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

From the “talented and impassioned writer” (San Francisco Chronicle) of How to Kill a City, a riveting journey that combines Drug Use for Grown-Ups with How to Do Nothing, as it explores our national mental health and drug use crises while also searching for answers as to how we can find a path to collective healing.

Why are so many of us unhappy, anxious, and without purpose? And how can we get better?

Several years ago, P.E. Moskowitz had a near-death experience, followed by a nervous breakdown. As they willed themselves back to life using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illicit, they started to wonder: Why are so many of us seeking out these types of interventions to deal with our daily reality?

In Breaking Awake, Moskowitz takes us on a kaleidoscopic voyage through our country’s collective mental health collapse, and the drugs we take—from fentanyl to SSRIs, to ketamine to LSD and beyond—to cope with the gnawing bleakness of our present moment. In a cross-country tour of drug use—including the free heroin handed out on the streets of Vancouver, a mom in Chicago who has been on SSRIs since childhood and now can’t live without them, and ravers in Brooklyn taking drugs most people have never heard of to push the limits of human consciousness—Moskowitz questions whether drugs can spark liberation or simply quell the pain of modern life. Is it time to view drugs differently? And can drugs help us envision a better future?

P.E. Moskowitz is a writer born and raised in New York City. Their writing has appeared in New York magazine, GQ, The Nation, and many other places. They run a popular Substack newsletter about psychology, psychiatry, and culture called Mental Hellth. When they’re not writing, they’re probably playing tennis, chilling with friends across the city, or watching the Mets lose again. For more information, visit their website at Moskowitz.xyz.