Press kit

“The drug is the scapegoat; the wound is social.”

The book begins with a death — the author's younger brother, lost to a heroin overdose — and argues that a century of prohibition, not the substance itself, is what turned it lethal. From there it opens into the hidden history of humanity's relationship with sacred plants, and the case for the freedom of one's own mind as a fundamental right.

• The death that started it. Losing a brother to heroin, and why prohibition, not the drug, was the killer.
• The real origin of the drug war. Temperance moralism, colonial opium politics, and the commercial rivalry of empires.
• Cognitive liberty as a human right. How the drug regime cuts against the Universal Declaration.
• Beyond medicalization. Why the psychedelic renaissance risks a new monopoly — and why your mind is not a prescription.
• The oldest warning is Greek. In myth, madness comes not from ecstasy but from the violent resistance to it — Pentheus, Lycurgus, the Bacchae.
• What Europe is missing. A continental lens on a debate usually framed from the United States.