A Field Guide to Your Brain on Drugs – By Jeremy Wolfe
Psychedelics, stimulants, dissociatives, and empathogens don’t just change how you feel; they change how your brain works. Altered States bridges neuroscience, culture, and lived experience to explore what actually happens when consciousness shifts—and how to do it with knowledge, caution, and respect.
From MDMA to mushrooms, LSD to ketamine, this field guide translates complex pharmacology into language you can use. You’ll learn how neurotransmitters shape identity, how “set and setting” can define an experience, and how harm reduction can transform survival into understanding.
It’s not a call to use drugs. It’s a call to stop pretending ignorance is safer than education.
Written by neuroscientist and longtime harm-reduction educator Jeremy Wolfe, Altered States combines footnoted science with field wisdom drawn from a decade of lectures at Burning Man and other festivals. Each chapter demystifies a different molecule, explaining not just what it does but how it rewires your perception, emotion, and sense of self.
This book isn’t about glorifying the chemical frontier. It’s about mapping it—honestly, compassionately, and with a flashlight bright enough to see where you’re stepping.
Why Does this Book Exist?
Because harm reduction is not risk elimination; it’s the practical art of staying alive long enough to learn something.
Because testing, nutrition, and context are as vital as chemistry.
Because you can’t navigate altered states without first understanding the brain that creates them.
Inside the Book
- The neuroscience of identity and perception: why your “self” is an ongoing chemical conversation.
- Clear, evidence-based guides to substances including MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, nitrous oxide, and DMT.
- Practical harm-reduction protocols: testing methods, vitamin stacks, and recovery strategies grounded in biochemistry.
- Cultural history tracing how sacred plants became controlled substances—and what’s changing now.
- Integration tools to help turn fleeting insight into lasting growth.
About the Author
Jeremy Wolfe, known to many as Dr. Awkward, has spent more than a decade teaching neuroscience-based harm reduction to festival audiences and academic circles alike. With a background in neuroscience and ethnobotany, he translates complex pharmacology into field-ready guidance that saves lives and deepens understanding.
He’s not a doctor—he’s the kind of scientist who reads medical journals for fun and hands out pocket-sized safety cards at desert lectures.