When the Law Declared the Party a Drug Den In the early 1990s, a new cultural form spread across America: the rave, the all-night dance parties built around electronic music (the house, the techno, and the jungle of the era's genres), the communal dancing, and the MDMA that the culture's pharmacology was organized around (the […]
Category Archives: Articles
The Legal Architecture Behind the Infrastructure Gap In 1986, at the height of the crack panic, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and buried in its pages was a provision that would, thirty years later, become one of the harm reduction movement's most-cited obstacles: the so-called crack house statute (21 U.S.C. 856), making it a […]
The Oldest Harm Reduction Fight Of all the interventions in this series' harm reduction toolkit, needle and syringe programs are the oldest and the most continuously contested: the simple provision of sterile injection equipment to people who inject drugs, proven across four decades and dozens of countries to reduce HIV and hepatitis transmission, and fought […]
The Compassionate Alternative's Double Edge In the 1980s and 1990s, as the drug war's incarceration machine filled the prisons, a reform idea emerged from the court system's own frustration: the drug court, a specialized court docket that diverted the nonviolent drug offenders from the prison pipeline into supervised treatment, with the court itself (the judge, […]
The Crisis's Geography of Neglect The overdose epidemic's geography is inverted from its infrastructure's geography: the highest death rates run through rural America (Appalachia, the Ozarks, the rural South and Midwest, the small towns and unincorporated communities of the opioid belt), while the harm reduction infrastructure (the syringe programs, the naloxone distribution, the treatment clinics, […]
The Poppy That Shaped the World The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, is arguably the most consequential plant in human history: the source of morphine, heroin, codeine, and the entire opioid pharmacology this series has covered; the engine of the nineteenth century's most infamous trade wars; the original substance of the global drug control system built […]
The Border That Decides What Reaches the Mind Every drug story in this series is, at the pharmacokinetic level, a border-crossing story: the molecule that reaches the brain does its work, the one that does not is merely chemistry passing through. The border is the blood-brain barrier, and it is among the most consequential and […]
The Sibling Experiment Drug courts' sibling followed the same template into the adjacent territory: the mental health court, the specialized docket that diverts the offenders whose crimes are driven by their psychiatric illness (the misdemeanors and the low-level felonies of the untreated schizophrenia and the bipolar disorder and the severe depression, the storefront-breaking and the […]
The Debate Nobody Wanted to Have Of all the places this series' naloxone coverage reaches, none produces the resistance that schools produce: the proposal to stock the overdose-reversal drug in the institutions that house the nation's children, where the parental instinct (protect them from the very knowledge of the drug's existence) collides with the epidemiological […]
The Heart Infection Behind the Overdose Shadow The opioid crisis's public face is the overdose: the fentanyl death, the naloxone reversal, the mortality statistics that this series has tracked throughout. Behind the overdose shadow runs a parallel epidemic that receives a fraction of the attention and consumes a shocking share of the healthcare system: infective […]