There is a version of the psychedelics story that everyone already knows. A veteran who stopped waking up screaming. A cancer patient who made peace with dying. A depressive who, after decades of grey, felt sunlight again. These stories are moving, they are frequently true, and Netflix, bestselling books, presidential press conferences, and a booming...
For decades, people recovering from addiction supported each other freely. They met in fellowship groups, ran recovery community centres and built informal networks from shared experience. Now a fierce debate is splitting the addiction field. Has that spirit of mutual aid quietly turned into something more transactional? Critics describe a regulated, funded and credentialed peer...
When journalist Camilla Tominey sits down with Aaron Bastani of left-wing outlet Novara Media for a Sunday Showdown debate, the conversation quickly turns to addiction benefits reform and whether PIP payments are helping vulnerable people or quietly making things worse. It is a quieter moment, drawn from personal grief, that cuts closest to the bone....
There is a particular kind of document produced by modern bureaucracies which manages, with great skill, to describe catastrophe while avoiding any responsibility for it. The latest quarterly bulletin from Public Health Scotland, comfortably situated within the expanding landscape of state-funded bodies often grouped under the ‘quango’ label, is a near perfect example. It tells...
Supervised consumption sites were sold as a disciplined, tightly monitored answer to the overdose crisis. In Alberta, the evidence suggests something far messier: weak oversight, fuzzy statistics, rising disorder, and a public policy that keeps asking citizens to trust what it does not fully measure. The claim that these facilities are “safe” has become a rhetorical...
Scientists in Israel have just engineered a tobacco plant to grow five psychedelic drugs at once. They call it pharmaceutical progress. They call it a simpler, more sustainable route to medicine. Yet what they have actually built, beneath the language of research and therapeutic potential, is a more efficient delivery system for psychotropic compounds that...
On the morning of 8 May 1976, something quietly extraordinary took place inside a Washington, D.C. hotel ballroom. Fifty-two well-known Americans stepped forward and told the truth about their lives. Among them were astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actor Dick Van Dyke, and Senator Harold Hughes. They were in recovery from alcoholism. Many had never said so...
Is Indiana Drug Policy at a Turning Point? Indiana has long held its ground on drug policy, but that resolve is now wavering. Cannabis regulation in Indiana faces its biggest test yet. In a March 2026 fireside chat, Governor Mike Braun described himself as “kind of agnostic” on medical marijuana, noting that four neighbouring states...
Walk into any well-stocked bookstore today and you will almost certainly find a dedicated corner for what has become known as “Quit Lit”, a growing shelf of memoirs shaped around humour in recovery literature, or the noticeable absence of it. The category has exploded over the past decade. It has also, largely, stayed serious. Very...
Child Drug Safety: A National Reckoning Begins Across the United States, a quiet reckoning is under way. State governments once embraced a hands-off approach to child drug safety. Now they are confronting an uncomfortable truth: voluntary support without accountability has cost young children their lives. The evidence is impossible to ignore. New Mexico Governor Michelle...