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The link between trauma, drug use, and our search to feel better
As long as humans have experienced emotional crisis (which is to say: for all of human history), they’ve attempted to ease their pain with drugs—plant-based psychoactives like marijuana in preindus…
First with an antipsychotic called Thorazine, and then, most popularly at the time, with meprobamate, aka Miltown, a sedative with mysterious chemical properties (to this day no one really understands how it works) that immediately flooded American culture and bloodstreams. Article continues after advertisement“Fashionable ladies and hard-driving male executives alike kept their supplies close at hand,” historian of science Anne Harrington wrote in her book Mind Fixers. I saw it in friends who lost jobs and then turned to drugs to ease the anxiety of their financial uncertainty; I saw it in the news, in statistics about suicide and addiction, and I saw it in myself—this feeling that the world and its violences had been placed into me, into my nervous system and psyche, an unwanted osmosis of energy.
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