New Yorker staffer Emily Witt’s debut memoir Health and Safety offers a sardonic look at her journey to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible. In 2013, after spending a few years on a prescribed antidepressant that “confirmed my love of stimulants,” Witt decided to try ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive beverage, for the first time. With honesty, the self-described nerdy midwesterner describes how the “primordial” taste of the ayahuasca led her to become a “zealot” of psychedelics like LSD, MDMA, mushrooms, and ketamine. She pokes fun at herself for thinking she was a “responsible” drug user because she only did it for introspection. As if this made her “somehow more noble than people who got high to have fun.” And her prudent pursuit of altered consciousness was fun until Donald Trump got elected, the Covid-19 pandemic started, and her boyfriend had a mental breakdown. Health and Safety is a sobering chronicle of a woman trying to find clarity in a world on the brink.
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