Stories of substances
Pharmakon publishes illustrated histories of substances and the worlds built around them. A chemical can pass through a laboratory, a clinic, a military programme and a shop. At each stop, its uses, evidence and reputation can change.
The stories follow that movement through people, experiments, institutions and laws. They ask who gets to make a claim, who is allowed access, and how a substance becomes a medicine, a commodity or a prohibited drug.
Names, evidence and authority
Mind-bending drugs follows the idea of the nootropic through its pharmacological origins and later uses. A category can survive long after its original criteria have become blurred. Its name does not settle the evidence for every substance placed inside it.
Twenty Cows traces a veterinary experiment through the history of an electrical therapy device. It examines how a small study becomes part of a much larger account of what a technology can do.
Both stories concern the distance between an observation and the authority it acquires. That is the part of this history we keep returning to: how evidence is made, repeated, used and sometimes stretched.
Open editions
Pharmakon’s books are free to read online, with illustrations and source material woven into the narrative.