This post is part of a collaborative narrative series composed of my writing and Chris Arnade’s photos exploring issues of addiction, poverty, prostitution and urban anthropology in Hunts Point, Bronx. For more on the series, look here. ————————- Opiate withdrawal refers to the wide range of symptoms that occur after stopping or dramatically reducing opiate [...]

I’ve asked a scientist who has struggled with mental health issues and substance abuse through STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate school to write about it, to highlight the pressures faced and the way problems are noticed, exacerbated and often, perhaps unintentionally, masked over the course of education. This as well as other recent [...]

This post is part of a collaborative narrative series composed of my writing and Chris Arnade’s photos exploring issues of addiction, poverty and prostitution in Hunts Point, Bronx. For more on the series, look here. ————————- Neecy clean. Photo courtesy of Chris Arnade. Neecy had been a lot of things lately: dead from a john’s [...]

I spend much of my time writing on homeless addicts in the Bronx. I’ve gotten encouragement on the work that I do, though for transparency’s sake, I have to detail the act of my own intellectual and lived ambiguity: I ignore the existence of a soon-to-be-homeless addict in my own life. —————————– I collected rainbows [...]

Goodbye AA, hello smartphone? University of Massachusetts and MIT researchers have developed a technology to sense the body’s biophysical changes, detecting periods when a drug abuser is most likely to use, and to offer innovative intervention. If you have a craving, the platform conjures a soothing song, video, or distracting game or app to get [...]

Every so often I’m briefly and viscerally aware of environmental “triggers,” cues to use a substance, and how difficult evading them must be for addicts. Alcohol, on billboards and shopping bags, commercials and taxi cabs, is everywhere, and avoiding it teems with impossibility. For the rest of us, it may be moderately comparable to running [...]