While it now carries a negative connotation, drug as originally defined was a totally benign word. It simply referred to any substance used in preparing medicines or, even more generally, to any dry good whatsoever: circa the eighteenth century, waging a “War on Drugs” would have made about as much sense as declaring a “War on Objects.” But by the late nineteenth century, that ordinary meaning had changed. “‘Drugs,’” Jay writes, “became a shorthand for a collection of substances that, when not used under appropriate medical supervision, carried the risk of self-poisoning, addiction, or mental illness.” By the mid-twentieth century, the very act of “taking drugs” was regarded as totally reprobate, outlaw behavior.
This rather drastic swing was, as Jay’s book makes clear, not just a matter of linguistic usage but of a broader cultural shift in attitudes about civilization’s relationship to the conscious mind. A century earlier, in 1850, willingly consuming some tonic, gas, or sticky resin with the explicit aim of reorienting ones relationship to reality (or what philosophers might call “consensus reality,” the common conditions of everyday experience that we generally take for granted as “real”) was not only accepted but widely encouraged. It was a mark of renegade, downright romantic, heroism. Jay’s conquistadors of consciousnesses include mesmerists, Masons, prodigious hash-eaters, sex magicians, esotericists, Charles Baudelaire, and William James, the latter of whom is depicted on the book’s cover in trippy tie-dye colors. The jacket design, like the book’s title—the word psychonaut did not enter common parlance until the 1970s, coined by the eccentric German philosopher, novelist, and memoirist Ernst Jünger—is deliberately anachronistic, an attempt to connect the current “renaissance” in psychedelic drugs, which sees potent hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT recast in the familiar terms of clinical therapies, to an even longer, stranger history.