How Rich People Smoke Pot
Paul Schrodt writes on the Daily Beast:
As the executive director of NORML, the leading lobbying organization for pot smokers’ rights, Allen St. Pierre gets asked a lot of strange questions. But the one he’s been getting lately is, “What is that metal thing they use on Weeds?”
The answer is the Volcano Vaporizer, a smokeless inhalation device that has recently shown up on both the Showtime series and HBO’s Bored to Death, in which a sexy stoner played by Jenny Slate lures Jason Schwartzman into her bedroom to test one out. (“Just squeeze down on that nipple and suck in the vapors,” she coaches him.) It’s even used at the renowned Chicago restaurant Alinea, albeit unconventionally, to pipe aromas of nutmeg and coffee to diners as they eat dessert.
The Volcano is affectionately known as the “Mercedes Benz” of toking up.
“If you live in Ohio, or if you’re a baby boomer who has no problem with cannabis, and you see them using that, you’re asking, ‘What’s going on?’” says Pierre. “There’s a veneer of sophistication to it. This is not your daddy’s bong.”
Out There Radio: It’s a Strange World
For those of you who are fans of the Disinformation Podcasts, make sure to check out Raymond, Joe, and Austin’s original series, Out There Radio.
We’ve built a brand new website with mobile integration for this 50 episode series about the occult, conspiracy theories, and other bizarre undercurrents of the human psyche.
While you are there, make sure to take a look at Raymond’s Ultimate Conspiracy Video List.
The list contains nearly 100 full length films, many of which are sources for episodes of Out There Radio.
When 70 Percent Support Marijuana Legalization, Starbucks Got The Message
Steve Elliott writes on New Junkie Post:
A remarkable scenario played out in the American media recently, and beyond the import of the story itself is the quantum shift in public perception that it illustrates.
A pro-cannabis group based in Colorado called for a nationwide boycott of coffee giant Starbucks after activists spotted a Starbucks logo on the website of a virulently extremist anti-drug organization. After intense negative publicity ensued, Starbucks actually felt moved to issue a denial.
Once Mason Tvert of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recation (SAFER) called for the boycott, it took only a couple days until Starbucks denied funding the Colorado Drug Investigators Association (CDIA). Starbucks further said they officially took no position on the marijuana issue, one way or the other.
That doesn’t sound so remarkable until you realize that the…
Reefer Madness May Be Real
Can smoking marijuana heavily make you psychotic?
Legitimate studies point to marijuana use as a risk factor for developing schizophrenia. Filmmaker Bruce Mohun made The Downside Of High after his pot-smoking nephew descended into severe mental illness.
A person who uses marijuana regularly is twice as likely to become schizophrenic as someone who doesn’t, with those smoking before the age of 16 being four times as likely.
Acknowledgment a link between marijuana and paranoid schizophrenia does not necessarily bolster the argument for prohibition; one could argue that legalizing pot in fact help the problem, by leading to regulation, quality control, standards, and warning labels.
Drug Could Turn Soldiers Into Super-Survivors
By Linda Geddes for New Scientist:
A lucky few seem to be able to laugh in the face of death, surviving massive blood loss and injuries that would kill others. Now a drug has been found that might turn virtually any injured person into a “super-survivor”, by preventing certain biological mechanisms from shutting down.
The drug has so far only been tested in animals. If it has a similar effect in humans, it could vastly improve survival from horrific injuries, particularly in soldiers, by allowing them to live long enough to make it to a hospital.
Loss of blood is the main problem with many battlefield injuries, and a blood transfusion the best treatment, although replacing lost fluid with saline can help. But both are difficult to transport in sufficient quantities. “You can’t…
YouTube Censors Marijuana Question In Obama Interview
Thanks Steve for the news tip! Steve Elliott writes in the Toke of the Town:
If you voted for marijuana as a CitizenTube question, then your vote didn’t count. Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.
But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President. Initial reports that the President had ignored the marijuana questions were inaccurate; YouTube took pot, the top vote getter, out of the running.
President Obama never even got an opportunity to answer the most popular question of all.
Wait, what? “We’ll let you vote, but don’t expect it to actually MEAN anything.”
If they were going to ignore the questions that got the most votes, then why, exactly, did YouTube ask viewers to…
The Vancouver Experiment
From Slate:
At the corner of East Hastings and Carrall Streets in Vancouver, Canada, a raucous crowd milled around the sidewalk. Goods were on offer from a dozen sellers: hand tools, electronics, clothing, toiletries, all of uncertain provenance. There was a frenzy to make deals. A man opened a backpack filled with new tubes of toothpaste, smiling with stumps of teeth. Another sold cartons of orange juice out of a baby carriage. A shiny new mountain bike was on sale for $20. Below it all, a hushed chorus: “Powder. Powder.” “Rock. Got rock.” “Down. Need down?” This last is the local term for heroin, and there were capped syringes, tourniquets, and empty ampoules of sterile water scattered on the ground. In a shuttered doorway, a pale blonde girl in a dirty…
Scientists Crack HIV/AIDS Puzzle
Potentially big news, via Reuters:
Scientists say they have solved a crucial puzzle about the AIDS virus after 20 years of research and that their findings could lead to better treatments for HIV.
British and U.S. researchers said they had grown a crystal that enabled them to see the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV and is a target for some of the newest HIV medicines.
“Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded,” said Peter Cherepanov of Imperial College London, who conducted the research with scientists from Harvard University.
The Imperial and Harvard scientists said that having the integrase structure means researchers can begin fully to understand how integrase inhibitor drugs work, how…
Antidepressants: The Emperor’s New Drugs?
By Irving Kirsch, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hull in the UK and author of The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, writing for the Huffington Post:
Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.
My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question…
The Walmart of Weed
Matthai Kuruvila writing for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Call it the Walmart of weed.
In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal marijuana cultivation that’s believed to be the largest in the state.
Don’t know the first thing about growing pot? The folks at iGrow have a doctor on site to get you a cannabis card and sell you all the necessary equipment for indoor, hydroponic cultivation – from pumps, nutrients and tubing to lights and fans.
Don’t know how to set it up? For a fee, on-site technicians will show you how to build it in your home and even maintain it weekly.
“A lot of people don’t know much about growing pot,” said Dhar Mann, 25, the owner, who stood…
67-Year-Old Grandpa Holds Off Three Marijuana Robbers
Thanks to disinfo.com reader Steve Elliott for the news tip! Steve Elliott writes on Toke of the Town:
If you plan on stealing James Tillman’s marijuana, you’re going to need more than three guys. They’re not going to get James Tillman’s weed.
Tillman, 67, on Sunday shot and wounded one of three burglars who broke into his Sacramento, California home to steal his medical marijuana, reports Elyce Kirchner of CBS13.com:
The other two fled and haven’t been seen since. Mr. Tillman was definitely having none of their nonsense. After all, his grandkids were at home.
Photos of Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts
Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing recommends taking a look at Life magazine’s great photo gallery of famous literary drunks and addicts; it’s pretty cool. One of my favorites:
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005): Everything
“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
The War on Drugs: What a Joke!
From American Drug War’s YouTube, a collection of clips about prescription pharmaceuticals, marijuana, and the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs:
Celebrity Portraits Made From Hundreds Of Prescription Pills
Another interesting drug-mosaic artist. Via IncredibleWorld.net:
It is well known that lot of celebrities have problems with using drugs. American artist Jason Mecier decided to speak about this problem in his own way. He created a number of celebrity mosaic-portraits out of colored prescription pills.
There you can find portrait of Heath Ledger who has lost his life because of drugs overdose. The Michael Jackson portrait is pretty interesting too. If you look those photos from a distance or resize them to a tiny images, you’ll see that those portraits are pretty realistic.
Jason Mecier is a mosaic portrait artist who has worked for a years in creation of amazing mosaic portraits using beans, noodles, yarn and similar inexpensive materials. He claims that there’s no any ‘fooling’ about his artworks and that he is not…
Cheech And Chong On Fox News
Stoner-comedy legends Cheech and Chong somehow got an interview on Fox News, where they called for marijuana legalization. By the end, Fox & Friends host Gretchen Carlson seems to have had her mind blown.
From Spas to Banks, Mexico Economy Rides on Drugs
From Reuters:
At a modern factory in a city whose main claim to fame is an image of the Virgin Mary revered for granting miracles, Mexican pharmaceuticals firm Grupo Collins churns out antibiotics and other medicines.
But the United States contends that the company in Zapopan is not what it seems. The U.S. Treasury put Grupo Collins on a black list in 2008, saying the firm supplies a small drug cartel in western Mexico with chemicals needed to make methamphetamines.
Grupo Collins, which has denied any connection to organized crime, is one of dozens under suspicion of laundering money for the nation’s booming drug business, whose growing economic impact now pervades just about every level of Mexican life.
Mexican cartels, which control most of the cocaine and methamphetamine smuggled into the United States, bring…
California Supreme Court Upholds Medical Marijuana Laws
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a major victory for medical marijuana proponents with this ruling by California’s Supreme Court:
In a victory for medical marijuana users, the state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state law that protects them from arrest if they show police official identification cards. The court also overturned a law that limits how much pot patients can carry and how many plants they can grow.
The court unanimously ruled that the limits – 8 ounces of dried marijuana, six mature plants or 12 immature plants – conflicted with Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use.
Prop. 215 said a patient, with a doctor’s approval, could possess an amount of marijuana that was “reasonably related to the patient’s current medical…
Pot Potato
From The Stranger:
A Bill to Decriminalize Pot Is Popular with Voters—So Why Won’t the Legislature Pass It?
Stoners get caricatured as layabouts who talk in circles, shrug off their responsibilities, and leave hard work to other people. But when it comes to reforming pot laws in Washington, it’s not stoners embodying this stereotype.
As this year’s legislative session begins, one of the bills still kicking around from last year’s session—after it stalled in the state house without a hearing—is a measure that would decriminalize marijuana. The bill would replace the existing penalty for possessing pot (up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine) with just a $100 citation, like a parking ticket. A fiscal report by the state’s Office of Financial Management shows the measure would save $11,283,360 a…
Treating Agony With Ecstasy
From Discover Magazine:
Post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD—can linger years after someone has experienced or witnessed something extremely upsetting. It may be accompanied by panic attacks, flashbacks, and nightmares, and it can be fiendishly difficult to treat. But experimental types of treatment could soon lend a hand.
In a pilot study, South Carolina psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer is targeting PTSD with a controversial drug: methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. He gave MDMA, along with psychotherapy, to 21 participants who had developed treatment-resistant PTSD as a result of experiences with crime or war. Only 15 percent of the MDMA-treated subjects continued to experience PTSD afterward, as opposed to 85 percent of the subjects who received psychotherapy with a placebo. Mithoefer considers the findings especially notable given that 20 of the 21 participants had previously…
