Psychonauts by Mike Jay review the drug-takers who changed history

Humphry Davy on laughing gas, Sigmund Freud on cocaine … how self-experimentation shaped science and art

Before writing this review, I got hold of some tiny canisters of nitrous oxide, filled a balloon or two and, watched by my bemused wife, breathed in the gas. It gave me no more of a buzz than smoking a cigarette. I must have been doing it wrong because, according to Mike Jay’s compelling history of narcotic self-exploration, it was when the chemist Humphry Davy began inhaling this newly discovered gas in Bristol in 1799, sometimes in the company of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that he started a revolution. While high, Davy declared that “Nothing exists but thoughts!”

This insight wasn’t new, of course. Bishop Berkeley had made it the cornerstone of his philosophy. Yet for Davy, it felt transformative. Another laughing gas lover, the psychologist William James, later observed that there are two types of people: the once-born and the twice-born. The once-born accept the world as it is and get on with it. The twice-born have a life-changing insight or vision. Some become questing, drug-ingesting “psychonauts” as a result – and it is they who form the focus of this fascinating book.

The medical applications of drugs have sometimes become clear only after their use in less formal settings. After Davy’s experiments, for instance, nitrous oxide first became a staple of vaudeville turns. Volunteers would breathe the gas, then caper about, while onlookers tittered. Then in Connecticut in 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells, who happened to be in one of these audiences, saw a participant injure himself but experience no pain. Wells introduced nitrous oxide into his work and thereby helped inaugurate a new era in anaesthetics. Similarly, after Sigmund Freud’s self-experimentation with cocaine in Austria in the 1880s, one of his colleagues adopted the drug as a numbing agent in eye surgery.

The reputation of drugs and their ability to shock has ebbed and flowed. Jay smartly signals one of the sea changes with reference to Sherlock Holmes. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle presented his detective’s cocaine habit as the exotic eccentricity of a bohemian. Then, in 1904, he said primly that Watson had “weaned” the great man from his “drug mania”. One reason for the shift in tone was that Collier’s, the company publishing Conan Doyle’s stories in the United States, was in the midst of an anti-drugs crusade. Broadly, Jay presents the 19th century as “the age of the individual”, in which almost everyone had a jolly time trying out new substances, and the 20th century as “the progressive era”, when things got serious.

Jay also believes that drug experimentation facilitated the birth of “the modern mind”. But there’s no rigorous analysis of what this might mean. Jean Lorrain’s ether-fuelled stories in the 1890s, we’re told, “anticipate” the stream of consciousness approach to fiction. Cubism and surrealism arose within a generation. But was this coincidence or influence? Certainly, Jay can name artists who were inspired by drug-taking. Many, of course, weren’t. Later he asserts: “The modernist art and culture of the generation to come, with its fractured and unfamiliar perspectives, dedicated itself to breaking through the veil of everyday reality to a world of pure experience.” But this wasn’t all modernists tried to do, nor did all modernism try to do it.

Nevertheless, the author’s central point, that the history of experimentation is more venerable and complex than many assume, is clearly right and not something you get taught at school. The complexities continue: the UK government recently announced its intention to criminalise possession of nitrous oxide. On the other hand, recent research into various drugs traditionally seen as illicit shows their promise in treating a range of mental-health conditions. Some even talk of a “psychedelic renaissance”. If that’s so, it won’t only be the psychonauts who have been twice-born, but the drugs themselves.

Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind is published by Yale (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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