On Drugs

A reframing of simplistic good-or-bad, black-or-white narratives about drugs.

What is a drug? The answer seems so obvious that the question is hardly worth asking. We can all agree that cocaine is a drug, or methamphetamine, or cannabis. But what about sugar? Caffeine? That heavy, sleepy feeling you get after eating a big portion of turkey at Thanksgiving? The extremes of experiences like sex and exercise or love and grief are created by the same consciousness-altering neurochemicals responsible for the highs and lows of a cocaine binge. What about your phone, or your toddler's iPad—can we be addicted to technology? Does using these devices make us "high"?

Drugs are slippery objects, difficult to define. Some make us feel good, others make us ill. Some take the form of pills, plants, or powders. Others, like the runner's high, require no physical substance at all. Much of what we think we know about drugs comes from a handful of well-used cultural narratives: drugs are either a public health menace, a social issue to be fixed, or an age-old criminal and legal problem. The rebels among us might even think of drugs as tools for creativity and artistic production. But despite the profound role drugs have played in human history and society, we rarely give any thought to what drugs actually are, and more importantly, what they do.

Reframing "drugs" as a wide variety of human experiences within a spectrum of altered consciousness, On Drugs weaves together cultural history, science, politics, personal anecdotes, and current events to ask why our frameworks for understanding drugs are so limited and how expanding them can transform our society's response to substance use.