Narcotica Podcast

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,

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?

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 c...

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 us...

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 ...

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...

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.

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,

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,

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 goi...