“It could be argued,” says Joe Roberts, “that the whole world is on one drug or another. I mean, if a plant or a mushroom is a drug it should also be considered that people are high on all sorts of things – power, technology, caffeine, alcohol.”

The San Francisco-based artist and psychonaut (someone who uses altered states brought on by meditation, drugs, ritual, perhaps even martial arts to gain existential insights and spiritual experiences) makes art that riffs on his experiences taking LSD, DMT, and psilocybin (AKA magic mushrooms), and often works while smoking weed. “What difference does any of it make as long as you’re not harming anyone else?” he argues. “There’s quite a bit of misinformation and fear around psychedelics. People like to put things in boxes and label them. Psychedelics make that seem silly.”

In the foreword to Roberts’ new book of paintings and drawings, We Ate the Acid, fellow psychonaut Hamilton Morris says there’s a great desire among those who’ve taken psychedelics to communicate what they experience. Perhaps art can help with that, he suggests. And certainly looking into Joe Roberts’ art does immerse one in a drug-fuelled world. In one scrawled image, Mickey Mouse in a sorcerer’s hat confronts a field of talking mushrooms. “I’ve been looking 4 U guys,” says Mickey’s speech bubble. One of the mushrooms replies “What took you so long?” and another adds “Eat us.” In another drawing, loved-up, grinning frogs in jester’s hats lick each other to open those perceptual portals – to turn on, tune in and, you’d think, hop out.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Psychedelics were an important part of my life, they changed the way I think’ … Joe Roberts. Photograph: Dennis McGrath

Mickey Mouse is a recurring motif in Roberts’ work – the artist’s projection of himself into his art. As his Mickey avatar, Roberts imagines himself as “not yet a master sorcerer, but dedicated to the quest to find the divine”. Mickey is not the only character in Roberts’ druggie menagerie: he also imagines himself as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The writer Matthew Ronay’s foreword to Roberts’ 2014 book, LSD World Peace, describes the mindset of that character: “With my friends I can separate from society, fight evil and become disciplined in the art of mind control”. His art also riffs on the Wu-Tang Clan – he sees the hip-hop outfit as emblems of martial arts discipline and philosophical camaraderie.

Roberts’ art teems with such pop-culture references, as well late-80 and early-90s brands (Air Jordans get repeated walk-ons). Comics, sweets, peace signs, Freddy Krueger, Scream masks, the 1979 film Alien and HR Giger (himself a psychedelics user and friend of psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary) all figure. One critic has argued that all the Mickey Mouses and other recurring figures in Roberts’ art are protective guardians accompanying him on his trips into the unknown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vivid visions … an illustration from We Ate the Acid by Joe Roberts.

But the pop-culture references scarcely exhaust the artistic ones. He paints lush jungly landscapes that recall Henri Rousseau, urban scenes that seem to riff on Edward Hopper, killer whales sporting in the Pacific surf, faux-naively rendered squirrels and UFOs. Is it possible to communicate an hallucinogenic experience through art? “I don’t know,” replies Roberts. “Perhaps the most important thing is to inspire someone to see for themselves what the psychedelic experience is. I think they are incredible tools or teachers that we have access to, and they should be used. And like any tool, they should be treated with respect and used with caution.”

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Roberts thinks of this world as a place where humans are, as it were, in Plato’s cave, habituated to a subjective experience that they deludedly take for reality. He thinks his drug experiences have liberated him from that, and hopes to open the doors of perception for others too. “My experimentation with psychedelics was a very important part of my life, I feel like it shifted the trajectory of my life – changed the way I think. The art included in We Ate the Acid was all made during this period of experimentation and I guess was my way of unpacking and processing these experiences.”

His paintings made me think of the anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, who eulogised LSD and gave it, under carefully controlled circumstances, to his patients. Laing wrote that hallucinogenic drug-taking and even psychosis were understandable responses to the greater madness of the world. Psychosis was, he wrote, “a psychedelic voyage of discovery in which the boundaries of perception were widened, and consciousness expanded.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: © Joe Roberts

What does Roberts think about that? “I agree the world seems crazy but that is only when I try to break it down and understand it. If I just let it be, it all seems like it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to. Even with all the horrible things happening there is always something next. Something unexpected. A twist and a turn.”

Roberts was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1976. He got into making art early. “We’re all introduced to art at the same time, when we’re small children,” he says. “I just stuck with it and made it a part of my everyday life, even if it’s just doodling on a scrap of paper.”

His grandfather was particularly inspirational. “[He made] sculptures from found objects, different printing methods, drawings, collages, paintings – pretty much everything. He really enjoyed making stuff and experimenting with new mediums and he didn’t care about impressing anyone. Hanging out with him was fun.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spaced invaders ... an illustration from We Ate The Acid by Joe Roberts Photograph: © Joe Roberts

Roberts left Wisconsin to train formally at San Francisco’s Art Institute, but concedes that while there he “mostly learned about drugs”. At the time, he was into skating and graffiti art. “Skateboarding is important to me because it is fun. It’s strange that it is so much fun because it is kind of hard. It makes me happy. Most of my friends in life have been connected to me through skateboarding somehow.”

And graffiti art? “I hung out with a bunch of graffiti writers but I just liked the exploring part of it. Being out all night and climbing on buildings. I never got the ‘writing your name on stuff’ part of tagging. I probably only did that once or twice, mostly I would just go with my friends and be a lookout. Maybe draw a Ninja Turtle kind of sloppy at the end of the night and feel that rush but I never took it that seriously.”

He was aware, though, of San Franciscan artists such as Chris Johanson, who initially drew cartoons on lampposts and toilet walls using black Sharpies before publishing a skateboarding and art zine called Karmaboarder in the late 80s. Roberts cites Johanson as a key influence, along with Mike Kelley, the late American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: © Joe Roberts

Roberts’ art has been compared to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Cornell. Like Basquiat, he’s been billed as an outsider artist who crossed from street graffiti into the gallery.

Many of the pictures in We Ate the Acid riff on the first era of San Franciscan trippy art in the 1960s and 70s, with their swirling patterns and hidden messages. They recall the art created by San Francisco hippies such as Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin and Alton Kelley who made posters for psychedelic musicians such as the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Roberts’ work especially reminds me of artist Bill Walker’s sleeve for the Grateful Dead’s 1968 album Anthem of the Sun, which depicts the members of the band’s faces on a multi-headed fire-breathing entity, most likely a Hindu deity. Like that image, much of Roberts’ art consists of gaudy, even sometimes DayGlo, geometric patterns and spinning fractals that, I learn, seem to surround LSD users as the drug kicks in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: © Joe Roberts

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson, author of Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, argues that Roberts’ work is part of a resurgent psychedelic movement: “This whole psychedelic thing is still part of our culture. It’s not over.” Johnson’s thesis is that, since the mass consumption of LSD began in the mid 1960s, hallucinogens have altered the minds of so many people that much contemporary art has come to conform with what one critic called the “psychedelic paradigm”.

If so, then it’s little wonder Roberts’ work has become so marketable. His bound and sewn book LSD Worldpeace – which includes 142 reproductions of his pieces, collages and dioramas – is currently sold out, making it a collector’s item. Earlier this year he launched a streetwear range with the same title. It works as a psychedelic history lesson. There’s a Leary baseball cap, a Hofmann T-shirt (after Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who first synthesised LSD in 1938) and a Garcia T-shirt (after Jerry, the founder of the Grateful Dead whom younger readers may know as an ice cream flavour but whom Deadheads revere for opening doors of perception through the band’s psychedelic music).

He’s doing well from that psychedelic paradigm, if it exists. “It’s weird to sell art,” Roberts concludes, “But I feel lucky that people are interested enough to spend money on some shit I made smoking weed.”

We Ate the Acid by Joe Roberts is published by Anthology Editions and available for purchase here.

• This article was amended on 6 December 2018. It was not Joe Roberts who said: “With my friends I can separate from society, fight evil and become disciplined in the art of mind control”. That is a quote from the foreword of Roberts’ book, LSD World Peace, written by Matthew Ronay, who is describing the mindset of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle character.