Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism,” is driving this change, aided by transformational technology that has increased not just access but also drug numbers, variety, and potency.

Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up wit... See more

Led by public figures like Michael Pollan, Tim Ferriss, and even Joe Rogan, and leading institutions like Johns Hopkins, NYU, Berkeley, and Imperial College London, therapeutic psychedelics are going mainstream again