The Land Beyond the Drug War

Inconsistent potency makes doing fentanyl—already up to 50 times stronger than heroine—like playing a game of Russian roulette. Will you get the dose you can tolerate or will you take the hit that leads to overdose? For Esquire, Jack Holmes reports from Portland in Oregon, a state which decriminalized drug possession via Measure 110 in an attempt to treat drug abuse as a behavioural-health disorder.

This was black tar heroin’s last stand,” Morgan told me, referring to the I-5 corridor from Washington to California. These days, she sits on the Oversight and Accountability Council for Measure 110, but years ago she was deep into heroin herself. She was in and out of jail for a long time, including four years on a federal charge when she was held responsible for her friend’s overdose death, but going to prison over and over never did much to stop her using. She was shocked at what she found in Portland when she got out in 2018, as a longtime housing shortage gave way to an explosion of tent cities. Then the state saw a surge in heroin and prescription-opioid use in 2019 and 2020, the culmination of a shift in which Portland’s beaming openness to the world began to fade toward something darker. Then the fentanyl flooded in, and now everything is fentanyl. It has almost completely replaced heroin on the street. A serviceable amount costs three dollars.

The true harm reductionists know that the material aid is about establishing a connection, planting a seed that you have to go back to the garden and tend to week after week until someone starts to believe for the first time in however long that somebody cares what happens to them, that maybe they should care, that they can’t just keep saying none of this shit matters so why not keeping getting high.

Everybody in this field has their own ways to navigate the philosophical quandaries, and nobody getting money through Measure 110 is pretending they have all the answers. Is the solution “housing first,” even before somebody gets sober, or do you give people medication and the supplies to keep living on the streets, hoping they can get clean in a tent? And considering all the many years when patients—especially Black patients—were thrown out of traditional inpatient programs so hastily, how do you decide when and why to toss somebody for screwing up?

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Revisiting My Rastafari Childhood

In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, How to Say Babylon, poet Safiya Sinclair recounts her upbringing in Jamaica—a life under livity, to use the argot of her parents’ adoptive Rastafarian tradition. (The culture, so often flattened by others into the stuff of dorm room posters, is rendered here with both nuance and clarity.) As Sinclair finds her own voice, her father retreats into the comforts of parochial repression; that tension propels readers through a happy but fraught adolescence and out the other side.

My father was never going to be a carpenter or a banker or a taximan, he said. He sang for Jah, so he had no choice but to cover the same ten Bob Marley songs for tourists eating their steak dinners in the west-coast hotels. At home, though, he could still be king. My mother placed every meal before him as soon as he beckoned for it. He had never turned on a stove, never washed a dish. Every evening before he left for work, my mother would wash his dreadlocks, pouring warm anointments over his bowed head at the bathroom sink, and then oil each lock as he sat eating fruit that she had cut for him. I imagined a servant, just out of frame, fanning a palm frond back and forth.

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Everything You Never Knew About Competitive Eating

Jamie Loftus’ piece on competitive eating is wonderful goodie bag full of surprises. Sit down at the table and allow her to serve you up a platter full of fascinating and admirable characters who are using their profile to advance meaningful causes.

It’s mid-July, and by now, the professional eating world is well into its 51 weeks of annual obscurity.

Their introductions are carefully crafted WWE-grade nightmare fuel, announced as if each competitor is a god come down from the heavens to vacuum meat tubes down their gullets. The intros for these lesser known eaters are largely drowned out by color commentary about the main competitors—still, there they are, forming the outer edges of a Last Supper–style tableau, each with their own stats and training processes and very specific traumas.

What if I were to tell you these are, by far, the most interesting characters in the professional eating world?

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Coach’s Kid

A reflection on a father and son relationship told through the sports that they played together. There are some unflinching and harrowing recollections, but they are told with insight and understanding.

What made us such mysteries to each other? Probably the fact that we didn’t talk about much besides sports. Other topics weren’t explicitly off-limits; Dad simply had little to say about them. Plus we both tended to sink into silent, solitary pastimes: me with my trading cards, pop music, and video games, and Dad with his computer.

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Ahead of Time

A beautiful meditation on the loss of a beloved sister to a long, slow battle with cancer, braided with poems the writer read during that experience:

Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been four­teen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.

The touchingly literal conceit of the Olds poem is that death is like this: a problem of a body having gone missing. You face some­body when you talk to them; if their body is gone, and you wish to go on talking, you must search for a new way of facing them. The poem elaborates this hypothesis, testing it out. The speaker turns to a “new rose,” only to realize that at night we can’t see color, leav­ing the lawn “grey,” the rose “glowing white.” Has the poem found a new way of seeing in the dark, or has grief drained all color from the world?

The desire to talk to the dead requires the “as if” of figurative language: a descent from the world of the living to an underworld. As the poet addresses the absent grandmother, she conjures her into the poem, and yet what appears is a person who had already, even in life, turned toward the darkened state of death: not knitting, not reading. The only unbroken lines in the poem are its final ones, in which the speaker seems to have reconciled herself to having noth­ing more than the imperfect, residual knowledge that death allows.

At the heart of the poem, though, lies a terrible doubt. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?” If our speech is what has seemed to grant others their presence in the first place, have we been fooling ourselves all along? Have we mistaken the projection of our own imagination, reflected back to us at night, for a dim impres­sion of the person whom we miss? “Why do I tell you these things?” John Ashbery asks at the end of one poem. “You are not even here.”

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How I Became a Modern Bootlegger

A blisteringly honest account of the thrill of the drug business. It’s not all about money, it’s about avoiding the “mind-numbing, soul-destroying drudgery at the jobs that are available to you.”

It would be more noble to say that I smuggled drugs out of economic desperation, but that’s not true. I liked the rush. I also liked the people I dealt with, and the exposure to the human condition. Even after 25 years in journalism, I never knew humanity the way I did working at a strip club and moving product. In the dark, you see people close up. You learn who has a good soul and whose is muddy. You have to trust your gut. People will show themselves to you and it’s important that you listen.

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What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me

For The New Yorker, technologist Jaron Lanier delights in his large collection of musical instruments and the singular and ephemeral joy of music made in collaboration with others.

Today, I love to have musicians over to my house, where we can combine different instruments to see what happens. The joy that transpires when things go well is multilayered. There is the pleasure of connection with other people, and there is also the happiness of finding a new little corner of aesthetic interiority together. Music can conjure a new flow, a new pattern, a new flavor, between and inside people. And playing sufficiently obscure instruments forces a different approach to music. How can you be competitive about raw skill, or get into some other macho trap, when the task at hand is so esoteric? Who is to judge the winner in a contest that must invent itself over and over? When music made collaboratively with other musicians goes right, I feel a budding, rising warmth and comfort. Is this my mother smiling on me? Or maybe it’s me, smiling on her.

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