I started building OpenSubstance because the harm reduction information I wanted to exist did not exist, at least not in a form a normal person could use quickly. The deep archives are out there, and I am grateful for them. But the gap between what is known and what is reachable, on a phone, in a moment that actually matters, is wider than it should be. I am trying to close that gap.
I am not doing it alone. From early on, the substance content, the editorial choices, and the framing have been shaped by people who know far more than I do: licensed psychedelic therapists, harm reduction clinicians, friends who have used, and former colleagues of my father's. Their pushback is in the bones of the site, in what is on it and, just as often, in what is not. That collaboration is not a footnote. It is how this project works.
The reasons it became this project specifically, and not some other one, are personal. Two experiences shaped it more than any others: growing up around my father's career in emergency medicine and harm reduction in Vermont, and a few months I spent at a recovery community in Thailand in 2012.
My father, Dr. Mark Depman, spent much of his career as an emergency physician and medical director in Vermont. He worked at the intersection of substance use and harm reduction long before either was a comfortable topic in mainstream medicine.
I grew up watching him advocate for patients who were too often dismissed, stigmatized, or failed by the systems around them. He treated overdoses without lectures. He treated withdrawal without contempt. He treated addiction as a medical condition that deserved the same care, dignity, and clinical seriousness as any other, because that is what it is.
He believed that compassion and evidence, not punishment and moral panic, are what save lives and heal communities. He said it often, but more importantly he practiced it, every shift, for decades.
His work didn't stop in the ER. He spent years on harm reduction at the policy level: the slower, less visible kind that tries to change how a system treats people rather than how a single patient is treated on a single shift. I think that work mattered even more than the clinical side. Policy shapes the conditions every clinical encounter happens inside; you cannot out-practice a system that is hostile to the people it is supposed to serve.
In 2025, the Vermont Association for Mental Health and Addiction Recovery established the Dr. Mark Depman Trailblazer Award in his honor. The award recognizes Vermonters who have done meaningful work in mental health and addiction recovery, exactly the kind of work he spent his career on.
OpenSubstance is built in that spirit. It is one of the ways I carry his work forward.
In 2012, I spent three months volunteering at the New Life Foundation, a residential community in northern Thailand for people in recovery from addiction. The program drew on Buddhist principles, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, simple living, honest conversation, to help people learn how to re-enter ordinary life after the disruption of substance use.
I went there expecting to help. What actually happened is that I spent three months listening.
I talked with people who had used heroin for twenty years. I talked with people who had built and lost careers on cocaine, with people whose lives had narrowed around alcohol, with people who had wrestled with substances most of the public has never heard of. They were not abstractions. They were not statistics. They were not the cautionary archetypes that public health campaigns reach for. They were thoughtful, complicated people with real stories about why they had used, what they had gotten from it, and what it had cost them.
Talking with them shaped how I think about substance use more than any book or paper ever has. I came away with less certainty and more curiosity. With more respect for the difficulty of recovery and more skepticism of any framework, moral, medical, or political, that pretends substance use is simple.
It is also where I began my own meditation practice.
Part of what mindfulness asks of you is to see things as they actually are. Not through fear. Not through fantasy. Not through wishful thinking. Just clearly.
That instinct sits underneath this entire project.
OpenSubstance does not glamorize substances and it does not demonize them. It does not pretend that all drugs are equally dangerous, and it does not pretend that any of them are completely harmless. It tries to describe what they are, what they do, and what toll they take, as accurately as the evidence allows, and to flag clearly where the evidence runs out.
This is the same instinct my father practiced, in the emergency room and in the rooms where policy is made, and the same one I encountered at the New Life Foundation. Different settings, the same underlying ethic: look at reality, treat people with dignity, and respond to what is actually in front of you.
OpenSubstance is the form that ethic takes for me, given the skills I have. I am not a clinician. I cannot do what my father did. But I can build software, I can read research, and I can synthesize complex information into something a person can actually use at the moment they need it.
So that is what this is. A small attempt to put accurate, accessible, evidence-based information into the hands of people who need it, and to do that without moralizing, without softening the truth, and without pretending the situation is simpler than it is.
It will not solve the overdose crisis. It will not undo the harms of bad policy. It will not bring anyone back. But it is part of the work, and that work matters.
Charlie Depman