On Drugs

In our episode on Utah, Mormonism and drugs, you met Dan Snarr, the former mayor of Murray Utah. He told us about losing his son to opioid overdose. Here's a full length version of Geoff's conversation with Dan.

There’s an expectation that members of the Church of Latter Day Saints will live with chastity and modesty in order to secure a place in heaven. And yet, Utah, the heart of Mormonism, has one of the highest overdose rates in the U-S. In this episode of On Drugs, we hit the road to investigate why.

People have been using caffeine in one form or another for thousands of years. And for more than a century, people have been fretting about what it does to our health and our moral condition. This episode dives into the history and significance of the most widely used psychoactive drug on earth.

This episode of On Drugs explores how cannabis went from unknown, illegal and vilified to the present day, where it's considered medicine and the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry.

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 this episode of On Drugs, we explore the connection between psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin and the transcendent feelings and perceptions that users report. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis shares his insight into the seeming ubiquity of psychedelics in mystical experience in the Americas. Dr. Rick Strassman describes what happened when he went in search of the spirit molecule. And Tanya Kamm...

If you've been craving a fix of the CBC original podcast, On Drugs, the wait is nearly over. Season 2 launches February 13. Here's a chance to meet the people who put it all together and to hear some highlights from the season ahead.

How Do You Sleep at Night? is a great podcast from the team at ABC about people who live their lives in the face of judgement. The show explores the different moral codes we all live by. Because no one thinks they’re a bad person, right?

The drugs we choose - legal and illicit - and the ways we use them, are at least partly determined by gender expectations. This episode explores how those expectations affect our relationships with 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?

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

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

If you want to learn about drug addiction, Vancouver is a good place to start. The city has struggled with opioid abuse nearly as long as it's existed. This episode explores Vancouver's narcotic past and present through the voices of residents struggling

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.

The relationship people have with drugs is complicated and a little bit messy, but not as messy as the relationship people have had with sex throughout history. Combine the two and things get interesting.

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.

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

The connection between drugs and rock and roll is a comic and tragic cliche. On Drugs gets past the cliches and explores the intersection of drugs and music from classical to hip hop.

Of all the reasons we use drugs, the management and suppression of pain is one of the most fundamental. And yet for all the advances in medication, our relationship with pain is still fraught with moral and chemical challenges.

Each week, On Drugs looks through the lenses of history, pop culture and personal experience to understand how drugs have shaped our world.