Songfacts®:

• Tristen Gaspadarek, better known as Tristen, is a singer-songwriter from Chicago who relocated to Nashville in the late 2000s. She released her debut studio album, Charlatans At The Garden Gate, in 2011, which featured the single "Baby Drugs."
  
  The pop tune is about a drug addict and his enabling girlfriend, who foolishly believes her love is enough to help him overcome his demons.
  
  "She still believes love can conquer all - 'I will never falter, I will never fear because I've seen the demons love can conquer disappear,'" Tristen told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022. "I know that my love can save you, and I can heal all these deep wounds that are making you want to do all these destructive things. I can save you. You just have to listen to me, I'll take care of you."
• Tristen, who has had relationships with drug addicts, says even the strongest person can unwittingly become an enabler, especially if they're comfortable in a caretaker role. But she had to learn a tough lesson that her character in "Baby Drugs" refuses to understand.
  
  "One of the hardest things to come to terms with when you're dealing with an addict is to just let them go and know they'll do what they're going to do and bottom out," she told Songfacts. "A lot of times, the bottoming out is when people die, and it's horrible to let go. But one of the themes you see when you learn and experience relationships with an addict is at a certain point, you've lost the person anyway when it gets really bad. They aren't who they were. Physiologically, the chemical makeup in their brain has changed, but also, they're stealing from you, they're lying, they're manipulating, and they just end up taking a lot. But I think it's totally natural to feel like you could save somebody and to still love somebody despite all of those things and for it to be actually the hardest thing to do."
• This first appeared on Tristen's 2010 EP, Eager For Your Love.
• The music video, directed by Justin Mitchell (Jenny Lewis, Death Cab For Cutie), follows the singer's journey to Las Vegas to score drug money for her strung-out boyfriend who can't get out of bed. Buddy Hughen, Tristen's husband and longtime musical collaborator, plays her drug-addicted beau in the clip. It was an easy gig for him - he was actually asleep during the video shoot!
• Charlatans At The Garden Gate was produced by Jeremy "Jinxx" Ferguson of Black Veil Brides (who released their second album, Set The World On Fire, a few months later).
• This was used in the movies Better Living Through Chemistry (2014) and After Everything (2018), and the TV shows Enlightened ("The Weekend" - 2011) and Teen Mom 2 ("A Means To An End" - 2013).