Hamilton Morris

Chemistry as adventure

Hamilton Morris turned a fascination with psychoactive chemistry into one of the most distinctive bodies of drug journalism of the era. In Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia — a column-turned-television-series — he devotes each installment to a single substance, tracing its molecule, its history, and its human use from the lab bench to the indigenous community to the underground network, refusing both hysteria and hype.

From Vice column to laboratory

Morris came to the subject young and from an unusual angle. The son of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, he began writing a monthly Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia column for Vice while still a student of anthropology and chemistry, and turned it into a television series in 2016. He has since carried that dual training into an actual laboratory — conducting pharmacological research with an emphasis on the synthesis and history of dissociative anaesthetics — and consulting widely on drug science. The result is a rare voice: someone who can both read a synthesis route and sit, without flinching or romanticising, with the people who use what it makes.

The reporter in the field

What sets Morris apart is that he does his own chemistry and his own travelling: he consults on pharmacology, publishes research, and shows up in person at the source. In an era thick with psychedelic marketing, his instinct is to go and look — the same instinct this archive prizes. He belongs among the contemporary figures who keep the mushroom’s story honest by chasing it to where it actually lives.