Are you self-medicating?

Unfortunately, drugs purchased on the black market do not carry instruction labels, dosage information, warnings, or a consultation from the pharmacist.  They are not regulated by the government, unless you count possible arrest for possession.  

Basic pharmacological and psychiatric principles may not always be familiar to people buying illegal drugs, but they should be.  If you feel you are medicating some condition with your drugs, you should understand your target symptoms, a good starting dose, a strategy for titration if you tolerate the drugs appropriately, and a tapering strategy in case you decide to stop taking the medication.  

Street drugs operate on the same pharmacological principles as legally prescribed drugs, but they are driven so far underground that people have a very difficult time making sense of what they are putting into their bodies.  This horrendous state of affairs has fueled an unprecedented overdose crisis, and the victims are being blamed.  

With harm reduction practices, you can be in charge of your substance use rather than a victim of the fraudulent drug war.  For example, “start low, go slow” is a classic harm reduction strategy which echoes the pharmacological principle of titration.  “Just say know” is a harm reduction slogan that encourages informed consumption of drugs.  “Just say no,” on the other hand, is a government slogan which only applies to drugs which are not peddled by big pharma.  

Harm reduction is not rocket science.  It is common sense, and a radical interruption of the treatment/enforcement/pharmaceutical industrial complex.  Dr. Carl Hart calls it Drug Use for Grown-Ups in his brilliant new book.  Even if the government treats people who use drugs like children, we are adults and we have a right to make informed decisions about what we put into our bodies.  We also have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and one another regardless of the genocidal drug policies hovering over us for decades.