After suffering a freak brain hemorrhage, Eric Perry was feeling depressed, hopeless, and overwhelmed by a constant fear of death. Then he heard about people who were using hallucinogens to overcome similar feelings of fear and despair. So he decided to give it a shot. “You lie there, waiting for something bigger to happen. Because all this — the drugs, the group work, presumably the Mariah Carey as well — is supposed to cure you of your crippling fear of death … Why was I, a father of two young children, tripping in a house with a bunch of strangers? It’s a complicated question.” And it makes for an interesting story.

+ “For 40 minutes, he sat in a hospital room as an IV drip delivered ketamine through his system. Several more hours passed before it occurred to him that all his thoughts of suicide had evaporated.” Sara Solovitch on the one-time party drug hailed as a miracle for treating severe depression. I like reading stories like these two because they remind people in psychological or physical pain of something that is entirely obscured during the worst moments: You are not alone.

+ WaPo: What happens when you get stoned every single day for five years. (That could be a rhetorical question. It all depends on which five years we’re talking about.)