Mike Jay: “Cannabis was the psychedelic of the 19th century: people would take large doses and have hallucinations and very intense experiences”

Mike Jay is a researcher and cultural historian who has been working on the subject of drugs for over 30 years. He began writing about substances in the late 80s/early 90s, when 'new drugs' such as Ecstasy/MDMA, Special K/ketamine and other substances were first appearing on the dancefloors. Jay was an active participant and an observer as electronic music and substances became mainstream, increasingly uniting urban subcultures at rave parties and, later, at organised events.

This phenomenon opened up a new field of journalistic and literary interest for him, through which he created a faithful portrait of the evolution of drug culture in the United Kingdom and, by extension, in the world. But his fascination with the characters who inhabited the “twilight zones of history, culture and the human mind”, as we can read in his website, made him go further, publishing several books on the subject.

CannaReporter® met with Mike Jay in Lisbon for the launch of “Psiconautas”, his 13th book. In this work, published in Portugal by Zigurate, the researcher recalls the scientists who, until the beginning of the 20th century, experimented with substances on themselves or on known 'guinea pigs', in order to study their effects in the various areas of medicine. These were the original 'psychonauts', who would later give way to the current ones.

Mike, it's an honor to be here with you after so many years of following your work.

Thank you very much! I'm very happy to be in Lisbon.

When will this last book, “Psychonauts”, it went out?

In the UK, it came out in early 2023 and in paperback in 2024. It was published in the UK and the US by Yale University Press, so it is an American book. But it is also in Spanish, Arabic, Korean and now Portuguese, which I am very excited about.

Mike Jay was in Lisbon for the launch of his 13th book, 'Psiconautas'. Photo: DR

You have been writing about drugs, psychotropic and hallucinogenic experiences and the relationship between humans and these substances for a long time. You started in the 90s, as far as I know, at the beginning of the drug movement.raveHow old were you at that time?

I was in my early twenties at the time. But it was before that, in the 80s, that I personally discovered cannabis, LSD and mushrooms – but back then it was, let's say, a fairly small subculture. In the 90s, what struck me was that it was no longer a subculture, it was a mainstream culture. In the UK it was said that half a million people were taking MDMA every weekend and going to clubs. raves. That's why, at that time, it seemed to me that we should talk about the issue, not just to the small community of drug users, but so that everyone would understand what was happening.

In your presentation of the book here in Lisbon, you said that you thought that,at the time,drug use was already a very important thing and it was going to be even more important in the future. Your prediction has been confirmed…

Yes, I think so. When I first started writing about this, it was a minority interest topic. But now, as you can see, it is a topic mainstream. Everyone is realizing that we live in a culture where the line between what are considered 'illegal drugs' and other drugs is blurring. Everyone is interested in microdosing or psychedelic therapies or, in the case of cannabis, it is even available in edibles and people are using it in different ways and for medicinal purposes. And this is merging with the world of traditional pharmacy and medicine.

As you say, many people consume now, but we are still under the prohibitionist system in most of the world – and in some countries it is still a very repressive system. If society has changed so much, why hasn't the law kept up?

I think politicians, politics and the law are always the last to change. I don’t expect the law to change until it somehow changes. But when I first started writing about this, the line was very clear: there were legal drugs and illegal drugs – legal drugs you buy in a pharmacy or with a prescription; illegal drugs you buy on the street. But now there are so many things in between: the internet, social media… There are all these grey areas between what’s legal and what’s illegal. So I think the landscape is changing, but I don’t think politicians want to acknowledge that.

But many are also consumers themselves.

Yes, it is true. One of the interesting things about the US is this system where small groups of consumers can make proposals and change the law. It is funny that the US, which has always been the big driver of global prohibition, which initiated it and enforced it, is now also the country where citizens say: “No, we want to be able to buy cannabis legally”. It is an experiment that has been going on for several years and is becoming more and more established.

“Whenever drugs were mentioned in the media, it came with a health warning. The tone was always ‘don’t do drugs’, or ‘drugs are really bad’. I wanted to fight against that.”

When you started, was it difficult to publish on these subjects?

Yes, in the 90s, the options were very limited. Many people considered drugs a bit of a dirty subject, a bit of a dishonest one. “No, we don’t want an article about drugs, that’s not good for our image.” It was quite limited. You could only publish through independent publishers and only a few articles. I think that’s changing, but it hasn’t changed completely. The gatekeepers of our media are still suspicious of drugs and very concerned; they don’t want to look like they’re promoting them.

When we write about drugs, there’s always that fine line: are we promoting drug use or are we informing and educating? How do you draw that line?

I would say that not all of the books I write contain my personal views on the legalisation of drugs, for example. It’s important to find a voice to communicate with readers, but what was interesting to me, especially in the early days, was that there were books that were aimed at the drug subculture, of course – Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary… Psychonauts wanted to read books by psychonauts about psychonauts. That was always the case. But also, at a more academic level, there was a very different view of the origins of the drug control system: it was all top-down. They weren’t interested in the experience of drugs, they were interested in how it was managed. That was really the voice. And whenever drugs were mentioned in the media, it was with a health warning. It was like the tone was always “don’t do drugs”, or “drugs are very bad”. I wanted to fight against that, I wanted to write something that would be for everyone: something that would be interesting for psychonauts and contain a lot of new information that they didn't know, but also for people who had never used drugs. I wanted to write something that would explain the subject to them. In this way, it would show the connections between drugs, other important issues and culture in general. That's what I wanted to do: find a voice that was neither for nor against drugs, and that would be accessible to everyone.

Have you ever been accused of promoting drug use?

That's a good question. I've been very involved in drug policy reform work. I worked with the Transform Drug Policy Foundation as part of the board of that organisation, which was, and I think still is, the leading NGO in the UK in favour of legalising all drugs. So that's always been my personal position and I've not tried to hide it. But I've also not tried to get that message across to everyone all the time.

Back to your book: through these fascinating figures that you bring together here – some of whom you've already written about before – you show the boldness of these scientists and the importance they had for the advancement of science. But why a book about them?

Partly because, as you say, it's a fascinating subject, and it's not very well known. People think that drugs were invented in the 60s, they don't know that there's a much longer history. And I think that's really interesting, especially now that science is very objective... Scientists don't take drugs themselves, they just look at brain scans of people who take drugs and talk about neurochemistry, which is interesting, but it's also a little frustrating to me. So I think it's interesting to look back and show that there was a time in science when people were talking more personally about that experience. But to me, it's also about the fact that people talk a lot, particularly in psychedelics, about finding your lineage and your ancestors. And people worry that we don't have a tradition of this in our culture and that we have to go to the Amazon to find other people who have traditions and ancestors. But I mean, actually, we have our own lineage. We have always been taught that drugs are something foreign to Western culture and science, and I wanted to show that no, this is not foreign, and that it has always been an important part of our culture. It is an important part of our ideas about modern science, especially in experiments to understand the mind. And there are so many interesting stories in Western history about how these drugs came into our culture and who adopted them… So it is also to say to people who use drugs, that we do not have to look for our tradition outside. We have our own tradition.

And our own substances and plants, right?

Yes. And also chemicals. For me, the beginning of this story was the discovery of nitrous oxide. It was amazing to people that this gas, just made in a laboratory, could be inhaled deeply and have an incredibly intense and profound experience. What does that tell us about the relationship between the body and the mind? How can a lung full of gas produce these kinds of mystical experiences? This is the story of Western science and Western culture.

And therefore you speak aboutJacques-Joseph Moreau (Moreaude Tours), the Hashish Eaters and the Club des Hashishins, which was promoted by Moreau.  

Yes, it's possible.

Who brought together all these writers and artists so that they could report and portray what they felt in the experience with hashish – at that time, the dawamesk that they used to eat?

Yes.

Moreau, an early 19th century psychiatrist, was a firm advocate of first-hand experience and wrote about it, even saying that in order to study the effects of hashish, you had to try it, right?

Exactly.

And you also talk about William James and other historical figures in science. Who is the most striking character you have encountered in these years of research, related to substances?

I think Moreau is very interesting because in a way he is very scientific, very modern, very progressive. He doesn't believe in religion, he believes that there are different states of mind and different states of consciousness. He is always looking for a material explanation, a scientific explanation, but this takes him into very strange territory. And he was a very bold self-experimenter. His doses of Dawamesk are very high. To me, what's interesting about all these hash scenarios is that really cannabis was the psychedelic of the 19th century: people would take large doses, two, three grams, orally, and have hallucinations and very intense experiences for many hours. When Baudelaire describes the different phases of the rise, the peak and the fall [in The Artificial Paradises[1860], it’s very similar to what people say today about the psychedelic experience. And I think we forget that, because nowadays cannabis is something that you might smoke or take in a small dose, but these were very serious experiences. Moreau was very interested in the mind, he was very interested in the connection with mental illness because he was a psychiatrist. But for him, it wasn’t just a medical issue; he also wanted to understand the experience correctly. He wanted to give it to writers and artists and people who could describe it as fully as possible. And people look at that and they often think, “Oh, that’s Baudelaire or Dumas, that’s a literary scene.” And this is something that I’ve found many times in history, when you find these literary drug scenes, you look a little bit closer and there’s a scientist or a doctor who discovered the drug and passed it on to his literary friends. So he’s one of my favorite figures. Another figure I talk about in the book is James Lee, who is very interesting to me. He was not a scientist, he was not a doctor, he was an engineer, a working-class British character who got a job in India and while he was there he discovered all the local drugs, like cannabis, and he also met Indian doctors who taught him about cocaine and morphine. And this became his hobby for 20 years, working mainly in Asia and discovering all these different drugs, experimenting himself and producing his own body of knowledge. So, drawing on Western medical knowledge and also using indigenous knowledge with great interest, he brought them together and used self-experimentation. It is very interesting to me to think that, apart from the doctors and the scientists, there were ordinary people at that time who were going on these voyages of discovery with different psychoactive plants and chemicals.

“I think scientists always think that science moves only in a scientific, logical, rational way. But science is part of culture and culture changed very quickly in the early 20th century.”

Doing research, in the purest sense of the word, right?

Yes, exactly.

And regarding the role of women, what can you tell us about female participation in this discoveries?

It's very interesting. When you start looking back in history, you don't find many women in this field, because really, in the 19th century, scientists were all men, doctors were all men, and most of the reports are from men. But then you have to dig a little bit deeper, and you find that there are women present, but it was very difficult for them, socially, to write about their personal experiences with drugs. So when you find the ones who did, and who were very brave, very independent and very strong, they become some of the most interesting characters.

Can you give us some names? 

Yes, the woman I’ve written most about is Maud Gonne. She’s well-known because the poet WB Yates was obsessed with her, and they both worked in magical practices, spiritualism and the occult. They both used cannabis and other substances like chloroform in their magical practices, which was very unusual for a woman at the time. She wrote about this in her memoirs and was very explicit about it. I think she’s a very interesting modern figure, and I’m sure there were many other women like her at the time, but we don’t have their writings. And gathering women’s histories is a long process. But it’s starting to happen. Other people are developing this research in very interesting ways.

Perhaps they wrote under male pseudonyms. 

Yes, it's possible.

And we will never know…

Yes, exactly.

Because many of the users and visitors of 'Turkish parlours', in the 19th century, in the United States, for example, were women.

Yes, that's true. We have The Hashish-House in New York, by Harry Hubbell Kane… And he says that there were also private cabins in these places where women could go and not be seen by everyone.

So is it to be expected that we will find more writings from women, perhaps disguised as men?

Yes. We also find women participating in experiments that are being conducted by men and whose report is written by men, but if we look a little further back, we see that, in fact, in the experiment there were also women.

“This word – drug – as we use it now, did not exist until the 20th century. But as soon as it became established, it immediately had many negative connotations.”

[Albert] Hofmann, for example. It was his wife who prepared the first LSD cookies for them to try, and she actively participated in the experiment.

Yes, and Susi Ramstein, his assistant, was the first woman to take LSD and was very important to its development. And also Gordon Wasson and the discovery of mushrooms. Valentina Wasson, his wife, was really the inspiration for him to start his study and knew much more about the history of mushrooms than he did. They worked together, but when it comes to writing the big papers, we only see Gordon Wasson's name, we don't see her name.

Coming back to your book and the bridge it builds between the current scientific method and this era, when self-experimentation was even considered fundamental by some scientists. What led to the non-experimentation or the more strictly clinical approach, in which doctors refuse to experiment with their subject matter [when this could give them very valuable information]? Why has science changed so much? 

I think scientists always think that science moves only in a scientific, logical, rational way. But science is part of culture, and culture changed very rapidly in the early 20th century. That's when we started to get the idea that drugs were a problem. Drugs including alcohol, I should say - which actually, if you look at this conversation at the time, is mostly about alcohol. And we know that that led to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States and the control of alcohol here. So drugs are just a small part of a much larger story. But at that point, a kind of demographic of the drug user, or the alcoholic, starts to develop, and people start to realize that. They become a category of people, and that's a problem. People who have health consequences, who have other issues... When you start to get the idea that people who use drugs are a problem, that means that doctors and scientists don't want to identify themselves as part of this "problem" community.

And that’s how, when it started to change, the term “drug” also changed its connotation. Can you tell us a little about that?

Yes, in the 19th century, at the time I portray [in this book], drug is a very general term. It means anything you buy in a pharmacy: that's a drug. Then, in the early 20th century, when substances like cannabis, cocaine and heroin started to be taken out of pharmacies, then yes, people started using drugs in the sense that we use them now. It's really an abbreviation. It means dangerous drugs, addictive drugs, and also 'foreign' drugs. People start thinking about opium, which was the main drug in every pharmacy and suddenly it becomes a Chinese, foreign substance. With cannabis in the United States, people start to identify it with the Mexican population and call it marijuana to make it seem more foreign. This word – drug – as we use it now, didn’t exist until the 20th century. But once it became established, it immediately had a lot of negative connotations. It was a bad word. And once they were criminalized and outlawed, it also came to mean illegal drugs, criminal drugs. It became the property, not of everyone, but only of a small criminal society. One of the interesting things about writing about ‘drugs’ in the 19th century is that we don’t have that, we can put it out of our minds, and we see cannabis or cocaine as something that’s on the pharmacy shelf, along with everything else.

What about the term 'psychonauts'? ​​You explained that these were scientists who experimented with drugs to expand and study human consciousness. But now that has changed. Who are today's psychonauts? 

Yes, 'psychonauts' is a term that comes from a novel by the German author Ernst Jünger. In this novel – which is a novel about the future – he talks about this special type of scientist called 'psychonauts', who take these drugs and bring their visions back into science. The term was then adopted by the psychedelic counterculture. I think Jonathan Ott was perhaps the first person to use the term 'psychonauts' and then it became a word that people who experimented with psychedelics used to describe themselves and their personal journeys. So I wanted to take this term back and say that psychonauts are now a separate type of person from scientists, but back in the 19th century, scientists were psychonauts – they were the same people.

What do you think about 'real world evidence'? Do you think science should look at current users and study the data they can bring forsociological and evenclinical research? Do you think this data should be collected and considered? 

I think it's very difficult to do that in the way science is currently constituted. It's very impersonal, very objective. You can read all the papers on neuroscience and you'll never find anyone saying 'I' or talking about themselves. That's not the language of today. But as you say, in the social sciences, people are studying it more deeply. There are a lot of studies of people using psychedelics in non-Western cultures and indigenous cultures, but also here in Western cultures. And many of the social scientists who are doing this are also involved. They are participants and also observers. So I think that the 'hard science', neuroscience, will always be too limited. But I think people who work in that field also recognize that that's a problem, because they're trying to study altered states of consciousness, they're trying to study a subjective experience, but they're not using subjective language. So I think we can find that subjective language elsewhere. We can find it in the arts and culture; we can find it in people who write about science. That's also what I'm trying to do: contribute to that dimension, which I think 'hard science' has lost.

And make the connection between both.

Yes, exactly.

Many people are now using cannabis as a medical solution, and there is actually a lot of data from people who have been experimenting on themselves. So this is an important issue, because the data that exists from people who have been experimenting over all these years could be collected, organised and used, but it's been systematically neglected. 

If we want to convince scientists, we can't go by individual experiments. We want large data sets. We want large groups of people. So they can say, "This was given to a thousand people and this was the result of this study." If one person says, "This is my experiment," that's not considered science.

What if there are a thousand people?… But the thing is that the plant is complex and each person takes different things, which would make it even more difficult.

Precisely.

—

Margarita Cardoso de Meneses writes according to the new Orthographic Agreement.