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Breaking Awake

My Search For A New Life Through Drugs

Breaking Awake cover

Description

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, this 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.

Searching for answers to find a path to healing, Moskowitz asks: do drugs spark liberation or simply numb our modern malaise?

Product details

Published 09 Sep 2025
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Extent 352
ISBN 9781526658104
Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

P. E. Moskowitz

P.E. Moskowitz is a writer born and raised in New…

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Environment: Staging