On April 28, a Louisiana Senate committee advanced a homelessness criminalization bill brightly titled “Streets to Success.” The legislation would make public camping a misdemeanor and funnel those ...

Emi Koyama is the founder of Seattle-based Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade. Her advocacy spans Washington and Oregon, and is rooted in her own lived experience. That included ...

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 ...

In 1986, HIV/AIDS was burning through New York. The city’s gay population was devastated, and, though it was talked about much less, so were its quarter million injection drug users. Maia Szalavitz ...

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 ...

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 ...

Confrontational counseling, sometimes known as attack therapy, is most commonly associated with so-called “therapeutic communities” for people with addictions. It is worth noting that the term ...

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 ...

Calls to defund the police are picking up national momentum from Los Angeles to New York City. The Minneapolis City Council recently voted to abolish its police department. This may seem radical to ...

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 ...

A recent Washington Post piece on the ever-worsening increase in drug poisoning deaths has reanimated angst over the supposed issue of fentanyl-contaminated cannabis. That drugs like heroin, cocaine ...