Hooke strongly hinted that he'd personally sampled his coffee shop score: The drug "is so well known and experimented by Thousands," he wrote, that "there is no Cause of Fear, tho' possibly there may be of Laughter." (Hooke's readers would have had good reason to be afraid of a new drug: This was a world in which pharmacies sold ground up skulls and Egyptian mummy feet).

2. LSD

During the time of the Roman empire, physicians described a painful disease called the sacred fire (sacer ignis), which by the Middle Ages came to be known as St. Anthony's Fire—"an ulcerous Eruption, reddish, or mix'd of pale and red," as one 1714 text put it. Sufferers of this gruesome illness, which could also cause hallucinations, were actually being poisoned by ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat. Several authors, most recently Oliver Sacks in his excellent book Hallucinations, have noted a potential link between ergot poisoning and cases of dancing mania and other forms of mass hysteria in premodern Europe.

By the 1920s, pharmaceutical firms began investigating the compounds in ergot, which showed potential as migraine treatments. A Swiss chemist at the Sandoz Corporation named Albert Hoffman grew especially intrigued, and in November 1938 (the week after Kristallnacht) he synthesized an ergot derivative: lysergic acid diethalyamide, or LSD for short.

It was not until five years later, however, that Hoffman experienced the drug. Immersed in his work, Hoffman accidentally allowed a tiny droplet of LSD to dissolve onto his skin. He thought nothing of it: Hardly any drugs are psychoactive in such minute doses. Later that day, however, Hoffmann went home sick, lay on his couch, and:

sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

Three days later, the chemist decided to self-administer what he assumed was a tiny dose to further test the drug's effects. He took 250 micrograms, roughly 10 times higher than the threshold dose. Within an hour, Hoffman asked his lab assistant to escort him home by bicycle. Cycling through the Swiss countryside, Hoffman was shocked to observe that "everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror."

By the time he arrived home, Hoffman decided to call a doctor. However, the physician reported no abnormal physical symptoms besides dilated pupils, and Hoffmann began to enjoy himself:

Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.

Hoffman awoke the next morning "refreshed, with a clear head," and with "a sensation of well-being and renewed life." In an echo of Hooke's report about his friend's cannabis experience, which left him "Refreshed...and exceeding hungry," Hoffman recalled that "Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure."

3. Meth

A member of the Meiji Japanese elite, Nagayoshi devoted much of his energy to the chemical analysis of traditional Japanese and Chinese medicines using the tools of Western science. In 1885, Nagai isolated the stimulant ephedrine from Ephedra sinica, a plant long used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine.