Drugged with prescription morphine, nineteenth-century Morphinées were reduced to so-called pathological symptoms, idleness and other pleasures that did not include the company of men, and were widely criticised in the press, literature and the arts. This moral condemnation not only narrows the addiction to the substance consumed but, in this case, essentializes women at the same time. It denies that substances exist only as practices, which are much broader: a practice that takes into account the individual, the context, the social environment and the totality of the multiple associated experiences. Thinking of drugs as practices means approaching users as active people, building a relationship with the substance. The agentivity that individuals demonstrate when they enter into such a relationship bears witness to an emancipatory affirmation, an ability to choose freely according to their intuitions. The practices that surround our relationship with a substance allow us to negotiate with reality, to gain autonomy and experiment with our own desires. 
       Drugs are a complex mix of powers and constraints, pleasures and addictions, introspection and egotistical delusions, freedoms and addictions, therapeutic and alienating.
       All drugs. 
       And not only drugs.  
       Art. Tobacco. Choose your hell. Every practice suggests skills: taking drugs —whatever the substance— is no exception. Reducing the risks. Knowing how to dose. Recognising the products. Navigating the experience itself. Managing addiction and dependence. Knowing how to do without. Quitting. Learning to deal with what we are—a malleable material of alterable experiences, conscious and unconscious, whose new perspectives are sometimes enough to give us the perspective we need to leverage what we aspire to. Time to distinguish which of our desires will inspire us favourably. What substances will have the action of a crowbar to create a gap within a constraining system, to deploy a power to act on existence, not as an absolute metaphysical freedom, but as a concrete reality of self-experience?