‘Who wouldn’t want pure cocaine?’: the radical plan to prevent overdoses with better drugs

The Drug User Liberation Front is being criminally prosecuted for providing a safer drug supply as harm reduction. They are urgently calling for donations to their legal defense fund to fight these charges and safeguard their mission. Donate here.

On 12 August 2017, I ran from the car that James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of anti-racist organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other people’s blood splattered on me. I lost my friends in the crowd and panicked. I thought I might die.

A month later, I woke up on a work trip in a hotel room alone in Oakland, California, with my hands trembling, and an unshakeable feeling that I was being chased by a pack of wild animals. I was having a mental breakdown.

This feeling did not cease for months. Repairing myself from that breakdown took years. In many ways, it is ongoing.

As I attempted to recover from my PTSD-induced collapse, I turned to a variety of mind-altering substances. There were the ones to keep me calm enough to not feel like I was about to die at any moment: benzodiazepines such as Klonopin; kratom, a plant from south-east Asia that has opioid-like properties. There were the ones meant to restabilize me into something like a functioning human: antidepressants and mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. And then there were the fun ones – the LSD and ketamine and 2C-B and MDMA – that helped me envision a newly healed self, and thus a future.