Ten Trips review: What tripping taught an academic about psychedelics

Ten Trips
Andy Mitchell (Bodley Head)

DESCRIBING your psychedelic trip to other people is notoriously dull. Poet or not, there will always be a gap between the raw experience of LSD or magic mushrooms, and a second-hand metaphor.

So it was with hesitation that I picked up neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell’s book Ten Trips: The new reality of psychedelics, detailing his personal journey. In a few months, Mitchell spends several hundred hours taking 10 drugs as “a douchey forty-nine-year-old psychedelic virgin”.

But his …