A Field Guide to Your Brain on Drugs – By Jeremy Wolfe
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Most books about drugs want to scare you or sell you something. This one just wants to explain what’s happening.
Altered States covers the neuroscience behind psychedelics, stimulants, dissociatives, and empathogens, one molecule at a time, in plain language, with citations. You’ll come away understanding what serotonin actually does, why dose and context shape an experience more than the drug itself, and what “harm reduction” means when it’s based on biochemistry instead of vibes.
The conversation around these substances has changed fast in the last decade. Psilocybin is in clinical trials. Ketamine is in doctor’s offices. MDMA came within a regulatory vote of being an approved PTSD treatment. The culture caught up to what researchers have known for years, which is that these are complex compounds with real therapeutic potential and real risks, and that the risks are mostly manageable when people understand what they’re dealing with.
Most people don’t. Not because they’re irresponsible, but because nobody ever gave them a straight answer.
This book is a straight answer. It’s not permission. It’s information. There’s a difference, and it matters.
Jeremy Wolfe has given his “Biochemistry of Psychedelics and Harm Reduction” lecture at Burning Man every year since 2013. Altered States is what happens when you take twelve years of those lectures, add a few hundred footnotes, and write it all down somewhere people can find it when they’re not standing in the desert at 2am trying to remember what he said about serotonin syndrome.
The lecture format forced a discipline that makes it into the book: if you can’t explain it clearly enough that a sleep-deprived person at a music festival can follow it, you don’t understand it well enough yet. Every chapter went through that filter. The pharmacology is real and sourced, and it’s also written for humans.
Each chapter covers a specific substance: what it does at the receptor level, what that feels like, what the risks actually are, and what you can do about them. Not what the government says. Not what your friend who did it once says. What the research says, translated into something you can actually use.
Why Does this Book Exist?
The standard alternatives are a pamphlet that says “don’t” or a forum post written by someone who doesn’t know what a neurotransmitter is. Neither one helps you make a decision. Neither one helps when something goes wrong at 3am and you need to know whether what’s happening is dangerous or just uncomfortable.
There’s a version of drug education that treats adults like they can’t be trusted with accurate information. It has not worked. Overdose rates, contaminated supply, people combining things they shouldn’t because they didn’t know, people having terrifying experiences that could have been avoided with basic preparation: these are the consequences of bad information infrastructure, not moral failure.
Harm reduction isn’t about encouraging drug use. It’s about acknowledging that people use drugs, that they always have, and that knowing more about them is always better than knowing less. Testing your substances, understanding drug interactions, timing your doses, eating beforehand, having someone you trust nearby: these aren’t radical ideas. They’re the obvious conclusions you reach once someone bothers to explain the underlying biology.
The underlying biology is interesting. It turns out that most of what these compounds do makes sense once you understand what the brain is doing in the first place. Why dissociatives feel the way they do. Why MDMA’s aftermath is predictable and manageable if you know what’s being depleted. Why two people can take the same dose of the same thing in the same place and have completely different experiences. The answers are in the neuroscience, and they’re not as complicated as the field sometimes makes them sound.
This book is the explanation.
Inside the Book
The first section covers the brain itself: how identity and perception are constructed from chemistry, how your sense of a continuous, coherent self is a kind of ongoing biological project, and what it means to chemically interrupt that project for a few hours. That foundation matters. The substance-specific chapters make more sense once you understand what the brain is doing by default.
The rest of the book goes substance by substance: Cannabis, MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, nitrous oxide, DMT, and several more. Each chapter includes the cultural history of how that substance got from wherever it started to where it is now, the pharmacology, the actual risk profile without exaggeration in either direction, and concrete harm reduction guidance based on what the research supports.
There’s a drug combination chart, because that’s the question everyone actually has and almost nobody answers well. There’s a section on testing methods, because fentanyl contamination is no longer a fentanyl-specific problem. There’s material on what supplementation and recovery actually look like when grounded in how these compounds interact with your biology, rather than the folklore version that gets passed around.
And because context matters as much as chemistry, there’s cultural history throughout: how these substances moved from ceremonial use to criminalization to clinical research, who got to study them and who got arrested for using them, and what the current moment in psychedelic science actually represents.
About the Author
Jeremy Wolfe has a background in neuroscience and ethnobotany, has been doing festival harm reduction work since the early 2000s, and speaks at events including PsyCon, Denver’s annual psychedelics conference. He has staffed harm reduction crews at festivals across the country, sat with people through difficult experiences, and spent a lot of time thinking about what separates a bad night from a catastrophic one. Usually it’s information.
He is not a doctor. He writes and lectures as Dr. Awkward, which started as a Burning Man joke and is now on a book cover, so here we are.
He wrote this book because the good information exists but it’s scattered across academic journals, harm reduction forums, and the institutional memory of people who’ve been doing this work quietly for decades, most of them unpaid. Someone needed to put it in one place and make it readable. The Burning Man lectures were the first version of that. This is the longer version, for people who want to go deeper than fifty minutes in the desert allows.