In the late 1960s, legislators passed laws outlawing drugs people were taking to alter their consciousness. Those politicians had never taken those drugs, they only wanted to legislate consciousness. To me, that smacked of the prohibition of alcohol that was tried and failed, decades earlier.
I thought: they can’t outlaw consciousness: there are just too many ways to get high. I decided to assemble several hundred of those ways into a mini-encyclopedia. While I was writing that book, two other books were published that were a great help to me…