Drugs & Alcohol

I've been a volunteer at a harm reduction group in New York City for about four years now. I do a bunch of different stuff. Usually, when I'm there, I'm running the syringe exchange. 

One day a week, I go out to distribute syringes, test kits and pipes, as well as food and clothing, hygiene supplies and so forth. We also do Narcan training, including ones where we set up at shows and events. One of the cool things we're going to do soon is to actually do in-person drug testing to let you know you really do have cocaine or ketamine and not something else, like fentanyl. That's something New York desperately needs and that they’ve had in certain parts of Europe for years.

There are a lot of people out on the street. They might be coming out of prison. Maybe they never really did dope before but they started in prison a little bit, and then they get out and they have a habit. But they don't really want that to be their life or have this habit define them. A lot of times, somebody comes out of prison, or they're temporarily unhoused, and there will be a six-month period that they'll be using and on the street and they don't have access to supplies. And in that six months, a lot of bad stuff can happen. They could contract something from sharing needles. They could have a wound become infected; they could lose a limb. That six months of someone being down and out—or two years, or however long it is—shouldn't define the entire rest of their lives. They shouldn’t end up with an easily preventable disease or a wound that would be easy to keep clean if they just had basic access to fresh water. That shouldn’t be the end for them. 

So by providing very simple supplies like this to people, it gives them a chance to not just reduce the harm that they might do themselves or that the environment does to them—it also buys people time. If they want to get clean, you can reduce the risk so that they just have a better shot. But it also doesn't matter if people get clean or not. If they don't, they should at least be able to have safe access to supplies and not have to consume things in the most miserable way possible. I'm not judgmental. I don't give a fuck. What people use or how they use it has nothing to do with me. At least here, you should feel comfortable. The people who come here, when they leave, they have to go through the rest of their lives where things aren’t so comfortable.

Dope is one of the hardest things I can think of for humans to deal with. When opium was discovered, people thought it was a test from God, this wonderful thing that allows us to do crazy surgeries, but it's also such a vicious drug. It feels like it was literally put on the planet to test us. And so it's incredibly hard to get off of or deal with your life. That takes time, and it’s not as simple as people think it is. 

People think that you can go to your insurance company and they’ll take care of it. But usually, the most that they'll pay for is maybe six weeks in rehab, and that's just not enough time for people to kick these habits. And they see overdoses as an event, like a car accident or something that you just deal with and move on. But that’s not how car accidents work. You might be dealing with injuries your entire life from one. Overdoses are the same way. 

Our health system isn’t set up to provide the kind of care that addiction and its effects require. They’re the ones who literally fucking dumped OxyContin on everybody and made so much fucking money doing it. It's such a joke. It's infuriating. But now a lot of the country understands that. So harm reduction is a way to add to a whole holistic plan for people to live better and deal with these types of things.

Some people, when they hear about harm reduction, they’re like, “Holy shit, that really makes sense.” And then some people just can't make sense of it. Even most people in my family don't know that I do this work, or if they do, they don't really understand it, even though there have been many people in my family who have died of overdoses or are still using. It’s a mental block. They'll just be like, “Wait, did you say you give out crack pipes? Wouldn't that make people do it more?” It's a very deep-seated thing. But that’s not how it works, and there's a lot of data to back that up. 

Harm reduction helps a lot of other people besides the person using drugs. Especially with syringe exchanges. People complain that the city is out of control, that there are syringes everywhere. And I’m like, “That's because you fucking made the city take away the bins that we had to collect syringes—where you think they're gonna go?” There are solutions to this, but people don't want to look at the one box. "I don't want children in the neighborhood looking at syringes and shit. They're dangerous!"

Crack is interesting because people just think it's the scariest, craziest thing in the world, like people murder people on it or something—but it's not. It’s a boogeyman drug, but it's super common. Tons of people do it. And we've been dealing with it since the ’80s. 

The main problem with crack pipes is that hepatitis C is really easy to transmit with them. We also give out these things like crack condoms so users don’t burn themselves smoking it, which can also transmit infections. If you smoke crack, you’re going to find a way to do it. You might as well be able to do it cleanly. 

I had the idea with our old coordinator at the harm reduction center to start giving out crack pipes and meth pipes. I put together a fundraiser for that, and we bought the first ones and started to give them out. That went really well. The health department actually heard about it, and they were like, “That's great, we want to fund it.”  We were like, “Holy shit, we're actually going to get funding for this and at a high level.” But before I even got to really process it, everybody on social media started saying, “Biden’s giving out crack pipes,” and the funding never came through. It was frustrating. 

People think ideas like this are crazy because that’s what they see on Law & Order. They can't even begin to process how good that is for people and how good a small change like that can change people's minds about everything. If you can get the federal government to give you money to take care of people who are considered the lowest common denominator, that's a great opportunity to change people's minds about how we treat each other in general. 

But if the federal government doesn't fund that shit, we'll keep doing it no matter what. That's one of the reasons I like harm reduction so much because we take care of each other in all these ways. If just a little bit more of the population did stuff like this, it would make a huge difference. The more community you have, the safer shit is in general, all the way across the board. And that’s how you make a better world. 

I grew up in the Bible Belt. I realized there's a pattern with all the people I grew up with, where the way we would rebel against what we were surrounded by was to get really fucked up. You weren't supposed to drink or smoke or do drugs, so everyone there who didn’t fit into that mold just got really fucked up. I lost people to drugs growing up: my family, a lot of friends. My first reaction to it was that I was just really mad. I hated some of these dealers that I knew. There were times when I was like, “I’m straight up going to murder this motherfucker for giving shit to people I knew.” Then, it clicked, and I was just like, “Holy shit, this is exactly what the people in control want: If you don't fall into line with them, then you kill yourself with fucking drugs.”

Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and came across syringe exchanges. I'd heard about it when I was a kid—through the punk community—but I’d never really connected with it. I decided I'm not really mad at any of these dealers or anybody. It is what it is. The problem is the war on drugs and the state.

The one way I can actually fight that is to do harm reduction and do it well, and keep these people alive because that's what the people in power really don’t want to see. The worst thing for them is for these people to be kept alive. I wish we could have done more of this shit earlier. I often think about all the people we lost from the late ’60s through the ’90s, how different our cities could be because so many really cool, creative, smart and radical people were wiped out, whether it's from street violence or drugs or AIDS. It’s a radical act, just keeping people alive so that they can be here to fight. I want people to be sober if they want to be and to be happy and healthy but not because of morality. I just want them to be happy and be a problem for the state. 

We need safer injection sites and a safe drug supply. But also, so much money needs to be put into the way pain is treated because, right now, it’s fucked. There needs to be a full staff of people working with a patient and a whole program for it so that someone isn't just pushed in and out of pill mills. There should be follow-ups and inpatient and outpatient care so people don’t even get into street drugs in the first place. It’s really hard to imagine because, in order for that to change, you need to get rid of insurance companies and restructure the entire medical system. Give me a big enough check and I'll do that.

Justice

Acts of Kindness

I Hand Out Free Crack Pipes to Save Lives

I doubt people in the media drink more than people in other fields but there is a very deep-rooted drinking-genius-writer myth that is very hard to dislodge. I mean, even if people slag off Ernest Hemingway, they still act like that’s the way to live. 

Everything seemed to revolve around drinking when I had a staff position. The good and the bad, both—these happened when we were full of booze. Obama elected? Drunk. Trump elected? Hammered. When something went right? Down to the bar. When someone was acting up? Let’s take them to lunch at the bar. The day after my sexual assault, I went through a whole list of reasons it might have happened, but it never occurred to me that alcohol might have played a role. Everyone was always drunk, so the condition was like a transparent film over everything.

When I think of my early days in writing, in the ’90s, it’s much more boozed up. There were nights during the week at the Magician or Brownies, when talking was woven into the spaces between pints. It was never a coffee date, always drinks. This will seem like an exaggeration, but it’s not, at least in my field. In the arts and in journalism, nobody ever went out for coffee—not in the ’90s. When the people I worked with and I were in London, it was, “See you down the pub.” AA is much less of a thing there.

Here, in New York, there was sort of a ghost schedule for everything. Weeknights would just happen at a certain bar, and it never much mattered which one. If it was a weeknight, you could ask to meet someone, anyone, at a bar. The people you worked with were almost certainly going to be at a bar somewhere, and usually that became a sort of default. If there was no plan, you simply went to the Scratcher or Tile Bar. The kids I know now in the art world, they make it sound just as bad, if not worse. They seem to be doing K and coke all night long and meeting at some of the same bars. 

The idea is that you’d hit the bar and talk about whatever you were working on and argue needlessly. Maybe somebody was playing, and you’d go to their gig, but that was sort of ancillary. The gig was just a brief interruption in the drinking and the shit-talking. What happened is that these drinking sessions framed my life and made me think a certain way about the scope of experience. When I was assaulted, I didn’t even really think much of it beyond, “Ugh, that was a weird night.” That wasn’t even really the bad part. The fusion of friendship and work and drinking made everything that much harder to see, part for part. 

At one job, when I had a staff of about five, we were across the street from an Irish bar. Not a Blarney Stone, but something like it. Because the parent company of the paper I was working for had a really hard-drinking, right-wing tilt, almost everyone in the building was doing booze lunches at this place. I started doing this kind of thing maybe once a month and then, all of a sudden, it was twice a week. And then there would be a meeting that night at Milady's or Milano’s or Tom and Jerry’s and the buzz from lunch would not have worn off. The shots and beer backs would start colliding with the rosé, and I’d be blind by 10 p.m.

There was no real impulse to change my behavior because the number of writers and editors who didn’t drink was so small as to seem like not worth considering. Of course, an alcoholic never realizes that they’re not drinking with alcoholics until it's too late. And this is how an alcoholic embarrasses themself, night by night. You see someone you work with, and you go over and drink with them. They nurse a drink all night; you have five. Whatever dumb shit you say goes into a folder whose contents are always being weighed against a folder of Other People’s Dumb Shit. This is how you would like to believe how the general social measure of behavior works. You are, by your own private math, in the middle of the pack. Your drinking and dumb behavior are normative, so it will have no impact. But the person you're talking to doesn't think that way nor should she. She just knows she’s having a bad time with you, the grabby motormouth, and this opinion is agnostic as to the behavior of others. 

This social aspect is important. Alcoholics, before they get sober, tend to think like cops. We assume that the other alcoholic writers and editors we work with will cover for us. And this is probably true, up to a point. And the culture, many years ago, was generally more alcoholic and things were forgiven, often when they shouldn’t have been. But the transparency of digital culture has changed all of that forever. Now people are getting sober because somebody they work with has taken a selfie with them. They thought it was all in good fun. And then the next day, they see the caption is, “LEAVING LAS VEGAS lol,” or, “COME GET YR GIRL TENNESSEE WHISKEY,” or some such. The things I kept hidden through social networks and complicit cohorts are being revealed by people who are not, in fact, alcoholics. Or maybe they are, and they’re just petty. 

There is also a range of delusions that the alcoholic engages with. Going to lunch with an important person and having wine seems like some kind of flex, like you’re really out here on some William Shawn bullshit, above it all. And whoever you imagined being your drinking idol may not have drunk like that. Think of how often you’ve seen Hunter S. Thompson’s breakfast routine reprinted. Did he ever do that, even once? 

We see our heroes and elders and colleagues as part of some vastly inspired cohort beyond the whims and restraints of the normies. We see footage of Thompson flipping a whiskey bottle at his desk and think, “Ah, that’s how it’s done.” Everyone else keeps watching and sees him drop it the next time, soaking himself in whiskey and being escorted out by the security guard. Nobody remembers the first five flips after the one that hits the floor. But the alcoholic, we trim and trim and trim the footage until the excerpt suits our needs. We are still the heroic last-minute filers. To the rest of the staff, we’re the alcoholic disasters who occasionally get it right.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a final lunch as I did. Jazzed about minor success, I took one of my mentors out to Cafe Un Deux Trois on 44th Street. She had the steak frites, and I had the French onion soup. She had seltzer, and I had white wine. We talked about everything, from the editors we hated to the ones we were worried about. The booze made me sentimental, which made her talk less. After two more glasses, I asked her to go to Jimmy’s Corner with me. After she paid the bill—why would an alcoholic ever put their card down first?—we went to the boxing bar. 

Jimmy was still there, at this time. We sat toward the front. I started with shots and beer backs, and my friend had a Coke. She looked unconcerned but also like she was sitting on something. I just rambled about TV, blogs, philosophers I barely understood, writers I had never met. I started claiming inspiration for my colleague’s pieces, talking about the more famous writers on staff without ever having met them. She was patient and occasionally corrected me on flaming, unbound errors. At 3 p.m., she said she had to go. And when she left me there, sideways and unable to remember my own schedule for the day, she said one thing. 

“You don’t have to do this anymore,” and that was the last time I saw her. 

I didn’t get sober for five more years, but almost every time I got home at 3 a.m. with a bad sandwich from the third-best bodega in my neighborhood (the only one open), I would think, “I don’t have to do this.” And then I’d watch documentaries about Eugene O’Neill on YouTube and think, “I’m not as bad as him.” I’d fall asleep on the couch, miss the 9 a.m. staff meeting and then rock up, cold brew in hand, excuses ready to go.

Media

Does Anybody Drink More Than Writers?

I have always been fascinated by the depths our bodies can endure. The duality of our mind both creates walls and destroys them. When we are tested, we are capable of much more than we think. This train of thought has led me down a path of all different self-experiments and, in the summer of 2018, a perfect storm of sleep deprivation, drugs and an ultramarathon led me to discover “the edge.”

It began at my business partner's wedding, a beautiful affair on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Upstate New York. In three days, I was due to race an ultra-marathon on the other side of the country in the Nevada desert at Burning Man. I had the best intentions to behave myself at the wedding, but one cocktail turned into several, then someone slipped me some ecstasy and mushrooms, and the evening was off to a wild ride.

The night raged on and culminated with lovemaking at sunrise with a lady friend on a mattress we pulled out of a dusty supply cupboard. Sunday morning delivered one of those ghastly headaches that open bars at weddings are famous for. I ambled my way back to Brooklyn to pack for Burning Man. By the time I packed, I’d managed to eke out three hours' sleep before flying to Portland to collect our RV. 

We arrived in Portland on Monday around lunchtime and picked up our RV. The race was in 17 hours and maps said it was a 12-hour drive. We hit the road stopping only for fuel and supplies. We carefully hid a considerable cache of recreational drugs intended to last us six days at the Burn. My friend and I split the driving and, around sunset, I started to hit my first wall.

A wall for me is an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. It’s the body's “low battery” warning. I tried to nap, but by the time I found a comfy position in the RV, it was my time to drive again. I cranked a Red Bull and some techno music to find a second wind. We arrived at the famous Burning Man traffic jam around 3 a.m. By the time we were through the gates, only an hour remained before the race.

As I laced up my shoes, I hit my second wall. Three hours of sleep in three nights started to catch up with me. Imagine the finish line, I thought. I trudged towards the start line. Butterflies formed in my stomach, adrenaline coursed through my veins. The energy of 300 eager ultramarathoners brought upon a much-needed third wind and I was ready to race.

When people say Burning Man has something for everyone, it’s true. If your thing is subjecting yourself to a sustained battering of your legs, aerobic system and mind, then there’s an ultramarathon for that. These are the deranged masochists of Burning Man. Many are dressed in costumes. There are tutus, a Superman, a leprechaun. One guy is fully naked except for his shoes. The race is four full laps of the festival. I told myself I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Running is an easy sport. The only real thing you need to do is not stop. Some say it’s the art of dying the fastest. The hard part is convincing yourself to not stop. Your mind wants to throw up walls and convince you that you are in danger and should no longer go on, but the mind also has the power to overcome. It’s as much about inner strength as it is about outer strength. Mind over body.

At 5 a.m., the starting bell rang. We made our way through the dark campsites and out onto the playa, full of lights, art, cars and music. The Milky Way bore high overhead. By the second lap, light appeared on the horizon, and the sun rose over the playa revealing revelers who were still partying from the night before.

By lap four, the sun blazed overhead. I found myself sitting in 11th place. At 42 kilometers in, I felt a third wall coming on. My legs started to feel heavy. My mind convinced me that I was doing some permanent damage to my joints as my knees and ankles screamed in pain. My lungs stung from the heat and my eyes were red from the dust. My pace slowed to a crawl with the finish line in sight. I told myself to keep going but the body refused to listen. I stopped.

At this point, I heard measured panting from behind. A fully naked man in his 50s slowly jogged past me. I tried to move my legs to keep up with him, but my legs had no more to give. There is a slow sad irony of being overtaken by a naked man in a marathon. You can’t help but check out his dusty tanned butt cheeks as they slowly pass you. A strange torture.

In the wake of his cheeks, I found a fourth wind. If a naked man could finish this race, so could I. Using energy conjured from an unknown source, I found the willpower required for the last eight kilometers. Shattered and dusty, I rolled into the finish line in a little under four hours. An honorable finish considering the sheer lack of sleep. My friends were there to greet me.

It was 9 a.m. and my crew was rested and ready for action. Someone slipped me a tab of acid and we were off on our bikes exploring the playa. The acid and excitement of exploration brought on a fifth wind. The acid negates the exhaustion and we bounced from party to party. With a little top-up of ketamine, we headed off to a sunset dance party. By the time 4 a.m. rolled around, I was in awe of my body. Still standing and into my fourth sleep-deprived night. Alas, the sixth and final wall hit me. I knew this experiment should end. Delirium overtook me and I asked my friend Nicole to escort me safely back to camp. We zig-zagged home and on the final turn before our camp, the world turned black.

Nicole dropped her bike and raced over to my dusty, tangled body. She removed my bike from on top of me as I regained consciousness. My eyes fluttered open and I saw a frightened look upon her eyes. I laughed like a hyena. “What’s funny?” she said. 

“Only those who have been over the edge know where the edge is,” I said. “And we found the edge.”

Adventure

Best of 2021

Running a Marathon on No Sleep and Lots of Drugs: Discovering the Edge

What people don’t realize about drugs that are prescribed to you by doctors is that it takes a very long time to even consider the idea that you have a problem with those drugs. If you’ve been prescribed Xanax, as I was, any physical or mental reactions to withdrawal will be filed away in your head as Problems of Your Own Making. 

Back up for a second and think about it: You feel anxious and miserable, so you go and ask your doctor about the feelings. He’s not going to tell you to go to therapy or think about AA. He’s going to give you the option that makes him money and keeps you coming back—some kind of pill.

So you take the pill, and it works. The drugs tend to work, and that's why we’re here. For a while, at least, this system doesn’t fail. Your body hasn't become habituated to the drugs, so they keep working, and you feel more relaxed because you can still feel the drug and you are telling yourself you’re less anxious because you can feel the drug. The drugs don't tell you the truth, though, which is that your body is feeling something but you are actually the one calming yourself down. Your brain simply reacts to the change in the body, and you find your own calm because your body is telling you that you should. You’re doing the heavy lifting.

But as your body habituates to the drug, the withdrawals become more palpable. You begin to sense the half-life of the drug, intensely. But that’s not what you’re telling yourself, because you’re taking the drug as medicine for anxiety. When the withdrawals kick in, you assume that your anxiety has gotten worse—not the drug—and that you are somehow to blame for the feelings you’re having. You just need more of the drug, that’s all. That is the new prescription you give yourself.

The doctor will not explain this to you, any more than he will explain that you don’t actually need the drug. He will not recommend meditation or any of the various things that will connect you to yourself and give you control of your emotions. He will connect you to a drug that will take control of your body.

I have never done Oxy but I am fairly sure this is what happens to Oxy users who start taking the drugs after an accident, as prescribed. The opioid epidemic has managed to gather some of the attention that benzos can’t, because benzo users aren’t dying. Oxy is much more powerful than benzos, so the fallout there is much bigger—you can overdose. With benzos, it’s pretty hard to overdose unless you combine them with something else. That fact that our lives are coming apart isn’t good enough for the newspaper writers, who want bodies and blood. 

Again, though—these are drugs prescribed to you by doctors. When you start feeling bad, the best you’ll get from a doctor, as I heard from mine, is: “Well, stop for a week and you’ll go crazy and then it will be over.” This, at some level, is technically true. I suppose if I had that kind of faith in myself and my strength, I would have done that. But it doesn’t feel true, and the physical withdrawal from benzos is savage. My light-headedness made it seem as if I might completely fracture and actually, somehow, concretely lose my mind, like it might float away. No doctor has ever said: “This drug feels pretty cool but is wildly addictive and will generate an entirely new dependency you don’t have right now, in this split second before you start taking it.” All of the awful feelings you are having and attributing to your anxiety are so baffling and clandestine. They are anxious feelings, but they are a reaction to the bodily condition brought on by the drugs themselves. Xanax works quickly, like booze, and it combined with my alcoholism beautifully.

When you realize that the medicine is trying to kill you, you’re halfway there, but you’re still alone. There are very few models for tapering off of benzos, and the best one is in a free PDF called The Ashton Manual. I didn’t trust it at first, because it was free. I wanted to go somewhere and pay money to get clean. That didn’t happen. I flailed, trying to get myself off benzos. The results were awful. I was at work, taping a podcast, and the panic set in so severely that I had to bail on the podcast and walk out of the building. It didn’t get me fired but that kind of stuff adds up to an atmospheric portrait of a person. The lovely man I was talking to didn’t have any idea what was going on. All I could say was, “I don’t feel great,” which makes people think you’re going to throw up. So I pretended I had a stomach condition because those usually demand some kind of immediate attention. And that’s a smaller version of the larger problem: You can’t tell people what’s happening because you yourself don’t yet believe it.

Without an explanation, if you haven’t admitted to yourself what’s going on with the benzos, you end up as puzzled as the people around you. Why, exactly, are you so anxious? You don’t know what your body is doing to you, and you don’t know how to make it stop. Mostly the drug wins. If you have enough benzos on hand, you can just wild out and pound them. My metabolism and weight and chemistry meant that I couldn’t really ever do too many. They just felt good. The reasons to stop felt weak. If benzo users overdosed more, maybe we’d get clean faster.

My hopes around this becoming a bigger public health issue are minimal. I occasionally talk to another user who’s flailing. Last week, I talked to a woman who was struggling with them after doing them for only a month. She’d been straight-edge her whole life but started having anxiety around COVID. She absolutely could not believe that her anxiety wasn’t controllable, even though she could see clearly that it had never been that bad in the 40 previous years. She also realized that the short time she’d been on benzos sort of proved the drug was correlated to her anxiety spike—there was a one-to-one correspondence. Even knowing all of that, the bodily withdrawal symptoms were so severe that she was terrified of going off the drug entirely. All I could do was tell her to titrate down as low as she could for as long as she needed. But then she would need to jump. And I told her the mantra I used, the one that got me clean:

“I’m not gonna die,” I told myself, over and over, as I walked around Morningside Heights.

And it was true. I didn’t die. But I can only extrapolate so far. People with comorbidity, with both anxiety and other mental health issues and addiction issues, will have their own experience. Benzos might relieve enough of the right pain to make other recovery possible. This is why it is important to let recovery have its own shape, and to avoid writing a bible of recovery.

The interaction between opioid users and drinkers and pill-poppers brought this home to me. I don’t ever do overdose drugs, and I didn’t understand, at first, why someone would want to be hooked on Suboxone after getting off of heroin. But somebody else couldn’t understand me being addicted to benzos.

“That shit is so light,” he said. I didn’t qualify for the rollerball vibes of addiction, apparently.

That’s where benzos land, is this netherworld where neither the junkies nor the doctors take you seriously. And because this particular addiction is so tied to your perception of it, the outside diminishment is a huge part of why it takes forever to start unwrapping the addiction. 

Mental Health

My Xanax Prescription Put Me Into a Spiral of Addiction

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Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

I knew early on that I didn't have a normal family. Dad was a punk, while Mom—well, we're still not sure what's going on. One thing that became obvious was adults liked to lie. They would hate it when you copied their behavior and they’d start shouting about the proper way to act. 

My parents taught me a lot. Not through advice but action. They were movies brought to life, unable to disguise their thoughts that created a level of connection most children grow up missing. My parents were also open to anything, so when it came to experimenting with drugs, it made sense to ask them to join. 

I wanted to try acid. Movies like Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas had done their best to scare me off, but curiosity led me to ask. My mom is the official guide in all things illegal. A veteran of the drug wars, she would be my unofficial guide, leading the way through the dense jungles of the subconscious.

Not wanting to be left out, my dad decided to come along. He hadn't tried acid before but assured us he could take anything. As a man known for his intimidating demeanor, it'd be interesting to watch him threaten his own mind.

Mom made her calls and came back holding a plastic baggie. Inside were four sugar cubes. So it was settled. This would be our first family “trip.” 

She sat beside me, and with a smile, she took my hand, opening it like a flower. When I looked down, I saw half a sugar cube staring back. Then, I felt the nerves kick in. All I could think was, “Why's it so heavy?” A lump of lead that crumbled to the touch. I looked over at my dad, hoping to see the same fear. Instead, he turned to my mom and asked, “Is this it?”

Dad was your old-school tough guy, an aged punk who never fully committed to becoming civilized. He viewed the world like an enemy. I watched him push his half around, casting glances at my mom.

I took my half and waited. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but I spent the next 30 minutes glancing nervously at the clock. I didn’t feel goofy or confused. There weren’t any monsters climbing out of the carpet. Maybe it wasn’t as strong as I thought. 

I was about to say something, but Dad got there first. “Mine's a dud,” he said, chest all puffed out. Mom just smiled. “Dud, is it?” Then, Dad started going off about how he wanted his money back. “I know all about drugs,” he said. “I’m not your average man. Best to just give me another half.”

“OK,” Mom said, opening the bag. “You sure?”

Dad gave my mom the look, the same whenever he senses his masculinity called into question. He turned to look at me, and then, with a slap of his chest, snatched up a whole sugar cube and swallowed it. 

“There,” he said, sitting back in his comfy chair. “Think I'll be having words with this so-called drug-dealer.” Mom just sat there, giving my dad a big smile.

Somewhere around the hour mark, Dad started to twitch. His eyes had gone all big and black. Every now and then, he smacked his lips, like a fish gasping for air. I looked at Mum, but she was just staring right back. So I turned to Dad and asked, “You OK?”

Dad didn't like that. He jumped up out of his seat and ran straight upstairs. I wanted to go after him, but that's when I began to melt into my chair. It felt like a marshmallow made from gray corduroy. I could feel myself begin to sink. Down I went, into the darkness. It took me a minute to realize I'd merged with the furniture. I sank a little further, down into the crumbs and old coins where I found peace—part man, part Ikea. 

I looked over, out through the gap in my couch hole. There was Mom, watching me. She looked like an owl made from pastel chalk. I could hear the soothing jingle of her ice cream earrings as her head bobbed from side to side. The voice in my head told me to relax. Here I was, a couch with a human heart and Mom spraying light with a flick of her wings. “All this from one half?” I thought. And then I heard it: a scream coming from upstairs. The next thing I knew, I was being spat out of the couch and onto the floor. I turned to Mom, wondering if she’d heard anything, but she was in her own world, fading in and out, in sync to the images of the TV.

Then, I heard the scream again. Terrified, I wanted nothing more than to leave this to the professionals. But I was left wondering what kind of law could be trusted with such a delicate decision. I couldn't think straight—not surprising when you consider I'd only returned to being a full human. I'd have asked Mom, but she was on her own journey, her shape melting with each passing thought. 

I didn't want to be rude and interrupt her, so I decided to keep the law out of it. After all, this was a family affair. So I lit a cigarette and ventured upstairs, ready to confront whatever devil was waiting for me. With a series of sound effects, I crawled into the bathroom. Suddenly, I was confronted with chaos. The tiled floors shuddered and winced with each step. The walls gasped like a panicky asthmatic. I was so caught up in the moment that I forgot why I was there. 

As I stood over the toilet, I didn't want to deal with the stress of pulling my pants down. So I just sat there, guiding the walls through some breathing exercises. Then, I realized the shower was on. The glass was stained with fog, and deep inside, I saw a shape. It took me a minute to realize it was my dad. There I was, watching his shadow drift back and forth like a jellyfish. Then, from deep inside the fog, I heard a voice: “Son? Are you real?”

Before I could speak, I noticed something in the fog. It was small and forced me to squint. And then I saw them, deep inside—the moors of Scotland, and I smiled at the soft notes of a distant bagpipe. Then I blinked, and I was right back on the toilet. 

“I don't think I'm the person to ask, Dad.” 

Soon, I headed back downstairs and into the living room, only to find Dad already there. He was fully dressed and dry as a bone, sitting right in front of the TV watching Avatar. Then, he slipped his feet inside his hoodie. “Watch the skies,” he said. Within seconds, he was dipping and dodging as the movie’s hero flew on his pterodactyl. I just sat there, watching Dad squawk over and over.

Mom went over and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me when it kicks in, love,” she said.

Dad didn’t respond. After all, he was fighting for the resistance. 

It was hard to keep a sense of time. Deep conversations rolled on. We opened up as a family. Then, I looked at the clock, and it had only been three minutes. Other times, my mom would point over my shoulder and laugh, but there was nothing there. “What is it?” I’d ask, looking back to notice five hours had elapsed. Next to me, Mom asked if I finally understood. I told her I didn't have a clue, and then we all started laughing. We laughed for so long, I remember asking, “Does anyone know what’s going on?” Mom and Dad exchanged a look and laughed again. 

At this point, everything had gone mythical. Avatar was finished, and now I was watching Percival battle his way through the plot of Excalibur. Weeds were rising up the walls, choking everything like the cast of Trainspotting agreed to a game of Jumanji. Mom and Dad kept laughing through the weeds and the teeny-tiny motorway on the carpet. They laughed as Percival was left to hang in the tree. 

“Does anyone know what's going on?” I asked them again. But my parents were suddenly sitting on thousand-foot-high skyscrapers. The tiny motorway beeped, so I lifted my foot to stop blocking traffic. 

It was all chaos—all my thoughts and memories filling the room. Hundreds of sounds and colors. It was intense. Then, I looked at my parents. Surely they saw the chaos, the madness. And yet there they were, still laughing. Slowly, I began to look around. I watched all the little moments happen, and I felt glad to be a part of it. And as I watched Percival fall free from the tree, I began to laugh too.

There we were, the three of us, laughing amongst the madness and chaos. For the first time, it felt good to welcome the distraction, to let go and embrace the moment. I was grateful to trip with my parents. To have that chance to strip away the expectation and roles and watch as two people tried to make sense of the world.

Ancestry

How My Parents Guided My First Psychedelic Trip

It used to be that when something good happened, I celebrated with a drink. If something bad happened, I would drink to forget. Something that started out as fun became a habit out of boredom. I ended up with multiple bruises from falling while blacked out, a sprained ankle and a jammed finger just because I wasn’t conscious enough to watch what I was doing.

It didn’t help that my friends couldn’t ever think of anything else to do other than meeting up to get drinks. Although there were times when I wound up taking care of others when they’d had too much, there were also many times when I was the one throwing my fist at people who were trying to take care of me. Drinking would result in me being late for work or missing it completely, canceling things that I had already paid for and having some people distance themselves from me because I was too much of a mess. 

I was drinking when I first met my boyfriend. I woke up in a daze that day. My mother had passed away less than a year before, and the only way that I knew how to deal with grief was by drowning it. A friend of mine, whom I had rarely spoken to, had invited me to a small holiday get-together at her apartment. I worked late the night before, but naturally for me at the time, I continued to drink after work. I had every intention of going to the party, but I slept in. In my dream state, my mother appeared to me, and we talked about how she was deceased. I will never forget what she said.

“What do you mean? I’m here with you, and you are here with me.”

She had passed away from an illness, but she went into a coma first. It had been almost a year, and she told me she wasn’t dead. I went on to explain to her that she was. Then, she suddenly told me to wake up and go to the party. 

I stumbled in late with two bottles of Prosecco in hand, and there he was, sitting in the corner alone. Without thinking about whether or not he would think I was batshit, I said to him, “My dead mother came to me in a dream and told me that I had to come here today. So here I am.” He was honest, thoughtful and definitely not scared of me. And he was over 15 years clean. He didn’t seem to care that I was drinking, but it would be a topic that came up more in the future whenever I drank to the point of inebriation. 

My friends hate the fact that my boyfriend is sober. Being with him meant that not only would I stop being the fun party girl that my friends loved (or pretended to), but his sobriety also forced them to look in the mirror at their own issues. They were also covering their pain with intoxication. They also drank when they were stressed out. They also didn’t have any other bright ideas about what to do outside of our local dive.

The truth is, although I was also apprehensive, being with someone sober has saved my life. I grew up in a family with a lot of substance abuse issues. My mother would take any type of medication she was offered, and my brother died from a mixture of drugs. I never felt that I needed a fix, but I had immersed myself in a city with a culture that felt like you had to have booze to have fun. After meeting my boyfriend, who had been sober in the same city for longer than I had lived there, it became obvious that it wasn’t a requirement but a hobby that was formed from whom I hung around.

When I first started seeing him, I listened to the advice that my friends had to give. Some told me that they feared a sober partner would try to control me. “He’s going to constantly be comparing you to himself,” others would say. After much thought, I realized that people were projecting their own trepidation onto my relationship. If I listened to them, I would still be drunk and alone. I would end up losing out on something great just because I took advice from an outsider looking in who had their objections.

I’ve had relationships with people that were only founded on drinking, and they didn’t last long. I had friends who would refer to me as a drinking buddy, as if there wasn’t anything else that I could bring to the table. My boyfriend saw me as something more than that. He saw me as someone who was adventurous and passionate and was dying to get out of a dimly lit bar to live my life and do all of the things that drinking with my friends was holding me back from. 

I’m not sober. I never felt I needed to drink, but I felt like sometimes I couldn’t figure out anything else to do. My boyfriend has never pressured me to become sober like him, but he has encouraged me to look at my actions. It’s hard to follow through with our goals if we’re constantly looking out of one eye while struggling to keep the other one open. I learned that sobriety isn’t just about having a drug addiction but about a state of mind. Many people can stop the drug but still be an incredible pain in the ass with a negative view of life. I didn’t feel like I needed to ever stop drinking completely, but I could see myself quickly turning into a relentless, bitter old soul with no room for improvement. I needed to focus on fixing my mentality and working through the wounds of my past instead of repressing them. 

Being with someone sober has shown me that life is what we make of it. When you don’t have a vice to rely on, you become clearer in your thoughts and patterns. You become more emotionally mature. I could never fully heal from my past before because I wouldn’t allow the pain ever to sink in. I wanted to go and party with my friends and forget about any sort of suffering rather than do healthy things for my mind and spirit. Drinking to black out might have made me forget momentarily what was hurting me deep down, but it didn’t erase it. One night out could turn into many, and its negative effects on my physical and mental state could last a lifetime. Unfortunately, I know many who have gone far too soon because of this behavior.

I feel that my relationship is more fulfilling than one that meets in bars and stays there. We take short trips together to plan outdoor activities instead of booze-related events. We have hiked mountains, swam in oceans, camped in some of the most beautiful spaces in the world and learned new hobbies together. I started focusing on myself more, even while I was with him. Many people form codependent bonds, but ours allowed us to focus on ourselves even while we were together. I began doing the work deep down that I had been putting off for too long. I started painting again, which I hadn’t done since high school. I started doing athletic activities and things that were good for my body instead of poisoning it daily. I found more soul-fulfilling things to do with my time, and I was with a partner who encouraged me to be creative rather than be in the center of a superficial scene.

I know that when my boyfriend shares thoughts, he means what he says. I know that he is always listening and won’t forget our conversations. And most importantly, he decided to do the work he needed to do on himself, as tedious as it might be. This type of introspection that comes with sobriety is something that most of us retreat from, whether or not we have an addiction problem. It’s the type of work that requires us to look at our flaws and assess our path in life, and it’s the type of work that is impossible to do when we’re impaired. 

Maybe this is what is so frightening to others?

Health

My Friends Hate My Sober Boyfriend

Several months ago, I was dining with an Italian friend when he told me he appreciated L.A. the most for its floating quality. “It’s a climate primed for dreamers,” he mused as he sipped his martini. A platitude, but I couldn’t help but agree with him. We were seated outside Figaro Bistrot, picking at burnt escargot, watching people stroll by the narrow Los Feliz street. It was nosebleed season, and any perspiration immediately wicked off the body into the dry air. 

He said the pedestrians walk differently in his hometown. “In Milan, there’s a constant bustle. People move with a destination in mind. They don’t seem to do so here.” Once again, I agreed with him. There was an impracticality to their pace. They sauntered by, often with earbuds in, and took up the entire middle of the street. As someone who moved back to California after a stint in New York, this happened to be my biggest peeve with the city; the pedestrian culture here was infuriating at times. But that day, watching my friend watch the street with detached curiosity, it felt novel again. 

Later that afternoon, we drove to Echo Park to ride the swan boats. He steered, I peddled, struggling to spark a joint I found crumpled at the bottom of my briefcase. After several hits, the harsh edges of the heat were dulled. 

“How often do you smoke?” he asked as I passed him the joint. 

“Twice a day usually. Sometimes more.” 

I used to be proud of the weed tolerance I’ve developed over the past four years in L.A. As a burgeoning adult, it’s become more of a guilty habit. The respite of weed is also the crux of my problem: It provides a cloud to drift on, away from the body and out of the present. I’ve become aware of long stretches of time lost to the cloud. We stopped pedaling and floated lazily along the lake. Yes, I thought to myself, L.A. floats. 

Fun fact: The history of weed in California predates its admission to the Union. In 1810, 220,000 pounds of hemp were grown in the state. The Mexican Revolution would eventually disrupt marijuana production, and subsidiaries were dissolved shortly thereafter. Following prohibitionist sentiments in 1907, California passed the Poison and Pharmacy Act and six years later became the first state to prohibit weed. In the 1930s, the infamous Reefer Madness campaign swept the nation. Weed had become inherent to the state before its boundaries were even drawn. 

The culture seeps into the disposition of Angelenos. 

To be honest, I was psychologically dependent long before my move. I started smoking in eighth grade. There wasn’t much to do in the inland desert outside L.A. besides getting stoned off your ass, especially on days when the thermometer reached the 110s. I lived in a three-bedroom home with my mom and five siblings. Weed gave me a mental headspace I could disappear into from the perpetual claustrophobia. And at that time, it truly served a utility. 

When I moved to New York for college, I was introduced to a whole new side of the culture. In California, you can get a gram for the price of several avocados (which also happen to be significantly more expensive in New York). We passed bongs around freely, regardless of anyone’s contribution. New Yorkers weren’t keen on sharing. They smoked spliffs and measured out their weed on scales before matching on joints, just to ensure no one was skimping. Then, I fell in love with a skater boy who taught me to roll my own joints. His hands were rough and scabbed from eating the pavement on many failed kickflips, but when he rolled, I’d watch his hands move gracefully, almost tenderly. When he licked the sides, it drove me out of my mind. 

I moved back to California the next year. The city was expensive and, unlike most of my peers, I didn’t have a trust fund. For two years, I associated my broken heart with the nostalgic ritual of rolling a joint. It was practically ceremonial. First, I’d wash my hands and either put on Lana Del Rey or pick from one of my many melancholy jazz playlists. Then, I’d roll up. 

I liked blowing dramatic circles and glamorizing my own loneliness. At that point, weed was so entrenched in my life, that it seemed difficult to imagine a future without it. For those two years, I was lost in the limbo of Los Angeles. The weather was so temperamental, I could drift through the seasons, suspended in a floating state without the bitter cold to bring me back to the body. I tried to keep in touch with the boy, but I was living on an island in the land. 

When the pandemic began, I justified veggie-frying my brain as a way to lose track of quarantine time. Sometimes, this worked. Other times, it made the hours pass more slowly. Time rolled on and the pandemic happened, and I smoked to make time pass quicker. When I’m high, I’m more vulnerable to intrusive thoughts, which can often spiral into an anxiety attack. I refused to admit pandemic-related panic because I am a stoner, and therefore, I am chill and impervious to the hysteria of normies. 

So instead, my thoughts turned inward. I rehashed embarrassing and shameful moments, which I viewed as generalized pandemic fatigue. But there’s also a sense of nostalgia. Rolling a joint was often a communal act, sharing stories and spit in close proximity, something that had been lost in the isolation of quarantine. 

I associate smoking with the many communities I was lucky enough to have been accepted into. Like the time I lived in Haiti for a year, working for an art center in a coastal beach town. During power outages, which occurred every other day, my co-workers and I would take to the roof. My Haitian friends would bring tobacco leaves, and together, under a vast canopy of brilliant stars, we’d pick out the seeds and branches of scraggly brown weed that smelled like dog. We’d tell stories and play cards under candlelight sieged by moths the size of a child’s fist. 

Or when I stayed in Cambodia for a summer. I’d drink a beer at the waterfront in Phnom Penh and order happy pizza—pizza baked with weed on top of the cheese. Maybe I was too blasted to fully remember all these moments, but the fragments I have are precious to me. 

Smoking weed is a social act that breaches past language and cultural barriers. You don’t need to wholly understand a person to smoke with them, but even so, sometimes, you can tell a person by the way they roll. Do they add tobacco or prefer it vegan? Are their hands nimble as they pack the weed down, or do they smoosh it and tuck the paper in broad, swift movements? Do they hold the joint hostage during a rotation and tell long-winded stories? In the circle, who brings the lighter, who rolls, who plays the music, who’s the resident comedian? The stoned philosopher? The paranoid friend? 

This is all to say, my happy moments with weed were never really about the weed to begin with. The memories of the people I shared it with are the ones that stick out. It was an excuse to gather and share. It’s no wonder the best storytellers I know are massive stoners.

In the past six months, after 10 years of daily smoking, I’ve finally started to reconfigure my relationship with the plant. I know now that it’s the people I cherish, not the high. 

L.A. has proven itself a sort of existential reckoning. There’s the endless cornucopia of herbs, tinctures, dabs, extracts, ointments, edibles—all an app away and comparatively affordable. But the problem isn’t the weed itself. L.A. provides a lot of indulgences to numb away the constant droll of a seasonless Alexandria. I understand the desire to lose time, especially these days. Without discipline, it’s easy to lose yourself to the vast indulgences offered by the city. 

Earlier this year, something shifted. Throughout the years, I attempted little breaks from weed but never succeeded for more than three days. But one day, fraught with generalized existential pandemic despair, I sat on my floor and lit a candle and prayed. Not specifically about weed but for change. We lost so much these past two years, and I didn’t want to lose anymore. So I prayed. Three days passed, and I had no cravings—then a week, then a month. I pick up the habit again every now and then, but my relationship with weed has been fundamentally altered. No longer a daily supplement, I treat the plant as I should—a positive and occasional relief, like a glass of wine at the end of a work week.

COVID Turned My Weed Habit Into a Problem

Somewhere in a vivid memory, 1990s Rachael Leigh Cook holds up an egg. 

Back in 2019, in the wake of the posed question, I am in a hospital bed staring at what looks like a black and white Polaroid of a cauliflower with a blotch of mold growing on it. 

“Yes,” says the man in the white lab coat. “And that’s a tumor.” 

Rachael Leigh Cook then smashes the egg and destroys the surrounding kitchen set with a frying pan, proclaiming, “This is what your family goes through, and your friends, and your self-respect, and your future…”

The gritty details of my diagnosis resembled an episode of a medical drama, but it was my understanding that if I committed to being an A-plus cancer patient, my odds of survival were high. Just stay the course, do what the doctors say, pay no attention to statistics and don’t ask a question if you expect a good answer. When I asked what to expect, my neuro-oncologist told me that most of her patients' suffering was psychological. Now, three years in, I finally understand what she meant. 

I’m a 34-year-old woman with brain cancer, treatable but incurable, and to survive, I’ve had to do a lot of drugs. However, the one that has truly saved me is a Schedule I illicit drug, possession of which could send me to jail.

I grew up in the era of MTV and Teen Vogue. In elementary school, I had a three-ring binder holding a prized collection of “Got Milk?” and Absolut Vodka ads. It is no wonder my first underage adult beverage was a white Russian. In fifth grade, like most kids across the U.S., I crossed the cafetorium as a D.A.R.E program graduate. My pure mind had been imprinted with graphic imagery showcasing that doing illicit drugs of any kind meant you would end up a toothless vagrant living on a dirty mattress.

The scare tactics worked. I triple-checked that the black markers said “Mr. Sketch scented” before inhaling their licorice aroma. If marijuana was the gateway drug, I wouldn’t let so much as a Sharpie cause me to lose control of my mind and future. Just drink your milk and say no to drugs! 

Into adulthood, I maintained a pretty rigid anti-drug mentality, but once the bad reputation changed, I got my medical marijuana card on the diagnosis of anxiety and crossed through the gateway. I felt a certain level of shame that I used weed to help me sleep and relax, but adulting is hard. Sure enough, using marijuana didn’t inspire me to move on to meth like I was taught in fifth grade. I was just one of the millions of Americans, many of whom are still being judged thanks to archaic legislation, who benefitted from the natural brain balm of THC.

In the three years since diagnosis, I have been prescribed the following drugs: Keppra, Ativan, Ozurdex, Gonal-F, Menopur, Cetrotide, Lupron, Senokot, Zofran, fentanyl, Norco, Temodar, Tibsovo, Imitrex and Enskyce. If most of this looks like Martian to you, that checks out. These are mostly the brand names—they’re not being advertised to us. Temodar showed up at my home in a hazmat package with instructions to flush twice if I vomited it up. It looked so dangerous in its yellow bag that I shoved it all into an empty Lucky Charms box. Packaging changes everything.

Until I had chemotherapy of my very own, I didn’t know that chemo for brain cancer was taken orally and doesn’t make your hair fall out. For 14 months, I looked like myself but felt like a walking lab rat with the shameful feeling that my body had failed me.

I had just enough deadly chemicals surging through my system to threaten the enemy and make me feel like I was dying. Whether or not these Lucky Charms did what they were supposed to do is unclear. The brain is so protected and mysterious, we simply have to wait and hope the bad guys never show up again. 

I rode on adrenaline for two-and-a-half years until a powerfully dark void crept into my psyche, eventually becoming the constant theme of my inner monologue. I succumbed to fear and uncertainty. Life’s fragility became so heavy that I frequently collapsed into the fetal position, unable to name the cause of my panic or provide any insight on what could help. 

There is no known cause for brain cancer. I did not want this life, and I had nothing to be angry at. I was in a purgatory of self-blame, wondering what I had done to deserve this fate, and of survivor's remorse, judging myself for failing to emerge with a greater sense of purpose. I had lost the self that I had come to know and love before the weight of my circumstances had a chokehold on my life. I didn’t want to make decisions based on fear anymore. I desperately wanted to feel carefree again. 

I never looked like the antidepressant ads, staring out at the rain in a blue-gray tinted world. I just felt exhausted. My mind was running through an endless corn maze of dead-end loops. Logically, I understood that I needed to reroute my thoughts and grab hold of the toxic ones, but I didn’t have the tools. The oncology psychiatrist advised an SSRI. I was hesitant. I had seen friends and family struggle with these drugs, experiencing side effects, dosing issues or finding them ineffective. I had also had enough drugs that came with a packet of warnings and an emergency hotline number. 

I had survived cancer only to find myself ready to give up on the life I should feel grateful to have. The word “should” was my biggest problem. Surviving now meant not only rewiring my thinking but reexamining everything else I believed. Being a survivor doesn’t look the same for everyone. Maybe doctors don’t always have the answers. Not all drugs are scary. 

Being a cancer patient has made me an amateur scientist, seeking out information and gathering my own resources. I had recently watched a documentary and studied research about using magic mushrooms for depression and anxiety. The documentary detailed a Johns Hopkins clinical trial that used guided trips for terminal cancer patients experiencing treatment-resistant depression. As these patients described their inner struggles before the trial, I felt less alone. Eighty percent of the patients in the trial reported improvement for six months after only one psilocybin treatment, with no side effects or dependency issues. 

“What about shrooms?” I suggested to the psychiatrist at our follow-up. 

I had always thought of magic mushrooms as a party drug with the reputation of making people stare at walls and jump out of windows. Not only are they illegal but they fall into the Schedule I class, along with meth and heroin. The DEA defines these as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. A drug is defined as a medicine or substance that has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced to the body. By this definition, sugar should be on the list. 

From my very first day of microdosing psilocybin, I felt the windows open in the attic of my mind. The breeze came through, and I noted the sun shining upon tiny specks of floating dust like glitter. Every sound and color was important. My thoughts were within my reach, and I could guide them safely across the deep waters of my psyche to dry shore. I was not high; I was just here. And simply being here is enough to make me happy. 

We are being advertised to all the time. In my mildly psychedelic state, I am now keenly aware of the influence this has on the way I see the world and myself. The PSAs released by Partnership for a Drug-Free America (now Partnership to End Addiction) were created by ad men in the 1980s who admittedly knew nothing about the drugs they were “unselling” or the young minds who they were targeting. They were just getting paid. Partnership to End Addiction continues to receive donations from big pharmaceutical companies. 

Just like marijuana, psilocybin can be found in nature and easily cultivated. There is no financial motivation to campaign for its medical use or legalization, but progress is being made to debunk the reputation of psilocybin and other psychedelics with therapeutic purposes, like MDMA, ketamine and LSD. It makes me wonder what kind of advertising would be necessary to change the narrative. Who would be the face of the campaign? Would they be wearing a lab coat or an American flag pin? 

A recent study, using historical insurance records of glioblastoma patients, showed that those who happened to be on Prozac outlived the patients that were not. Prozac is now being researched for brain cancer treatment. Though all of the medical professionals on my team support it, my chart lists my 0.2-gram dose of psilocybe cubensis as “herbal drugs,” so in the future, when I have died, should a medical pioneer choose to study historical brain cancer cases in search of a cure, they would be lacking a vital piece of information. 

I am extremely lucky to be here and exercise the use of my most important organ to its utmost capacity but even more lucky to have been forced to face and examine the source of my fears. Every thought that travels through the neural pathways and into a synapse is malleable. Perhaps if I can literally change my own mind, then the organ in control of it can also change. 

Or perhaps that’s just a little magical (mushroom) thinking.

The Best Treatment for My Brain Cancer? Magic Mushrooms

The first item I ever stole was an umbrella. Two minutes later, the umbrella broke. 

I laughed and thought, who cares? I didn't pay for it anyway. Of course, if I had paid for it, I would have gone back and got a refund and maybe even got a new umbrella. But stealing makes items meaningless. For a person who loses items on a regular basis, a meaningless item is highly valuable. If you don't get attached to items, then you don't get sad when they're gone because they never meant anything to you in the first place.  

The next item I stole was a leopard-print bra from Victoria's Secret, worth about £70. That night, I wore it to a club. For some reason, it was annoying me. So I took it off. I thought I'd put it in my pocket, but I just dropped it on the street. The next morning, I pretended to myself that I didn’t care. But deep down, I knew that it was pathetic and childish—someone might have saved up for weeks to buy that bra, and I just stole it for adrenaline, then disregarded it like a useless cloth. 

It wasn't for about a year until I started to get embarrassed about stealing things. I wasn't defined by it, but I was definitely controlled by it. When your life is out of control, the natural human reaction is to seek a method of control, whether it’s control over another person or what you eat, smoke or drink. You think you control the addiction, but the addiction controls you. Kleptomania controlled me for nearly four years. Now that I have almost conquered the addiction, I wanted to reflect. Let’s start with my first ever session at Addicts Anonymous. This is where my recovery began. 

Why did I take the leap? I suppose I was a bit desperate. I felt very out of control and needed some method of deterrence. Also, none of the counselors I worked with had much training in addiction and not any at all in kleptomania. I thought the AA team might have some experience with it. 

Everybody is introducing themselves and drinking tea. One man from Belfast says that he hates people. He stares us all in the eyes as he tells us this: He really hates people. But as soon as he has some cocaine inside of him, he fucking loves people. 

An awkward-looking ginger man from Cork tells us that he's just been kicked out of his fifth house this year. He cannot pay the rent because he spends it all on weed. He will continue to disappoint his friends and his family because he can't survive without weed.

A girl with a Dublin accent starts speaking very quickly. She's just been diagnosed with a severe liver problem, and she has serious health anxiety. She has a friend who came as support. The friend tells us that she herself is not struggling with an addiction, but she thinks that some of her friends might have addictions that they are shrugging off as part of university life.

An aristocratic man from Eton with polished shoes gives us a Shakespearean-like monologue about his alcoholism. He describes a cave for which he has the key. He feels like a monster who should be trapped and locked up in the cave because outside the cave, there is alcohol, pubs and drugs. He wants someone else to own the key.

What struck me was the respect from the rest of the group. Everything is accepted and usually related to by another member. There is a look of release from each speaker, as if they can breathe again. 

I am really nervous. I like attention, but not everyone staring at me while I confess the most embarrassing addiction on the planet (except maybe a porn addiction).

I tell them that nothing that I steal I particularly need or want. I don't steal because I'm poor or struggling financially. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with losing things, being disorganized and failing exams. Crucially, it's a secret that my family doesn't know about. They can berate me about everything that I don't deserve, but this one thing I have to myself and they don't know about it.

I tell them that I feel so shameful every time I steal. I always feel sorry for the shopkeepers who are innocently trying to do their jobs. I know as soon as I enter a shop that something is going to happen, whether I like it or not. I've been in shops crying as I steal because I have no control over my body or mind. On the way back home, I sob. “I know this is not a normal addiction, and maybe you guys are thinking that no one can help me here,” I say.

The British aristocrat takes my hand and tells me that everything I said about my addiction is the same as everyone else. The regrets, the shame, the guilt, the secrets from families and friends. I am crying even more because I actually feel heard and unjudged. I can’t actually believe that I am not being judged. But I suppose if they judged me, then they would be judging themselves. Everyone is open-wounded in Addicts Anonymous. 

But with close-wounded friends, who are not as vulnerable, it’s much easier to feel judged. 

I do not think any of my friends have ever really judged me at all, but the deep shame and guilt attached to an addiction makes you believe it.

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