How The World Gets High: A Global Tour of Sacred Mushrooms, Amazon Vines, Mad Honey, Desert Toads and the New Science of Psychedelic Healing

by T.J. Toce

Let's talk. In 401 BCE, ten thousand Greek soldiers retreating through the mountains of Turkey found beehives, ate their fill, and spent the next three days flat on their backs. Xenophon wrote it down. It is the oldest trip report in Western literature.

Nine thousand years ago, somebody painted a running man with mushrooms sprouting from his arms onto a rock face in what is now the Sahara.

Humans have been deliberately changing their own minds for longer than we have had agriculture, writing, or the wheel. Not occasionally. Constantly, everywhere, on every landmass we have ever occupied.

How the World Gets High is a tour of how they did it, and it does not travel country by country. It travels kingdom by kingdom.

Fungi that make a molecule shaped to fit a lock in your head, for reasons nobody can explain. Two Amazonian plants that do nothing apart and everything together, found among eighty thousand species by people who say the plants told them. A desert toad carrying the most total experience known to science in a gland behind its eye. A Mediterranean fish that borrowed its chemistry from algae. Honey from a Turkish hillside that has been putting armies on the ground for twenty-four centuries. And your own body, which has been quietly manufacturing this stuff the whole time.

Then, in 1970, one law closed the door for fifty-six years.

It is open again. Oregon licenses facilitators. The FDA is reading an application. And a practice older than civilization is walking back into the room carrying brain scanners.

Warm, surprising and rigorously honest, this is the book for the seeker who suspected there was more to the story. Much more!

156 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 14, 2026

About the author

TJ Toce is a career retail executive who has always been curious about psychedelics and could not stop pulling the thread. His first book, How the World Gets High, is the result: a global tour of sacred mushrooms, Amazon vines, mad honey and desert toads, and the science that is finally catching up to nine thousand years of human practice. He is not a scientist. He is a very persistent seeker on that millennia-old path to enlightenment. His second book, Street Names Exposed, grew out of the first one's dictionary: a fast, honest A-to-Z of 54 drugs and 677 of their street names, every one of them sourced, none of them made up. He also writes a free weekly newsletter on how the legal map keeps changing, here in the US and around the world. Readers can sign up at howtheworldgetshigh.com. An avid musician, TJ has written and published over 200 pop-rock songs and is working on new projects in the Los Angeles music scene. His songs can be heard on SoundCloud and wherever you stream music.