In Ten Trips, Mitchell takes ten different drugs in ten diverse locations--including a neuroimaging lab in London, the Columbian Andes, Silicon Valley and his friend's basement kitchen--to document their remarkable effects. Along the way he encounters a cast of distinctive characters: scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and philosophers, psychonauts and shamans, musicians, monks, therapists, poets, and conmen. His experience opens a doorway to psychedelics' full potential: for healing and trauma, for ecstatic one-ness and utter terror, for transcendence and corruption, for profundity and laughter. Mitchell argues that by removing psychedelics from their cultures and rituals, both indigenous and underground, we risk rejecting the expertise and the contexts which hold the key to understanding them--and from which their real benefits may derive. In the drive to standardize, control, and monetize the psychedelic experience, we may ultimately destroy what makes them potent: their ability to transform our whole perspective on mental health and reenchant us with the world