It’s rare to become addicted to esoteric hallucinogens. But it’s not impossible. ChristRobbins reports on the curious life and mind-altering death of Justin Clark
Justin Clark in 2019. Photo: In January 2021, the third season of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia premiered on Vice TV with an episode titled “Synthetic Toad Venom Machine.” Part science lesson, part travelogue, each installment of the documentary series explores esoteric hallucinogens and the “psychonauts” who make and take them.
Clark shared Morris’s views that there is no such thing as a “bad” drug and that dosage is an underappreciated concept. “If there’s one thing that is not talked about enough in the realm of psychedelics and drugs in general, it’s dose,” Morris once told the podcaster Tim Ferriss, citing a seminal 16th-century physician who taught that dosage could be “the difference between a medicine and a poison.
If you’re interested in learning more about the potential dangers of psychedelics, part two of Cover Story, New York’s podcast exposing the dark secrets of psychedelic therapy, starts March 1. Listen to the trailer below. Clark in May 2021, two weeks before his death. Photo: Christian Hansen Justin Clark grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where his father, Michael, was a contractor for a flooring company and his mother, Leslie, cleaned houses. By the second grade, he was reading at an eighth-grade level, and he could pick up an instrument and play it by ear. Michael recalls bringing Justin to work and asking him to lay studs for the entire basement of a house. His drywall crew was impressed.
These quests would always be broken up with time in Louisville, where he once got a temporary job sorting and archiving the work of Grady Clay, a pioneering urbanist then in his 90s. Archiving encouraged Clark’s obsessive tendencies, and he built a collection of books bordering on a small library. He’d memorize poems like Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” , recite them for friends, then never mention them again.
Last year, Clark described for a friend how he and Morris worked together. “I would be like, ‘Hamilton, what’s the next episode going to be about?’” Clark told the friend. “And I would turn on my voice notes and Hamilton would go on this long spiel, like a daydream, of the episode he wanted to make. And then it would be my job to come as close to that in reality as possible.”
In the months after an episode of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia featured ketamine in December 2017, Clark started telling his friends and family that he was using the drug to treat his depression. He had seen the occasional psychiatrist to get Adderall or Ritalin and had been prescribed antidepressants in the past, he said, but ketamine worked for him.
Recently, ketamine has been prescribed to treat people suffering from severe depression. It can work especially well with those who are suicidal, since it takes minutes, not weeks, to kick in. In 2019, the FDA approved a low-dose ketamine nasal spray to be taken with other antidepressants. But insurance companies usually won’t pay for it, and full FDA approval is years away.
Clark had come to prefer ketamine’s gray-market cousins, which are cheaper and more potent. Made in labs across the world, these dissociative anesthetics are dubiously known as “research chemicals” . They may have similar effects to ketamine or PCP or different personalities altogether. New ones are created constantly and can be bought online.
“He’s crying on my stoop, and he says, like, ‘I think something bad is gonna happen to me if I don’t get away from this job,’” Livingstone says. “And so I have to kind of live with the memory of that.” In late August, with season three nearly wrapped, Clark quit. He had been flaking on assignments and going incommunicado for hours. He sent a lengthy text to Morris apologizing for his erratic behavior and said he was moving back to Kentucky to be with a girlfriend from high school.
After season three of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia started airing in early 2021, Becca Brooks Morrin saw a member of the crew promoting the show on Instagram. She messaged him, “Dude my friend Justin is addicted to taking ketamine now because of this show. Lol and he’s broke because the show paid him so badly.” The crew member sent the DM to Morris, who sent it to Clark, who called Morrin immediately.
He moved back east in March. To pay rent, he kept editing podcasts and took a job at Fanelli Cafe in Soho. Clark was having a hard time finding his preferred dissociatives, and he started texting with a Kentucky friend, who began to send extras from their stash. After receiving a “care package” in April, he wrote a thank-you note: “Always a little short on supply of the medicine that keeps me sane. This could potentially save my life.
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