New Modality Team:
Katie MacBride
Profile edited by Katie MacBride and Lydia Laurenson
Photo courtesy of Katie MacBride
Last update: October 17, 2019
Katie MacBride has helped out with a number of editorial tasks for The New Modality. Here's a bit more about her.
Hi Katie! What's your official bio?
I'm a writer and editor living in the Bay Area. I typically cover drug policy, health, politics, gender, and the arts. I'm also a co-founder and the associate editor of Anxy Magazine. I've done a lot of cannabis reporting and in 2018, I was a story and field producer for a documentary about the pediatric use of medical cannabis (which is currently in post-production). My work has appeared in Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and Longreads, among other publications.
What are some of your favorite past projects? Why do you feel great about them?
I will always be exceptionally proud of Anxy magazine. It started as an idea among a small group of creatives who care about mental health and became a bi-annual print magazine with 20,000 copies sold internationally. It was really wonderful seeing something go from an idea to a physical thing that people could hold in their hands. The fact that people felt passionately about it and were moved by it was a dream come true. I'm so excited for that to happen with The New Modality!
What's a current cultural edge you're excited to see people pushing?
As a journalist who frequently covers substance use disorders and drug policy, I’m excited by some of the harm reduction efforts happening in Canada, like supervised consumption sites (SCS). These sites offer people a safe place with clean needles to use pre-purchased drugs. Typically, the staff at these sites have a supply of naloxone, a drug that can be life-saving when administered to someone during an opioid overdose. These sites reduce transmission of diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C as well as incidents of lethal overdose.
SCS are just one small part of harm reduction, and there aren’t as many sites (in Canada and certainly in the United States), but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m hopeful that the general public will start to understand what harm reduction is and understand the efficacy of harm reduction programs. If that happens, and governments start spending actual money on Harm Reducation programs, we could save millions of lives, stop incarcerating people who use drugs, and begin to truly destigmatize and decriminalize drug use.
Where can we find out more about you?
Who created this profile?
This profile was a joint effort between Lydia Laurenson, editor in chief of The New Modality, and Katie herself, so it is a bit recursive. Nobody fact-checked it, but we're pretty sure it's all true. (In all seriousness, you can learn more about The New Modality's fact-checking and epistemological ideas by reading the page about our process for truth and transparency.)