What if psychoactive plants and fungi were not peripheral curiosities in human history, but active participants in its formation? Drawing on the research for my forthcoming book Stoned Sapiens, this presentation follows the altered human mind across continents and millennia, examining how intoxicants, hallucinogens and sacred medicines became intertwined with ritual, healing, artistic expression, political authority and the emergence of organized religion. From the earliest suggestive traces of altered states to the Datura quids of California’s Pinwheel Cave, the psychoactive pharmacopoeia of Chavín de Huántar and the controlled use of visionary substances by ancient ritual elites, the archaeological record increasingly allows us to move beyond speculation and identify the material presence of drugs in places of ceremony and power. Yet these discoveries also raise a more unsettling question: Who controlled access to altered consciousness, and how did private revelation become institutional authority? Combining archaeology, pharmacology, history and firsthand research journeys, the lecture proposes a new account of civilization—one in which the human search for transformed consciousness was not an escape from history, but one of the forces that made history possible.