I am not a scientist.
I am a very persistent seeker.

Many of us think of space as the final frontier. To me, the mind has always been the real frontier that leads to all roads.

I have spent my working life in retail. Sourcing, merchandising, go-to-market calendars, sales operations. Thirty years of getting product from a factory to a floor on a date somebody promised a customer. These days I do that work through T-Suite Advisors. It is a good living and it taught me one thing that turned out to matter here: how to follow a supply chain all the way back to where the thing actually comes from.

So when I got curious about psychedelics, I did what I have always done. I pulled the thread.

I expected the trail to end somewhere in the 1960s. It did not. It went past the Summer of Love, past Hofmann and his bicycle, past Wasson and María Sabina in Huautla. It went past writing. It went past agriculture. It ended nine thousand years ago on a rock face in the Sahara, where somebody painted a running man with mushrooms sprouting from his arms — and then it turned out there was a second painting, six thousand years old, four thousand miles away in eastern Spain, made by people who could not possibly have been in contact with the first.

Two paintings. Two continents. The same idea.

That is when I understood I was not researching a counterculture. I was researching a human constant. The book that came out of that thread, How the World Gets High, does not travel country by country — it travels kingdom by kingdom. The whole shape of it, and the world it opens onto, lives at howtheworldgetshigh.com.

Along the way I kept a little A-to-Z dictionary of every name I ran into. That dictionary grew up into my second book, Street Names Exposed: 54 drugs, 677 street names, every one checked against DEA and NIDA sources, and the wild truth behind each of them. Facts first. And then, I promise, the wonder.

What I owe

The book is dedicated to Michael Pollan, for showing me how to change my mind. There would be a lot fewer books like this one without his, and credit belongs where it belongs.

The rest of the debt goes to the researchers who kept this work alive through fifty-six years when it was career suicide to touch it, and to the traditional practitioners who kept it alive for a great deal longer than that, at a much higher cost, and who are still too often the last people consulted about their own knowledge. Talk about way-showers.

What I am not

I am not a scientist, a clinician, a therapist or a guide. I do not sell anything but the books. Nothing on this site or in them is medical or legal advice, and there is a real difference between a substance being decriminalized and it being legal — a difference the book takes seriously enough to give its own page.

The book is a celebration and it is also honest. It reports the ballot measures that failed alongside the ones that passed. It says when an interpretation is contested. It says plainly when something is dangerous, because enthusiasm without honesty is just marketing.

Where I am

When I’m not traveling, I live in Beverly Hills, where I am at work on my next book. I am also an avid songwriter — two hundred-plus songs and counting, with new material coming out of the Los Angeles scene, on Soundcloud and Distrokid.

One great truth, and it is the one this whole thing rests on: no matter where you go on this blue planet you will find something in nature that is designed to expand your consciousness. That is not by accident. Let me show you the possibilities.