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A quick guide to drugs, the brain and brain chemistry
Discover some of the major chemicals that govern activity in our brains, how they work, and why certain drugs have the effects they do.
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Chemical highs and psychedelic research
Could recreational drugs make you happy? Kate Wilkinson explores why keen clubber Simon believes taking psychedelics has helped him develop as a person.
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Guerrilla public health
From safe-use guides to needle exchange schemes, Harry Shapiro reflects on 40 years of drug harm reduction in the UK.
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Thalidomide, a bitter pill
Hear from some of the women who took the drug thalidomide over sixty years ago about the fear, isolation and grief that they experienced as the appalling pharmaceutical scandal unfolded around them.
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Acid and the sexual psychonauts
How LSD fuelled one woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery in the late 1950s.
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Why even plastic surgery can’t hide you from facial recognition
Once upon a time, plastic surgery allowed a few notorious criminals to evade the law. But today, sophisticated facial-recognition technology has turned dreams of anonymity to dust.
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Thalidomide babies
In a time without scans or antenatal tests, neither medical staff nor parents were prepared for the damage to the foetus caused by the thalidomide drug.
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Coleridge’s hypochondria
An intense focus on his own bodily sensations led poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to self-medicate with narcotics. But this fascination also put Coleridge ahead of the medical sensibilities of his day.
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Families fighting for justice
In 1962 a group of parents whose children had been affected by thalidomide began a decades-long battle in the law courts, the media and Parliament in order to win fair justice for all thalidomide survivors.
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The hell of hay fever
After years suffering in silence, David Jesudason finds speaking out about his pollen allergy gives him hope for a future where his hay-fever symptoms are under control.
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The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War
In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.