Expanding Mindscapes A Global History of Psychedelics

The first collection of its kind to explore the diverse and global history of psychedelics as they appealed to several generations of researchers and thinkers.

Expanding Mindscapes offers a fascinatingly fluid and diverse history of psychedelics that stretches around the globe. While much of the literature to date has focused on the history of these drugs in the United States and Canada, editors Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock deliberately move away from these places in this collection to reveal a longer and more global history of psychedelics, which chronicles their discovery, use, and cultural impact in the twentieth century.

The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China. Along the way, they also consider how psychedelic experiments generated their own cultural expressions, where the specter of the United States may have loomed large and where colonial empires exerted influence on the local reception of psychedelics in botanical and pharmaceutical pursuits.

Breaking new ground by adopting perspectives that are currently lacking in the historiography of psychedelics, this collection adds to the burgeoning field by offering important discussions on underexplored topics such as gender, agriculture, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovations.

Erika Dyck is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry and Facing Eugenics; coauthor of Managing Madness, Challenging Choices, and The Acid Room; and coeditor of Psychedelic Prophets, A Culture’s Catalyst, and Wonder Drug. Erika is also a Board Member of Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plants and Associate Director of Chacruna Canada.

Chris Elcock is an award-winning independent historian of psychedelics who has authored Psychedelic New York: A History of LSD in the City along with several articles on the history of the American psychedelic movement.