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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

[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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Back when I was running with biker gangs, we used to play a game called Crash or Fly. Someone would come to the clubhouse with a Chivas Regal bag, you’d reach in blind, and whatever you pulled you had ...

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 ...

“The Evolving Field of Opioid Treatment” was the theme of the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (AATOD) conference, held in Philadelphia in October. But the field has been ...