Bureau of Lost Culture – The London Psychonauts (29/04/2023)
Historian of the mind Mike Jay returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists, artist, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with such substances and recording and reflecting on their experiences in an earlier Victorian countercultural age and onwards. But the notion that researchers might partake of drugs if they were going to have something valuable to say about them became unacceptable.
We discuss how the debate around drugs became dominated by discussion about addiction whilst the devastating harm and addictive properties of legal intoxicants and aggressively marketed pharmaceutical products remained largely ignored.
And we hear about the first British psychedelic experiences of Aleister Crowley, W B Yeats, Havelock Ellis and Maude Gone along with some of the lesser known London Psychonauts huffing various gases including ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide in the pursuit of knowledge.