The junkie’s goal with each shot of junk is to “get the nod on,” to get into the detached state of twilight sleep in which the long reveries of the opiates can unfurl themselves. In this state there is no pain, no regret, no distraction, and no fear. Heroin is the perfect drug for anyone who has been damaged by lack of self-esteem or traumatized by

The accounts given by his subjects are fascinating:

In his science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick imagined an alternative world in which World War II had been won by the Japanese and the Third Reich.8 In Dick’s fictional world, the Japanese occupation authorities introduced and legalized marijuana as one of their first moves at pacifying the population of California. Things

The practice of adding resin to wine in Greece to make retsina may well hark back to times when other plants, perhaps belladonna or Datura, also went into wine.

one of the places where the old goddess culture died, Çatal Hüyük, in present-day Anatolian Turkey, is the very place where agriculture may have first arisen.

Dr. Kurt Beringer, Lewin’s student and an acquaintance of Hermann Hesse’s and Carl Jung’s, became the father of psychedelic psychiatry.

Shamanism is the practice of the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and theatrical performance based on natural magic developed ten to fifty thousand years ago.

Militarily, Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt was a failure, but as an effort at the cross-fertilization of disparate cultures it was a resounding success. Napoleon took with him into Egypt an excellent library and 175 scholars who observed, sketched, and collected linguistic and cultural information. This effort ultimately resulted in the

invented honey;2 and the sacred ground on which the maenads, his handmaidens, performed their ritual dance was said to have flowed with milk, wine, and the “Nectre of bees.”