Cheiron’s Book Prize Committee is delighted to announce the 2024 winner, Mike Jay, for his book Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, published in 2023 by Yale University Press.

Mike Jay is an author, cultural historian, and curator who has written extensively on the history of drug use, madness and asylums, and literature and radical politics. Renowned as a leading specialist in the study of mind-altering drugs across history and cultures, Jay has written three previous books on the subject in addition to the widely praised Psychonauts. His writing also appears regularly in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and Literary Review, and he serves as an adviser on drug policy.

Psychonauts is an accessible account of the history of “drug” use from the late 18^th through the 20^th century, detailing how doctors, physiologists, writers, philosophers, and other thinkers, with varied motivations, expansively explored the ways in which many different substances affect the mind. It uncovers a forgotten intellectual tradition of drug-taking that was part and parcel of the early history of psychology. One of the book’s many strengths is its careful attention to the practice of self-experimentation employed by key figures exploring the new experiential world that various drugs seemed to reveal. Although in many other scientific fields self-experimentation had largely given way to more mechanical forms of objectivity, Jay demonstrates that in the mind sciences introspective reports remained of vital importance, particularly so when trying to understand the altered mental states that certain drugs could induce. While not unaware of the dangers such self-experimentation could and did pose, Jay also wants to highlight its importance to the investigation of these new psychic phenomena as well as the bravery, if occasionally foolhardiness, of the practitioners willing to become, in his words, “psychonauts” for us all. Taking deep dives into the primary literature, Jay also examines the various forces—especially the twin blows of Progressivism and the War on Drugs—that put an often premature end, not to astronauts’ outer expeditions, but to psychonauts’ inner expeditions.

On the prize committee, we praised the book as engagingly and vividly written and making a clear case for the relevance of the history of the psychonauts’ experimentation to our present-day fascination with psychedelics and novel cognitive enhancers.

The Committee also recognizes three other finalists for the prize: Rebecca Schwartz Greene, for Breaking Point: The Ironic Evolution of Psychiatry in World War II (Fordham University Press, 2023); Rachel E. Walker, for Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2023); and Ran Zwigenberg, for Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

The Book Prize Committee (John Carson, Vincent Hevern, Alan Tjeltveit, and Nadine Weidman) offers heartiest congratulations to Mike Jay, as do the Cheiron Executive Officer and members of the Review Committee.