On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu review – a philosopher’s guide to psychedelics

What if Descartes had melted his brain on acid? Find out in this mind-expanding exploration of drugs and formal philosophy

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of& science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax& (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990”); and, at& least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is& not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a& tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as& familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves& and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it& (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things”).