Near the end of her brilliantly written new memoir Health and Safety: A Breakdown, author Emily Witt offers this observation: “I knew people close to me—especially those who had not understood this season of my life from the outset—could look for a cause for what had happened to me and find it in the drugs that I used. It would be almost formulaic to say that 2020 was a comeuppance and that my having ended up childless and alone in my forties was an outcome I had engineered in pursuing a messy life. Our behavior had been antisocial, and look how it had ended.”
This seems to be an epiphany. But then Witt retreats: “On a bad day I could almost convince myself to frame my story this way, too. Almost, but not for very long.”
That’s a shame because accepting the truth would probably give Witt some serenity. She deserves it.
Health and Safety is the story of a dazzlingly bright person who made a wrong turn, got into drugs, and suffered for it. Just admitting that could bring her peace.
Witt grew up in Minneapolis, a smart child interested in theater, music, and art. Drugs, she writes, “were incompatible with my ideas of success, good health, and the clear exercise of reason. The druggiest kids I knew in high school had in fact ended up living out the nightmares that the propaganda had promised, and spent their late twenties and early thirties cleaning the bathroom in Goodwill, stuck in halfway houses, and trying to regain custody of their children.”
This grasp of reality makes it truly difficult to understand why, in 2013 at the age of 31, Witt, a successful writer who would soon join the staff of the New Yorker, started doing cocaine, MDMA, ayahuasca, ketamine, ecstasy, mushrooms, and her favorite, LSD. It’s like Taylor Swift was possessed by the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson.
Witt explains that in the early 2000s, drugs were unpopular, thanks to large Food and Drug Administration busts, anti-drug songs and attitudes in popular culture, and, well, common sense. People had seen lives destroyed by the great party of the 1960s. They weren’t stupid.
This began to change in the 2010s. Hallucinogens were praised for helping with problems such as depression and anxiety. Marijuana was legalized in Colorado in 2014, and many more states followed.
Witt decided to dive in. Now approaching the 2016 election and living in Brooklyn, the epicenter of hip, and working on her first book about sex in the digital age, Witt was attracted by New York City’s rave culture and the dance music underground.
Her descriptions of the scene are electrifying and poetic. In one passage, she compares the huge dance floor of a club to an old high school gym: “The net over the DJ setup was lit with a ghostly strobe, and when I looked around the room at the crowd, it was as if everyone who’d had a kickball thrown at their head in gym class was having a do-over. They were dressed in 1990s fashion like children going to day camp, but they were adult-size, and as they compressed time using psychoactive chemicals, the pep rallies or the golden plastic trophies or the joint snuck under a bleacher or the drills they’d been made to run around orange traffic cones surfaced in their minds and blended into the music as the music blended into itself. We were all on the same team now; we’d finally made varsity.”
Witt also points out that her nocturnal chemical romance was frowned upon by her fellow journalists. Writers were just not the daredevils they used to be, she concludes. The writing of her peers “was laden with hyperbole and false epiphany. It anxiously attempted to convince the reader of the importance of unimportant things—of the genius of our mediocre pop stars, of the revolutionary nature of token political symbols. Very little that was written pierced the ersatz nature of the world around us.”
Witt eventually met and fell in love with a man named Andrew. He proved to be her undoing. After several years of acid trips, alcohol binges, hallucinogenic mushrooms, cocaine, and sex with other people, as well as travel to different raves and concerts, things began to fall apart.
Right as Witt was thinking about having a baby and starting a family, Andrew began to display mental problems. He became verbally abusive toward her. This part of Health and Safety is harrowing, with Witt fearing for her life as Andrew approached the point where he required hospitalization.
At one point, he attached golf clubs to his bike and manically insisted he discovered a new golf cart hybrid that would make millions. Witt, despite possessing a brilliant mind, just can’t connect Andrew’s behavior to the drugs they had been consuming. They fought about Andrew’s “daily habit of deep, stupor-inducing bong hits.”
Witt was catching on. Something had gone wrong. Could it be the pharmacy they were ingesting every week?
Witt, unsurprisingly for a leftist New Yorker writer, also has her perspicacity fail her when reporting on conservatives. Her political philosophy: “The Democratic Party had sold out decades ago to billionaires, bankers, and warmongers. America and its myths of freedom were canards betrayed by the country’s origins in slavery and genocide, and liberalism was just a comforting lie we told ourselves as we massacred abroad. In short, we had no leg to stand on.”
It’s not surprising that she mocks conservatives and defends the destruction of property that took place during the George Floyd riots. It’s a shame because there are passages where she seems to grasp the problems of liberalism. In one section, for example, she torches Andrew as a “virtue-signaling” ideologue who tears her down to prove his far-left bona fides. It’s a bullseye.
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“The cost of pushing our minds to extremes was high,” Witt concludes near the end. “To get to that place, some minds get lost along the way. The monitors that keep people safe and self-aware get overridden; the chemical override can become more about the drug than the world, and the shade is pulled down over whatever window out to the world that the drug might have opened.”
So true — and so tragic that to this incredible talent the solution is just more of the same.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.