Hamilton Morris's Web Series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" Dana Lavoie Hamilton Morris in his series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" on Vice.com: in Haiti, investigating the zombie phenomenon. Daniel Pinchbeck described Mr. Morris as "a mad scientist, chemical genius, alchemist on the hunt for the chemical elixir of consciousness." ON camera Hamilton Morris has smoked Amanita muscaria fungi in Iceland, interviewed a woman who endured torture by psychedelics, rubbed the secretions of an Amazonian frog into his burns and, in Haiti, dusted himself with the voodoo zombie poison Tetrodotoxin, which was thankfully an inactive batch, since even at low doses, this neurotoxin is lethal. Mr. Morris, a 24-year-old writer and filmmaker, clearly isn't satisfied with the popular models for understanding drugs. The best-known thinkers on the subject - Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary and their successor, Daniel Pinchbeck - have married an understanding of psychedelics to spiritual ideologies and the loose, forgiving analysis of the soft sciences. But Mr. Morris seeks no deities, therapy or enlightenment. He is interested in scientific research and is inspired by neurologists like Oliver Sacks and psychiatrists like Claudio Naranjo. He has been known to sketch out a drug's molecular structure and rattle off a list of its derivatives but won't offer an interpretation of his subjective experience. "Drugs are prescribed so frequently, but no one is ever taught about them," he said recently at his apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It creates a dangerous atmosphere of ignorance on the subject. In a phone interview Mr. Pinchbeck described Mr. Morris as a combination of "a mad scientist, chemical genius, alchemist on the hunt for the chemical elixir of consciousness," but added, "I personally feel that the hard science method gets a little bit limited." Still, he said, "I think it's a great avenue of approach because so many people share that materialist belief system and ethos with him that it opens their minds to exploring nonordinary states of consciousness." In "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia," his series for Vice.com, Mr. Morris has a grinning, laid-back persona, with an approach not dissimilar to Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism. In person Mr. Morris, son of the filmmaker Errol Morris, is bookish and intense, speaking with a fastidious attention to word choice. Currently a student at the New School (where he studies with the psychedelics expert Nicolas Langlitz), Mr. Morris has an apartment filled with books like "Fundamentals to a Pharmacology of the Mind" by Corneliu E. Giurgea and Alexander Shulgin's "PiHKAL," the seminal text on Phenethylamines, a class of drugs that includes MDMA, or ecstasy. Mr. Morris describes Mr. Shulgin, a drug developer and self tester, as a personal hero and "the most important psychedelic chemist who has ever lived." Today there exist post-Shulgin "psychonauts" - pioneers in search of unexplored drugs - and Mr. Morris, through his early videos, has become one of their more public voices. Like others, he had psychonautical interests that blossomed when he discovered online forums like Erowid.org and Bluelight.ru, on which members write about their personal use and chemical inventions, sometimes in surprisingly lucid prose. "There's more chemical diversity accessible now to the drug consumer than any other time in human history," Mr. Morris said. Every week there's a new chemical. Anyone with Internet access can order thousands of new drugs and have them delivered to their door. Any chemical modification that can possibly be made is being made and sold, and the market is thirsty for it. Through documentary footage "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" tries to expand viewers" knowledge of drugs and temper a subject that can be romanticized. Episodes run as shorts or sometimes as multipart serials, chronicling Mr. Morris's travels, obsessions and encounters with figures on the fringe of culture. Unlike his father, who has an understated off-screen presence, Mr. Morris is in front of the camera as interviewer and host. His narration is filled with monologues on sub-subcultures and scientific evidence. His work is driven by research, not by aesthetics or any filmic lineage. In most episodes the stories that emerge feel exploratory, with failures and complications incorporated, not hidden, in the final edit. Mr. Morris spent several miserable nights in a Brazilian village waiting for a frog that didn't arrive and in Reykjavik discovering that the liberty cap mushrooms he planned to ingest were out of season. It's a raw, earnest approach used across much of Vice's programming, including the widely viewed series, "The Vice Guide to Travel." Until now psychedelics have been his focus on the show, but Mr. Morris said he was interested in the spectrum of substances, from stimulants to dissociatives. In high school, after receiving a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, he began a course of Ritalin and for the last four years he has regularly swallowed a cocktail of pramiracetam and centrophenoxine, two nootropics, or "smart drugs." Mr. Morris said he felt they aided him in reading and memorization, the reasons some students "stack" them for off-label use. "Some critics feel these nootropic substances pose a bioethical problem regarding the fairness of cognitive enhancement," Mr. Morris said. I think we should be so lucky as to face such a problem. Coming episodes of Mr. Morris's show will depart from drugs entirely, widening the purview to include all the ways people alter consciousness - "a fundamental human desire," as Mr. Morris put it. One will profile a controversial Peruvian psychosurgeon who conducts bilateral cingulotomies, a lobotomy alternative, to treat cocaine addiction; another will survey sensory deprivation tanks and was filmed with the help of the comic Joe Rogan, who is a proponent of their use. Mr. Morris isn't stepping away from substances entirely. He's at work on a book about clandestine chemists and hosts monthly drug-related film screenings at the Spectacle theater in Williamsburg. But discussing his own use has become tiresome and irrelevant for him. When asked about it, he sighed. People who dismiss synthetic chemicals don't understand that life itself is built on chemicals, he said. It's basic neuroscience. I don't think anyone would deny that.