“The dose makes the poison” – Paracelsus (Father of Toxicology)

To get to a different future we not only have to imagine what could be, but help others see what is. Few have spent more time busting the myths of the present and the past as Ryan Marino (@RyanMarino), an Emergency medical toxicologist who takes the ambivalence at the root of the word, “toxicologist” seriously, he has spent years online, and elsewhere busting myths surrounding fentanyl & naloxone in the United States. Recently he was interviewed in the New York Times when a police officer had a panic attack that was attributed as a fentanyl overdose.

Claire & Alex talk with Ryan about the future he would like to see drug policy go in the US and beyond, as well as about why he keeps “toxic” plants, and what we can learn about the ambivalence between poison and medicine when we think about dose.

Edited by Marcel Rambo

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Notes:

New York Times article on the San Diego Police Department: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/san-diego-police-overdose-fentanyl.html

William James – the Nitrous Philosopher: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/

G. Henderson (1988), on “Designer Drugs” and the potential for fentanyl to replace heroin, https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/designer.drugs.history.html

Alex Stevens & Fiona Measham (2014) “The ‘drug policy ratchet’: why do sanctions for new psychoactive drugs typically only go up?” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.12406