Gage - Say Why to Drugs : Everything You Need to Know About the Drugs We Take and Why We Get High

Contents

Dr. Suzi Gage is a psychologist and epidemiologist at the University of Liverpool, investigating associations between recreational drug use and mental health.

In 2016 she began her Say Why to Drugs podcast alongside Scroobius Pip. Each episode discusses a different recreational drug, with no hyperbole, no spin and no judgment.

This is her first book.

Everything You Need to Know About the Drugs We Take and Why We Get High

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Suzi Gage 2020

The right of Suzi Gage to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 9781473686229

eBook ISBN 9781473686250

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For L

You are not entitled to your opinion.

You are entitled to your informed opinion.

No one is entitled to be ignorant.

HARLAN ELLISON

The internet has given us access to so much information and provided us with the ability to have an opinion on such a wide variety of subjects but we seem to focus heavily on the latter and not so much on the former.

Drugs are one such topic. People love to have an opinion, but the waters are so muddied with fearmongering and bias that it is hard to figure out how to inform that opinion reliably. It is for this reason that I am so overwhelmingly proud for even the small part I have played in helping Say Why to Drugs to exist.

Way back in 2015, it was the internet that made me aware of Dr Suzi Gage and led to her becoming a guest on my Distraction Pieces Podcast . In that very first recorded conversation, the seeds were watered for the idea of a podcast that provided an unbiased, fact-based education on the taboo subject of drugs. Not getting mixed up in the opinion and often emotion-led argument of right or wrong / good or evil, but simply focusing on facts and studies.

I had just begun working on the idea of using the reach of my podcast to expand and build a network of podcasts, giving a platform to people I felt were more than deserving of one. As you can imagine, I was keen for one of the first additions to the network to be the realisation of Suzis podcast ideas.

At this stage, I was already starting to worry that, as podcasts were growing, the quote that opened this foreword was getting more and more ignored. So many opinions, so few informed ones. Thus, having suggested the name Say Why to Drugs to Suzi, I was even more motivated to do anything I could to help bring a researched, informed and rational podcast on a much-mythologised subject to the ever-growing podcast world.

When Suzi was ready to launch, she decided it would work best, format wise, if she had a guest on each episode to discuss it all with her. What better way to confirm or dispel a myth than for it to be presented by someone who believes it and addressed by someone who has studied it? I was lucky enough to be asked to be that said guest.

As the episodes went on, Suzi decided that I was a good fit to have a regular position as the guest for a few reasons. The clearest reason was that, in my youth, I had tried a fair number of the drugs in question and was happy to discuss openly my experiences. I feel it also helped that, through nothing but personal choice, I now do not take any drugs apart from the occasional drop of alcohol and I truly mean occasional, as I tend to drink only eight or nine times a year.

This was all well and good and to be involved felt great but it was the reaction when it launched that was truly overwhelming.

Listenership exceeded all expectation and feedback was coming in from parents and teachers who wished that they had had such a resource when they were in their younger, experimental years. Young and old, those who had used drugs and those that had not, the podcast seemed to reach so many people. People who needed to hear it.

And now its a book!

A real-life actual book that you are reading.

I truly believe that what Suzi has created here will live on as an essential tool in the war on ignorance; the natural successor and antidote to start repairing the damage done by the war on drugs.

Scroobius Pip

July 2019

Have you ever taken drugs?

Every time I ask this question as part of a talk or lecture, a few people put their hands up. And sometimes, when these talks are at events like Skeptics in the Pub , I then mischievously point out that the pint of beer in front of them contains a psychoactive substance. Almost all of us have at least tried a psychoactive substance, from our cuppa in the morning, to a teenage coughing fit after a cigarette behind the bike sheds, or a vodka-filled alcopop, even if we decide not to try them again, or have never tried anything illicit.

If you have tried drugs (and I have, Im sipping a coffee as I write this), you are not alone. Humans have been enjoying the effects of psychoactive substances for thousands of years. If chewing a particular leaf might improve your concentration, speed or accuracy, you might be more likely to catch and therefore eat meat that day its clear why that would have been advantageous.

Psychoactive drugs have also been used in ritualistic settings for centuries shamans imbibing psychedelic substances to allow them to communicate with gods or spirits. Tobacco and cannabis were both initially used in ritualistic settings. Psychedelic drugs such as ayahuasca still are in some Amazonian communities.

The UKs drug of choice, alcohol, has probably been around since the Stone Age. Some historians believe that alcohol was a food staple before bread, as it contained plenty of carbohydrates. In all likelihood, it was considerably weaker than the beers were used to today evidence suggests that even children drank it.

What about more recently? Fast forward to the turn of the last century, when machine rolling of cigarettes meant they could be mass-produced, and we see a new way to consume tobacco. In the UK and USA, the inclusion of cigarettes in soldiers ration packs during the First and Second World Wars really cemented their place as a drug of choice in the countries. And even though cigarettes have fallen out of favour more recently, as evidence of how much of a health risk they are has weakened their appeal, the World Health Organisation estimate that as of 2018 there are still 1.1 billion smokers worldwide, with 6.1 million of them in the UK.

Even more Brits drink alcohol around 58 per cent of UK adults (those over sixteen) drank alcohol in the previous week, according to the Office for National Statistics. And the history of alcohol as the UKs drug of choice is long and rich.

As would be expected, illicit drugs are not as widely used. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) 2019 report, just under 10 per cent of UK adults (which they define as those aged between sixteen and fifty-nine) have used an illicit substance in the past year. Cannabis is the most commonly used; the same report found that 12.3 per cent of sixteen- to thirty-four-year-olds in the UK reported using cannabis in the past year. Other drugs are even less common cocaine use was reported by roughly 5 per cent of those surveyed, and MDMA by 3 per cent.