Person

Mike Jay

Bylines

Ecstasy’s Odyssey

When the creator of MDMA first experimented with the drug, he felt a mellow sensation that he compared to "a low-calorie martini."

by Mike Jay via New York Review of Books on May 2, 2024
That Ol’ Thumb: Hitchhiking

A review of "Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity."

by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 23, 2022
Man-Bat and Raven: Poe on the Moon

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.

by Mike Jay via London Review of Books on June 24, 2021
The Fascinating History of Mescaline, the OG Psychedelic

From prehistoric caves, through Aztecs, Mormons, Beat poets, Jean-Paul Sartre and a British MP.

by Mike Jay, Max Daly via Vice on May 15, 2019
Shaman's Revenge?

The birth, death and afterlife of our romance with tobacco.

by Mike Jay via mikejay.net on January 1, 2019

Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind

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Artistic representation of a man using psychedelics. The man's head appears like a matryoshka doll.

Brains on Drugs

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drug use to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

by John Semley via The Baffler on June 14, 2023

The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century

Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.

by Claire Bucknell via The New Yorker on April 17, 2023

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