On Drugs!
A Pre-Pub Day Round-Up | Plus, a Pub-Day Livestream Virtual Launch, Tomorrow, September 23
On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality will be published tomorrow, Tuesday, September 23, 2025, by W. W. Norton/Liveright. We’re in the middle of a somewhat nerve-wracking media blitz, and rather than hide from it (my natural instinct) I’ve decided to join it by offering, here, a summary of the book’s reception and ramifications so far.
Most importantly, please note that I will be hosting a virtual launch, in the form of a Substack livestream, tomorrow, the book’s pub day, at 20:00 Paris | 19:00 London | 14:00 New York | 11:00 Rio Linda / Elverta / North Highlands. It will be a freewheeling AMA session for paid subscribers only. I’ve never done such a thing before, and am as anxious as a laboratory mouse, but as Robert Redford told Maureen Dowd when she rebuffed his efforts to cast her in a cameo role: we’re all shy and you really just need to push past that. So be there! (He did not convince her.)
The New York Times ran a profile of me yesterday, by the formidable Emily Eakin. The photographs, including one of those cool new live-motion images they’ve begun rolling out on their homepage, are by Elliott Verdier — we had an awfully enjoyable séance photo at the Place des Vosges. Among other boons this profile brings, it caused our Hinternet subscription numbers absolutely to skyrocket! Oh man my phone was buzzing right off the hook all day yesterday. Numerous others on Substack kept writing to me to inform me that they were also getting subscription boosts of their own just in virtue of their presence on my recommendations list. Dang. The lamestream media’s not so lame after all! Welcome to all of you who arrived here via the generously placed link in the profile. For the rest of you, go read it now!
The Guardian ran an extremely positive review of the book a few days before that by Stuart Jeffries, veteran critic and author of, um, Mrs. Slocombe’s Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly. I might take issue with Jeffries’s claim that I am a “tough-minded analytic philosopher”, but besides that he really gets it all just right (I had wanted to joke that I think this claim meets the UK standard for libel, but I did not want even the hint of seriousness to seep through the joke’s cracks, since, obviously, I like Jeffries and am grateful to him for this review). My favorite pull-quote:
[Y]ou don’t even need to take magic mushrooms from some geezer in a Dutch head shop (as Smith-Ruiu did) to melt your mind… [Y]ou could try reading this extraordinary book, whose riches I can only hint at in this review.
Hinternet Managing Editor Olivia Ward-Jackson and I recorded an episode of our Symposion podcast, in which she poses all the right questions about the book, and I struggle to answer them. Watch it!
In all honesty I am still looking for the right way to talk about this book, which threads together personal memoir, intellectual and cultural history, and, okay I admit it, at least some amount of “tough-minded” philosophical argumentation. It’s the personal part that is the hardest for me, since, for one thing, the thoughts and experiences described belong to a very different moment of my life, recent yet distant, which I almost have trouble now recognizing as my own. For one thing, the events described belong to a period before I was a Christian. I mean, I was already shuffling around in the narthex, but, tergiversating doofus that I was, I continued to hold out some hope for the discovery of answers to the profoundest existential questions entirely from within the immanent spheres of nature and of human society. I now believe, deeply, that such hope is in vain. Yet the real difficulty in my current relationship to this book is even more elementary: the personal stories I recount concern my passage, so to speak, through the valley of the shadow of death. I was sad and scared in a way I simply no longer am, and I worry, now, having allowed my public self to be anchored to those stories, that I myself will remain anchored to them in a way that doesn’t really match the current reality of my life. These are not reasons to not read the book; on the contrary they might help to cast it in a happier light, as recounting a stage on life’s way, rather than describing its end-station (which is where I really thought I was,in the depths of my despair circa 2021-22), and as coming with a happy ending that is only subtly hinted at within the book’s physical covers.
If you are someone I know personally, and I have been evasive with you when you’ve asked me about this book, I have two things to say: (1) Sorry, but also (2) Please stop pushing. I think I need to practice talking about it with strangers first, so that, perhaps someday, I might be able to talk about it with you. Or maybe I’ll just move on to other projects and we’ll never talk about it. Either way it’s not you, it’s me.
(I’m assuming my publishers are fine with me writing stuff like this. After all, I am a writer, not a merchant, and if it is my responsibility to help to sell this book, it seems to me that I can best do so simply by continuing to be a writer, which is to say by evolving, doubting, changing my mind, moving on…)
Anyhow the interview with Olivia helped me to make a great leap forward in learning to speak with confidence and clarity about this project — at least to strangers (and I guess of course also to Olivia herself, a friend). Our interview supplements, but does not replace, this earlier interview I did in May with our other Managing Editor, Hélène Le Goff (no competition, mesdames, you both play a vital role here!)
The indefatigable
has written no fewer than five installments in a long-running and free-floating critical engagement with my book, all under the clever title “On On Drugs”. You can find them here, here, here, here, and here. Before too long I hope to write the sort of reply his careful attention warrants, perhaps under the title “On ‘On On Drugs’”. Mary Jane and I also did a livestream together, both of us looking perfectly gonzo and obviously enjoying ourselves. Watch it!Let’s see, what else? Publishers Weekly calls the book “profound”, and promises that “open-minded readers will have much to chew on.” Kirkus Reviews calls it “a layered philosophical investigation of drugs and their complexities”, and “an innovative application of philosophy to matters ineffable, intoxicating, and altogether interesting.”
Kristen Roupenian writes of the book:
An insightful work of philosophy supported by a surprisingly powerful memoiristic arc, Justin Smith-Ruiu’s new book works better than any psychedelic could to reopen the doors of perception and cast humanity’s long-standing hunger for mind-altering experiences in a new and thrilling light.
William Deresiewicz says:
It makes perfect sense to me that Justin Smith-Ruiu has written a book about being on drugs, because his intellectually psychedelic writing always makes me feel like I'm on drugs myself. So it is here. Disparate domains of mind are brought together. Strange, compelling entities appear. The world feels altered yet uncannily familiar. Something groovy happens to your brain. It all adds up to a higher lucidity that leaves you feeling permanently wiser.
And as for Christopher Beha:
Like the best psychedelic experiences, On Drugs estranges the familiar, familiarizes the strange, and returns us to reality (whatever that is) with a broadened sense of the possible. Justin Smith-Ruiu is simply one of the most interesting thinkers alive, and he has found an ideal subject for his peculiar brand of brilliance.
And that’s more or less all I’ve got, so far. I’m sure there will be plenty of echoes to come, and I will do my best to relay whatever else comes in — even in the supremely unlikely event that someone should say something negative about it.
Otherwise for now, order the book, read it, and enjoy it. And come to the virtual launch tomorrow!
—JSR
I only ever had one dose of THC and found it rather boring... I have to say I'm intrigued by the recent popularity of psychedelics. Will have to get the book :)
Not surprised by the religious connection; religious ritual is also a non-ordinary state of consciousness, as is meditation. It's all powerful stuff, and the world has too much of a bias towards ordinary waking consciousness, as if it was the only possibly valid state.
Congrats on the NYTimes writeup. Imagine my surprise reading the newspaper and seeing your face on the front page!
So I am actually very interested in this book and in a very paranoid way I think you wrote this for me, or at least a very specific cohort. See, I also did a bunch of shrooms during covid and then binged philosophy. There must be dozens of us out there!
My binge was just making it through Macintyre's "After Virtue" and then barely finishing Nicomachean ethics before realizing I'm not a philosophy guy, but it was a transformative experience. Sounds like this book is more focused on perception and philosophy of mind and not on virtue ethics and the quest for meaning, but I'll have to read it to find out.