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, […]
Category Archives: Articles
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 […]
The Scene That Carried the Torch Across the World If the Grateful Dead anchored the American psychedelic underground (the companion post's subject), psytrance anchored the global one: the electronic-dance-music culture that emerged from the beaches of Goa in the 1980s and spread, through the decades of the compounds' criminalization, into the worldwide network of the […]
When the Trauma Lives in the Tissue This series has documented, across a hundred and seventy posts, that the compounds' therapeutic promise runs substantially through the trauma conditions (the PTSD trials of the veterans and the sexual-assault survivors, the addiction and the depression that the trauma underlies), and the trauma field's own therapeutic evolution deserves […]
What a Hundred and Seventy Thousand Words Add Up To This is the hundred and seventy-second post in a series that began with ten blog-length articles and grew, at the reader's request, into a library: the substances and the science, the policies and the histories, the communities and the families, the molecules and the doors […]
When the Findings Refused to Repeat In the early 2010s, psychology and the adjacent sciences entered a reckoning that has since reshaped how every careful reader approaches every scientific claim: the replication crisis, the discovery, through the systematic large-scale replication attempts, that a shocking fraction of the published findings could not be reproduced by independent […]
The Pipeline the Headlines Skip Every drug claim in this series, from the psilocybin trials to the nitazene alerts to the CBD marketing, rests somewhere on the clinical trial pipeline, and the pipeline's structure (the phases, the endpoints, the attrition rates that the headlines skip) is the literacy this series' how-to-read-a-study post recommended in its […]