Hamilton Morris is on a mind-altering mission to reveal the truth about psychoactive stimulants – from secret government drug experiments in South Africa to the joys of salvia divinorum. So why do people assume he’s a waster?

When people tell Hamilton Morris that he “gets high for a living” – and when I say “people” I mean “devilish Guardian headline writers” – it leaves him exasperated.

“It’s funny, but it’s also reductive,” he says. “It feeds into the biases and more hateful interpretation of what I do. It would be completely unacceptable for you to say that someone who writes about relationships gets fucked for a living!”

After watching Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a new six-part Viceland series about psychoactive stimulants and the mind-altering stories behind them, I can understand his frustration. Yes, on some level, Morris has made a career out of getting high – he’s a self-confessed psychonaut who embraces an individual’s right to explore the outer reaches of their mind. But the ingestion of strange chemicals is only a tiny part of what the show is about.

More prominent are the dazzling laboratory science scenes (Morris is a qualified chemist) and a journalistic rigour that compels Morris to get to the heart of some incredibly juicy tales: in The Story of the South African Quaalude, he looks into Wouter Basson – aka “Dr Death” – who worked on a secret Apartheid-era project that many believe aimed to reduce the black population through chemical means and suppress protests using weaponised methaqualone (“there were things going on in the country at the time that frankly made the Nazis look like a Sunday school picnic,” says human rights lawyer Jenny Wild). In A Positive PCP Story, which kicks off the series, we meet Christ Bearer, the Wu Tang Clan affiliate who chopped off his own penis while high on the drug and – remarkably – doesn’t seem to regret the experience.

“He felt his penis had a negative impact on his life, and cutting it off allowed him to focus on his art,” says Morris. “If he stands by it and thinks his life is better as a result, does that really mean he did something bad?”

Morris says such stories were familiar to him because he’s been reading about psychoactive drugs daily for at least the last decade of his life – filming the documentary simply gave him a chance to get out into the field and explore them. In South Africa, he befriends users of methaqualone (or Mandrax) and slowly works his way up the drug food chain until he meets a kingpin who allows him access to his lab. The process took about three years, he says, and involved a case of mistaken identity in which he was offered $400,000 to work for them as a chemist for a month. Such situations seem edgy, to say the least, yet Morris remains relaxed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Morris has been reading about psychoactive drugs daily for at least the last decade … but his know-how comes from working weekends at a pharmaceutical lab in Philadelphia. Photograph: Viceland

“If anyone is in danger, it’s the subjects,” he says. “They’re the people making a sacrifice and putting themselves in precarious situations.”

What about the time he goes diving in bull-shark-infested waters near the island of Réunion, on the hunt for fish with hallucinogenic properties? “I was accompanied by a marine biologist who is an expert on the subject, and he felt it was ok to enter the water at that particular time, so I deferred to his expertise,” he says breezily.

Hamilton, 29, is the son of Errol Morris, the man behind iconic documentaries such as 1988’s The Thin Blue Line and 2003’s The Fog of War. He says his dad’s an obsessive person, and this attention to detail is something he’s taken into Pharmacopeia. He’s certainly done his research: much of Morris’s access comes from knowing his subject inside out – “I could make friends with the PCP chemist by showing him that I’ve published scientific articles on the subject, I’m not just a guy from the news,” he reasons.

Morris has a “weird interdisciplinary science degree” but says most of his know-how comes from working weekends at a lab in Philadelphia, which he’s done for the last seven years. “We do a lot of work with the pharmacology of new emerging dissociative drugs that appear on the grey market in the US and UK,” he explains. “It’s nerdier stuff that I find super-interesting but it doesn’t have the same narrative interest.” (Say what you like about “preparation and characterization of the ‘research chemical’ diphenidine, its pyrrolidine analogue, and their 2,2-diphenylethyl isomers” but it’s not quite as clickable as “Hamilton Morris gets high for a living”).

A self-confessed geek, Morris says science was his first love – he was on the school science team and didn’t really dabble with psychoactive substances for fear of a bad trip. But once he became enamoured with altered states of consciousness, his journalistic instincts told him that here was a subject with near infinite stories to tell, ones that impact upon everybody’s daily lives whether they use drugs or not.

Morris is a good presence on screen – dressed all in white, he has a sort of charming awkwardness not dissimilar to Louis Theroux (they share the same disarming smile) and he allows his subjects plenty of space to tell their stories. But does he worry that he might be glorifying drug use for the show’s younger viewers?

He sounds surprised: “Which bits did I glorify?”

I mention a salvia divinorum ceremony he attended in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, where he chews the plant leaves under the guidance of a shaman and has a thoroughly ecstatic reaction to it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I don’t want to glorify or demonise or do anything other than depict the reality’ … Morris looking rather ecstatic at a salvia divinorum ceremony in Oaxaca. Photograph: Viceland

“Yes, but I didn’t make it seem that way, it was that way,” he says. “I’m not trying to make any kind of value judgement, I just want to show the reality. And in this case, I had a really profound experience. I don’t want to glorify or demonise or do anything other than depict the reality of what it was like to ingest that plant in the traditional context.”

But of course there are lots of editorial judgements that need to be made when showing drugs on screen. Morris says he wanted to use a boisterous disco song to accompany scenes of people smoking Mandrax in South Africa, but that Vice intervened. “There is sadness at the heart of some of these stories,” he concedes, “but the truth is that the drug use is often the happiest time of the day for these people, that is the time of celebration ... so to use sad, still music to show what is a joyous moment seemed to be lying about the reality of this drug and the role it played in the user’s lives.”

Morris admits that the loftier side of what he’s trying to do often gets shot down by people who think he’s just a glorified waster. It’s for this reason that he keeps his own drug use to a minimum on screen. “If I’d smoked Mandrax, it would have been compelling footage but it would probably have been the thing people talked about more than anything – more than a massive government undertaking to weaponise a drug potentially to suppress the rise of democracy!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If I’d smoked Mandrax, it would have been the thing people talked about – more than a massive government undertaking to weaponise a drug potentially to suppress the rise of democracy!’ … Morris in The Story of the South African Quaalude. Photograph: Viceland

Morris is far more keen to glorify the science behind these substances than the ingestion of them. In the lab he dons a white coat and gets to work synthesising PCP (or rather a close relation of it, to avoid breaking the law) and he says he’s especially proud to have received emails from viewers who’ve seen the show in the US and now want to take organic chemistry in their next semester.

So as science progresses and attitudes towards drugs change, what does the future hold for such psychoactive stimulants and the industry itself? Morris isn’t optimistic about how the incoming Trump administration will tackle drugs – he foresees an even greater opioid epidemic sweeping the States – but he believes that a change of mindset could reap great rewards. He points to the work of scientists such as Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London, who has conducted neuroimaging studies on patients under the influence of LSD, as a way we can use such substances to help patients with mental health problems.

“There’s a lot of evidence for the psychotherapeutic value of MDMA,” he says. “It could help a lot of people with PTSD. Ketamine could probably help a lot of people with depression. Psychedelics might be able to help with all sorts of scientific problem-solving although that hasn’t been rigorously studied, so it’s speculative at this point. Ultimately the possibilities haven’t been explored yet because there’s no country on Earth where people have approached this issue intelligently enough to fully take advantage of the potential benefits to see what’s possible.”

While his positive outlook is refreshing, surely he must have had some pretty awful times with psychoactive drugs on his travels?

“I’ve had unpleasant experiences,” he says hesitantly, “but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. As long as there’s something to be taken away from it, superficially bad experiences can have a positive impact – they can help you understand aspects of yourself that are uncomfortable but ultimately beneficial to confront. So when you ask about my mental health … if there’s anything that’s dangerous or brain-damaging in this process at all, it’s television production.”

Hang on, working for Vice is more damaging to your mental health than taking hardcore drugs? That sounds like yet another devilish headline in the making …

“The editing, sleep deprivation, stress of hitting deadlines, arguments about legality of this or that scene – that’s the part that makes me concerned about my mental wellbeing,” he concludes. “If anything, the drug use has had a positive impact.”

Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia starts tonight on Viceland at 10pm.