If you only get your international drug policy history from Netflix, you might think that the drug traffickers in Mexico are a smart, coordinated system of violent sociopaths that control the government. They are cartels. Therefore they have leadership, and hierarchies and tangible targets that can be taken out just like in a Call of Duty game. Thi…

Like some kind of perverse fishing expedition, we’re all familiar with the drug warriors’ favorite form of theater: the drug bust. Every police department seems to do this, posing their officers with huge (or even tiny, inconsequential) bags of drugs, stacks of cash and sometimes a cache of weapons, propping everything up as if it’s the prize that …

The War on (People who Use) Drugs has claimed over a million victims in the last two decades, every fatal overdose representing deep policy failures that attempt in vain to control normal human behavior: self-medicating and inducing euphoria. None of this wonky policy bullshit matters much when you’re the parent of a child who dies from an overdose…

The Drug War is more brutal than ever. Overdose deaths are still shattering records, there’s talk of war with the cartels, increased penalties are just making things worse, there’s little money for harm reduction programs or addiction treatment, yet plenty of cash for prisons, cops and the DEA, weird new drugs are appearing that no one knows how to…

Harm reduction is an imperfect philosophy that serves as the only wedge between prohibition and what we all really want, which is a healthy, productive society. If more police and prisons could make drugs safer, we’d have a lot less overdose deaths and problematic addiction. But that’s not what’s happening. Drugs are more available than ever, while…

At Narcotica, we’ve often talked about how methadone is one of the most over-regulated substances on the planet. It’s not a perfect drug — nothing is — but it helps a lot of people. So why is it so hard to access? On this episode, the crew (Zachary Siegel, Chris Moraff and Troy Farah) speak with Dr. Zoe Adams, an internal medicine resident at Massa…

People have this conception that San Francisco’s streets are just overflowing with human shit and people injecting drugs in the open. Stereotypes about California being overrun with homeless encampments and open-air drug markets abound, as if these things don’t exist in other states, while politicians in Arkansas and Oklahoma, for example, warn aga…

A future where abortion drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol are trafficked just like fentanyl or methamphetamine or where birth control is sold on the street corner like crack cocaine is really not that distant of a reality, if it’s not already happening. The drug war is deeply intertwined with reproductive rights. That’s not always obvious to …

The United States sure loves to cage people. Incarceration statistics can be shocking, but they can be cited so often that they can lose their potency. It can seem abstract or just the way things are. But it is completely immoral that the U.S. throws more people into cages than any other country for which we have reliable data. In order to partiall…

Certain celebrity authors want to help you accept that certain drug use is OK—and there’s nothing wrong with psychedelic exceptionalism, but it overlooks the biggest destructive forces of the drug war. Yet, legalizing drugs like meth, heroin and cocaine remains a hard sell for even the most progressive of drug policy reformers. So how do we cross t…

No matter what the problem is, whether it’s fentanyl overdoses or mass shootings, the solution to all of our problems is always more money and bigger budgets for police, prosecutors and prisons. Funny how that works, right? If crime goes up we need police, if crime goes down it’s because of the police, so we still need more police. They can’t lose!…

For good reason, about 150 million people use cannabis, according to the World Health Organization. That’s around 3 percent of the global population or the entire population of Russia. In most places, smoking the flowers or extracts of this plant can come with some steep legal consequences: long prison sentences, heavy fines, loss of civil rights, …

Naltrexone, also known by its brand name, Vivitrol, is an opioid antagonist that kicks opioids off of opioid receptor in the brain, not unlike naloxone. But thanks to a combination of overprescription, unscrupulous marketing practices and ubiquitous use over more effective alternatives, naltrexone is a very controversial drug. In fact, a common rea…

Psychedelics and other drugs can trigger a condition called Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, a terrible name for a real condition that we don’t have much data on and is poorly understood. But while it’s clear that psychedelics shouldn’t be illegal, it’s also clear we’re still learning about some of the risks. This fascinating and often …

It’s easy to hate the massive pharmaceutical corporations that extract obscene profit from the healthcare system—and there are many, many reasons why you should distrust these companies, although the situation is far more complex than “Big Pharma = bad.” But how did we get here? How did medical care get so expensive, so complicated and sometimes, s…

Imagine banning a chemical that we all make in our bodies. But that’s exactly where drug war logic takes us and why testosterone is Schedule III on the Controlled Substances Act, alongside ketamine and buprenorphine. Testosterone is painted as some dangerous substance that must be locked up. These outlandish fears led to restrictive laws which lead…

Psychedelics are not exactly taking the same path that cannabis has taken to the mainstream, but there are some similarities. In the late ‘90s and early aughts, when medical cannabis was first starting to take hold in California, quasi-legal businesses popped up overnight, with a lot of questionable quality control and these shops were often raided…

On this episode, Narcotica co-hosts Zachary Siegel, Chris Moraff and Troy Farah interview each other, riffing on one question: Is the drug war getting better… Or worse? They cover everything from nitazenes, Dopesick, the Drug User’s Liberation Front, banning psychedelics like DiPT, benzo dope, West Virginia, buprenorphine, psychedelic exceptionalis…

Harm reduction programs like syringe access, supervised consumption or even just handing out condoms on the street, can be some of the only access to healthcare some people encounter. Definitely not all, but some people who use drugs routinely shun going to the doctor—not because they don’t care about their health, but because our for-profit health…

Booze is one of the most ancient and most prolific drugs in society, yet for some reason, it’s always placed in some separate category. Drugs and alcohol. Even at Narcotica, we’ve done over 65 episodes about drugs and not one of them has focused solely on ethanol. We just haven’t gotten to it yet, we’ve had so many other topics we’ve wanted to expl…

Over the past two decades, as fatal drug overdoses have risen precipitously, few professions have been hit harder by the crisis than the medical community. Physicians in particular have found themselves in the no-win position of being both blamed for the overdose crisis, which claimed more than 100,000 American lives in the past 12 months, while be…

These days, there isn’t an ailment some Silicon Valley-esque startup is trying to treat with psychedelics. Of course you have depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD and fear of death for the terminally ill—there’s some good data for treating all of that—but some of the more obscure treatments include anorexia and eating disorders, sexual dysfunction,…

Nearly half the U.S. population now have access to adult-use cannabis. Marijuana is a medicine, if it’s cultivated or extracted right, and millions of people find relief or pleasure from this fantastic plant. But as legalization accelerates, regulations have struggled to keep up. Most experts and maybe many consumers would agree that cannabis is no…

Sex work is work, just like coal mining, professional sports and literally any job that involves physical labor. So why is a show about drugs interested in sex work? For starters, there’s a lot of overlap in terms of harm reduction services that help people who use drugs and sex workers. Unfortunately, these services can be criminalized and weaponi…

We’re truly living through a disaster. Drug overdose deaths rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 to a record high 93,000. This is no longer an “opioid” crisis. What I mean is, 2020 overdose deaths linked to stimulants, especially methamphetamine, also broke records. The other key development here is the further entrenchment of illicit fentanyl in the dru…

One area where drug stigma especially persists, even among harm reduction advocates, is the prejudice against mothers and pregnant people who use drugs. Even some people in syringe exchange or who work in drug policy are against the idea of people with the capacity for pregnancy, (i.e. anyone with a uterus), using pretty much any drugs for any purp…

Psychedelic drugs are well beyond the quote ‘renaissance’ stage and relatively recently entered a ‘gold rush’ as dozens of companies maneuver themselves to make this nascent industry as profitable as possible for themselves. At least that’s part of their motivation. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword for folks that want to see an end to the drug wa…

Few social justice groups have put in as much work to end the war on (people who use) drugs like the Drug Policy Alliance. Since 2000, DPA has been behind some landmark drug reforms, such as leading a campaign to enact major reforms of New York’s notorious Rockefeller drug laws, assisting in a public education campaign that saw Uruguay legalize can…

For many people, psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin are their first major introduction to a profoundly altered state of consciousness. Mental conditions like autism or ADHD are other forms of consciousness, although they don’t wear off after 12 hours and so-called ‘neurotypical’ people often have misconceptions about these mental arrangements…

Our planet is in crisis, plagued by an increase in wildfires, floods, hurricanes, freak storms and outbreaks of disease. As a result, we’re seeing more and more people isolated, left to fend for themselves, as the cracks in public infrastructure only seem to widen. To use one prominent example, the state of Texas has been slapped with recurrent cat…

Amid a wave of synthetic drugs in recent years, Kensington, Pennsylvania has emerged as the locus for a different kind of experimentation, through a new generation of freelance entrepreneurs. Their bathtub chemistry is often guided by trial and error—leaving doctors, public health officials and harm reductionists struggling to understand the latest…

There’s a “twindemic” raging across the state of West Virginia: Covid-19 has collided with an outbreak of HIV and hepatitis C. If that’s not bad enough, West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the nation. The CDC recently called the HIV outbreak in Kanawha County, West Virginia the “most concerning” in the country. Make no mistake, thi…

It’s kinda weird hearing people say “weed is mainstream” now, when merely possessing the plant stuff can still earn you serious consequences in many parts of the world. But the growing popularity of cannabis is unmistakable. Marijuana is now a global, multi-billion dollar industry—well, to be fair, it always was, only now it’s all legitimate and ov…

Maybe it seems like an obvious question, but why is certain drug use illegal in the first place? Don’t you, as a human being, have some bodily autonomy and doesn’t that extend to alterations in the mind as well? What about the fundamental right to change your mind? On this episode of Narcotica, co-hosts Troy Farah, Chris Moraff and Zachary Siegel t…

Dr. Carl Hart has long been known as America’s preeminent drug scientist. If you listen to our show regularly, you’ve probably heard of him. He appeared briefly way back on Episode 6, talking about crack-cocaine. For the uninitiated, Dr. Hart is a neuroscientist at Columbia University, and he’s published well over 100 peer-reviewed, scientific pape…

On this episode, we discuss how Mexico became a flashpoint of the war on drugs, broader trends in American foreign policy and drug policy, as well as the evolution of synthetic drugs as the main category of illicit narcotics. Our guest is Stewart Scott, a security analyst who for years penned one of the best annual assessments of Mexico’s evolving …

Most people know salvia as the weird psychedelic drug at head shops that you try once, have a bizarre, uncomfortable experience and never touch it again. But there’s so much more to salvia divinorum, psychedelics and plant medicine in general. Narcotica co-host Troy Farah speaks with Dr. Ivan Casselman, from Vancouver, B.C., Canada, who has a Ph.D.…

Is there any class of people who receive more stigma, who get more shit and abuse for using drugs, than mothers? Probably not! For whatever reason, society really looks down upon mothers who use drugs. And too often, Child Protective Services use evidence of drug use, even prescribed drugs like methadone or buprenorphine, as a pretense for seizing …

Something that never gets said enough is that the drug war is racist. This is not an opinion any more than it is an opinion that the American Civil War was fought over slavery. Both were crafted by racists to serve racist agendas of controlling people based on their skin color. It is why it is more urgent than ever that we dismantle this system of …

You ever wonder what the hell pharmacists even do? To laypeople, pharmacists are the gatekeepers standing between us and our drugs. But they can be, and arguably, should be, much more than that. Even though just about everyone has experience with pharmacists, some good, some really bad, the profession is still a bit of a mystery. What’s going on be…

When Morgan Godvin was 24, she sold her best friend Justin a gram of heroin. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. Both of them often used together and hooking each other up was essentially seen as a favor, to keep one another from experiencing withdrawal sickness. But this one time proved to be fatal. Justin would later be found dead from an overdose, …

There are several health crises occurring around the U.S. and the world right now: overdose deaths, a pandemic, police brutality and violence… While these crises may all feel distinct one from one another, they are actually deeply entwined and can be understood through a lens of racial justice. Overdose deaths disparately impact people of color, as…

The last place you’d want to be dependent on drugs, besides the Philippines, North Korea or the United States, is probably Russia. To give just one example, the Motherland has long banned the use of medication-assisted treatment, such as buprenorphine or methadone, which has made recovery next to impossible for many users. Narcotica co-host Christo…

Pretty much everyone on the planet is being impacted by Covid-19 right now. Harm reduction services like syringe access programs or supervised consumption sites are no exception. But for some people, these services are not just their lifeline, they’re the only healthcare they receive, period. And when hospitals and doctor’s offices are already stre…

The covid-19 crisis has exposed many weak spots in our culture and the need for radical change. It has revealed which workers are really essential—hint: it’s not executives keeping this late-stage capitalist economy afloat—and that we need to pay these workers a living wage. It has revealed that yes, healthcare is a human right and that contributin…

Ketamine is one of the most versatile drugs on Earth, an amazing anesthetic that can relieve pain without the same risk of respiratory failure as opioids (nothing against them, of course.) Overwhelming evidence also suggests ketamine can rapidly reverse suicidal thoughts, making it a potent treatment for PTSD and treatment-resistant depression. Las…

In these uncertain times, Narcotica aims to not only give our listeners vital public health information, but also offer a sense of reassurance and community. If you’re following the social distancing guidelines, or working from home, life may feel a little extra lonely right now, and we aim to provide interviews and conversations to keep you compan…

In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid out guidelines for primary care doctors prescribing opioids to treat chronic pain. Essentially, these guidelines stated that opioids should not be the first line treatment for pain, and that other methods should be tried first. Which is perfectly sensible. But when it came to dosing and d…

Public officials have been yelling from the rooftops that there’s an opioid epidemic. Yes, an obscene number of people are dying from overdoses, many of which involve opioids. But they’re not quite right. Researchers who really get what’s going on describe what’s happening to the U.S. drug supply over the last few years as a mass poisoning. Were it…

It’s difficult to write about drugs without being steeped and schooled in the discourse. Cultural tropes and conventional wisdom dominates the space. Drugs are anthropomorphized as the enemy. People who use drugs are described as manipulative and selfish, unless, of course, they’re “clean.” Often there is little empirical research cited and the sam…