Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic Hardcover – June 18, 2019

It is seldom I come across a book like this one. Despite that it is a topic so loaded, it restrains itself to the merely factual, allowing them to sing from between the lines. There is depth here for the researcher, with which to develop wholly new syntheses of how and why things have come to our current social passe.Yes, herein is indicated an obvious personal preference, but suffciently restrained not to put one in doubt of its honesty. Its notes and references are remarkably thorough. About the only thing that was missing for me was the likely pathway of dispersion among 16th Century European royalty, and therwith the associates of its supply chain.I know what it takes to do a lifetime of work on an esoteric topic. It is nothing less than inspiring to see one come to fruition with the full knowledge of a sense of duty to capture those truths for one's fellow humanity. Mr. Jay, I wish you well.

This book isn't just a history of mescaline. It's a history of our entire love / hate relationship with psychedelic substances. Jay covers everyone from Quanah Parker and James Mooney to Aleister Crowley and Alexandre Rouhier. I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone interested in the history of drugs and the psychedelic experience.

Writing as vibrant and interesting as it's subject. Favorite summer quarantine read so far.

...but falls just short. The half of the book dealing with centuries of sacred use of peyote by the native American tribes amidst the suffocating and cruel oppression of the US government is riveting. And the little known history of the doctors, collectors, artists, poets, priests, writers, socialites, philosophers, and pharmaceutical companies as they scrambled to profit in so many varied ways from the ingredient extracted from the peyote is fascinating and incredibly researched. Much mention is also rightly made of LSD as a rival to mescaline and the comparisons are fair. Unfortunately, the book loses its way and resorts to useless filler as it rambles through the escapades of William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda, and Hunter Thompson. Even the addition of a few pages on the brilliant and brave Alexander Shulgin are besides the point as it drifts into off-topic drug selections. Egregiously, the author makes nearly no mention of the far older and much more popular source of mescaline steeped in hundreds of more years of conflict between colonials and natives, the San Pedro cactuses of South America. So promising a text with an ultimately disappointing finish yet still an important and great resource for the parts it succeeds in.

The depth of research and accuracy of detail make this the single most comprehensive summary reference to anything related to mescaline.The style is purely informative and not the most entertaining, but 5 stars for the level of academic prowess taken to compile so much distinct pieces of the mescaline story into one readable, clear and unbiased research history.Well done!

We used to live in a world full of spirits, gods, Kami, angels, ghosts, guides, watchers... They had many names, but we knew we were not alone. Then came science which claimed to remove all these entities from the world. Now everything could be explained through non-conscious processes. Laws of nature are mechanical, we collect data and measure and construct models and suddenly we are in a very empty universe. But mind and consciousness remain a mystery. How can a conscious mind arise from unconscious laws of nature ? It is questions like these that makes the relationship between the mind and the body fascinating, and the interaction of drugs with human experience makes us wonder if science has locked us out of our spiritual inheritance. The contrast presented in this book with how peyote works as a person/spirit within the Native American Church and how the secular west seeks through drugs experience without belief, makes clear the spiritual void in the west. However the idea that drugs were needed for the West to still experience spiritual ecstasy is shown to be invalid through the rise of the Pentecostal movement. Ultimately the story of mescaline is the impossibility of finding God in a pill.

Engaging, thorough, and academically robust journey of mescaline's cactus origins to now - if you have any interest in drug culture, research, or all things psychedelic it's a fantastic read. Far from sensationalist, a rather sober account of the drug (no pun intended).

Meskalin war retrospektiv betrachtet das erste Psychedelikum. Der Schriftsteller Aldous Huxley schrieb in den 1950ern darüber ("Die Pforten der Wahrnehmung" und "Himmel und Hölle") und löste einen Interessenboom aus. Das zuverlässiger mit weniger Nebenwirkungen wirksame hochpotente LSD verdrängte jedoch in Folge der psychedelischen Revolution der 1960er Jahre diese hochinteressante Substanz aus dem Fokus der Öffentlichkeit. Über Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) wird sie in den USA (Native American Church) und Mexiko (Huicholes) und über San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi et. al.) in Peru in rituellen heilenden und spirituellen Kontexten noch eingenommen. Dort fing ihre Geschichte auch vor einigen Jahrtausenden an. Diese Kulturgeschichte von der Chavin-Kultur, über erste wissenschaftliche Experimente im 19. Jahrhundert mit Peyote, die Entdeckung und Synthese des Meskalins, medizinische und experimentelle Versuche damit und wechselnde Einschätzungen zur Einordnung des Meskalinrausches bis hin zu Verboten, den Romantisierungen echter und vermeintlicher indianisch-schamanischer Kulturen und damit verbundenem Tourismus etc. pp. erzählt der Autor in erstaunlich packender sehr gut lesbarer an der historischen Chronologie orientierter Weise auf das Wesentliche konzentriert und sich nicht in Details verlierend sachlich ausgesprochen fundiert. Damit gehört das ausgezeichnte Werk zur Pflichtlektüre aller an Psychedelika Interessierter, wie auch aller medizingeschichtlich Interessierten.

Very good