People have been having fun with nitrous oxide—often in the name of science—since its discovery more than 240 years ago.

A snitch comes clean.

Drug trips in space; from Motherboard's new science fiction series.

"During the Earth trials, someone told her that being in orbit was just falling around the planet forever. Back in the safe house somewhere in the Midwest, with 2,000 milligrams of MDMA ricocheting across her brain stem, it wasn't practical information. But she had retained it. Ground Control didn’t know the first thing about throwing a party. The drugs were free, but those nights on Earth always ended with psychonauts sobbing in the corners of the room, touching each others’ faces in the darkness. Of course, the Earth was falling too—around the sun."

Alfred Dellentash Jr. chartered the Rolling Stones in private jets while smuggling planeloads of Pablo Escobar’s drugs on the side.

The misadventures of two hospital workers, from the 1992 collection Jesus' Son.

"The eye man was on vacation or something. While the hospital’s operator called around to find someone else just as good, the other specialists were hurrying through the night to join us. I stood around looking at charts and chewing up more of Georgie’s pills. Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of them burned, some of them tasted like chalk. Various nurses, and two physicians who’d been tending somebody in I.C.U., were hanging out down here with us now."

The tragic romance of Jim Irsay, the shrewd owner of the Indianapolis Colts, and Kimberly Wundrum, a mother who shared his longtime addiction to painkillers, that ended with her overdosing in the secret condo he bought her.

The writer is reluctantly whisked away to to a small house in upstate New York to attend an ayhuasca ceremony with six strangers.

A series of memories and addictions from various years.

"I come here after my shift at the record store and sit around at picnic tables outside, scribbling into notebooks while drinking shitty coffee and waiting for my girlfriend, Velvet, to get off work so we can go get high. The crowd here is varied: AA people alongside art people and punks alongside dirty Deadheads and downtown casualties. There are many open mic poetry events, usually outdoors at dusk. One night I decide to read. I go to the mic and drop weapons. I go to the mic and read about Kuwait City and southern Iraq. I go to the mic and read about prostitutes and hashish and drinking homemade wine made out of grape juice in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I go to the mic and curse over and over again. Nobody claps. Nobody moves. I am not asked to read again."

An excerpt from Goebel's novel: a man's strange world of peyote, addiction, family, and conflicting identities.

"I dropped tobacco from a cig I took apart and kept the loose stuff in my palm, and I circled the tree counter clockwise, like the turn of the earth, and dropped the tobacco staring up in the tree and praying, like an old wide-faced (I)ndian showed me to do in rehab in the snow in Minnesota around a big oak tree, horses in the field of night, snowflakes falling like drunks, like a dream, stars holy above, and as I finished dropping the last speck, finishing a circle around the ponderosa, praying for the old man in the Upper East Side to have, there it was, standing up in a rich grass, by its quill, right out of the ground. Get it? EAGLE FEATHER. This is a wild trip."

On the highly enjoyable, nearly fatal first experiments with laughing gas in late 18th-century London.

The story of a naïve fisherman, a boat headed for Spain and 1.5 tons of cocaine.

Life on a weed farm in Humboldt County.

Getting clean with a three-day trip.

Previously: The Longform Guide to Addiction.

Can an illegal drug heal PTSD?

On addiction and addiction narratives.

Robert Aaron was a veteran horn player who sold bags of heroin to friends to support his own habit. Then his friend Philip Seymour Hoffman overdosed.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Scenes from a Bowery flophouse.

A punk heroin addict navigates 1980s Detroit.

"About an hour later, Harwell and Rollo were squatting (literal) in their squat (figurative) on Broadville, about a mile from the convenience store that had just fallen victim to their considerable wrath. They hadn’t said a word longer than four letters to each other since sprinting away from the Quality Dairy, and for the last thirty minutes they’d been listening for any movement outside, not sure if they’d been followed, or if Chavo and the night manager had enough information about them gathered from their several months of patronage to know where they hung their heads."

A forgotten birthday cake sets off a chain of unexpected events.

"The door to the bakery is meant to be pulled, but I push hard against it, like a bird hitting the glass. The lady behind the counter settles eyes on me, so I pull myself up as straight as I can and pull the door. On a wooden board above the register a TV is playing The Today Show. Jane Pauley and Madonna won’t shut up about Madonna’s dress like it’s gonna end the Cold War and I have to wonder if I’m the only person in the world living with trouble. Be-hind the glare of the case, I can see the Cinderella cake covered in icy blue frosting thick as a comforter. A glass carriage flies across the surface in needle-thin icing. I put my hand to the glass—forgetting the lady behind the counter—smudging it, until she clears her throat.

Jane Neubauer was just out of basic training when a secretive military unit recruited her for an undercover mission. She and the Air Force disagree about what happened next.

An undercover cop targets an autistic teen as a drug dealer.

How a supposedly safe party drug turned lethal.

How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.

A bungled operation in Honduras and the enduring ineffectiveness of America’s war on drugs.