Through documentary footage “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia” tries to expand viewers’ knowledge of drugs and temper a subject that can be romanticized. Episodes run as shorts or sometimes as multipart serials, chronicling Mr. Morris’s travels, obsessions and encounters with figures on the fringe of culture. Unlike his father, who has an understated off-screen presence, Mr. Morris is in front of the camera as interviewer and host. His narration is filled with monologues on sub-subcultures and scientific evidence.

His work is driven by research, not by aesthetics or any filmic lineage. In most episodes the stories that emerge feel exploratory, with failures and complications incorporated, not hidden, in the final edit. Mr. Morris spent several miserable nights in a Brazilian village waiting for a frog that didn’t arrive and in Reykjavik discovering that the liberty cap mushrooms he planned to ingest were out of season. It’s a raw, earnest approach used across much of Vice’s programming, including the widely viewed series, “The Vice Guide to Travel.”

Until now psychedelics have been his focus on the show, but Mr. Morris said he was interested in the spectrum of substances, from stimulants to dissociatives. In high school, after receiving a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, he began a course of Ritalin and for the last four years he has regularly swallowed a cocktail of pramiracetam and centrophenoxine, two nootropics, or “smart drugs.” Mr. Morris said he felt they aided him in reading and memorization, the reasons some students “stack” them for off-label use. “Some critics feel these nootropic substances pose a bioethical problem regarding the fairness of cognitive enhancement,” Mr. Morris said. “I think we should be so lucky as to face such a problem.”

Coming episodes of Mr. Morris’s show will depart from drugs entirely, widening the purview to include all the ways people alter consciousness — “a fundamental human desire,” as Mr. Morris put it. One will profile a controversial Peruvian psychosurgeon who conducts bilateral cingulotomies, a lobotomy alternative, to treat cocaine addiction; another will survey sensory deprivation tanks and was filmed with the help of the comic Joe Rogan, who is a proponent of their use.

Mr. Morris isn’t stepping away from substances entirely. He’s at work on a book about clandestine chemists and hosts monthly drug-related film screenings at the Spectacle theater in Williamsburg. But discussing his own use has become tiresome and irrelevant for him. When asked about it, he sighed. People who dismiss synthetic chemicals don’t understand that life itself is built on chemicals, he said. “It’s basic neuroscience. I don’t think anyone would deny that.”