The Odyssey has a word for it – nepenthe, a drug of forgetfulness. People have been reaching for something to take the edge off for a very long time.

Psilocybin mushrooms turn up in Mesoamerican ritual going back centuries. For most of the twentieth century, Western medicine simply stopped studying any of it.

Benzodiazepines arrived in the 1960s promising something safer. SSRIs followed in the 1980s, promising something gentler. Both came with complications.