a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis…
High Society is a major new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection opening on 11 November 2010, co-curated by historian and SA pal Mike Jay, who has also authored a fantastic, heavily illustrated book published by Thames and Hudson.
“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad’…Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”
There’s a long piece about the show over at the Guardian, while Mike will be speaking on drugs and culture at the Strange Attractor Salon on 3 December.
High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is on at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb.