Trips: How Hallucinagens Work in Your Brain

Trips shows, using color illustrations, the latest research, and bleeding-edge cultural analogies, how the still-mysterious hallucinogens may work in the still-mysterious brain. Written in language a general audience can understand, the book's tone is light and irreverent, yet at the same time deals with the drug culture in a serious way.

Trips offers readers a rare look at the social, cultural, historical, and scientific phenomenon of psychedelics-through the eyes of artists who've grown up with them, regulators who control them, federal scientists who approve and fund their research, and scientists who've spent careers studying them--and in the process fills a growing need for truthful information about drugs. For a generation, people have been worried about false horrors attributed to LSD-chromosome damage (LSD doesn't; coffee and aspirin do), suicide, madness, and flashbacks (no such thing). There are, however, real problems associated with hallucinogens, which until now have been unknown, ignored, or untranslated from the scientific literature. Trips separates the facts from the falsehoods and provides, through the combination of Pellerin's text and the artwork of legendary American artist Robert Crumb, a practical, entertaining, and yet rock-solid guide.