The Most Dangerous Word in Recreational Use: "Also" Most drug harm doesn't come from any single substance — it comes from combinations. The liver metabolizes substances through a finite set of enzymes; the brain runs on a limited set of neurotransmitter systems. Stack two compounds that compete for the same pathway or push the same […]
Category Archives: Articles
A Drug That Isn't What It Claims Synthetic cannabinoids — the compounds sold as "K2," "Spice," "herbal incense," and, increasingly, hidden inside unregulated "mushroom" gummies and vape cartridges — have almost nothing in common with cannabis beyond activating the same receptor. The comparison isn't apples to oranges; it's apples to a class of industrial chemicals […]
The Job Nobody Trains You For In clinical trials, nobody takes a psychedelic without two trained professionals in the room. Outside the clinic, that role usually falls to a friend — someone who agreed to sit because they were available, not because they knew what to do. This guide is for that friend. What you […]
The Rare Aftereffect Nobody Warns You About For the overwhelming majority of people, a psychedelic experience ends when the drug clears the system — hours later, with nothing but memory and (maybe) insight remaining. For a small minority, some of the perceptual changes persist: visual snow across the field of view, halos and starbursts around […]
A Relationship That Runs in Both Directions Few topics in drug policy generate more confident nonsense than cannabis and mental health. Advocates call it medicine; opponents call it a gateway to psychosis. The actual evidence, read carefully, supports neither slogan. What it shows is a genuinely bidirectional, dose-dependent, vulnerability-dependent relationship — one where the same […]
The Most Medically Legitimate Psychedelic You've Never Properly Met Ketamine occupies a strange position in the modern psychedelic moment. It's the one dissociative anesthetic with a half-century of legitimate medical use — battlefield surgery, pediatric anesthesia, veterinary medicine — and simultaneously the one that's exploded into a controversial wellness industry of at-home lozenge subscriptions and […]
Three Minutes of Training, One Life Saved There is no more lopsided cost-benefit in all of harm reduction than naloxone. A nasal spray or auto-injector that takes minutes to learn, costs little or nothing in most jurisdictions, carries essentially no risk of harm if given in error, and — when administered to someone overdosing on […]
A Different Risk Environment A festival is not a living room. It's heat and dehydration stacked on dancing for hours, noise that drowns out a friend calling your name, crowds that swallow people whole, substances of unknown provenance consumed in a state of excitement and impaired judgment, medical tents that might be half a mile […]
The Most Dangerous Myth in Cannabis Culture "If I drive better stoned," runs the standard line, "it's because I'm paranoid and drive slower." It's one of the most widely believed claims in cannabis culture, and it's wrong in ways that get people killed. The science of cannabis impairment is unambiguous on the core point: THC […]
The Diagnosis That Surprises Everyone Cannabis has a famous anti-nausea reputation — it's prescribed for chemotherapy patients, it's the go-to for stomach bugs and motion sickness, and for many users a joint reliably settles an uneasy gut. Which is why cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) is so bewildering, both to patients and to the emergency physicians […]