delve deeper
Video credit: istockphoto.com/portfolio/SimonSkafar
The following resources are here to empower you to make decisions about drugs that are informed, intentional, and wholly your own. Explore each category below, search for whatever you're curious about, or drop down to the Learning section to start at the source(s).
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Understand – bite-sized intros to terms, myths, evidence, and history
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Ways of Relating – the various settings in which people take drugs
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Safety & Autonomy – keys to making your own decisions about drugs
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Organizations – cultural, community, drug policy, educational, and health & safety organizations’ websites
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Learning – the voices, works, and evidence behind all of the above
understand
Core concepts, plainly said, without moral judgment. Each connects to further reading in Learning.
Glossary
How this site uses words. Drugs, continuum, discernment, relief, avoidance, pleasure, harm reduction — defined descriptively, not morally. Language shapes what we're allowed to think, and most of the language around drugs was built to end the conversation, not open it. This is the vocabulary for a different kind of conversation.
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Myths & Evidence
Most of what people are taught about drugs is wrong — not slightly, but from the roots up. That most who use become addicted. That one category of drug is uniformly deadly while another is safe. That the substance alone determines the outcome. The evidence says otherwise, and has for a long time.
How Prohibition Happened
Many of the substances now considered illegal were once sold openly — in pharmacies, in patent medicines, without prescription. Alcohol was prohibited and then un-prohibited. A repeal extended to some but not others.
How substances became crimes is a story about people, not chemistry — which drugs, used by which communities, became illegal at which moments. From the first racialized bans through the War on Drugs, the crack sentencing disparity, and the medicalization of pharmaceutical dependence while other dependencies were criminalized, the throughline holds: drug law has always been about who, not what.
Who Tells the Story
The same drug gets two stories depending on who's holding it. Crack was criminalized; pharmaceutical dependence was medicalized. Psychedelics went from menace to wellness as their public face changed. One person is called an addict, another a patient, another a psychonaut — same act, different name, and the difference usually tracks race and class. This is about who gets believed, and whose knowledge got pushed outside the room.
ways of relating
People take part in drugs and other psychoactive substances through different settings, and each setting has its own language for them: medicine or sacrament in ceremony, medication or treatment in the clinic, other names elsewhere. We use the word “drugs” throughout because it names the same continuum and refuses to rank any setting above another. The setting shapes the experience as much as the drug does.
Ceremonial
For thousands of years, across the world, drugs have been taken within sacred and communal life — in rites of passage, initiation, worship, mourning, and healing. These are traditions with their own rules, teachers, and lineages, many older than the nations that later outlawed them. To understand this setting is to understand context: who holds the ceremony, what it is for, and what is owed to the peoples who carry it.
Clinical & Therapeutic
In structured, guided settings, drugs are given with screening beforehand, support during, and help making sense of the experience afterward. People come for many reasons: relief from trauma, depression, or pain, and growth, insight, and expansion — not only to mend something, but to reach for more. Who sits in the room, whose framework shapes the work, and whether a person feels safe there shape the experience as much as the drug does.
Social
Drugs are taken together — for pleasure, celebration, and connection. It runs the full range, from two people sharing quietly to the large collective settings of festivals, concerts, clubs, and raves.
Personal & Solitary
Drugs are taken alone rather than with others — by choice, not only by circumstance.
safety +
autonomy
Adults have the right to make informed decisions about their own bodies. That right means little without information — and stigma has kept good information away from the people who most need it.
This section holds the principle and points toward the resources that serve it. It assumes nothing about what you will choose. Its only premise is that a decision made with knowledge is more your own than one made in fear or in the dark.
The Ground We Stand On
This work begins with dignity, not compliance. It does not require anyone to stop, and it does not push anyone to start — it meets people where they are and works to reduce harm rather than enforce a verdict. Care, not judgment. Information, not silence. Respect of each person's own authority over their own life.
Know What You're Taking
To make an informed choice about a drug, an adult needs three kinds of knowledge: what it is, what's in it, and how it meets their own body and mind.
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What it is — how a drug acts in the body and mind, what it does, how long it lasts, its risks, and how it behaves alongside other drugs, including alcohol and prescribed medications.
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What's in it — drugs sold outside regulation are often not what they are said to be. Drug checking, testing a substance to learn its actual contents, is one of the oldest and most practical ways to close that gap.
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How it meets you — the same drug meets each body and mind differently, and changes with health conditions, mental wellness, medications, and stage of life.
Knowing yourself, as you are now, is as much a part of safety as knowing the drug.
Set & Setting
A drug is never the whole story. Who a person is on a given day — their state of mind, their history, what they carry — and where they are — the place, the people, the safety or danger of the surroundings — shape an experience as much as the drug itself. This is old knowledge, named plainly by those who have studied it and by traditions that understood it long before it had a name.
Together & In Combination
Much of the real risk with drugs lives not in any single one but in how they combine. Mixing drugs — including with alcohol and with prescribed medications — changes their effects in ways that are not always predictable, and it is where a great deal of preventable harm happens. Knowing this is part of knowing what you're taking.
Staying Well
Happy, healthy, intentional living requires informed decisions. Making informed decisions about drugs and other psychoactive substances means knowing who can help and how to reach them before the need arises. Experiences don't always go as planned. And sometimes, you just need another perspective. There are organizations that exist for both.
Culture & Community
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Chacruna Institute — US, international — Education on plant medicines, Indigenous reciprocity, and racial equity in the psychedelic field.
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ICEERS — International — Ethnobotanical education and legal defense of traditional practices worldwide.
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People of Color Psychedelic Collective — US, national — Community and education for people of color navigating psychedelic experiences.
Drug Policy
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Amnesty International — Drug Policy Reform — Global — Documents the human rights impact of punitive drug laws worldwide, including racially discriminatory enforcement, arbitrary detention, and the death penalty for drug offences.
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Drug Policy Alliance — US, national — Leading drug policy reform organization; racial equity in drug law is central to their work.
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Global Commission on Drug Policy — Global — A body of former heads of state and world leaders advocating for human rights-based drug policy reform, with regional commissions for West Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Latin America.
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International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) — Global, 75 countries — A network of 210 organizations advocating for drug policies grounded in human rights, public health, and social inclusion. Monthly alert in English, French, and Spanish.
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Transform Drug Policy Foundation — UK, international — Explains global drug law in plain language and works to reform the UN drug conventions that govern national policies worldwide. Includes dedicated work on drugs, race, and economic justice.
Education & Safety
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Black Harm Reduction Network — US, national — Black-led collective building regional harm reduction hubs across the country, with a focus on the South.
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DanceSafe — US, national — Providing home kits to confirm drug content and purity, and nonjudgmental educational materials on safer use.
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Erowid — US, online — A vast, member-supported library of unbiased documentation and research on more than 700 psychoactive plants and chemicals.
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Fireside Project — US, national — Free peer support during and after drug use via phone or text. Staffed by people with lived experience.
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Harm Reduction International — Global — Documents the human rights impact of punitive drug laws and advocates for harm reduction as a global standard.
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National Harm Reduction Coalition — US, national — Resources, advocacy, training, and connections to local harm reduction groups.
organizations
Working in culture, community, drug policy, education, and health & safety, these organizations comprise a living list — one that doesn't claim to hold everyone doing meaningful work in this space, welcomes recommendations, and grows over time.
learning
Academic scholarship and oral teaching sit together here as equal authorities — a recorded lecture carries the same standing as a peer-reviewed paper. A collection that is curated, not exhaustive, and growing over time.
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Carl Hart, Drug Use for Grown-Ups — the descriptive, non-moral use of “drugs”
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Do Dope. Then Hope. — featuring Dr. Carl Hart | Conversate with Killer Mike episode 52
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Let's Quit Abusing Drug Users — Dr. Carl Hart's TEDMED Talk
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National Harm Reduction Coalition — harm reduction's principles, in its own words
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Carl Hart, High Price — multiple purchase options on GoodReads; plus the Daily Show extended interview and his Breakfast Club appearance
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Monnica Williams et al. (2020) — the 313-person BIPOC survey; naturalistic use and reduced racism-related traumatic stress
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Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain — what addiction is and isn't
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NIDA / NSDUH — federal data on actual use and dependence rates
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Kilindi Iyi, Breaking Convention 2013 lecture — psilocybin as “a tool for exploration” (babakilindi.com)
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Chacruna — "Chacruna Debunks 6 Racist Myths from the Psychedelic Community"
Behind How Prohibition Happened
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Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow — plus her recorded talks
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David Musto, The American Disease — the early racialized drug laws
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Queen Adesuyi, Drug Policy Alliance — marijuana justice, decriminalization, racial equity
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Ifetayo Harvey — “Time to Abolish the DEA: Evaluating the Agency's Failures and Calling for Community Investments” — Fordham Law Review, Vol. 93, November 2024 (fordhamlawreview.org)
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Darren Le Baron — “Psychedelics in Africa: The Untold Story”
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Kilindi Iyi — “African Entheogens — Towards an Organic Singularity” (2012)
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Harm Reduction International — “Decolonising Drug Policy”
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A Table of Our Own — documentary: atableofourown.org
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Smith, Faber, Buchanan, Foster, Green (2022) — "The Need for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy in the Black Community and the Burdens of Its Provision"
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Maia Szalavitz — "A Tale of Two Cities in the Grips of the Opioid Crisis" — the imagery gap between the two opioid epidemics
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Acacea Lewis — ATTMind interview, episode 182
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The Chacruna catalog — racial equity and “People of Color Making a Difference” pieces
Behind Where the Knowledge Comes From
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Carl Hart, High Price — a neuroscientist's memoir about growing up amid the drugs the War on Drugs targeted, whose own science later contradicted everything the culture said about them. His own life is the primary source.
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The Detroit–Cleveland lineage — Kilindi Iyi, Kai Wingo, Ayana Iyi; the Women and Entheogens Conference; the Detroit Psychedelic Society
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Darren Le Baron — “Psychedelics in Africa: The Untold Story”
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Jean-Francois Sobiecki — African Psychoactive Plants: Journeys in Phytoalchemy (via Chacruna)
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Yuria Celidwen — Indigenous ethics in the field
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Monnica Williams, Reed & Aggarwal (2020) — culturally adapted MDMA protocol; the clinician's identity and cultural framework as set-and-setting variables: “Culturally informed research design issues in a study for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder”
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A Table of Our Own — documentary; Black people in conversation about lived experience, itself a demonstration of what a culturally grounded setting requires
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Monnica Williams, Reed & Aggarwal (2020) — culturally adapted MDMA protocol; the clinician's identity and cultural framework as set-and-setting variables
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Chacruna — “How Set and Setting Shape Psychedelic Cultures”
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Chacruna — “The Paradox of Set and Setting in the American Psychedelic Experience”
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Chacruna — "Queering Psychedelics: A Resource Toolkit" — expanding set and setting to include identity, positionality, and cultural environment
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National Harm Reduction Coalition — harm reduction's principles
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Chacruna — “Foundations of Plant Medicine Facilitation, Integration and Ethics” — consent, power dynamics, and ethics across ceremonial and clinical settings
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Lee, Rosenbaum & Buchman (2024) — “Informed Consent to Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Ethical Considerations”
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Ifetayo Harvey — “Time to Abolish the DEA” (fordhamlawreview.org)
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Amnesty International — Drug Policy Reform — rights in encounters with police, at borders, in medical settings
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Global Commission on Drug Policy — international legal landscape
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International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) — global network tracking drug law and human rights
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Transform Drug Policy Foundation — the UN drug conventions explained plainly