much evidence that we’re going to come to our senses anytime soon. Many of us probably prefer to keep it that way. Our faith in an earthly paradise, unchanged since time immemorial, or since Zoroaster first envisioned it, has its uses.

The writer Stephen Greenblatt notes that for most people, throughout most of human history, going back to Terence’s beloved Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, the idea of a “finite mortal world” has always been intolerable. The notion that we only get one “at-bat” in life (baseball, again, is metaphorically rich), one achingly brief sojourn on planet earth that’s gone in a flash, a life that for a vast portion of humanity is largely defined by suffering, before falling into a burning ring of fire, down down down as the flames go higher—many of us can’t accept it.

With all due respect to the Man in Black, it’s too grim and defeatist. Religion, Greenblatt writes, is an attempt to “negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise.” And to help us suffer less in the here-and-now. Irrational or not, myths of ultimate salvation exercise an eternal hold on our imaginations because the alternative hugely blows.

By the same token, Terence’s vision of a mycelial-engineered utopia promised to unfetter us from our present troubles and make our unhappy deaths recoverable. His was a quest, like Jesus of Nazareth’s, for everlasting bliss. Loathing traditional religion, he invented a new one, one that, ironically enough, explained away our mortal fears by way of a supernatural cataclysm found in most monotheistic traditions: “At this point, a shock is necessary for the culture, a shock equivalent to the shock of the Resurrection on Roman imperialism,” he said, tailoring the language of scripture into a modern metaphor for interspecies deliverance. “The myths that are building now are like the messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ. They are myths of intervention by a hyperintelligent entity that comes from the stars to reveal the right way to live.”

Of course, questions of belief become even more questionable once talk turns to hyperdimensional machine elves at the end of history. It may be impossible to know what Terence really believed, just as it may be impossible to know what we really believe.

And yet, he was clear about a great many things. Among them, that our ultimate concerns can be glimpsed only “at the edge of sanctified reality,” where the “thick veils of personal and societal ignorance” might be cut away so that we can experience the Huxleyan trouser folds as they’re meant to be experienced. The rationalist’s contention that a quantifiable, visible world is all there didn’t sit with Terence. We need more than logic allows, he knew, and he urged us to retain an enchanted view of reality. “What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises,” he said the year before he died. “I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle; the fact that that can happen to your mind... It means all kinds of things are possible. Nothing is to be assumed or prejudged.”

A friend likened reading Terence to the project of meditating. No matter how bad of a meditator you are—and I’m unquestionably among the worst—it doesn’t take long to see there’s more to consciousness than meets the eye, a much fuller expression of our daily needs and wants than what can be described by science. Exhibit A: Love. Exhibit B: Happiness. Exhibit C: What Buddhists call the transcendence of the self, which means owning up to the undeniable fact that our narratives about ourselves are inadequate to describe the intensely complex question of who we are and what we believe, or what kind of world it is that we inhabit. Terence understood this better than most. It was his faith in unseen truths that kept him going.

To be continued . . .

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This is Part V of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV.

***

By the mid-’90s, Terence was holding forth to paying audiences of two thousand people. The operative word is “paying.” To my knowledge, Terence held just one nine-to-five job in his life, and that one not for long. While he wanted as many of us aboard the End Times Party Bus as possible, he also needed the cash, especially now with two kids.

He found more of it in the early rave scene, freestyling his scattered thoughts on shamanism and our “cyberdelic” future over intolerable trance beats, the effect landing somewhere between TED Talk and barstool homily. According to one writer, Terence became “the intellectual voice of the rave culture,” his visionary images seeping into the minds of listeners via albums like Zuvuya’s Dream Matrix Telemetry (1993). It made perfect sense: music that’s ecstatic and transportive, dancers sweating toward illumination, “healing the inner elf through trance [and] dance,” as Terence put it. Another writer says that Terence is “likely the most sampled individual in the history of electronic music.”

However tempted we might be to dismiss his more bizarre thought experiments, Terence’s determination to have a lasting impact on the psychedelic subculture succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, in large measure because of his “better public relations” in the ’90s. Despite some misgivings, he’d become a brand, one with serious crossover appeal. He was a regular at Esalen, the Ojai Foundation, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Shared Visions in Berkeley. He spoke at conferences and seminars and workshops in Stuttgart, London, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Dover, and Mexico. He gave a multimedia event in San Francisco called “Alien Dreamtime” that dragged on for two days, with Terence shepherding a CliffsNotes version of Archaic Revival over a didgeridoo accompaniment.

His language of chemically altered states and ecological imbalance spoke directly to the countercultural memes of his day (and to our own), when the whole system was on the fritz. He saw before most the perversity of our drug laws and the portents and idiocies of viewing nature “as nothing more than a ‘resource’ to be fought over and plundered.” A half a century before it became tenable, he chided us for packaging psychedelics as yet another commodity to be bought and sold. We can also place him alongside the great utopian seers of the past and present, from Zoroaster to Trotsky, Mother Jones to Greta Thunberg, who dreamed of salvation not in heaven but here on earth, once its evils (or capitalists) miraculously passed away.

He was a spirited guide to it all. Expansive. Ballsy. Deadpan (“A delusion of grandeur is when you’re a helluva lot happier than other people think you should be”). Totally harebrained yet often the smartest guy in the room. A brilliant, singular weirdo. He got better and better. And he never weighed himself down with certainties, his descriptions of the world, in tandem with his half-imaginary theories, changing form and becoming, by turns, an abstract canvas. Little by little, he fashioned himself into a guru. By the time of his death, in 2000, Terence’s “psychedelic self-spirituality,” notes Christopher Partridge, had achieved a kind of ubiquity, his ideas strewn like “occultural spores . . . across the countercultural landscape.”

The dynamic in his marriage shifted. He and Kat began couples therapy. One issue, she said, was his dishonesty about “heroic doses.” She revealed something I’d only heard in snippets. In 1988 or 1989, he had a bad trip, a first sign that the impervious Terence might actually be pervious. “It was a very, very difficult evening. We worked through it, but it took all night. He was terrified. He said how nothing could mean anything. He felt like a child abandoned by the universe.”

We were speaking by phone. Kat’s voice, unforced and fluent, stiffened on this subject, a reminder that another book could be written from the point of view of the women in Terence’s life, about the pain and bitterness he often left in his wake. “I’d had an experience like that years before, but I dealt with it. Terence wasn’t embodied enough to be able to handle the perception. He said, ‘I can never trip with you again.’ And he didn’t.”

Although he avoided mushrooms for years afterward, Terence continued proselytizing on their behalf. “He was still telling people to do five grams of psilocybin alone in the dark,” Kat told me. “I thought it was disingenuous. I said, ‘You’ve got a lot of followers now and you’re telling them to do something that you wouldn’t do.’”

Truth and falsehood intertwined throughout Terence’s life. At times there was no clear distinction between the two. Not much struck him as out-of-bounds. “He could really tell a tale,” Kat said. “He was a narcissist and he embellished. And he knew when he was making things up. It was the source of a lot of disquiet between us.” They divorced in 1992. “He did a valuable thing for the culture by saying what the psychedelic experience was and that life is an adventure,” she said. “But Terence had some very flawed ideas.”

“Psychedelic shamanism” being, in my mind, the most flawed, since it’s built on historical claims that are patently false. “[Terence] simply failed to understand the importance of sociocultural contexts in the construction of ideas,” Partridge writes, “because he was keen to isolate the psychedelic experience as a moment of revelation that had broken into history from beyond.”

To be continued . . .

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This is Part IV of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II, Part III. Enjoy.

***

I was fishing one evening with my friend Isaac Campos, whose family vacations with us in Vermont. Isaac’s mother, Margarita, had just passed away, at ninety-two. We weren’t talking about that. We were chatting instead about Roland Griffiths’s latent mysticism, and whether a sense of spiritual rapture was part of the warp and weft of psychedelic drugs, or an appliqué sewn onto it by gurus like Griffiths and Terence.

Isaac’s a drug historian at the University of Cincinnati. I’ve known him my whole life. He has thought about drugs, and the drug war, and drugs in the public imagination for longer than anyone I know. While just a mediocre fisherman,1 he’s remarkably good on a subject that tends to sow a lot of confusion.

“You wanna know what I think?” he said from the back of the canoe.

“Go.”

It’s like seeing reality with fresh eyes, and it seems like God, or like how children see the world with all the wonder and astonishment that entails. Psychedelics do an end around on our brains’ normal functioning. We spend most of our lives with very dark, self-centered blinders on, lost in our heads and paying no attention to the marvelous reality all around us. Psychedelics rip those blinders off, allowing us to see the world in extraordinary detail. It’s a druggy version of Buddhist awakening, or for Christians, the beatific vision, an ecstatic experience that convinces people these substances can save the world, with the logical next step being to go out and spread the good news.

All at once I thought of my father. I remembered him not as I’d last seen him, angry and downtrodden at Markas’s house, but fishing on a lake similar to this one, in Michigan, when I was a boy and he was about the age I am now. We were fishing from a dock and along the grass in either direction for bluegill and bass. Minnows were on the bank breaking apart and reforming again like flocks of starlings. I caught my very first fish then, a runt bluegill littler than my palm.

My father, overexcited, was in water up to his waist helping me unhook it. He hung on to his fishing rod and mine as I stood and waited. The second fish I caught almost by accident, my mind adrift when the fish ran toward the dock and turned around and ran in the opposite direction with my line chasing after it. I was a daydreamer. Still am. That one he swept up into his hands before he let me unhook it and toss it back.

He wore the same old cotton shorts every day. Dirty white Converse. Beneath his cap his scalp was sunburned with hair swept over it. It was his method to have a cigarette and Miller Lite going as we fished. I was glad to be alone with him in the great whirring silence of summer. My feelings about my father even then were many and complicated, but I thought I understood his bitterness, based on what I’d heard my mother say about his father and mother and all the drama that had surrounded them.

It was getting dark when we turned and headed back to the house, up the beach stairs past the tennis courts, proud of having fished well. Droplets caught us at the porch. That night we woke to a thunderstorm so tremendous it drove us from our beds into the kitchen bathroom. The racket was insane, but my father told me to look out the window at the waving treetops. A giant spruce had blasted apart in the side yard, felling a network of wires. Lightning flared, the sky vaporizing soundlessly, before a roar like a crashing wave washed over us. When it was done, my father, more or less sober, smiled and said he loved a good Michigan storm, loved the noise it made and the smells it left behind. We were smirking at each other. I’ve recalled this moment often over the years, at a loss to understand how and when his life went wrong, wishing he’d come back to us as his old self.

*

“It’s a trip that still goes on,” Terence told an audience at Esalen on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Experiment at La Chorrera. “We never came down. Now I’ve given up on coming down.”

More so than his books, what gathered a community of followers around him was public speaking. After years of obscurity, Terence broke through to a dimension of semi-fame. “The bardic, shaman-trickster figure,” Dennis wrote, “became his beloved (and occasionally ridiculed) public persona.” Whereas Leary was too old and Ginsberg washed up, Terence was still young, smart, droll, and capable of speaking to everyone and bringing most of them halfway around to his way of seeing things. “Silver-tongued and a riveting speaker, he articulated the concepts that his fans groped for but could not express, and he did so in a witty, disarming way.”

In fact, before we go any further, you have to hear him speak.

Terence’s small, quavering voice, like someone talking underwater, was one of the many unforgettable things about him. He developed his own style, pre-Pee-wee Herman, of an archly effeminate chatterbox and borderline narcissist whose most constant activity was mythmaking. It doesn’t sit well with some ears: whiney, solemn, and possessing none of the Western flavor of his upbringing. He was more Neal Cassady than Hank Williams, less Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones than an emphysemic Alan Watts calling from the guts of Penn Station.

All the stranger, then, that he made his living at it for years, sermonizing and digressing and getting fairly carried away at psychedelic workshops and seminars around the world, elaborating on his occult theories while half joking that he embodied the lunatic fringe of an already fringe-y counterculture. He gave hundreds, if not thousands of talks through the years. Many were recorded, sometimes badly. But Kathleen launched a publishing company to sell the tapes and his books. There was a devotion to it, a tirelessness, that’s hard for me to fathom. He could carry on, mesmerizingly, for three or four hours— without notes!—immersing you so completely in his world that you forget, momentarily, how bonkers it is. They’re all over YouTube.

Take one, “Empowering Hope in Dark Times,” delivered at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles on either June 1 or 2, 1991, not long after the Persian Gulf War ended. Terence is at a poignant moment, with his marriage on the rocks and True Hallucinations nearing completion. He’s searching for some kind of answer, some way of keeping things afloat, trying to fathom what’s been left behind: “I want to reach back tonight and invoke a vanished tradition, get to the heart of it and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives to empower hope in the most dark of situations and even make these dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope than might ordinarily be the case,” he says in his opening lines.

The immediacy of this succumbs, however, to an insistence that we write off our current problems as transient and pile our eggs into the “psychedelic possibility” basket, so “we can begin consciously the process of distillation and sublimation, the casting of ourselves into [a] golden being, that luminous creature” within each of us—this sounds curiously like Solo Dark’s “Beings of Light”—greater than anything Kubrick or George Lucas ever dreamed up. Once again, the human world and the mythic, the totally reasonable and the totally ridiculous, stand side by side in a state of mutual incomprehension.

He goes on to quote T. S. Eliot, Heraclitus, William Blake, Sartre, Captain Ahab, Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow, and Thomas the Apostle. He was always quoting people, sometimes misquoting them, in mock academic style, to bolster his claims.

Yes, I’m aware I do the same thing, thank you very much. Comes a time when it’s impossible to resist, even when I worry I’m overdoing it. But who better to sum up Terence’s rhetorical style than Roberto Calasso (referring here to Franz Kafka): “From the first line to the last,” he was “on the threshold of a hidden world that one suspects is implicit in this world.” Or Richard Hofstadter (referring here to the progressive political tradition)?: “It wandered over the border between reality and impossibility.” Or Bobby Seale (referring here to the white establishment)?: “Ah, man, let’s go burn it down.”

You see? It simply can’t be helped.

In any case . . . Where was I? Oh right. Terence, among many other things, asks what the consequences might be if we fail to “reclaim our planet” from war, famine, “bonehead politics,” and the rest. Good question. But for someone who had so much to say, all too often, we are none the wiser for it.

To be continued . . .

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This is Part III of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. If you missed the earlier installments, you can find them here: Part I , Part II. Enjoy.

***

In the past year, I’d received emails from friends and acquaintances describing their experiences with psilocybin and LSD. My own having been fairly pedestrian, I was glad to learn of more compelling hallucinations and perceptual transformations, as well as the relief they occasionally provided from depression and anxiety, or just the ordinary malaise that strikes middle-aged parents.

But even as I warmed to these stories, I struggled to separate them from the more vexing, occasionally terrifying occurrences that filled my inbox. Whatever these drugs unlock, their effects are remarkably consistent. It’s not that one pattern fits all, simply that so many conform to what philosopher L. A. Paul calls “transformative experiences,” personal mutations and upheavals that, for better or worse, fundamentally change your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had the experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience. It changes your subjective value for what it is like to be you, and changes your core preferences about what matters.

I heard from about a dozen people, every one of them, for mysterious reasons, male. Here’s some of what they said:

W.S., twenty-one, suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, ate seven grams of psilocybin mushrooms in the presence of a psychedelic guide.

It began with multicolored particles floating in darkness. The particles then started to take different forms. The first thing that I remember is a cobra opening its mouth wide as if to swallow my soul. (Before this trip I was absolutely terrified of snakes.) Something about the snake however filled me with a kind of peace . . . There was an overwhelming sensation that this snake somehow represented my inner self. The one I had buried from years of social rejection and societal pressures. I somehow recognized the sensitive child people told me I used to be . . . This whole process was intensely cathartic. It was also very stressful, and I remember breathing heavily . . . Reality as I knew it started to fade away. I was confused and afraid and I didn’t know what anything was anymore . . . I came to several realizations about what I did and did not want out of life . . . This culminated in what I would describe as a sort of enlightenment/nirvana. I don’t mean to use these terms haphazardly, as I understand they have religious origin and are achieved through different methods, but I do not know of any other vocabulary that would encapsulate the peace and bliss I experienced in that moment . . . I also remember feelings of oneness with other people and the earth.

It didn’t end there.

An intense paranoia then set in . . . I thought I had entered into some sort of drug-induced schizophrenia . . . My frustration and fear was building. I remember pacing around and then at the worst point visualizing that all of my surroundings were slowly burning and melting around me. I thought I had reached the end of existence. I was going to end in fiery oblivion, partially for what I considered my sins . . . I slowly came out of the trip . . . Four months out from my experience I am less anxious, more excited about the future, feel more love for others and overall just have a general appreciation for life and the world I live in. To clarify, I do not believe I have been “cured” of anything. A big part of the relief has come from realizing there is nothing to cure.

F.A., fifty, dropped acid several times in college as a “cheap and an effective means of distracting ourselves on tranquil Providence’s fall nights,” until the inevitable happened:

I never succumbed to the prejudice that an encounter with the divine while in an altered state spoke eternal truths, so perhaps I was inoculated against having a spiritual experience. Most of my trips were saccharine, neon adventures through Wonka-like landscapes. Trips did occasionally get dark, however. One drove me to the edge of, perhaps, madness. I recall having to pee. I stumbled to the dorm’s bathroom . . . When I went to wash my hands, I noticed that the skin of my face radiated in the harsh overhead lighting. My face started to sallow, to jaundice. Then, as my hair greyed and grew uncontrollably long, my skin began to decompose . . . I couldn’t look away from my rapidly decaying visage. The transformation was captivating even as it started to terrify me. As my face shed layers of skin and my eyes receded into their sockets, a voice whispered to me. It was a voice delivered from within: “Look away.”

Just before my reflection reached its final decomposition, I managed to jerk my head away and the spell was broken. I remember hanging on to the cool porcelain sink, steadying myself and breathing deeply to calm down, unsure of what I’d just avoided seeing. I was afraid to look in the mirror again, but I had to make sure I hadn’t aged: Thankfully, my face returned to its normal self with no signs of sacramental rot . . . I often wonder what would’ve happened had I not turned away. Perhaps nothing. But the specter I saw in the mirror seemed to cross a threshold into madness. It still haunts me. I can imagine an alternative scenario where I hadn’t listened to that voice and saw my own death, in a sense. How close had I come to madness? Could I have held on to my sanity? I have never heard that voice again, but I like to think that that trip pushed me to heed my own instincts.

J.M., thirty-five, suffering from depression, ate three-and-a-half grams of mushrooms in a therapeutic setting.

A few serpent-like creatures, somewhere between an eel and a snake, with color-changing eyes, started to float into my field of view . . . They were black and their eyes would change colors between yellow, green, and blue . . . As I zeroed in on the red-eyed eel, a Jurassic era scene appeared directly in front of me . . . A Brachiosaurus was hanging out, eating leaves . . . Was the dinosaur me in a past life? Is the medicine about to run through my evolution of where my consciousness has been before it became “me”? Am I just seeing this because the long neck looks like a serpent and serpent-like objects are a common theme in visions? I had no answer and just accepted this is what the medicine must show me right now . . .

Everything was going black with bright neon colors shooting around. I was in space, not in any sort of spaceship or space suit, just flying through space by myself. I had a small red, flame-like heart where my real heart is. The red was fading, and the flame was turning blue. The bluer it turned, the colder I became . . . I flew by what looked like greenish-blue ripples in time. They were moving like a car moving past me on the road . . . Something was going on inside of these ripples, and it turned my blue flame a little red every time a ripple flew past me, with the flame quickly turning blue and me getting cold again after the ripple had passed by . . . I broke down crying for the first time on my journey. I was freezing and could not get warm because everything that [could] warm me up just flew past me. I was destined to float through space alone forever.

As he continued moving toward wherever the time ripples were coming from, J.M. struggled to stay warm. His only option, he decided, was to surrender to the cold and “be in the moment.” He eventually warmed himself enough to keep going. “I learned to be content with myself,” he explained. “Sometimes, I must find my own warmth from within.” Later, he read that warmth is “a metaphor for the inner light in everyone, which represents love.” He found this immensely liberating. “My first pearl of wisdom was that I have to practice being present in the moment and growing my inner light, also known as ‘love.’” Then:

I landed on the surface of a star . . . I was still alone but I was a little warmer. I looked over at my right hand and my two-year-old son was coming out of it like a genie appearing out of a bottle . . . My son was an extension of me, although I still knew he was his own person and is on his own journey. I jumped into solar flares that were coming out of the star, each was an experience from my life that would fade away . . . If I tried to lucidly think of a negative experience from my life, I could faintly see the experience, but the medicine would not let me explore it . . . This was a big takeaway: the past is the past and there’s no point dwelling on it; I must be present now . . .

My heart started to grow. It even looked like a cartoon heart instead of a flame . . . I felt warmer . . . I cried because I was alone and cold for so long and I found my wife, dog, and son in the vastness of infinity . . . I could have spent the rest of eternity huddled up on the star with all the other star particles. Huddled up to me was my immediate family and friends, next to them were their family and friends, and so on. I felt love for all of them. Living in this moment was permanent warmth . . . I came to the conclusion that the current moment is all you have; otherwise, you’re chasing the next thing . . . Every moment is its own experience.

The next morning, while packing his son’s lunch, J.M. burst into tears. “There’s a new feeling of empathy,” he wrote. “All issues feel minor, and I find myself saying there will be time for everything; time still felt infinite.”

To be continued . . .

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This is Part II of our serialized excerpt from John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. You can find Part I here.

Winter lengthened into spring and spring into summer. I was in Vermont with my family, fishing and swimming and trying to finish this book. I’d brought along True Hallucinations, wanting to read it again, plus ten grams of psilocybin mushrooms. I didn’t have a plan for the mushrooms. I kept thinking I’d take them as a reward for writing my last sentence, like James Caan’s celebratory cigarette in Misery. But my kids, then five and eight, were the wrong audience, and anyway it took another two months for that sentence to arrive.

Also a long time coming were the mushrooms. To say I’d raised them myself isn’t strictly true. I’d started off with one of those DIY grow kits whose instructions a lab chimp on his third martini could master. Somehow I’d botched the whole operation, fruiting an oily black mass that looked as though it’d bubbled up from an ogre’s toilet. With a strong assist from the McKennas’ Grower’s Guide, I rescued the next batch. Like any proud parent, I was so beguiled by the result that I trotted them out whenever an opportunity arose, thrusting into the hands of puzzled guests a five-quart garden bag threaded along the bottom with good white mycelium and bounded on all sides by sawdust-colored chords of mushrooms so soft and alive you might’ve taken them for sentient beings. Wonderful little tikes, those.

I jest, but it was a difficult time. Ignatz was still sick. He would heave up and shake like it was his last breath, gritting his teeth in pain. When I held him to me, I felt his heart hammering. At other times there seemed to be nothing the matter with him. Elio kindly offered to send yagé medicinal from La Chorrera. My wife, Cassie, had worked so hard and slept so little for a great part of the year that she often looked to be on the verge of crying. Nevertheless, the corporate vampires stirred, displeased with the extra sick days she’d taken to care for our son, and let it be known her job was in peril. We tried, out of habit, to force detachment from the more overwhelming parts and pretend like it was a vacation. How awful to think that, compared to so many, we’re the lucky ones.

“Is Iggy having a moment?” my daughter would ask.
“Yes,” Cassie said. “Give him space.”

Ignatz was heavy into Disney’s Fantasia then. It seemed to sooth him, so we put it on his iPad and he played it in a continuous loop. The film, as you already know, is a series of dreamy animated vignettes set to pieces by Stravinsky, Schubert, and others. The mix of over-saturated color and form is so extravagant it’s like watching a movie inside a planetarium. I’m pretty sure if you played it backward it’d still hold together narratively.

After its release at the start of World War II, Disney shelved it, then rebooted and repackaged the film, in 1969, capitalizing on its suddenly hip psychedelia. Bleak and beautiful and steeped in hallucinatory, religious symbolism (hence its countercultural appeal), Fantasia is far weirder and, in the Disney vein, more racist than I remembered. Terence had this to say about it: “One has only to recall the carefully choreographed dances of Oriental mushrooms in Fantasia to wonder whether some portions of the Disney production group might have been shamanically inspired.”1

Ignatz’s favorite part is when those cringey “Oriental” mushrooms, which, in addition to a Fu Manchu likeness, closely resemble hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, dance and sway to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, circling what looks remarkably like a budding Psilocybe cubensis.

How trippy is that? At a certain point, Ignatz will twine his fingers together before his eyes and, lost in his own secret joy, squeal until he drowns out all sound.

Love, grief, and mushrooms. I’d been thinking about all three for so long that they’d settled in my mind as one and the same. I see now that what drove me to write this book was in part a procession of deaths and their aftermaths that overtook my wife and me starting in 2019. I was no longer surprised when, on hearing of a friend’s passing, my imagination twisted it into a full sensory experience, not quite a visitation, but akin to a repeated vision or haunting, which I came to know as a “bereavement hallucination.” I’d see our friends in their final moments—in a Brooklyn apartment, on a Barcelona sidewalk—as clearly as if I’d been there myself, like Pip’s encounters with Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, though not frightening in any way. “The emotions here can be of various kinds,” Oliver Sacks wrote, “grief or longing for a loved person or place from which death or exile or the passage of time has separated one; terror, horror, anguish, or dread following deeply traumatic, ego-threatening or life-threatening events.”

A dear friend whose husband died suddenly in 2021 wrote to me of “just trying to sort of carve out a place where I don’t have to think about death.” It reminded me of Seamus Heaney, who described his poetry as an attempt to escape from “the silent things within us”—to replace pain with its opposite. “One weird thing about grieving, or about the stage of grieving I’m presently in,” my friend wrote, “is that I feel so hungry for any sort of visceral pleasure, like anything that might feel good for a second—I can see how this path ends in heroin addiction or sex addiction or maybe just ice cream addiction, in my case.” Instead, she planted a garden of zucchinis and tomatoes, with a birdfeeder that drew “goldfinches, woodpeckers, and a red-tailed hawk that dive-bombs the squirrels.”

We all know bits of this story, whether it’s ours or someone else’s. Even love, in the end, fails to find an answer to the inevitable tragedy of our lives. Grief isn’t whole but cut into many parts that move off and come back to you semiconsciously, again and again, without letup. No one can be responsible for them all. To get outside of ourselves in a way that allows us to think we might’ve been mistaken— that there is an answer to grief, and that we’re not stuck, forever, in the present—feels heaven-sent.

To be continued…

This week, John O’Connor’s new book, A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon, hit bookshelves nationwide.

On Tuesday I featured John on the podcast, and today I’ll begin publishing an excerpt (the book’s sixth chapter) in serial format. That is, nineteenth-century style. Which is appropriate, because, as John explains in this chapter, today’s psychedelic renaissance shares traits with the great American religious revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Below is a short introduction to the chapter that John sent along, followed by the first installment of the series. Enjoy!

Dear History on Drugs Readers:

In the spring of 1971, a ragtag crew of “psychonauts” -- explorers of psychedelic drugs and their potential to unlock the secrets of the mind -- plunged into the Colombian Amazon in search of obscure hallucinogens. Led by Terence McKenna, a brilliant yet troubled refugee from the Berkeley barricades, the group became convinced that a powerful combination of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT-containing yagé would hasten a global revolution. There in remotest Amazonia, the door to a new “dimension of absolute freedom” stood open, they believed. All they had to do was walk through it.

The “Experiment at La Chorrera,” as he called it, after the village where it took place, forged the cornerstone of Terence’s twentieth century psychedelic religion.

His was a profoundly ecstatic vision, millenarian at root, in which an unassuming fungus, psilocybe cubensis, would help ring in the End Times, leading to “an overall transformation of humanity into an entirely different kind of creature.” I’m not the first to claim that Terence made psilocybin and other hallucinogens the center of an influential religious and political movement, one inspired by the monotheisms he deplored and sharing many cosmological points, but with unusual sacraments and paths of healing. My own contention is that he retains considerable power and authority over today’s “psychedelic renaissance,” which is a religious revival framed in secular terms. His insistence that nature, if harnessed correctly, holds the seeds of human salvation, is the longest running con in the game. It remains alive and well in the modern cult of psychedelic science.

Terence died in 2000, at not quite fifty-four, of a malignant brain tumor. Here we find him at the end of his cruelly short life, contemplating the meaning of whatever insights he gleaned from psychedelics, including his intriguing yet unprovable Stoned Ape Theory, which held that psilocybin mushrooms played a crucial role in human evolution, giving our remote ancestors a cognitive jolt that brought us, in Terence’s words, “out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”

-John

CHURCH WITHOUT CHRIST

“Imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven.” —MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

—
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there is no truth . . . No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place . . . In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
—

This sounds a lot like Terence after La Chorrera. It’s actually Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood, getting into a pissing contest with Hoover Shoats over Motes’s heretical new religion; a “Church without Christ,” he calls it, heavy on relativism but light on mainline Christianity’s dogma and decadence. Their rift escalates. Motes, harvesting a lifetime of bitterness, commits vehicular homicide, before wrapping his chest in barbed wire, like Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, cleansing himself of all sin.

Even by Flannery O’Connor’s standards, Motes’s a bit out there. But on this score, he’s also evocative of a timeless American passion for spiritual reinvention. Religious historian Jon Butler has called the early United States an “antebellum spiritual hothouse,” with the old and the new, the wearisome and the weird, mixing incestuously together in a kaleidoscopic crucible. Catholic and Protestant doctrines alike cleared space for magic and occultism—astrology, clairvoyance, divination, witchcraft, exorcism, shamanic healing, worship of relics, the wearing of talismans and amulets to ward off evil spirits—much of which, in one form or another, persist to this day.

Religious revivals, Butler suggests, tend to flourish in times of combustive social and material change. The first two Great Awakenings swept over America’s colonies in the decades before and after the Revolutionary War, for instance, when dissident preachers like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards found adherents seeking more visceral, fulfilling connections to God. In Terence’s day, revivalism surged anew, driven by chaos and cruelty down bewilderingly loony paths. There was the flying saucer cult of George King, a London cab driver who claimed direct psychic contact with extraterrestrials by means of kundalini yoga; the “near-death experience” furor inspired by Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, which sold millions of copies; the free-love commune of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (subject of the popular Netflix series Wild Wild Country), which dabbled in attempted murder and chemical warfare; and the Sullivanians, a psychotherapy cult on New York’s Upper West Side that practiced a radical form of Freudian analysis, or as the police called it, “kidnapping” and “sexual exploitation.”

The first psychedelic revival meeting, you remember, was held on the Polo Fields of Golden Gate Park in 1967. Allen Ginsberg, whose opening benediction was something between a séance and a Hindu chant, called the inaugural Human Be-In a “mela,” or spiritual celebration. Subtitled “A Gathering of the Tribes,” it was comprised mostly of young white devotees of LSD. “Robed figures moved through the crowd with paper bags of Owsley acid,” writes Jay Stevens, while twenty thousand beatniks, activists, “pagan” Sufis, Hells Angels, Tarot-reading mystics, and Berkeley’s walking wounded—the “apostolic vanguard” of the acid culture—sat cross-legged in a semicircle around a speaker’s platform, imbibing sermons by Alan Watts and Tim Leary. According to Haight-Ashbury historian Charles Perry, rumor had it that “a flying saucer with good news” was soon going to land. At sunset, poet Gary Snyder blew and blew on a conch shell.

Ginsberg predicted a mass movement of “younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with new consciousness, and desiring of a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition, and war.”

Richard Alpert (later renamed Ram Dass) told the Los Angeles Free Press, “In seven or eight years, the psychedelic population of the U.S. will be able to vote anybody into office they want to. Allen Ginsberg? Sure . . . imagine what it would be like to have anybody in high political office with our understanding of the universe. I mean, let’s just imagine that Bobby Kennedy had a fully expanded consciousness.”1

Recalling the vibe a few years later, Hunter Thompson wrote of a “sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”

At some point in the afternoon, Ginsberg leaned into poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and whispered, “What if we’re all wrong?”

To be continued…

(Direct link to Part II)

My latest podcast guest is John O’Connor, author of A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon, which was published today (April 14, 2026).

This is the story of Terence McKenna, arguably the single most important figure in popularizing psilocybin mushrooms in the late twentieth century United States. In the early 1970s, McKenna traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of psychedelics and, in the end, believed he’d discovered the key to saving humanity. Though he is perhaps better known for his “stoned ape theory,” which posits the importance of psychedelics in the evolution of Homo sapiens. In the 1990s he spread his ideas through various publications and, most importantly, on the American lecture circuit, helping to reignite interest in these substances. All of this would eventually morph into today’s psychedelic renaissance.

In this episode John and I talk about McKenna, Colombia, writing, and our own adventures with these drugs. It’s a great conversation.

As always the podcast is available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app.

Episode Outline

0:00-4:09: Introduction.

4:09-20:22: Podcast critiques, the new book, psychonauts, McKenna and his mission, True Hallucinations, Roger Casement, La Chorrera, the “hippie trail,” Richard Evans Schultes, psychedelics in Colombia.

20:22-51:45: Setting the record straight, personal experiences with psychedelics, fun versus therapy, what LSD meant in the 1980s, “set and setting” and drugs, identifying with the Sixties during the 1980s, more on psychedelics and fun, do psychedelics have to be therapy?

51:45-1:05:39: Roland Griffiths, the challenges of psychedelic therapy, quackery, indigenous psychedelics versus the global market, psychedelics and violence in the Amazon.

1:05:39-1:15:48: On becoming a writer, what makes for a successful travel story, writing books versus magazine articles.

1:15:48-1:24:13: Regrets, last thoughts on the impact of Terence and Dennis McKenna, psychedelics and bullshit.

1:24:13-End: Outro.

Shall we take a break from the masked storm troopers invading American cities and rounding up our immigrant neighbors?

Maybe slip into another time and place?

1930s Mexico City, perhaps?

Ah, Mexico City. The perfect climate. The amazing architecture. The glorious food!

It’s still fantastic.

Except for one thing—all the Gringos.

Seriously. These days the city is utterly overrun by English-speaking invaders from the north.

I saw it with my own eyes last month. I had flown down for a week of research on the very morning the U.S. invaded Venezuela. But upon arrival, I quickly noticed this separate, ongoing imperial operation.

Sure, the invasion of Mexico City doesn’t involve warships and attack helicopters, but in some ways it’s actually worse than that.

You know what I’m talking about here.

That’s right: INFLUENCERS.

It all began at the height of the Covid lockdowns. The beautiful neighborhoods of Roma and Condesa were, and remain, ground zero of this phenomenon. Gringo telecommuters and influencers began moving in, and they’ve been driving up rents and the price of food ever since.

Last summer all of this ignited into full-scale, violent protests, some of them taking on a decidedly xenophobic flavor.

This is surely making many of my U.S. readers uncomfortable, especially those of you who, like me, stand firmly against xenophobia.

Buuuuttttttt . . . . what if we’re talking about Gringo influencers mucking up Mexico City?

It’s complicated, right?

Also, didn’t I say that I wanted to give you a break from the news?

I did, and I meant to, but as soon as I started writing about Mexico City, I got sucked back in. I swear, it wasn’t on purpose. I just wanted to comment on how annoying it was to see these beautiful old neighborhoods now overrun by the Gringo hoards.

For my wife and me last month (she came to meet me at the end of my research trip), the moment of clarity occurred when we stopped by a little bakery in Roma. This was meant to be a walk down memory lane. Back in 2014, she used to regularly take our kids (5 and 2 at the time) to said bakery. Back then it was small and quiet.

But things have radically changed over the last decade.

As we approached, we saw masses of people from a distance. And then the huge line. It looked like a brunch place in New York City on a Sunday morning. And it sounded like it too, with English being the lingua franca. Though in Mexico it seemed louder, more entitled, and, for us, just kind of embarrassing.

My (somewhat-hypocritical) thought was: Get the fuck out of here you goddamn Gringo invaders!!!

But it’s obviously not that simple, especially when you consider those protests last summer.

If Americans were marching through your local Latino neighborhood waving signs that said “learn English, respect my culture” while also smashing out the windows of shops frequented by those immigrants, you, dear reader, would surely be appalled. I mean, check out this video:

That is scary and disturbing stuff.

But somehow I understand where the protesters were coming from. I don’t condone it, mind you. But I get it. They feel like the rich foreigners are ruining something that ultimately belongs to them. Plus, all of this is happening as they watch their compatriots in the United States being demeaned, harassed, and abused by masked, MAGA storm troopers.

Though I’m sure the owners of that bakery that is now twice its original size, or those businesses under assault in that video, would have a different take on who these neighborhoods actually belong to.

             Chiquitita, chiquitita mía 
                   You belong to only me
                         That's the way it's gotta be
- Chris Montez (1960s Mexican-American pop)

My wife and I come at this from an especially interesting subjectivity: We are both first-generation Hispanic Americans. And, ironically, both of my parents were once immigrants to Condesa.

Yes, this was almost ninety years ago and a result of the Spanish Civil War. And my grandfather, who was on the fascist hit list, was literally running for his life. My parents were obviously a far cry from Matcha-sipping, twenty-first-century influencers.

But they were still immigrants. Indeed, Spanish immigrants in a country with a lot of accumulated (and understandable) resentment about Spanish immigration.

Of course those Spanish immigrants were more like today’s Latino immigrants to the United States than the current Gringo telecommuters in Mexico. Most of the Latino immigrants to the U.S. have a damn good excuse for moving north, whether because they are fleeing political violence, or corruption, or just a chronic lack of opportunity.

By contrast, Gringo immigrants to Roma and Condesa just look like the rich getting richer. They’re swooping in to take advantage of the lower cost of living and, in the process, making their relative prosperity seem even more pronounced.

Now, ordinary citizens marching in the streets and smashing some windows clearly rates a few levels below masked storm troopers violently kidnapping and deporting people.

But it’s still pretty bad.

This is not what I’d meant to write about today, though it’s certainly related.

I’m currently developing a project on drugs in 1930s Mexico City. It involves marijuana smokers, heroin traffickers, addicts, crooked cops, etc. It’s a story that takes place far from the tony streets of today’s Roma or Condesa. The setting for my story is the more downtown, and downtrodden, Colonia Morelos, a hot spot for drugs both then and now.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way events in Mexico and the United States—like today’s immigration battles—feed back on each other across the border, and in the middle of the twentieth century, Colonia Morelos was at the center of another one of these cross-border controversies. It was in this neighborhood that, during the 1950s, American anthropologist Oscar Lewis developed his “culture of poverty” concept—the notion that the poor cannot escape poverty because their “culture” prevents them from doing so.

This idea was highly influential (and controversial) in the United States during the 1960s and ‘70s, where it eventually helped support the right-wing assertion that the poor are primarily responsible for their own situation. This theory’s adoption by the Right was somewhat ironic given that Lewis was a socialist. It also demonstrates the kinds of distortions that occur when people, ideas, and goods move back and forth across the border.

Lewis’s work doesn’t deal much with intoxicants beyond alcohol, but the neighborhood he described has been center stage for street-level drug dealing since at least the 1930s.

And like Lewis’s “culture of poverty” or today’s immigration debates, the 1930s drug story is definitely a part of that distorting, transnational U.S.-Mexico feedback loop.

So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the coming weeks. But we’re out of time for today.

       Chiquitita mía, won't you hear my prayer
          So that when I awaken from my dream
              I will see you standing there

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My latest conversation is with Graham Harding, author of Champagne in Britain, 1800-1914: How the British Transformed a French Luxury (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Graham and I met last spring in London, where we talked about the history of champagne during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the fascinating history of “branding,” which came of age during the same period. Graham has not only studied branding with academic rigor, but also lived it during a long career in marketing prior to becoming an academic. Additionally, he has published A Wine Miscellany: A Jaunt Through the Whimsical World of Wine, which has been described as “a thorough and entertaining collection, sprinkling facts and lore on the history, culture, business and science of savoring and making wine.” This episode is filled with booze, business, and some great stories.

As always the podcast is available through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, and the Substack app.

Episode Outline

0:00-5:30: Introduction.

5:30-7:56: The unexpected bonuses of publishing Champagne in Britain.

7:56-18:21: Early life, Cambridge, working in publishing, advertising, and marketing.

18:21-28:25: Leaving the business world for academia, getting into wine, A Wine Miscellany, developing his dissertation topic, champagne and the origins of modern marketing, nineteenth-century “influencers,” product placement.

28:25-41:58: The science of champagne bubbles, the early history of champagne, “Sir Farter,” making champagne drier in Britain and the origins of the drink we enjoy today.

41:58-49:55: The birth of modern branding, the intersection of taste and social history, why champagne was better for branding than “still” wine.

49:55-57:16: The history of the term “branding,” why champagne became the drink of the aristocracy.

57:16-1:05:41: Graham’s family background and its possible relationship to his career path, going back to school in his 60s, working with William White, Christina de Bellaigue, and Peter Mandler.

1:05:41-1:16:45-: New collaborative projects, craft vs. science in pinot noir.

1:16:45-end: Outro.

Greetings from Snowpocalypse 2026.

As the world burns, I’m hunkered down with my family in our Cincinnati bunker, totally snowed in, with no way to get anywhere.

So I spent some time this morning doing some social media.

Wait, social media?

Yes, it’s true.

History on Drugs is making a real effort in 2026 to use Instagram to send out interesting—and perhaps even edifying—stuff to a world full of seemingly nothing but bad news. I put together a post this morning, in fact—a short excerpt from my terrific conversation last year with Willard Sunderland. In that excerpt, Willard talks about visiting the Soviet Union as a young college student in the 1980s:

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I’ve been in Mexico all week doing research on 1930s Mexico City drug cultures. I’ve been finding some amazing stuff that I’d like to eventually write about here, but first I need to finish this little mini-series I’ve been doing on cocaine, cannabis, and performance, so that’s what we’re going to do today.

On a side note, my wife and I went to see the film “Sentimental Value” last night at the Cineteca Nacional.

I won’t spoil it for you except to say that it takes place in Europe, mainly Norway, and it was profoundly beautiful. An incredible palate cleanser.

It turns out you can still make a movie without a single cop, explosion, superhero, or appearance from U.S. special forces.

Amazing! A movie for grown-ups! What a concept!

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