131. Scientists, Poets and Dissidents with Mike Jay

·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

them in amazing detail and then after that he went on and he you know sort of worked with the voltai

Bristol matters here. Hanna Thurger opens from a local angle, after reading Jay's book and noticing how often the city appears in it. Mike Jay is back on the show, and the conversation quickly settles into something more careful than a tour through drug history. Jay makes the case that drug science has never been only about lab technique. Description matters too: people trying to put words to thoughts, feelings, and interior states that science had not quite learned how to name. The hosts lean into that breadth and connect it to the psychedelic renaissance, where research can feel more socially aware and less boxed in by one discipline. Jay agrees, up to a point. He argues that money and institutions still shape what researchers can try, publish, and defend. Alexander Shulgin is the modern comparison. Jay hears an echo of Humphry Davy in Shulgin's books: chemistry set beside first-person reports at different doses. Shulgin, he says, worked outside the pressure to license compounds, satisfy pharmaceutical companies, or win FDA approval. That freedom gave his reporting room to breathe. The Davy lamp closes the loop as a rare case where lab insight moved cleanly into industrial use, partly because those cases were not common.

As heard by us

A measured history lesson on psychedelics, science, and the institutions around them.

Mike Jay's return to the Drug Science Podcast delivers a measured tour through psychedelic science, historical context, and the institutional pressures that shape what gets treated as legitimate inquiry.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want psychedelic history and research method in the same conversation.

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