There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government.

But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time.

We've reported on it and lived through it.

And when we look at America today, right now,

we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun.

It's not some distant future, it's the present.

I'm Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at the Atlantic.

I'm Peter Pomerantse of a senior fellow at the

S&F Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

We're the host of a new podcast from the Atlantic, Autocracy in America.

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Today we have the third and final episode in our series exploring psychotropic meds and the

cultural stories surrounding them.

In those early uncertain days of the pandemic, the government made a decision,

a decision that's proving very hard to walk back,

and that transformed how we access these drugs,

how doctors prescribed them, and how we stay on them.

This week a story about ketamine and about the fallout of that decision.

Reporter Ethan Brooks will take it from here.

Okay I'm going to start with a doctor.

...