A Field Guide to Your Brain on Drugs
There’s a strange pattern in the history of psychoactive substances. Humans discover something that fundamentally alters consciousness. They build ceremonies around it, integrate it into their spiritual and medical practices, pass the knowledge down through generations. Then, for various reasons, that knowledge gets suppressed, forgotten, or driven underground. Sometimes it…
If you went through DARE in the 1990s or early 2000s, you heard about PCP. You probably heard about it more than you heard about drugs you were actually likely to encounter. The presentations always had the same energy. A cop or a former user would stand at the front…
In my time working festivals as a psych tech, one of the most dangerous combinations I encountered was cocaine and alcohol. Shockingly, it’s also one of the most common. I spent several years at a harm reduction tent at music festivals, the kind where people would stumble in at 3…
Tea began, like most trouble, as an accident. In Chinese legend, dried tea leaves drifted into an emperor’s boiling pot in deep antiquity, then spent the next couple of thousand years moving from medicine to habit to art. By the Tang dynasty, tea wasn’t a quirky regional curiosity. It was…
When I talk to people about harm reduction and vitamins, one of the first supplements that comes up is 5-HTP. It’s a popular choice in many festival-goers’ toolkits, but what does it actually do, why would you take it, and what should you know before you throw it into your…
