The Farm Bill's Chemical Children In 2018, the U.S. Farm Bill legalized hemp, defined by a single bright line: cannabis plants and products containing less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. The line was drawn around a molecule, not a plant, and the chemistry did what chemistry always does when the law draws […]
Category Archives: Articles
The Science of When and How Much Every post in this series has touched, implicitly or explicitly, on pharmacokinetics: the absorption timelines that make edibles different from smoking, the half-lives that drive the testing absurdities of the workplace post, the onset windows that the redose traps exploit and the overdose windows that the response-times close. […]
Your Liver's Fingerprint Give the same dose of the same drug to two people with identical body weights, and one may experience a strong effect, the other almost none, and a third a dangerous overdose: the differences are not randomness, in most cases, but genetics, and the science of pharmacogenetics (how inherited variation in drug-metabolizing […]
The Desert's Experiment in Temporary Community For one week each August, a dry lake bed in northwestern Nevada becomes the sixth-largest city in Nevada: Black Rock City, the Burning Man gathering's temporary metropolis, built and dismantled annually by its inhabitants (the participants, the citizens of the week-long city) under the principles that the event codified […]
The Gatekeeper's Machinery The Food and Drug Administration's drug-approval process is the most consequential regulatory gate in the world: the single decision (the approval or the rejection) that determines which compounds become medicines for three hundred million Americans and, through the world's regulatory reference-point effect, for much of the globe. The process is also, for […]
The Other Gatekeeper While the FDA asks whether a drug works, the Drug Enforcement Administration asks a different question: where the drug belongs in the Controlled Substances Act's five schedules, the regulatory classification that determines, more consequentially than almost any other single decision, what research can be done on the compound, who can possess it, […]
The Movies' Long Argument With the Compounds The movies have been arguing with the psychedelics since the argument began: the cinema, barely fifty years old when the first golden age's compounds entered the culture, became the compounds' mirror, their prosecutor, their romanticizer, their documentarian, and eventually their serious narrative subject, in a century of films […]
The Intervention That Starts Where the Problem Starts Among all the interventions this series has covered, Housing First carries the strangest distinction: it is the one whose logic the unaided common sense endorses immediately (the homeless person's problem starts with the homelessness; give them the home first; everything else follows), whose evidence is among the […]
The Treatment That Prescribes the Drug Of all the interventions this series has documented, heroin-assisted treatment carries the heaviest rhetorical weight: the supervised prescription of pharmaceutical-grade heroin (diamorphine) to people with severe, treatment-refractory opioid dependence, as the treatment itself, in the clinics where the doses are administered under medical supervision. The intervention is the safe-supply […]
The Repair Nobody Prescribes The first months of recovery from heavy substance use are a whole-body reconstruction project that the treatment system rarely addresses: the brain's chemistry recalibrating, the sleep architecture healing, the mood stabilizing, and the body, the physical body, rebuilding from the malnutrition, the sleep deprivation, the sedentary collapse, and the organ stress […]