Category Archives: Words

Sep 05 2017

The Influence

Investigations shake confidence in treatment centers

Addiction treatment centers are supposed to be places of hope and recovery, sanctuaries where people feel cared for and supported so they can enter treatment with confidence. But a recent string of investigations found some treatment providers are putting their own interests ahead of their patients’...

Aug 31 2017

The Influence

Calculating the economic cost of drug-related crime

“Drugs and crime go hand in hand.” It’s a message that’s been burned into our minds since before Nixon declared his War on Drugs. But it’s also an overly simple message that belies the complex nature of the problem and has more often provided an excuse for authorities to target minority populations ...

Aug 01 2017

The Influence

Stop Claiming Alcohol is Good for You

People have looked for miracle remedies to life’s maladies for centuries. Before the FDA, snake oil salesmen roamed the U.S. offering tonics that were guaranteed to cure what ails you. Although we’ve done away with much of that practice through federal regulations, there seems to be one substance wi...

Jul 31 2017

The Influence

College drinkers bingeing less, study says

Among college students, keg parties and drinking to excess have – wrongly – been considered an integral part of the college experience. In recent years, many U.S. colleges and universities have made efforts to educate students on the dangers of binge drinking, and change behavior. Those efforts may ...

Jul 21 2017

The Influence

Accidental fentanyl exposure blamed in 10-year-old’s death

Fentanyl came into the national spotlight after it was revealed that the opioid caused the death of legendary musician Prince in April of 2016. Much of the attention surrounding fentanyl has been focused on the prescription form and the increasing trend of it being used as an additive to heroin. The...

Jul 19 2017

The Influence

Not Just an Urban Problem

It’s a long held tenet of substance abuse treatment that addiction affects everyone regardless of age, gender, class, or location. But recently treatment providers have noticed a shift in the overall addiction trends that require immediate attention. Addiction to illicit drugs was long thought to af...

Nov 25 2016

The Influence

Voices From the Inside: Celebrate the Power of Prisoners’ Writing

November 25th, 2016 An amazing event will take place in New York on Monday, November 28 to celebrate the award-winning work of men and women incarcerated across the country—PEN America’s Breakout: Voices from the Inside. Actors and writers like Jeffrey Toobin will be reading submissions from the ann...

Oct 19 2016

The Influence

Eight Hundred Years Ago, Islamic Poets Wrote These Two Extraordinary Odes to Marijuana

October 19th, 2016 In some early Islamic societies, cannabis was outright prohibited on religious grounds. In others, it was embraced by intellectuals. The well-known Assassins sect, formed in the late 11th century, is rumored to have given hashish to its warriors and even to have derived its name f...

Sep 28 2016

The Influence

On “National Drink Beer Day,” 10 of the World’s Greatest Writers Praise Their Favorite Booze

September 28th, 2016 Are you drunk yet? Why not? It’s National Drink Beer Day. So we’ve assembled 10 great quotes from some of the world’s greatest literary minds in honor of the world’s most widely consumed alcoholic drink. 1. Milan Kundera (b. 1929), the Czech magical reali...

Sep 15 2016

The Influence

“Pretending to Be a Heroin User, I Could Always Run Faster Than One”—Undercover Drug Cop Repents

September 15th, 2016 From 1993 to 2007, Neil Woods lived a double life. He spent half of his time running around with the UK’s most notorious and violent drug gangs, and the other half living at home as a “respectable” police officer with a wife and kids. He worked in covert operat...

Aug 30 2016

The Influence

“Necessary Trouble”—Why Grassroots Protest Movements Are Reshaping America

August 29th, 2016 In summer 2011, I went to the launch of “Rebuild the Dream“—a campaign by MoveOn.org that was supposed to serve as the progressive answer to the Tea Party. The event was hosted by the activist and Democratic strategist Van Jones. His pitch was to get Americans fired up ...

Aug 26 2016

The Influence

With “I Love Dick,” Director Jill Soloway Returns to Limerence

August 26th, 2016 Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, published in 1997, is a good description of the dissonance inherent to being a straight woman in the patriarchy: attraction to your own oppressor. When I first read I Love Dick—a work of meta-fiction with a protagonist named “Chris Kraus”...

Aug 23 2016

The Influence

Four Photos That Illustrate What It Was Like Growing Up as Pablo Escobar’s Son

August 23rd, 2016 [Editor’s note: These photographs are from Pablo Escobar: My Father, by Juan Pablo Escobar, which comes out in the US on August 30. You can read The Influence‘s interview with the author here. The photos are published here with permission; the captions are the words of ...

Aug 16 2016

The Influence

This Is Your Brain on Bad Media Coverage—Five Dire Drug Headlines, Just From Today

August 16th, 2016 Although media coverage of drugs, addiction and criminal justice is gradually improving, there’s still no shortage of headlines (articles, too) that summon up outdated ideas and regressive stereotypes. Here are five examples obtained simply by Googling the word “drugs&#...

Aug 15 2016

The Influence

Do Antidepressants Actually Work? The Author of “Listening to Prozac” Is Back With the Answers

August 15th, 2016 A couple of months ago, a study on the efficacy of antidepressants for children and adolescents was published in The Lancet. A flurry of headlines from major news outlets followed: “Most Antidepressants Aren’t Effective for Children, New Study Finds” (Wall Street Journa...

Jul 25 2016

The Influence

The Drug-Dealing Egyptian Super-Heroine Everyone’s Talking About

July 25th, 2016 “The reality of human nature—none of us are totally good or pure evil. Even if we do make mistakes, it’s okay to forgive ourselves and accept it,” says Safya Baraka about the titular heroine of her new comic book, Lamis. In a testament to Baraka and her husband̵...

Jul 13 2016

The Influence

Is This a Prescription Drug or a Harry Potter Spell? Take Our Interactive Quiz!

July 13th, 2016 Prescription drugs are notorious for their suggestively vague yet lyrical names—the result of a delicate dance between (sometimes diabolical) Big Pharma marketing and the FDA. Some companies try to market their wares as silver bullets…almost like magic spells. But can you disti...

Jul 06 2016

The Influence

These 12 Words Will Make Wine Snobs Love You, If That’s Really What You Want

July 6th, 2016 What is it about wine—above all other drinks and drugs, even modern marijuana—that brings out the imbiber’s inner snob? Ok, wine can be nice. Some find it nicer than other modes of intoxication. But doesn’t your innate ability to content yourself with the bargain rack at y...

Jul 05 2016

The Influence

“Girls” Meets “Trainspotting”? How Jade Sharma’s “Problems” Goes Way Beyond Heroin

July 5th, 2016 Few books feel as honest as Problems, Jade Sharma’s debut novel, which comes out today. Maya, the novel’s clever protagonist, is about as unfiltered and unpolished as a narrator gets these days, and she’s full of sharp insight about relationships, her drug use and being a young woman ...

Jun 17 2016

The Influence

The “First Great Millennial Novelist” on Porn, Drugs and Becoming a “Golden God of Clarity”

June 17th, 2016 My favorite line in Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, is one in which Linda, a wannabe writer whose main creative outlet is ingesting different drug combinations, sums up the creative writing proclivities of her college peers: “Ooh, I had these Mennonite ...

Jun 01 2016

The Influence

“Art Is My God”—Sarah Matzar Isn’t Like Other Acid Cooks

June 2nd, 2016 [Editor’s note: The following excerpt from Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, by Jesse Jarnow, relays the never-before-told story of Sarah Matzar (above), a Guatemalan quilter and groundbreaking LSD chemist. In the 1980s, Matzar was living in the US, making quilts and wo...

Jun 01 2016

The Influence

With Ceaseless Turmoil Seething, the World’s Greatest Drug-Induced Poem Turns 200

June 1st, 2016 Ah, those Romantics. If they weren’t bedding their half-sisters or drowning in the Gulf of La Spezia, they were guzzling opium. Perhaps the most Romantic of all Romantic poems is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”—a fabulously conceived, breathlessly paced,...

May 31 2016

The Influence

How Actually Druggy Is “Alice in Wonderland”?

May 31st, 2016 Since a hundred years before Don McLean’s “American Pie” and later-stage Beatles songs came to dominate stoned conversations about lyrical symbolism, one book’s enigmatic appeal has lent itself perfectly to such speculation. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderla...

May 25 2016

The Influence

Beyond Parody? Five Times “the Onion” Brilliantly Skewered the War on Drugs

May 25th, 2016 America’s favorite snarky “news” source, the Onion, has never been short of ammunition when it comes to the War on Drugs. The only trouble is, in this field it can be hard to know when parody stops and reality begins… 1. Drugs Now Legal If User Is Emplo...

May 11 2016

The Influence

Observing the Art Appear From Nowhere: Tao Lin’s Addiction to Terence McKenna

May 11th, 2016 Alt-lit icon Tao Lin is working on a new book, his first nonfiction, which he estimates will come out in 2017. It’s called Beyond Existentialism, and it’s about Terence McKenna (1946—2000), a philosopher and advocate of psychedelics dubbed the “Timothy Leary of the 9...

May 02 2016

The Influence

Quiz: Think You Know Your Strains? Then Tell Us, Is This Marijuana or Tomato?

May 2nd, 2016 As marijuana transitions in the public eye from strictly a street drug to a recognized medicine, the layman’s language develops alongside it. What was once simply “the good shit” to all but the most discerning might today be commonly described as “a high-THC, sativa-dominant hybrid pro...

Apr 21 2016

The Influence

Meet Three Ex-Drug War Prisoners Doing Amazing Things With Their Lives

April 22nd, 2016 Reentering society after serving time in our nation’s correctional facilities thanks to the misguided War on Drugs can be a strangely disheartening experience. Sure, it’s a chance for a new start in life—something we’ve waited for for months, years, or even decades. But for many of ...

Apr 20 2016

The Influence

Author Mira Gonzalez Tells Us About Her Plans for 4/20, Passing as “White,” and Her Twitter Habit

April 20th, 2016 Mira Gonzalez, 23, is a poet, prolific tweeter and psychosexual voice of an internet generation. Her first book, a collection of poetry, was I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make Us Beautiful Together (Sorry House, 2013). Her second book, a collaboration with Tao Lin called Selec...

Apr 13 2016

The Influence

Did Stephen King, the Master Storyteller, Lose His Truth in Writing About Addiction?

April 13th, 2016 I am an unapologetic Stephen King fan. Not the kind of fan who has read every book of his, nor the kind that writes fan-mail or takes the author hostage, as Annie Wilkes did in King’s 1987 novel Misery. But I am a fan. King’s memoir about his craft, On Writing, was the first [&helli...

Apr 08 2016

The Influence

An Editorial About Drugs, by Hilde Kate Lysiak, the Nine-Year-Old Reporting Sensation

Ever since her self-published Orange Street News broke the story of a homicide in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, nine-year-old reporter Hilde Kate Lysiak has become a news sensation (and sadly, even little girls are not spared attacks by online trolls. She’s had to deal with some nasty comments). ...