The most famous anti-smoking campaign in history was branded, simply, as @truth. It was launched in 2000 by the American Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded with $1.5 billion from the ...

The need for harm reduction around alcohol use is both pressing and obvious. Yet too often—in a field dominated on the one hand by concerns over use of banned drugs, and on the other by the ubiquity ...

Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12 Steps, with their prescription of abstinence, have dominated America’s response to addiction for a half-century or more. Yet despite the urges of advocates and the ...

Around 2013, fentanyl started percolating in the United States street opioid supply, which was heroin-based at that time. Over the next few years it steadily pushed heroin out of the East Coast, and ...

A misguided nurse coinciding with the arrival of medetomidine in the drug supply nearly proved fatal for me. In 2020, having recovered from heroin addiction years previously, I was working at an ...

Tanesia DeMacon is no stranger to jail. She estimates she was arrested no fewer than 15 times, starting at the age of 18 and continuing throughout her 20s. “I used to joke that county jail was school ...

Prisoners in solitary confinement are often served something called Nutraloaf. Imagine taking all the old crap from the back of your fridge, mashing it together, then baking into a brick. This is ...

In January, the United States’ first state-sanctioned overdose prevention center (OPC) began operations in Providence, Rhode Island. Run by harm reduction service provider Project Weber/RENEW (PWR) ...

Praised by politicians, parents and presidents, police officers taught DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) to fifth and sixth-grade students in around 75 percent of United States school districts ...

Tamera Lynn Stewart had been taking prescribed opioids for 12 years to treat her chronic pain, following some cancer-related surgeries. Then one day in April 2018, her doctor told her he could no ...

[This article is an adapted excerpt from On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance, which was published in Canada by Goose Lane Editions in September. An audiobook will be available ...

All life studies of people’s drug use show that most people who develop addictions—a small minority of drug users—move past their addictions on their own over time, usually without total abstinence.