Books like The Nature of Drugs — picked by fans

This recommendation, I’ll admit, takes as its premise the hope that your partner on this walk might be Eli, the protagonist and narrator of The Beaut’, who—if I know him—probably snuck in his first read of the Huxley some time between the single day that he is remembering and the day he decided to tell us about it.

The question was, was there ever an edition of The Doors of Perception that wasn’t coupled with its customary companion, Heaven and Hell? Turns out there was, making this a mere 38-page volume of charmingly recollected mind expansion, and the next best thing to being there, which you kind of would be on your walk.

Kay Parley is a remarkable woman. Her book takes readers through her amazing life and the diverse experiences she encountered in an effort to make sense of her family history of psychiatric illness, her own institutionalization, and later her role as a psychiatric nurse and psychedelic guide. Against contemporary medical advice, Parley took LSD in Saskatchewan with Frances Huxley (Aldous’ nephew), and in this book, she explains how it gave her insights into her own excursions into madness and how to be a gentle guiding force for others who experienced disorientation, whether through illness or through mind-altering drugs.

This editorial team has worked tirelessly to promote informed discussions about psychedelic plant medicines. Peyote is one of their many published books that takes seriously the need to consider issues of Indigenous reciprocity, gender inclusion, cultural context, and environmental sustainability in the world of psychedelics. Psychedelic justice is not simply about consuming plant medicines but involves a reciprocal set of relationships that honour a long and often disturbing history of cultural appropriation and psychedelic tourism.

Anthropological fieldwork is not restricted to isolated indigenous people in remote areas. Anthropologists study scientists in university research labs. Langlitz did a remarkable feat: He immersed himself in the research activities of two laboratories studying psychedelic effects on humans and animals. Through this participation in everyday work, he delineated contextual sociological and psychological factors of what made it possible for researchers to be allowed to give healthy human subjects and patients with psychiatric problems mind-altering drugs in the lab and what motivates researchers to go into these frontier areas of research. LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca are studied again scientifically. What made that possible? Langlitz gives answers.

I was deeply impressed by how Psychiatry Under the Influence combines medical history, clinical knowledge, and investigative journalism about pervasive institutional conflicts of interest in medicine.

In Whitaker’s and Cosgrove’s case study of “institutional corruption” they trace the development over time of an alignment of the psychiatric profession’s “guild interests” in turf maximization and scientific legitimation with drug companies’ drive to market a widening array of drugs massively profitable drugs.

It is a fascinating illustration of the medicalization of life resulting from what I would call the “commercial construction of disease.”

Particularly eye-opening was the role of the American Psychiatric Association in constructing pseudo-scientific diagnostic categories of psychoses, panics, anxieties, depressive states, and the like for drug companies to capitalize on—and concealing, distorting, and fabricating research results that facilitate mass overprescribing of potentially harm-causing drugs.

This is the first of Dervla’s Detective Cormac Reilly books - and what a wonderful start to a new series.

Here is a book as dark and unpredictable as the early spring weather in Galway. Cormac springs to life, fully formed as a complex, honest policeman, uncompromising and determined to solve a case that has re-emerged after haunting him for over twenty years.

Back then he rescued a little boy and his sister from terrible squalor and abuse. Now grown up, that boy has apparently committed suicide and his missing sister has returned claiming he was murdered and accusing the police of a cover up.

Add to this, Cormac’s own problems with a new posting in Galway, a hostile squad of detectives and a relationship he’s frantically trying to hold on to. A wonderful, complex, engrossing book.

Although heists and team-driven stories are difficult to mess up, I rarely find a gem with fun, snarky, and interesting characters like those delivered by Bardugo.

Clever banter effortlessly drives the storyline from beginning to end. When you start to feel the characters are proving to be one-dimensional and predictable, they begin to change and evolve (albeit a bit slowly for my tastes), which made for a surprisingly satisfying read (I’m including book two in this observation).

Worldbuilding is intelligent enough to keep you trusting the author when you grow concerned that the ending will be unrealistically implausible. Okay, maybe that last observation is my personal pet peeve with modern authors, but Six of Crows pulled off the credibility factor reasonably well.

In All That’s Left To Say, dual timelines braid threads of a mystery together in a way that allowed me to contrast Hannah then and now and wonder not just about the mystery Hannah’s trying to solve, but about how she became the master sleuth she thinks she needs to be to get answers.

This contrast, as much as the mystery, drew me into the story and had me turning pages every time we jumped between past and present. Of course, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance also helped. How Lord imbued a single tie-straightening scene with more sexual tension than most kissing scenes might be the biggest mystery in this book.

Thrillers! At a time when the world feels so perilous, what could be more satisfying than a high-stakes story that’s fully resolved by the last page? Only one that’s also a triumphant revenge fantasy.

Delilah is sick of feeling scared. When she retaliates against her tyrannical stepfather and he winds up dead, it would be the perfect crime–if not for a hidden camera planted by her creepy classmate. Logan believes he and Delilah are meant to be together, and he’s not above using blackmail to keep her around. Told in dual POV between Delilah and the eerily calm Logan, The Obsession is fast-paced, riveting, and, if you’re new to the thriller world, an A+ introduction to the genre.

I found, as a history buff, The Struggle for Drug Reform to be an eye-opener about how America’s exceptionally high drug prices among other deficits in health care quality and coverage resulted from the past exercise of power by the pharmaceutical industry, the lynchpin of America’s “medico-industrial complex.”

I was impressed by historian Tobbell’s meticulously researched account of the industry’s strategic alliances with self-interested medical scientists, not just conservative political forces, and its use of anti-communist propaganda to fight off the threat of drug pricing regulations.

I personally found important her discussions of how the industry allied with the American Medical Association against universal health care, against FDA demands for evidence about drug efficacy and safety before allowing drugs on the market, and against the threat to its profits from generic drugs.