More than half the U.S. population is now able to legally purchase marijuana with a debit card, and plenty of today’s white-collar professionals will happily proselytize about the beneficial effects of microdosing acid or mushrooms or ketamine. American attitudes toward controlled substances may never become as permissive as those of the Portuguese or the Dutch, but liberalization of drug use in the U.S. has been a predominant trend of the 21st century. Even a teetotaler, upon being targeted by sophisticated marketing copy and perhaps one’s persistent friends, may therefore wonder: Well, why not see for myself?
In 2012, the writer Emily Witt had a similar thought after deciding to wean herself off the antidepressant Wellbutrin, which she had taken for much of her adult life. Psychedelic drugs had become more readily available to the public, and Witt—a contributor to publications including The New Yorker and The Nation—was curious. Being a journalist, she also wanted to understand how exactly these substances might expand her own consciousness, which had started to feel stuck in place. Although she sensed that her emergent interest in recreational drugs might be a cliché for someone of her socioeconomic profile (white, middle-class, Ivy League–educated, Brooklyn-dwelling), she was nonetheless sucked in by the potential of each experience to bring a new epiphany about herself.
Witt’s observations became Health and Safety: A Breakdown, a new memoir about both her foray into serious drug use and her turbulent relationship with Andrew, a computer programmer and electronic-music producer with whom she explores the pulsing rhythms of Brooklyn nightlife. Her journey of self-discovery dovetailed with an existential crisis about her career in journalism, which earned her increasing stability and prestige but fell far short of changing the world. Undergirding this professional dilemma, though, was a more relatable concern, which she renders in exacting and mournful prose: the evergreen search for a satisfying life in an unfeeling, chaotic country.
By Emily Witt
Witt’s quest evolved beyond a casual journalistic undertaking into a headlong immersion; drugs and nightlife began to feel like the answer to problems personal, political, and philosophical. “If in the world we were atomized, at the rave, for a few hours, we could model a collective ideal with its own manners and ethics,” she writes, solemnly intellectualizing the base pleasures of getting high and dancing to body-shattering music.
As Witt tells it, this was not just a new way of feeling but a new way of life. It was also by its nature insular and fleeting. Although Witt seemed to tunnel her way toward a more enlightened perspective, she eventually bumped up against the limitations of any force—be it love or LSD—to liberate her from herself and her place within the real world. Many drugs, legal or not, are sold as a transformative cure-all for the pains of existence, but sometimes, her book suggests, there’s no escaping reality.
At the opening of Health and Safety, when Witt is in her early 30s, she recalls having lived a life defined by careful decision making. “Drugs … were incompatible with my ideas of success, good health, and the clear exercise of reason,” she explains. Beginning her experiments, she applies the same cool logic: “I took drugs, I would tell people, for introspection, which was a pious posture, as if the way I went about it was somehow more noble than people who got high to have fun.”
Witt’s descriptions of her initial trips show why she felt so compelled to seek new frontiers. Smoking the hallucinogen DMT turns her world purple and green, and evokes her childhood; an ayahuasca ritual introduces her to a godlike manifestation of the universe, which triggers a series of profound emotional understandings. At a music festival, she tries a synthetic drug that seems to induce the total dissolution of her thinking brain, upstreaming her into a current of pure bliss.
If you already like the way you think, perhaps these encounters sound jarring—or even dangerously misleading. Yet for Witt, they felt like a reprieve from a reality in which she felt powerless. She’d found herself shocked and unsettled by Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, which occasioned a sense of futility that no gathering of pink-hat-wearing protesters could help alleviate.
Professionally, Witt was near the top of her game, amassing a slew of enviable bylines and publishing an acclaimed collection of essays on modern dating—but in every other way she was spiraling into cynicism that bordered on nihilism. Her growing disenchantment with journalism was accelerated by her incredulity at the rise of Trump, whose inauguration confirmed all of her anxieties about the future of America and the power of her field to shape it.
The journey into drugs was, in her framing, not a selfish escape but an effort to harness journalism toward something more useful than chronicling national decay. “What I liked about reporting was that, like drugs, it caused a temporary defamiliarization that could reveal my own insularity and myopia, if I were sensitive enough to recognize it,” she writes. And though she doubted whether she had much to say about the Parkland shootings, or the surge of right-wing militias—assignments doled out to her by The New Yorker, where she became a staff writer—she felt she could better turn the analytical lens on herself.
Some readers might react to such justifications with skepticism, but Witt’s directness and sincerity are disarming. She is not embarking, she tells herself, on a Behind the Music–style personal arc of self-discovery and decadence; she is pursuing hard introspective truths with a neutral, unsentimental rigor. LSD, which became Witt’s preferred substance, was “a drug of discernment” that “demanded authenticity and complexity and revealed the ersatz.” This forensic perspective, she writes, allowed her to slice through Gordian knots of emotion and appraise core beliefs that would have taken a therapist dozens of billable hours to find.
Nonetheless, the arc of rise-and-fall asserts itself. A piece of bad news can easily trigger a bad trip—and Witt’s revelations are sometimes set against descriptions of shame or sadness. And yet the promise of one more long and enchanting night always draws her back out. “There was no getting comfortable, no venue would ever last, and it might be the last time,” she writes—a fatalistic attitude for a fatalistic era. The dance floor feels to Witt like a cauldron of diverse bodies and gender identities, and the participants at the parties she attends stew in a shared mistrust of corporate society—a natural home for the author’s progressive ideals. Still, her utopian vision is occasionally disrupted by reminders of what exists beyond her bubble. “I knew our life in Brooklyn did not constitute any form of political resistance,” she concludes bluntly after returning from a reporting trip to Texas during the 2018 midterm elections.
This push-and-pull structures most of the book. Witt’s relationship with Andrew is nominally built on honesty and playfulness—they are “open”; they stay up until dawn; they resist placing guardrails on each other’s behavior. Yet Witt desires a conventional outcome: having a child together. “The idea made me feel trapped but it was a trapped I was ready to concede to,” she says. She’s fiercely in love with Andrew, but they can’t commit to the same future. It would be better to make a decisive break—but identifying the choice before you does not make the choosing any easier.
Health and Safety is not framed as a cautionary tale; the experience of a great time out with her friends and a lover is its own reward. But as Witt moves through the years, from the election of Trump through the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, she succumbs to the exhaustion of living hard. The possibility of settling within a healthy, supportive community begins to seem like a mirage. It’s easy to be idealistic when you’re young—but a few years pass, your back suddenly hurts, and the dance floor fills with unfamiliar faces.
“In nineteenth-century novels, the characters whose lives defy convention end up punished,” Witt notes. For her, this punishment arrives when Andrew decides to end their relationship in a blaze of rage and abuse, forcing her to wonder what she could have done differently. She remains insistent that, for all of the costs, the drugs have served a grander purpose. “I took them to psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted by moral hypocrisy and profit motive that I sought a chemical window to see outside (also for pleasure, for fun),” she writes—and she rejects a moralistic narrative for where she ends up.
The cruelty of memoirs (at least the honest ones) lies in their reveal of the places where the plot went awry, at a moment when it’s all far beyond fixing. Although it’s tempting to judge Witt’s choices now—Come on, don’t date a Brooklyn DJ who wants an open relationship!—I found myself sympathizing, broadly, with her longing for a more fulfilling existence. Who doesn’t feel down about the state of things, and their own decision making, from time to time? Who doesn’t wish there were a magical remedy?
In the end, responsible drug use cannot fundamentally change everyone’s personality, and the world is the world is the world. Yet Witt’s travelogues do bring her to a deeper understanding of herself. In 2022, she attends a party in Detroit that seems to justify all this wandering. The sound is “profound and immersive”; the setting, in the birthplace of techno, reminds her of how far this music has traveled. Under the influence of another transcendent acid trip, she accesses what she calls “a new level” of appreciation for the joys of nightlife. “It was proof that one goes through life collecting bits and pieces of experience and every once in a very long while they get added into a sum that reveals their collective worth,” she writes. That’s a hard-won victory, perhaps even worth the missteps that now feel inevitable.
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