Mike Jay’s books include This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind and Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic.
The film Confessions of an Opium Eater, shot on a shoestring by Albert Zugsmith in 1962 and starring Vincent Price, opens with Vaseline-fogged images of a Chinese junk and a delirious Price voice-over (‘I am De Quincey … I dream … and I create dreams … out of my opium pipe’). This is Gilbert De Quincey, a presumed descendant, who wanders the seas as a captain...
My own experience with peyote was inconclusive. I now know that a confusing occasion I got involved in by accident in 2013 was in fact a Native American Church meeting. A friend had invited me to what...
In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to...
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