Instead of a criminal or a drug addict, I was looking at a boy—just a boy.

How could I have missed the opportunity to pop pills with my sister who was purer than a Quaker?

I don’t like to overdose. Call me old-fashioned.

Introduction of rational standards to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable forms of drug related conduct allows us to hold drug users fully accountable for any harm resulting from irresponsible, stupid or ‘anti-social’ drug use in...

When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like...

Moral ideas about what constitutes a meritorious or meaningful use of one’s life and opportunities produce specific attitudes towards drug use and intoxication.

I mean, that’s at least in part why I ingested chemical waste – it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column...

Rationalizing him and the glass pipe, Dad smoked crack, but he was not a crackhead; it was just something he did. To do something didn’t define you, I thought.I saw Dad through a dusty lens...

Last week, I suggested the candidates take up mushrooms. I’ll be damned if Rick Perry didn’t take me up on that.

When you push someone’s head under water for 5 minutes, they will drown. It doesn’t matter if the person is a sinner or a saint. It’s just a natural process. If their head is under...

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving…. AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug...

I’d felt the pop of the needle sliding into my veins, like a fang into flesh. I’d been enveloped in the golden haze where nothing is wrong even when everything is falling apart. A dance...

I woke up with a heart attack just out of my field of vision and with my dick in my hand, saying, I love you I love you I love you over and over…And that...

The next I’m standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I’m bleeding all over, hoping I don’t get arrested. It was completely crazy. But...

In cases of organized and multi-perpetrator abuse when the abuse occurs in the context of rituals and ceremonies, some elements of the experience may have been staged specifically with the intention of encouraging the disbelief...

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought – a system in which the sinner is to be punished...

Across the board… Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are – and we’re not weird, are we? Hell no, we’re just...

He, the One, the bringer of all to enlightenment, had an earthy name. His name was Jimmy.

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without...