Charles Hayes, a substance use disorder counselor in New York City, has been a writer/editor for a variety of businesses and organizations, a communications manager for a marketing firm, and a journalist whose work has appeared in Reason, The Oxford American, Tikkun, High Times, and E magazine. Charles can be contacted by email at trippingtales@aol.com and at his website, www.psychedelicadventures.com.
A magnificent collection. - Alexander Shulgin, godfather of MDMA Hayes is such a bristling and intelligent writer that one almost wishes that he had written the whole book himself. The free flow of ideas about these verboten substances and their anthropological/psychological possibilities is exhilarating. - The Oxford American A sensitive and responsible approach to documenting profound experiences with 'drugs.' The results of this informal research are both informative and highly moving. - The Lancet Intriguing. The narratives are informative, cautionary, hilarious and spooky. The uninitiated may recoil from stories of visions of goat-devils, the moon as an alien flashlight, and nude escapades at Burning Man, but those in on the book's implicit wink will find like-minded stories of drug-induced bliss and abject terror. - San Francisco Chronicle Readers will find a sequence of first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales) that presents, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last thirty years as refracted through the prism of a drug experience. - The Chronicle of Higher Education We can theorize about psychedelics till the cow patties come home, but there's nothing as poignant, perplexing, and funny as a well-told trip report. Charles Hayes has gathered together some great ones. Tripping is instructive, hilarious and -- let's face it -- enticing. I loved it. - R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000 A classic in the growing body of contemporary psychedelic literature. For the experienced, Tripping is a harvest of inspiring moments and a reminiscence of one's own deeply shape-shifting journeys. For the uninitiated, it is a profound glimpse into the hidden world of the subconscious and a provocation for wider acceptance of the usefulness of psychedelic states. - Allan Badiner, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics