The Journalist-Chemist
Hamilton Morris was born on April 14, 1987, in New York City, the son of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) and art historian Julia Sheehan. Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was immersed from childhood in an intellectual environment that prized rigorous inquiry and unconventional thinking.
Morris attended the University of Chicago and later earned a bachelor of science from The New School, studying anthropology and chemistry. But his education extended far beyond the classroom. From his teenage years, Morris was drawn to the chemistry of psychoactive substances, reading Alexander Shulgin's PiHKAL and TiHKAL and conducting his own library research on synthesis routes and pharmacological mechanisms. He began writing a column on psychoactive drugs for Vice magazine while still in his early twenties, and when Vice offered him the opportunity to produce short documentaries to accompany his written pieces, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia was born.
Origins as a Web Series
The earliest iteration of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia appeared as a series of online mini-documentaries for Vice's website. The first installment, The Sapo Diaries, followed Morris to the Amazon basin, where he documented the use of kambo (the secretion of the giant monkey frog, Phyllomedusa bicolor) by Indigenous communities. The piece set the template for what would follow: Morris participating directly in the practices he documented, asking probing questions, and maintaining a deadpan tone that balanced intellectual curiosity with dry humor.
