Acceptable Risk

The bestselling “master of the medical thriller” (The New York Times) confronts one of the most compelling issues of our time: personality-altering drugs and the complex moral questions they raise.

When neuroscientist Edward Armstrong begins dating Kimberly Stewart, a descendant of a woman who was hanged as a witch at the time of the Salem witch trials, he takes advantage of the opportunity to delve into a pet theory: that the “devil” in Salem in 1692 had been a hallucinogenic drug inadverte...