Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm with Mike Jay, freelance writer whose new book is a history of mescaline.

Mike, to start with, maybe it's a slightly impertinent question, but why should we

be interested in this, you know, wacky drug that makes people see strange visions? What is there

that makes mescaline deserve a book? Well, it's a wacky drug that makes people see strange

visions, which is very interesting in itself, I think, when you start to unpack it. I guess people

will mostly be familiar with it from Aldous Huxley's doors of perception. You know, Aldous

Huxley took masculine in 1953 and he and his psychiatrist coined the term psychedelic after that

to describe what it did. And that's usually taken to be the beginning of the psychedelic era, the start of the story.

So the reason I wanted to write a book about mescaline was that it's actually pretty much the end of

Mescaline's story because by that time it's kind of disappearing and being replaced by LSD.

But it turns out that it has a surprisingly long history and surprisingly

varied. So we now have this kind of tidy pigeonhole called psychedelic that we can put things

like that in. But it's very interesting, I think, to look at what mescaline was before

the category of psychedelic existed. And it turns out it was of enormous importance

to science to people who wanted to know how perception and consciousness worked and to understand

abnormal mental states at the same time it's very interesting for artists and for intellectuals

so you have these figures like jean pa Sartre and Walter Benjamin taking it back in the 30s.

Yeah, it's got an amazing kind of cast list this book.

It has, yeah.

And that's before you even get...

Porol Sartre was pursued by imaginary crabs for much of the rest of his life after taking Mascalin, wasn't it?

...