All right, we're scrapping the cute stuff and cutting straight to the chase.

I'm Dessa.

This is deeply human.

Today, we're talking about drugs.

And we're already like five and a half seconds in.

Let's go.

Hit it.

James, can we speed it up a little?

I've just got like an insane amount of stuff to get to in this episode.

Great. Thank you. Hey, come on, man. Don't speed me. You know, dude, that always makes me dizzy and you know it.

Okay. I work as a touring musician where it's not considered unprofessional to drink on the job.

In fact,

taking a slug of whiskey on stage often elicits a round of applause. This business is full of fascinating,

brilliant weirdos, and intoxicants are easy to get and sometimes hard to avoid.

Alexis Stevenson, an author friend of mine, once told me, I'm not a writer, I just drink a lot about it,

which I immediately cribbed for a song lyric. Substance use and abuse is sort of baked into the culture, and that's true at the indie level and for the A-listers. To quote the late great

Robin Williams, cocaine is God's way of saying that you are making too much money.

Even being so surrounded by it, there is still something that's sort of paradoxical about drugs to me.

Not just the many hazards of abuse, but the very idea of drugs.

Isn't every organism supposed to be out here fighting for survival?

Wouldn't getting messed up slower reflexes and make us worse at hunting or escaping whoever is hunting us why would we choose

to regularly impair ourselves and even if you don't drink or smoke odds are you probably had the

...