Richert’s book, Strange Trips, presents the history of recreational, palliative and pharmaceutical drugs and the tension in debates between evidence and opinion, compassion and politics. Readers may not know that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my father became Canada’s most vocal advocate for the legalization of medical heroin. At the time, heroin was widely used in Britain for pain control, yet Canadian patients were denied access. Scotland Yard officials, he noted, brushed off the claims of critics that medical heroin stored in hospital pharmacies would increase crime. The fight didn’t end debates in palliative care, and experts then and now would argue the focus should be broader than drugs alone.