BUT TEA ISN’T A DRUG!

Have you ever wondered why drug stores are essential businesses while drug dealers can be sentenced to life in prison? Or how we’re experiencing a drug shortage while our streets are being flooded with drugs?

When it comes down to it, the line that separates “drugs” from other psychoactive substances is delineated by cultural norms and moral attitudes, not by the fundamental pharmacological truths of various substances.

So welcome to Tea And Other Drugs (TAOD), the podcast where we break down these norms and discuss all the drugs in your life—even the ones you might not consider to be drugs.

From the tea in our kitchen cabinets to the white powders made in clandestine laboratories, drugs are everywhere. They unlock flavors of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible. Perfect abstinence from drugs is nearly impossible and ignorance of their effects can be dangerous.

So on TAOD, we’ll examine the drug paradoxes, phobias, and obsessions we run into every day.

I started Tea and Other Drugs because I believe that drugs of all kinds—not just the “good” ones or the normalized ones—have a great deal to offer us humans and the planet we inhabit. At a basic level, I believe that people shouldn’t be thrown in prison for exploring their own states of consciousness.

I spend my days examining all areas that drugs intersect and working to end the harm caused by prohibitionism and the War on Drugs. I was raised in the hills of West Virginia, where psychoactive substances grew all around me. I eventually moved to Brooklyn to produce the third season of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a Vice series about different psychoactive substances used around the world. In 2020, when the show ended, I co-founded the kratom tea company Top Tree Herbs. I now spend half of my time slinging tea and the other half producing The Hamilton Morris Podcast.

Oftentimes people keep their drug-related stories a secret, but I can’t wait to share my stories (and those of some incredible advocates, researchers, and psychonauts) with you. I hope you enjoy TAOD.