Empire of the Mind

Psychedelics is a multi-billion dollar industry that just keeps growing. To many, the proliferation of research, investment and treatment options could be life-changing. But as much as we stand to gain, as age-old substances are transformed into medical commodities, how much more do we stand to lose?Empire of the Mind is an investigation into how psychedelics are changing the medical world, from the institutions and interest groups that are sprouting up around them, to the patients they promise to aid. What Goldhill uncovers is a landscape reverberating with the clash of ideologies and motivations. For-profit entities and patent-hungry philanthropists lock horns with researchers desperate to keep everything open-source in the ever-expanding world of psychedelics-as-therapy. Caught in between, or more often shunted to the side, are the communities from which many of these cures were born. As a new class of drug lords emerges to decide how we access treatment, and at what cost, this book asks: Who will win and who will lose in this race to turn psychedelics into medicine?