In this thematic issue of Drugs, Health and Society, the authors were invited to examine different types of psychotropic use belonging to more or less ancient traditions or even emerging. Since their respective socio-anthropological perspective, the authors have sought to explain the characteristics of the contexts in which these practices are carried out by looking at the representations that justify them and contribute to their regulation. The number opens with a reflection on neo-raditional drug use. After clearing the normative anchorages and inventoried the main functions of the traditional uses of psychotropic psychotropic, Marc Perreault, taking the example of neo-chamanism, examines some of the factors that contribute to the movement of practices and representations. The author draws attention to the importance of the role played by intellectuals in promoting and legitimizing drug use in the so-called New-traditional context. In the following article, Anne-Marie Colpron deals with the use of a psychotropic with hallucinogenic properties – ayahuasca in the traditional healing practices of the Western Amazon’s Shipibo-Conibo. The author explains how this use is socially articulated in a shamanic cosmology that integrates the environmental entities (trees, streams, stars) and regulates practices. In the third article, Julie Laplante returns to his research journey with the Rastafari herbalists in the townships of Cape Town. Specifically, it focuses on the unifying function of cannabis in their plant therapeutic practices and its antagonist relationships with the South African bio-forensic system. It concludes that it is important to get out of dominant scientific and biopolitical epistemologies to explore new ways of understanding the effectiveness of remedies. Can Quebec Native Americans drink without a drunk? Contracting the dominant representations and speeches, anthropologists Marie-Pierre Bousquet and Anny Morissette are trying to answer this question by looking at different models of consumption of Algonquian alcohol culture. The reality about alcohol, the authors observe, is much more complex and nuanced than the image of the social scourge suggests. They therefore look closer to their article on the social, ideological and political aspects of a model emerging of wine consumption advocating moderation, which is increasingly gaining followers among some groups of this population. Anne Petiau’s article, Lionel Pourtau and Charles Galand, carries us to a whole different universe of psychotropic use, that is the techno festive environment in France. The authors have followed the pathways in which drug users were initiated for 6 to 15 years, especially synthetic drugs. From a public health perspective, they stress in their analysis on how to control consumption that promotes relatively controlled use of psychotropic among these environments. To close this issue, François Gauthier proposes a theory of “good drug use” for ritual and spiritual purposes in today’s consumer society. The annual Burning Man festival, which is the scene of many uses of neo-shamanic psychotropic, serves as a pretext for this theoretical reflection. The author is engaged in critical deconstruction of essential and differentialist approaches and their respective individualistic and holistic perspective to propose a “third path” of analysis taking into account the religiosity of practices and their functional unity beyond their division between festive practices and spiritual practices. From healing practices to “techno” evenings from the Amazon to the Nevada Desert to South Africa and the Amerindian communities of Quebec, this thematic issue of Drugs, Health and Society offers a varied overview of “neo-traditional” drug use in the perspective of users and contexts in which they are taking place. The “neo-traditional” character is put here in quotes to emphasize the ambivalence not only of the concept, but also of its statutes in society. Tradition, whether old or become, does not justify socially the merits of practice or its legality. As a result, one of our goals would have been fulfilled if, at the end of the route, without pouring in apology or losing its critical sense, the reader could look at drug use other than a problem to be solved.