Tag: addiction

A survivor of childhood sexual abuse now in recovery, Larry Ruhl finds himself adrift in the age of hookup apps.

“I thought I’d never publish these things. I thought it was important for me to hide the fact that I’m not right in the head.”

One journalist shares what her experience with prescription painkillers taught her about decriminalization and recovery.

“How do I tell my kids that their dad just died? What are the words?”

A decade after her mother’s death, Ashley Abramson reflects on being raised by a parent addicted to opioids.

Inventing maladies and marketing drugs to relieve them isn’t a new m.o. for pharmaceutical companies. OxyContin is its fullest and most terrible expression.

The creators of addictive smartphone technology admit they were too immature to consider the downsides of persuasive design.

In his late twenties, John Sherman finds a new fondness for cigarettes, despite everything he was ever taught about them.

The state with the highest overdose rate in the United States is the front line of the opioid crisis.

In Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in Russia, one in 50 are HIV positive, half of which are due to intravenous drug use.

Years before Prince died of an overdose, his music provided a lifeline for Eva Tenuto.

In the New Yorker, Naomi Fry writes about Cat Marnell’s new memoir in a piece that’s part review, part analysis of women’s addiction stories.

Seth Davis Branitz had an awful suspicion he’d feel relieved when, some day, his very troubled brother would pass. He had no idea about the other ends it would rapidly bring with it.

The secret sweet and salty comfort food that fuels the NBA? None other than the lowly, delicious, peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

New York Times reporter Jack Healy was sitting in a diner when he received a tip about a father who had lost two of his three adult children to opioid overdoses.

The unexpected biological and psychological commonalities of addiction and autism, and some new science that suggests that combination may be more common than you think.

The story of Zaine, Arianna, and Zoie Pulliam — three kids under 17 living in South Charleston, West Virginia. Deemed “opiate orphans,” they exemplify a generation of children whose parents have died of drug overdoses as a result of the opioid epidemic.

How willpower — and its absence — turned from a moral and religious concept to a controversial scientific one.

At Mother Jones, Julia Lurie reports on a rising trend: death by opioid withdrawal in jail. Read about how addict shame and silence, jail short-staffing, scant medical equipment, and a general apathy toward inmates make a deadly combination.

At Pacific Standard, Rachel Nuwer reports on the aging homeless population of California and how something seemingly innocuous — like forgetting to renew your driver’s licence on time — can instigate a downward spiral into poverty and homelessness that skyrocketing rent and street-inflicted trauma can extend, sometimes indefinitely.

At The Cut, Emily Gould profiles Cat Marnell, the famously self-destructive former beauty editor who miraculously managed to complete a compelling, well-written memoir, How to Murder Your Life — despite first blowing her entire advance on drugs.

At Pacific Standard, Will McGrath reports on Fort Lyon — “a Betty Ford Center for the homeless — a radical experiment to rehabilitate some of society’s most vulnerable members.”

At Buzzfeed, sober writer Michelle Tea takes readers on a tour of some L.A. establishments where she partied hard in 2001, the year she says she was hitting rock bottom with her addictions.

At Guernica, Lucas Mann (who lost his brother to heroin addiction) writes on why abstinence and methadone don’t work and how doctors are failing in their fight against arbitrary, DEA-enforced patient caps on buprenorphine — a promising treatment for heroin addiction. Curran began prescribing in 2002. He was stunned by the results, and so were […]

After 25 years of fighting a losing war on drugs and with a heroin epidemic raging in his home state of Massachusetts, Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello decided to take matters into his own hands. He opened his police station’s doors to any addict seeking help, promising to get them into treatment. Writing for Boston Magazine, Chris Sweeney […]

Like Senna’s, Winehouse’s family co-operated with Kapadia, but unlike them, they are displeased with the film, and it’s not hard to see why. As well as a welcome portrait of the frequently caricatured Winehouse as an (exceptional) artist and as a person, Amy is an indictment of those around her, especially her ex-husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, […]

Writing for Backchannel, Andrew McMillen recently profiled a woman named Tracey Helton. Helton—a former heroin addict who now works as a public health advocate—has taken to Reddit to advocate harm reduction strategies among addicts and to distribute the overdose-reversing drug naloxone. Dubbed the “mother of r/opiates,” Helton’s program “illustrates the unexpected good that can emerge from darker corners of […]

The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”). But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of […]

“The effects produced by oxycodone and hydrocodone are indistinguishable from the effects produced by heroin,” said psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer of Phoenix House, which runs more than 100 drug treatment clinics nationwide. “If we don’t see that the many veterans who became addicted are provided with effective addiction treatment, we will continue to see veterans turn to heroin, and we will continue to see very high overdose death rates.”

What Burroughs revealed in his 1965 conversation with The Paris Review.