Justin Smith-Ruiu
On Drugs
PRE-ORDER
SEPTEMBER 2025
“Like the best psychedelic experiences, On Drugs estranges the familiar, familiarizes the strange, and returns us to reality (whatever that is) with a broadened sense of the possible. Justin Smith-Ruiu is simply one of the most interesting thinkers alive, and he has found an ideal subject for his peculiar brand of brilliance.”
— Christopher Beha
In the late, post-lockdown days of the pandemic, grappling with personal loss and existential uncertainty, Justin Smith-Ruiu found himself standing in a California cannabis dispensary, pondering a question his tribe of fellow philosophers have often dismissed as too simple: How did I get here? That moment marked a transition for him—it was the start of a journey Smith-Ruiu would take to experience his own mind and the world around him in a new, clarifying way.
On Drugs blends autobiography, intellectual history, and philosophical inquiry to explore the transformative impact of psychedelics on human consciousness and thought. Drawing on his personal experiences as ‘an articulate guinea pig,’ Smith-Ruiu argues that psychedelics upend our assumptions about the nature of reality—and thus force a reckoning with the very foundations of Western philosophy.
Provocative, profound, and deeply personal, On Drugs points toward a radically new way of thinking about the world and our capacity to understand it.
Books
Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses
Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.
The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
Combining the sweep of intellectual history with the incisiveness of philosophy, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is cuts through our daily digital lives to give a clear-sighted picture of what the internet is, where it came from, and where it might be taking us in the coming decades.
In Search Of The Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021
A great deal of uncertainty—and even some genuine confusion—surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or “Order of the Third Bird.” Sensational accounts of this “attentional cult” emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes—both to its ranks, and to its scholarship.