Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front believes we shouldn’t blame users for the ills of capitalism: if so many people are self-medicating, why not give them the clean stuff?
On 12 August 2017, I ran from the car that James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of anti-racist organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other peoples’ blood splattered on me. I lost my friends in the crowd and panicked. I thought I might die.
A month later, I woke up on a work trip in a hotel room alone in Oakland, California, with my hands trembling, and an unshakeable feeling that I was being chased by a pack of wild animals. I was having a mental breakdown.
This feeling did not cease for months. Repairing myself from that breakdown took years. In many ways, it is ongoing.
As I attempted to recover from my PTSD-induced collapse, I turned to a variety of mind-altering substances. There were the ones to keep me calm enough to not feel like I was about to die at any moment: benzodiazepines such as Klonopin; kratom, a plant from south-east Asia that has opioid-like properties. There were the ones meant to restabilize me into something like a functioning human: antidepressants and mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. And then there were the fun ones – the LSD and ketamine and 2C-B and MDMA – that helped me envision a newly healed self, and thus a future.
