Breaking Awake : A Reporter's Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs

Why do so many of us need drugs to make it through the day?What is wrong with us?In August 2017 a car ploughed into a crowd of peaceful marchers.For P.E. Moskowitz it was a shattering near-death experience, followed by a nervous breakdown.As they willed themselves back to life using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illegal, they started to wonder: why do we need drugs to quell the pain of modern life?In Breaking Awake, Moskowitz takes us on a kaleidoscopic voyage through the twenty-first century’s mental health crisis and the drugs we take - from fentanyl to SSRIs, from ketamine to LSD and beyond - to cope with the gnawing bleakness of our present moment.We meet a team handing out free heroin on the streets of Vancouver and a young mother in Chicago who has been on SSRIs since childhood, ravers in Brooklyn taking drugs to push the limits of human consciousness and ordinary people leading ordinary lives on a constant cocktail of medication. Moskowitz asks: do drugs spark libera