“Becoming a sober punk was a labor of love. 

Punk started in the late 1960s in New York. You could, as maybe I do, credit its roots to the New York Dolls. To being queer and bored and pissed. It took awhile for punk to reach the MidWest, where we all now sit. MidWest punk started out of political outrage. Out of deindustrialization. Radicalization. Righteous indignation. And then its parents moved to the suburbs. It rebelled. Maintained the fashion, the resource and the anger of poverty, while shedding the insight. It stopped caring.

I grew up in a punk that forgot how to care. For those of us who collaborated on this zine, substance misuse is tied to punk and DIY subculture. Some of us started using at house shows. Punk nabbed us early. Showed us how to use. Threw our 14 years among a lot of 30s. Some of us fed our addictions in the scene. A culture of easy use. At house shows, it’s easy to score. It’s easy to fuck around, to nod off, to overramp. Nobody cares if you disappear or OD or break shit. Substance use is embedded into the roots of the culture. There’s a reason Iggy slept most nights in the gutter. 

And yet, anything that raises you feels like a beautiful thing. Punk can be community. Political, caring, eccentric community. Some of us have chosen to stay in the subculture, loving it in its complexity. And others of us have chosen to leave, making punk a solo venture. 

I chose to leave. But the music, the taste, the scrappiness and resilience lives in me anyway. I am still punk. 

Sober punk. This zine is about the journeys we take to get there.”