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 ...

In public drug policy conversations, decriminalization has too often been framed as a catch-all solution to drug-related issues, from overdose and stigma to health care access and public drug use.

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 ...

Over two years ago, in June 2019, the city of Oakland, California became the first in the US to decriminalize plant-based entheogens including psilocybin, iboga, ayahuasca and mescaline cacti. Since ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Vaping with flavors versus having to vape without them: The difference might sound trivial. But people whose lives have been transformed by tobacco harm reduction see it as existential. “The ...

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 ...

Drugs, troublemaking, bad grades. At the close of 1968, Sidi was expelled from school. Now, the party could begin in earnest. He made music and lived in a filthy shared apartment, pretentiously ...