Many of us think of space as the final frontier. To me, the mind has always been the real frontier that leads to all roads.
I have spent my working life in retail. Sourcing, merchandising, go-to-market calendars, sales operations. Thirty years of getting product from a factory to a floor on a date somebody promised a customer. These days I do that work through T-Suite Consulting. It is a good living and it taught me one thing that turned out to matter here: how to follow a supply chain all the way back to where the thing actually comes from.
So when I got curious about psychedelics, I did what I have always done. I pulled the thread.
I expected the trail to end somewhere in the 1960s. It did not. It went past the Summer of Love, past Hofmann and his bicycle, past Wasson and María Sabina in Huautla. It went past writing. It went past agriculture. It ended nine thousand years ago on a rock face in the Sahara, where somebody painted a running man with mushrooms sprouting from his arms — and then it turned out there was a second painting six thousand years old in eastern Spain, four thousand miles away, made by people who had no possible contact with the first.
Two paintings. Two continents. The same idea.
That is when I understood I was not researching a counterculture. I was researching a human constant.
What the book turned into
How the World Gets High does not travel country by country. It travels kingdom by kingdom. Fungi. Plants. Amphibians. Fish. Insects, by way of a jar of honey. And then, last, the human body itself, which has been quietly manufacturing this chemistry the whole time.
That structure was the whole discovery. Organize it by drug and you get a catalog. Organize it by kingdom and you can suddenly see the pattern: nature arrived at this answer again and again, in lineages that split from one another hundreds of millions of years ago, and humans found essentially all of it, usually thousands of years before there was any writing to record it.
Can you see the pattern? Can you see the intention of creation?
What I owe
The book is dedicated to Michael Pollan, for showing me how to change my mind. There would be a lot fewer books like this one without his, and credit belongs where it belongs.
The rest of the debt goes to the researchers who kept this work alive through fifty-six years when it was career suicide to touch it, and to the traditional practitioners who kept it alive for a great deal longer than that, at a much higher cost, and who are still too often the last people consulted about their own knowledge. This amazing group of people we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to. Talk about way-showers!
What I am not
I am not a scientist, a clinician, a therapist or a guide. I do not sell anything but the book. Nothing on this site or in it is medical or legal advice, and there is a real difference between a substance being decriminalized and it being legal — a difference this site takes seriously enough to give its own page.
The book is a celebration and it is also honest. It reports the ballot measures that failed alongside the ones that passed. It says when an interpretation is contested, and several of the best stories in it are contested. It says plainly when something is dangerous, because enthusiasm without honesty is just marketing.
You can build your house on sand or on rock. Both look fine on a clear day. You find out which one you built when the rain comes.
Where I am
I split my time between California, Hawaii and Maine, which are about as far apart as three places can be and somehow all three still match that same internal feeling of HOME. I am currently at work on my next book, which takes a vastly different path but still promises plenty of fun and plenty to learn. News of that, and everything else I am up to, lives on my author site at tjtoce.com.
One great truth, and it is the one this whole thing rests on: no matter where you go on this blue planet you will find something in nature that is designed to expand your consciousness. That is not by accident.
Let me show you the possibilities…