Drugs

How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles

20 January 2024 9:00 am

For the bands playing at Eric’s, the celebrated Merseyside punk club of the late 1970s, even to own a Beatles record was considered embarrassing

The view from the lab

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The neuroscientist Camilla Nord places considerable emphasis on scanning technology, but has disappointingly little to suggest in the way of effective new treatments

Barometer

9 September 2023 9:00 am

Going for broke

12 August 2023 9:00 am

The founding member of the Small Faces was playing an instrument from the age of six, but was forever haunted by the fear of MS, the inherited disease which eventually killed him

The Teutonic goddess who ‘created’ the Rolling Stones

29 July 2023 9:00 am

Of the Stones’ talented wives and girlfriends, Anita Pallenberg contributed most, dictating the band’s style and even how they should remix tracks

My life as a meth addict

3 June 2023 9:00 am

The highs and lows of being a meth addict

A shaggy drug story: Industry of Magic & Light, by David Keenan, reviewed

20 August 2022 9:00 am

The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…

Scots are being sacrificed to a failed drug policy

29 July 2022 11:15 pm

The Scottish government’s attempts to spin the latest drugs deaths statistics are a grim response to a total failure of…

My brief career as a marijuana farmer

23 July 2022 9:00 am

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976,…

Bisexuality was the Bloomsbury norm

11 June 2022 9:00 am

It’s been a century since the heyday of the Bloomsbury group, and now Nino Strachey, a descendant of one of…

Too close to home: Nonfiction, by Julie Myerson, reviewed

4 June 2022 9:00 am

Julie Myerson has, somewhat confusingly, written a novel called Nonfiction. The confusion of course is the point, because this is…

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

21 May 2022 9:00 am

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

Will the bad luck of the Philippines ever turn?

7 May 2022 9:00 am

The Philippines is the odd man out in Asia, a predominantly Catholic country colonised first by Spain, then the United…

Why we drink

26 March 2022 9:00 am

‘I like to have a martini,/ Two at the very most./ After three I’m under the table,/ After four I’m…

Tina: the drug devastating the gay community

26 March 2022 9:00 am

The ‘chemsex’ drug devastating the gay community

Nuclear war, magic mushrooms and a teenage trip I’ll never forget

5 March 2022 9:00 am

Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put his ‘deterrence forces’ – code for nuclear weapons – in a high state…

Is Britain heading for an opioid crisis?

12 February 2022 9:00 am

Almost everyone here that I’ve spoken to about it assumes that the opioid crisis in the United States won’t ever…

For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed

22 January 2022 9:00 am

Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…

Why legalising cannabis is safer than decriminalising it

15 January 2022 9:00 am

The London mayor’s new policy on cannabis is a disaster

A war on drugs? I do hope so

7 December 2021 4:10 am

I’m not going to lie, I let out a little chuckle — maybe even a murmur of approval — when I read…

Did Chinese fentanyl kill Michael K. Williams?

8 September 2021 8:30 pm

Did Chinese-manufactured fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, kill Michael Kenneth Williams, the man who played ‘Omar’ in The Wire? Within minutes…

There's no such thing as 'woke coke'

19 July 2021 11:06 pm

Have you heard about ‘Woke Coke’ – ‘Wokaine’, if you will? Apparently drug dealers are now targeting the WaWs (Woke…

Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California

1 May 2021 9:00 am

San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…

Our mental health is going up in smoke

17 April 2021 9:00 am

As we creep back into the open, as the Covid wards empty and the mental health clinics fill up, how…