Mike Jay is an author, cultural historian, and curator.
More about this author
Mike Jay is an author, cultural historian, and curator who specializes in the history of science, medicine, and the mind, particularly the cultural and historical uses of psychotropic substances. He contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. Jay is the author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, Mescaline, High Society, and The Atmosphere of Heaven. He has curated exhibitions, including the “High Society” exhibition for the Wellcome Collection in London, and acted as a historical consultant for the final season of the BBC TV series Poldark. He lives in London.
External
Orient Excess
James S Lee’s Drug Memoir Underworld of the East
The Quietus | January | 2022
Jay first discovered The Underworld of the East in the 1990s and was surprised it was real, since many thought it was a modern fake. The 1935 book, written by James Lee about his travels in Asia, describes dangers like tigers and bandits but focuses on his bold drug experiments. Unlike other dramatic 19th-century drug writers, Lee claimed drug use could be happy or miserable depending on knowledge, challenging the usual moral warnings of the genre.
Chacruna | August | 2019
An 1893 photograph shows a historic meeting between Quanah Parker, a Comanche leader, and James Mooney, a Smithsonian ethnologist. After an all-night peyote ceremony, Quanah gave Mooney a sack of peyote buttons, which Mooney later brought to Washington, DC for the first scientific studies of its effects. Quanah supported peyote as a spiritual path that strengthened Native identity during harsh reservation life. Mooney, moved by its meaning, spent his life defending Native religion and helping introduce peyote to Western science.
Peyote among the Aesthetes
Public Domain Review | July | 2019
In 1897, writer and doctor Havelock Ellis tried peyote, becoming the first person in Britain to experiment with this hallucinogenic cactus. Inspired by medical reports, he brewed and drank a mixture in a London apartment and soon saw dazzling, colorful visions. Ellis later described these experiences in medical and literary journals, linking them to art, culture, and growing interest in visual effects. He also encouraged artists and writers—including likely W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons—to try peyote, helping create an early psychedelic art scene.
Monatshefte für Chemie - Chemical Monthly | April | 2019
In the century since Ernst Späth first created mescaline in a lab, researchers have used it to study hallucinations, creativity, and mental illness. Aldous Huxley’s famous book The Doors of Perception made mescaline well known to the public. By the 1960s, scientists mostly switched to studying LSD instead. Today, mescaline research is tightly regulated, but many synthetic drugs based on its chemical structure are widely used.
Publications by this author
Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
Thames & Hudson | July | 2024
This book tells the global history of drug use, showing how every culture has its own everyday intoxicants—from coffee and tobacco to coca leaf and betel nut. Mike Jay explores ancient archaeological evidence, plant-based drugs in the classical world, early scientific experiments, and today’s war on drugs. He explains how drugs have served as medicine, religious tools, status symbols, and major trade goods, and how substances like tea, tobacco, and opium helped shape the modern world.
Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind
Yale University Press | April | 2023
Before the 1900s, scientists studying how drugs affect the mind often tested the substances on themselves. Their detailed reports inspired new ideas in psychology, medicine, and philosophy, and even encouraged the public to try their own experiments. But after 1900, drugs came to be seen mainly as a social danger, and this practice faded. From Freud’s cocaine use to William James’s nitrous-oxide insights, these early “psychonauts” helped shape modern psychology and our understanding of the mind.
A Global History of the First Psychedelic
Yale University Press | May | 2019
This book tells the full history of mescaline, a mind-altering drug used from ancient American cultures to modern times. Mescaline, found in peyote and other cacti, was first isolated in 1897, though Indigenous peoples had used it for thousands of years. In the 1900s, psychologists, spiritual seekers, artists, and writers experimented with it to explore consciousness and creativity. Peyote also remained important to Native American identity. Combining science and culture, the book follows mescaline’s influence on many famous thinkers.
Media by this author
Feature | January | 2024
Mike Jay’s Psychonauts explores how scientists, writers, and thinkers once used drugs to study the mind. Before the 1900s, many researchers tested substances on themselves and wrote vivid accounts that shaped psychology, medicine, and philosophy. Their stories also inspired the public to experiment. After 1900, drugs came to be seen mainly as a social problem, and this tradition faded. Jay shows how early drug explorers—from Freud to William James—helped build modern ideas about the mind and still influence today’s interest in psychedelics.
Feature | February | 2018
Jay looks at the beginnings of engagement with psychadelics in modern West and in the scientific paradigm.
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