The Dr. Junkie Show

If you want to stop using a drug in the United States, your only choice is often "cold turkey," a terrible name for an unnecessary risk that can often prove fatal if not properly treated. One alternative to this painful experience is a service called In Home Detox, which comes in many shapes and sizes depending on the part of the world you live in. Some doctors do it on the low; others a...

In music it is called Purple Syrup, Sizzerp, or Lean. At the dope house it is called liquid codeine. At the doctor's office it is called Codeine with Promethazine. Regardless of where you get it, it is more popular today than ever before. In this episode I examine Codeine and Promethazine syrup: what it is, what it does, why it is so popular, and why, like most drugs, the war on drugs has mad...

Morgan Godvin joined me last week to talk about Oregon's Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs around one year ago. In this powerful conversation, we discuss the results of decriminalization, the increase in overdoses nationwide, fentanyl(s) and how we can prevent them from flooding the streets, thefts of desperation, Medication Assisted Treatment success and the stigma that goes with u...

Every day in the United States possessions and cash are stolen from citizens who have committed no crime. They can't call the police because the police are responsible for the theft.  Its called Civil Asset Forfeiture.  In this episode I will talk about the history of Civil Asset Forfeiture, an underhanded scheme used by police departments across the country to confiscate cash or valuable ite...

In this episode, I take a look at rapid (roadside) drug tests which are often used as probable cause for arrest. Police make up to 100k arrests every year using Roadside Drug tests with a failure rate high enough to require lab tests for validation of every charge in most jurisdictions. But even though you can't convict someone based on a rapid roadside test, you can arrest them and keep them...

You asked for it...literally. In this episode, Dr. Erin Boyce and I will answer many of the questions we have received over the years doing this podcast, and the specific questions sent out recently by those of you responding to my request. For Ben Why didn’t you use methamphetamine?  Are you anti-Christian? Do you think of yourself as having a religious identity? What is your favorite drug?  Do y...

Hollywood feeds viewers a lot of problematic stereotypes regarding drug use, perhaps none as misleading as the notorious speedball. Users who combine heroin with a stimulant like methamphetamine or cocaine to create a single injectable liquid are said to be "speedballing," and when it is depicted on television or in books, it is used as the proverbial rock bottom of addiction, the final...

Stories about viral apocalypse are not new. Some of our oldest narratives play with the gloomy fantasy, and it has become a spectacle of contemporary Hollywood productions like 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead , and Shaun of the Dead. The way we talk about contagions and diseases says a lot about what we value and how we see the world. When news networks cover COVID-1...

As always, the Dr. Junkie Show does not provide medical advice. In this episode I discuss fentanyl(s) and why they are causing so many problems culturally right now, 100 years into a war on drugs.  Fentanyl and its relatives (remifentanil, etc.) are not the problem. The war on drugs is the problem. Doctors have been using fentanyl(s) in hospital settings for more than 50 years, and they provide a...

This week marks the start of another semester of college classes, and this year I  managed to get approved to teach inside the Department of Corrections; I am heading back into prison. In this episode, I discuss the classes, the approval process, and I talk about my criminal record. In a few weeks I will record the "Ask Me Anything" episode. Submit your questions at DrJunkieShow.com  If...

Dedicated to the memory of David Poses, a rock star in harm reduction with a huge heart who left us way too soon. David Poses recently released his addiction memoir The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies About Addiction and the Truth About Recovery.   David joined me this week to me about it. We discusses ways to end the war on drugs, the rehab industrial complex, Suboxone (buprenorphine), methado...

New York recently announced a $1.8 billion settlement with major drug distributors, and a larger $26 billion "global settlement" scheduled to follow shortly thereafter. But that money won't be devoted to methadone treatment or paying for rehab. It will probably be devoted to making the war on drugs even larger and more violent. This week I sit down with Christine Minhee, author and...

The "Western World" has trained most who live here to feel as if monogamy is natural and normal: that it's "just the way thigs are." But humans are not wired up to live in monogamous frameworks. Evolutionarily, we fit somewhere between monogamy and polyamory, and our history as a species makes it easy to recognize why.  This week's episode is all about polyamory ( pol...

As always, the Dr. Junkie Show does NOT provide medical advice. On this episode, Elise Keller joins me to discuss the endocannabinoid system. What is it? How does it work? Why is it so un-studied? Plus what on Earth is Cannabis Coaching .  Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Elise gave a Ted Talk sharing her journey to and through cannabis: "The Surprising Connection between Cannabis and M...

Big Pharma opioid settlements already total billions-of-dollars.  In this episode, I talk about why the government is really after that money, and what these settlements mean for the war on drugs. I also introduce topics which I will cover with Christine Minhee when she comes on the show to unpack her work at opioidsettlementtracker.com .  In this episode, I also discuss the "systems, not peo...

Addiction specialist and best-selling author Maia Szalavitz joins me to talk about her new book, Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction. Maia has been researching, writing about, and working within the harm reduction community for more than twenty years, and her latest book is just one of many required reads for anyone who is beginning to realize they have be...

The things we are trained to remain silent about usually involve shame. We learn from a young age to avoid particular issues: "never talk politics or religion at parties." But it turns out that the things we are taught to never talk about are usually the things we should be talking about most. What sort of world do we want to build for our posterity? What sorts of practices ought we allo...

Dr. Travis Heath joins me to discuss many of the problematic norms in both therapeutic and academic communities. We talk about the war on drugs, therapy and how it works, systems approaches and how to teach them, gender and how it instigates unconscious (and often toxic) performances, drugs, crime, trauma, reauthoring, ideas and who owns them, approaches to therapy, and our cultural lust for reven...

Power is something we seldom discuss despite living enmeshed in its inescapable web. Power is "visible and unverifiable," per Foucault, and it "concedes nothing without demand," per Frederick Douglass. But what the hell does any of that mean?  In this episode I discuss the performance of roles and what that has to do with power, plus Michel Foucault's idea of panoptic powe...

Drugs were not always illegal in the USA. For a good deal of our history you could walk into your local pharmacy and buy cocaine, heroin or cannabis right off the shelf, without a prescription. But something changed around the turn of the century (1900), and by the 1930s the War on Drugs was in full swing. Opium was outlawed by associating it with Chinese immigrants. Cannabis was outlawed by assoc...

This short episode is a recording of a submission from repeat-guest Chris Trigg, who is currently still incarcerated in the US Federal Prison System. Chris was released in 2023. You can check out more of Chris's work (along with other prisoners across the country) in Captured Words Free Thoughts Support the show

Karl Marx famously described religion as, "the opium of the people," not (only) because he thought religion was a drug, but because he saw how much relief it brought to those in the most hopeless of situations. Last week I talked about religion as a drug. This week my wife, Dr. Erin Boyce, joins me to talk about the phenomenon of wokeness as a religion, and as such, a drug.  We also disc...

"Sin City" has hundreds of hotels without a 13th floor and a Roulette wheel with numbers totaling 666 in every casino. What happens there supposedly stays there. Anything is possible, or so it seems once you step onto the Strip.  In this episode I will talk about how the city gets us high when we visit, or when we just think about it. Plus some history, and my favorite don't-skip de...

In this episode, I share a bit about my past with religion (Christianity), and why I see religion as a drug. I also discuss what the word religion means in a Western context, why everyone (especially religious people) believes they are not religious yet everyone else is, the role of holy books (religions) in the formation of human morals, and why humans evolved to need religion, or rather, needed...

Today I will share a few stories about my experience with The New Jim Crow , a title Michelle Alexander popularized when discussing the legal discrimination of convicted criminals.  The Department of Corrections (DOC) is all about a lot of things. But helping prisoners avoid recidivism is not one of them.  Support the show