Breaking Awake
My Search for a New Life Through Drugs
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Breaking Awake
Narrated by:
P. E. Moskowitz
Pre-order for $21.99
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Narrated by:
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P. E. Moskowitz
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By:
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P. E. Moskowitz
About this listen
Why do so many of us need drugs to make it through the day? What is wrong with us?
In August 2017 a car ploughed into a crowd of peaceful marchers. For P.E. Moskowitz, this was a shattering near-death experience, followed by a nervous breakdown. As they willed themselves back to life using a variety of drugs, both prescription and illegal, they started to wonder: why do we need drugs to quell the pain of modern life?
In Breaking Awake, Moskowitz takes us on a kaleidoscopic voyage through the twenty-first century’s mental health crisis and the drugs we take – from fentanyl to SSRIs, from ketamine to LSD and beyond – to cope with the gnawing bleakness of our present moment. We meet a team handing out free heroin on the streets of Vancouver and a young mother in Chicago who has been on SSRIs since childhood, ravers in Brooklyn taking drugs to push the limits of human consciousness and ordinary people leading ordinary lives on a constant cocktail of medication.
Searching for answers to find a path to healing, Moskowitz asks: do drugs spark liberation or simply numb our modern malaise?©2025 P. E. Moskowitz (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Critic Reviews
A wide-ranging cultural exploration of drugs and society that melds the personal and the political while bypassing cliche with nuanced questions (Grace Byron, author of HERCULINE)
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