The media has become somewhat aware that you can't overdose from touching fentanyl, while continuing to propagate other myths every day.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

[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 ...

Those of us incarcerated by the Georgia Department of Corrections got used to the drones a while ago. They’ve been dropping in drugs and other contraband for years, and still do. But in the early days ...

Tyler Mischley, 38, has lived with opioid use disorder (OUD) since he was 15. At age 18, he got an additional diagnosis of chronic pain—doctors discovered that the source of his back pain was half 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 ...

[This article is excerpted from UNDOING DRUGS: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, by Maia Szalavitz. Copyright © 2021. Available from ...