Narcotica Podcast

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 some people, but at Narcotica, we will emphasize over and over that bodily autonomy — the core of harm reduction and progressive drug policy — includes abortion access and reproductive sovereignty as much it includes the human right to freely use drugs.

On this episode, Narcotica co-host Troy Farah speaks with Dinah Ortiz, an Afrolatinx drug user activist who has fought for over 14 years for impacted communities. After her role as supervisor at the Bronx Defenders Family Defense Practice, Dinah began doing consultant work as a drug user organizer and activist who has shared her story of parenting during past chaotic substance use nationally and is a fierce advocate for parents in the child regulation system. She is currently the co-chair on the North Carolina’s Survivors Union board of directors and leadership team member of Urban Survivors Union.

Follow Dinah on Twitter at: @Dinahortiz4

If you need to obtain abortion pills, for any reason, for yourself, for your mother, for your sister, or your neighbor, go to PlanCPills.org or AidAccess.org.

Join an Urban Survivor’s Union call by going here: https://www.druguservoice.org/blank-page-3

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel, Aaron Ferguson

The post Episode 78: Drug Use in a Post-Roe World with Dinah Ortiz appeared first on Narcotica.

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 partially address this problem, some jurisdictions have promoted the idea of drug courts, which the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services defines as “alternative to incarceration, drug courts reduce the burden and costs of repeatedly processing low‐level, non‐violent offenders through the nation’s courts, jails, and prisons while providing offenders an opportunity to receive treatment and education.”

Sounds great, right? Well, as you’ll learn on today’s episode, drug courts come with their own set of problems, and in some ways, can make situations worse.

Narcotica co-hosts Chris Moraff and Troy Farah speak with Dave Lucas, a clinical advisor, social work educator, and therapist committed to reducing the harms of the criminal legal and substance use treatment systems. He serves as a Clinical Advisor with the Health and Justice Action Lab. They discuss drug testing, Measure 110 in Oregon, MAT in courtrooms, synthetic cannabinoids, what drug courts actually get right and much more.

Follow Dave on Twitter at: @davidewlucas

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel, Aaron Ferguson

The post Episode 77: Harm Production — The Hazards of Drug Courts with Dave Lucas appeared first on Narcotica.

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 this bridge?

Narcotica co-host Chris Moraff speaks with Veronica Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Drug Legalization. They discuss how prohibition is far worse than the drugs deemed too dangerous for public consumption, and only works to worsen health inequities and harms from drug use. However, the transition from prohibition to a future where drug use isn’t criminalized won’t be easy. Veronica shares what helped her change her mind on this issue and the future of drug use that she envisions.

Follow Veronica on Twitter at: @veronicawright8 and visit the National Coalition for Drug Legalization’s website here: https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 76: How To Change Your Mind About ALL Drugs with Veronica Wright appeared first on Narcotica.

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!

One of the main ways public support for police is so insidious has to do with police propaganda (e.g. copaganda) but it can be hard to detect, let alone debunk, these powerful tools of controlling public opinion. Understanding how this works is crucial to any aspect of drug policy reform and holding accountable the journalists who perpetuate copaganda is an important step in undoing the harms of police states.

On this episode of Narcotica, co-hosts Zachary Siegel and Troy Farah talk with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a non-profit organization dedicated to challenging systemic injustice in the United States’ legal system–a system that is built on white supremacy and economic inequality. Alec has helped challenge the money bail system in California and is the author of the book Usual Cruelty. He is passionate about ending human caging, surveillance, police, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality, and he has made debunking copaganda into an artform.

Follow Alec on Twitter at: @equalityAlec and read his newsletter here: https://equalityalec.substack.com/

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 75: Copaganda — The Favorite Tool of Drug Warriors with Alec Karakatsanis appeared first on Narcotica.

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, the state may take away your kids or deny you medical care. You may even get executed.

For some of us, especially if we live in places where cannabis is legal, such dire consequences for using cannabis can seem like a distant nightmare. But even as we slowly emerge from the dark ages of marijuana prohibition, we’re encountering entirely predictable problems: unchecked capitalist greed. So yes, while it’s worth celebrating our emergence from the dark ages of cannabis prohibition, we risk entering into different forms of prohibition, oppression and inequality at the hands of the so-called “free market.”

Narcotica co-host Troy Farah talks with Shaleen Title, an Indian-American attorney and longtime drug policy activist who has been writing, passing, and implementing equitable cannabis laws for over 20 years. She is a former top regulator for the state of Massachusetts, where she served as commissioner of the Cannabis Control Commission from 2017 to 2020. She is the author of “Fair and Square: How to Effectively Incorporate Social Equity Into Cannabis Laws and Regulations” and “Bigger is Not Better: Preventing Monopolies in the National Cannabis Market.”  Currently, her primary focus is running the nonprofit think tank Parabola Center, which pushes for cannabis policies to protect people rather than corporate profits.

Follow Shaleen on Twitter at: @shaleentitle

Read Bigger is Not Better: Preventing Monopolies in the National Cannabis Market

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 74: Cannabis And Capitalism — Preventing Another Big Tobacco with Shaleen Title appeared first on Narcotica.

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 reaction is Oh no! Not naltrexone!

Of course, naltrexone has some benefits and many people say their life has been saved by it. And at Narcotica, we don’t believe any drug is “bad” or “evil.” So where does this substance fit into the broader scheme of things? We’ve spoken about naltrexone many times on this show, but never this indepth before.

Narcotica co-hosts Zachary Siegel and Troy Farah speak with Nancy Curran, a nurse practitioner who has been practicing for 5 years in an OBOT clinic in the Lowell Massachusetts area, treating both opioid and alcohol use disorders. She prescribes buprenorphine (both Suboxone and Sublocade), as well as naltrexone (Vivitrol). She also treats patients who need Hep C treatment. Nancy is passionate about advocating for and educating her patients on their medication options, as well as their rights.

They discuss the history of hallucinogenic opioids, the shrewd and quasilegal marketing practices of Alkermes, Inc., how naltrexone stacks up against buprenorphine and methadone, why stigma persists against people who take certain opioid use disorder drugs but not others, the difference between addiction and dependency, some basic opioid receptor science, and much, much more.

Follow Nancy on Twitter at: @cashboygo

More background on naltrexone and the XBOT Studay can be found here and here. We also recommend reading Walter Sneader’s book: Drug Discovery, A History and also Nancy Campbell’s book OD: The Politics of Overdose.

You can read Zach’s article on Four Good Days and more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/magazine/addiction-movies.html

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 73: Oh No! Not Naltrexone! with Nancy Curran appeared first on Narcotica.

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 distressing phenomenon deserves a closer look, but not everything about it is devastatingly tragic, either.

In this episode of Narcotica, co-host Troy Farah talks all about HPPD with Ed Prideaux, a master’s student in psychology at the University of East London with a background in journalism. Ed is currently focused on researching and addressing the problems, possibilities and questions raised by HPPD: a broad, under-researched and not entirely uncommon condition in which people experience sustained and distressing changes to their visual perception (among other effects) after psychedelic trips. Ed has lived with these visual effects for nearly seven years, and is affiliated with a nonprofit launched last year to promote harm reduction around HPPD called the Perception Restoration Foundation.

Follow Ed at https://edprideaux.journoportfolio.com/

Some more info on perception as a hallucination: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2022/02/is-reality-a-hallucination-the-neuroscientist-anil-seth-thinks-so

Some of the studies mentioned in this episode:

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. We just opened a shop where you can order Narcotica merch: narcocast.myshopify.com Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

*Note: Troy says niacin is Vitamin C, it’s actually Vitamin B3. We regret the error.

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 72: When The Trip Doesn’t End with Ed Prideaux appeared first on Narcotica.

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, so harmful?

Narcotica co-host Troy Farah speaks with Dr. John Abramson, a long-time critic of Big Pharma, whose new book Sickening untangles the many perverse incentives that dominate American healthcare. It helps explain why drug prices are so high, why medications that harm instead of heal are regularly approved by the FDA and much more, starting with the recent debacle over Aduhelm, an extremely controversial Alzheimer’s drug.

Follow Dr. Abramson on Twitter: @DrJohnAbramson and get Sickening: ow Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It here.

You can read Troy’s review of Sickening on Undark Magazine here: https://undark.org/2022/03/18/book-review-sickening/

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 71: Aduhelm, Obscene Drug Prices and Big Pharma Tactics with Dr. John Abramson appeared first on Narcotica.

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 to criminalization and barriers to access—essentially criminalizing identity and the very bodies we inhabit. But bans on testosterone, ostensibly to stop athletes from boosting their competitive abilities, can have real world impacts, especially for gender variant people, especially transmasculine people.

Narcotica co-hosts Zachary Siegel and Troy Farah talk with Adryan Corcione about the climate of testosterone, why this hormone became so scrutinized (and how Joe Biden was part of that), and how syringe access programs have stepped in to help folks get the recognition and healthcare they deserve.

Follow Adryan Corcione on Twitter and read their piece in Filter Magazine here.

A few resources:

Also, reach out to trans-specific groups local to you.

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 70: How Testosterone Bans Criminalize the Body with Adryan Corcione appeared first on Narcotica.

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 by the DEA. Now cannabis is so blasé in places like California and more than 15 other states that have adult-use weed, that it’s almost hard to imagine a time when you couldn’t have a bag of cannabis gummies, plus a joint dipped in oil and rolled in kief, delivered directly to your door like they used to do with Netflix DVDs.

Is that what we’re going to see with psilocybin, LSD, DMT and all the rest? Already people in some places like D.C., Colorado and Oregon are selling branded psychedelic edibles. In a lot of ways with psychedelics, we’re right where we were around 2010 with cannabis—a quasi-legal market that is ready to become legitimate, whether you like it or not.

Narcotica co-host Troy Farah talks with Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin, two of the great minds behind DoubleBlind Magazine, a publication dedicated to all things psychedelics and much more in the periphery of psychedelic culture. They discuss some of the pros and cons psychedelics becoming mainstream, how people can navigate this emerging space, the Decriminalize Nature movement, reciprocity for Indigenous people and much more.

Visit https://doubleblindmag.com/ for more info.

Follow Madison on Twitter: @margolinmadison

If you liked this episode, here are others you might enjoy:

Follow Narcotica on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and support us on Patreon. Help keep this podcast ad-free! Your support is appreciated! We’re on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher and more. Tell your friends about us! Rate us! And thanks for your support!

Producers: Christopher Moraff, Troy Farah, Zachary Siegel

The post Episode 69: The Promise and Peril of the Psychedelic Mainstream with Shelby Hartman and Madison Margolin appeared first on Narcotica.