On Drugs

The Flamethrowers captures the punch-you-in-the-mouth energy and sound of right-wing talk radio. Host Justin Ling takes us from the fringe preachers and conspiracy peddlers of the 1920s to the political firestorm that rages today. With humour and candour, Ling examines the appeal of broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, who found a sleeping audience, radicalized it, and became an accidental kingmaker — culminating in the election of Donald Trump. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/theflamethrowers

The 1950s & 60s saw a wave of radical movements. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The Black Panthers. Quebec and Canada had the FLQ — a showdown that dissolved into crisis. By October 1970, there were soldiers in the streets, communities on edge, kidnapping and terror in the headlines. But those frightening weeks were just the crescendo of a wave of terror and violence that was nearly a decade in the making. This series will reveal the stories of that time through immersive storytelling and the people who lived it: the bomb disposal expert on defusing live explosives, the survivors of terror, their families, and the radicals themselves. More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/recallcbc

From berzerkers on mushrooms, to Nazis on meth and Iraq vets on ecstasy, armies and soldiers have used drugs to fight, cope with and recover from war since ancient times.

Drugs don't exist in a vacuum. In many cases, they've been used to prop up mythologies around race and justify discriminatory policies against already struggling communities.

In this episode of On Drugs, it's the story of a very important drug that you've probably never heard of. The Drug is called Miltown and it changed the world of psychiatric medicine forever.

We explore the topic of drug addiction and how to think about it in this extended interview with Bruce Alexander

We dig deeper into our conversation about the historical intersection between drugs and music with author Martin Torgoff.

If most recreational drug users do it because it feels good, why is pleasure always left out of policy conversations about drugs?

From athletes pumping steroids to tech entrepreneurs microdosing LSD, what happens when people use drugs to make themselves stronger, smarter and faster than their normal healthy selves?

We launched season two of On Drugs with an episode about how people are using psychedelics in search of spiritual enlightenment. One of the people we met was Tanya Kammonen. Tanya and I spoke at length about her experience with psychedelics -- ayahuasca in particular -- and if you’ve listened to the episode already, you’ll have heard some of that conversation. But I thought you might be interested in hearing what didn’t make it to air. So here's a special extended version of my conversation with Tanya Kammonen.