Long-form essays on drug science, supply changes, and harm reduction.
Why one shape, six carbons in a ring, keeps appearing across opioids, stimulants, dissociatives, psychedelics, and benzodiazepines. A short tour of the most common shape in psychoactive drug chemistry.
Overdose deaths in the U.S. fell 15.9% in the year ending November 2025 — the longest sustained decline in over four decades. But the supply remains volatile, with medetomidine, BTMPS, and stimulant contamination making testing more important than ever.
Ketamine and psychedelics are often described as 'promoting neuroplasticity.' That's true but flattens a more interesting story. Chronic stress physically eliminates specific synaptic connections in the prefrontal cortex. What ketamine does, at least in mice, is regrow them in the exact positions where stress deleted them.
Neurogenesis shows up in the pop-science framing of almost every substance. Most of it is rodent work, some of it is human postmortem, and some of it is wishful extrapolation. Here's what the evidence actually supports.