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 from their existential unraveling using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illicit, they started to wonder: Why do countless people need substances to deal with their daily reality?

In Breaking Awake, Moskowitz takes us on a kaleidoscopic voyage through our nationwide 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. Think “Eat, Pray Love, but with ketamine instead of pasta” (Dazed magazine). We meet a team handing out free heroin on the streets of Vancouver, a young mother in Chicago who has been on SSRIs since childhood, and ravers in Brooklyn taking hallucinogens to push the limits of human consciousness and collective healing. Throughout this cross-country tour, Moskowitz questions whether drugs can spark liberation or simply quell the pain of modern life. Blending memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism, Breaking Awake takes readers on a “funny, smart, and profound” (Interview magazine) journey through how we actually use drugs—to survive, to soothe, and, sometimes, to thrive.

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. For more information, visit their website at Moskowitz.xyz.