Tag: drugs

Michael Pollan talks about using psychedelic drugs, escaping his own ego, and the therapeutic potential of seeing yourself spread out over the landscape like a coat of paint.

After a profound shift in thinking about an unfairly stigmatized plant, Bolivia is ready to spread the gospel of coca.

Lance Armstrong ran a well-oiled cycling machine, and a well-oiled doping factory. Maybe those are the same thing.

Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force were celebrated for getting firearms off the street, until detectives discovered they were also robbing criminals of guns, drugs and money.

Amy Long on how it feels to fight for the man you don’t want.

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

Aaron Gilbreath considers the impact a live Jane’s Addiction recording has had on him, and the effect heroin had on the band’s — and his own — creativity.

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.

Seven years after a vicious drug cartel massacre, residents are still looking for answers about the fates of their loved ones.

“But to bring cannabis to the region of the US where states are deeply red and religious and where pot is both a social taboo and a ticket to jail, Decker and others are harnessing their devotion to their faiths to evangelize for it.”

Carol Blevins’ work as a confidential informant put 13 members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas behind bars. Now they want revenge.

At Toronto Life, Katherine Laidlaw tells the story of Darryl Gebein, who got hooked one of the most dangerous opioids on the market.

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.

It took Leah Carroll years to determine that her mother was murdered by an organized crime syndicate as a suspected drug informant.

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.

This week, read stories by Mark MacKinnon, Rachel Cusk, Carmen Maria Machado, Suketu Mehta, and an excerpt from Bill Hayes.

At The New York Review of Books, James Fenton reports from the night shift in Manila, giving us a glimpse into the war on drugs in the Philippines, from “buy-bust” undercover operations to EJKs (extrajudicial killings).

At Lenny, read an excerpt of Ayelet Waldman’s memoir of LSD microdosing, A Really Good Day.

A reading list of eight stories on marijuana.

“A new book is like a new brand of detergent,” Jacqueline Susann famously said. “You have to let the public know about it. What’s wrong with that?”

Can a liberal arts college foster a culture of experimentation and personal growth while also ensuring the safety of its students? Connecticut’s Wesleyan University has long had a reputation for progressive students and politics (“Keep Wesleyan Weird” is a common refrain on campus), but after a headline-grabbing drug debacle this spring, the community finds itself grappling with the […]

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 […]

“The tourists don’t know anything,” said Nichole, 29, a former heroin user who lives in a shelter and goes to the McDonald’s regularly with her boyfriend. “I love when they walk in here and look around and everybody is nodding out on a table. Because they have no idea what’s going on. They’re like, ‘Why […]

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 […]

Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth. Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to […]

“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.”

In a piece for the Financial Times John Paul Rathbone wrote about the murder of Glauco Villas Boas, one of Brazil’s best-known cartoonists. Glauco was a leader of the Céu de Maria church, one of the many churches in Brazil that treat hallucinogenic ayahuasca tea as a sacrament. The young man charged with murdering Glauco had partaken in the religious rituals […]

[William] Powell quit his job and began writing for up to ten hours a day. Despite the title, there is nothing about anarchism as a political theory in the book, which focuses on drugs, surveillance, weapons, and explosives. About drugs, Powell knew plenty. He had overcome a speed habit, smoked lots of pot, consumed his […]

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

Documents espousing marijuana’s medical benefits first appeared in 2900 B.C. in China, but medicinal cannabis in Europe is indebted to one over-achieving Irishman. Born in 1809, Dr. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy invented the modern treatment for cholera, laid the first telegraph system in Asia, contributed inventions in underwater engineering, and effectively pioneered the use of medical cannabis in Europe. Inspired by the use of cannabis in Ayurvedic and Persian medicine, O’Shaughnessy conducted the first clinical trials of marijuana, treating rheumatism, hydrophobia, cholera, tetanus, and convulsions.