Psychonaut Hamilton Morris On Drugs After Prohibition

What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to legally use more substances in more settings?

- Nick Gillespie

No one is better situated to start that discussion than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a documentary series that has aired for two seasons on the Viceland cable channel. The show explores the variety of drugs that are available, how they work, and how we might best use them to fulfill our hopes and dreams.

In one early episode, Morris confounds the conventional wisdom by telling “a positive story about PCP,” a drug about which even legalizers typically have nothing good to say. He visits with Timothy Wyllie, an artist and visionary who used the drug as part of his creative process. In another, Morris travels to the Brazilian Amazon, where locals get high on a substance taken from hallucinogenic frogs.

Morris also does laboratory work at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he and his collaborators create new medicines for testing and research trials. In May, he sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to talk about how the drug war has warped the conversation about intoxicants and what a post-prohibition landscape will look like.

Q: Why are you so interested in drugs?