"You do it to yourself" sang Radiohead

Well that was certainly true of some of the subjects of this episode.

 

Historian of the mind MIKE JAY returns to the Bureau to tell of the intrepid scientists, artists, writers and thinkers who were experimenting with psychoactive substances and recording their experiences in the Victorian 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.

 

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 ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide in the pursuit of knowledge during the 19th century counterculture.

 

For Mike's book: Psychonauts: drugs and the making of the modern mind 

 

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