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What Happens When the War on Drugs Turns Into a Wellness Fad
Around the year 2000 Nick Wallis was sat at a card table at the back of an abandoned docklands shed in Melbourne surrounded by lasers, strobe lighting and loud, thumping bass music. As he sat there,...
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Are Writers Intrinsically Vulnerable to Alcohol and Drugs?
The history of art in general, and literature in particular, is full of alcoholics, opium addicts, cocaine users, and junkies of all sorts. And the process is always the same: the chemical muse kills...
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America’s First War on Drugs Was Also a War on Jazz
In May 1947, Billie Holiday had a one-week engagement at Philadelphia’s Earle Theatre, one of the biggest venues in the city for Black entertainers. The Earle Theatre was built as a vaudeville palace...
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The Scent of Rebellion: How Cannabis Became the Drug of Choice For the...
In 1927, twenty-six-year-old American jazz musician Louis Armstrong smoked cannabis for the first time. He was backstage at a Chicago music club when a white musician named Mezz Mezzrow lit a reefer,...
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Diagnosing Murder: How Addiction Became a Central Motif in Crime Fiction
The War on Drugs was clearly on the minds of crime novelists in the early 1990s. Patricia Cornwell’s All That Remains (1992) finds medical examiner Kay Scarpetta working for the national drug policy...
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Alcohol: The Oldest (and Most Popular) Drug in the World
I had my first encounter with alcohol at the age of thirteen in Munich, Germany. I was on a school trip to Innsbruck, Austria, and about thirty of us had come by coach to Munich for the day. A splinter...
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The Link Between Trauma, Drug Use, and Our Search to Feel Better
As long as humans have experienced emotional crisis (which is to say: for all of human history), they’ve attempted to ease their pain with drugs—plant-based psychoactives like marijuana in...
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Nature’s Strangest Psychedelic is Everywhere: The Ever-Surprising History of DMT
For both the McKenna brothers, ethnobotanist Terence and ethnopharmacologist Dennis, and for anyone else with the courage and respiratory fortitude to hold a couple of lungfuls of its vapor in their...
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Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned?
William Shakespeare was in danger of being canceled. He was a big fan of mind-altering drugs—especially cannabis. But the Church of England looked down on live theater because of its “unwholesome”...
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How Big Pharma Intentionally Misleads Patients About the Efficacy of Their...
The key to being a good salesperson is being a good listener. As it turns out, the same skill applies to being a whistleblower. I’ve always known how to listen, but I prefer to do the talking. A...
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The Acid Queen: Rosemary Woodruff Leary, the Invisible Woman of Western...
They wrote to each other in code. Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid, had sent her letters every single day he sat in California state prison—sentenced to a near lifetime for a handful of...
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“Good Medicine and a Very Bad Drug…” Reckoning With the Deadly Duality of...
The bowling ball on my chest is always heaviest at 3 a.m. Its steady pressure pushes me out of sleep most mornings before the sun rises on either coast. I could set my alarm by it, but I don’t need to....
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Can We Reschedule? In Praise of Carl Sagan, Iconic Pothead
In 1971, a year after Richard Nixon signed into law the Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Prevention Act—a statute that, amongst other things, created the five federal schedules for drugs we still have...
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A Struggle for Survival: Inside Mexico City’s Illegal Detox Centers
“It’s not a good idea,” Manuel said when I asked him to help me enter an anexo. It was June of 2011 and another attack on one of Mexico’s anexos had left six people dead. An anexo—or annex—is the name...
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Graffiti Gentrification: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on the Exploitation of...
Image courtesy Magnolia Pictures Is the point of art to bring us into ourselves, or out? I mean the Parkway theater is my favorite place to go to get out of the heat—I can even stare at the...
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Panacea or Problematic Hype?: The Uncertain Promises of Ketamine Therapy
For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of...
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On the Rise of Women in Latin America’s Drug Cartels
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right...
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13 Ways of Looking at a Virus: Joseph Osmundson on the Visual Side of Virology
Jumping off Wallace Stevens’s classic poem, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 13 Ways of Looking asks authors to show the visual inspirations for their latest projects, with accompanying background...
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In the Opioid Epidemic Prosecutions Don’t Always Help Victims
After working as a Rape Victim Advocate, I knew that I wanted to become a prosecutor. I saw how violence impacts survivors. I wanted to end the cycles of violence and stop the perpetrators. I thought...
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My Little Drug Story: David Sanchez on (Begrudgingly) Turning to Autofiction
I never wanted to write autofiction or anything based on my “lived experience.” I especially did not want to write a book about addiction. The books I love are typically sweeping third person...
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