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 ...

Calls to eradicate coca fields in the Peruvian Andes began a century ago as part of a mission civilisatrice led by eugenicist Enrique Paz Soldán, long before concern over cocaine and the subsequent ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

There must be all kinds of unexplored applications for harm reduction, but the one I always come back to is bulimia. This is partly because, like drug use, it revolves around a specific behavior—easy ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

[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 ...

Does the world really need another book that examines the opioid-involved overdose crisis? There’s no shortage of tomes devoted to deconstructing, badly or (rarely) well, what happened. In the first ...