TV Ad Campaign: Weed Is Safer Than Booze
An obvious message to some, perhaps, but there are still those who need help believing that reefer madness is a myth. Tricia Escobedo and Jim Spellman report for CNN:
A Colorado advocacy group is spending thousands of dollars to convince people that smoking pot is safer than drinking alcohol. It’s an attempt by the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol to rally support for a vote in November that would legalize the drug for recreational use. Colorado legalized marijuana for medical use in 2000.
Last Friday, the group aired an advertisement on a local Denver channel during daytime programming encouraging people to “start your conversation about marijuana.” The 30-second spot features a young woman typing a message to her mother on her laptop, explaining that after spending her college years drinking heavily, she now prefers marijuana because “it’s less harmful … I don’t get hung-over and honestly I feel safer around marijuana users.”…
Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?
Illustration: Dizzy thorns (CC)
So what do you think, psychonauts? Pretty interesting article from Adam Halberstadt and Mark Geyer in Scientific American:
What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception.
It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness,…
Mouth Spray Makes You Instantly Drunk
The bizarre part about this story, for me anyway, is that the spray was designed by Phillippe Starck, the French designer of expensive boutique hotels, furniture and all sorts of other bits and bobs. From the Daily Mail:
A new gadget is designed to get people drunk INSTANTLY.
The makers claim, however, that the ‘harm’ is limited, because you sober up equally rapidly.
The alcohol is delivered via an aerosol spray, so people feel briefly drunk, then sober up.
But however quickly people might recover, drunkenness can lead to accidents – and it’s also unclear how the device could be misused by alcoholics.
Two American scientists designed the device – a small spray that gives you that instant drunk sensation from less than a drop of alcohol.
The feeling lasts just seconds – but when it fades, you are sober and able to carry on with your day.
The ‘Wahh Quantum Sensations’ delivers just a miniscule dose…
Netherlands Judge Backs Cannabis Cafe Ban For Foreign Tourists
Via BBC News:
A judge in the Netherlands has upheld a new law to ban foreign tourists from entering cannabis cafes.
While soft drugs are tolerated, there is growing concern at tourists visiting just for drugs, and foreign dealers selling illegally at home.
The ban is due to start in three southern provinces next month, and go nationwide by the end of the year.
A group of cafe owners argued at The Hague district court that the ban was discriminatory against foreigners. Under the new law, Dutch residents will still be allowed into the cafes, as long as they have valid identification, or possibly hold a new “weed pass”, which is also being debated. There are about 700 coffee shops, as they are called, in the Netherlands. The cultivation and sale of soft drugs through them is decriminalised, although not legal; police generally tolerate possession of up to five grams of cannabis.
Does Drinking Make Someone A Better President?
Timothy Egan breaks down the drinking habits of past presidents in his opinion piece in the New York Times:
We know from a rare personal admission that Mitt Romney experienced a faint whiff of alcohol, a long, long time ago. “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager,” he said last November, “and never tried it again …
… The last president to swear off alcohol was George W. Bush, who seems doomed to have his name forever followed by the words, “and we know how that turned out.” During his misspent youth, W. was a heavy drinker and considered quite the cutup, but was also obnoxious, smashing his car into trash cans and challenging his father to go “mano a mano.”…
… Jimmy Carter was a teetotaler, and he earned his one-term status. Were the two connected? Can’t say. But his temperance (though he now drinks wine)…
How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death
The return of psychedelics to the medical arsenal seems to be well under way. Lauren Slater writes for the New York Times Magazine about Charles Grob, “a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death”:
…When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.
Grob’s interest in the power of psychedelics to mitigate mortality’s sting is not just the obsession of one lone researcher. Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont Mass., a psychiatric training hospital for Harvard Medical School, used MDMA — also known as…
When LSD Was Legal (And Cary Grant Was Tripping)
In honor of the latest lysergic episode of MAD MEN, a look back at the time before LSD was outlawed, by Devin Faraci for BadAss Digest:
In the latest episode of Mad Men Roger Sterling, the silver-haired drunkard rascal of SCDP, attends a high society LSD party. For some 21st century viewers this seemed strange – wasn’t LSD a hippie drug? Wasn’t it all about long hairs and weird tribal imagery? Eventually that would be the case, but the early of history of acid – before it became illegal – was filled with trippers who were at the very top of the social order – the richest and most famous people in America.
LSD was first synthesized in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hoffman in Switzerland, but it wasn’t until five years later that anybody knew what it did to you. That’s because it wasn’t until 1943 that Hoffman accidentally took some of the…
4/20 Goes Mainstream In California’s Bay Area
Stoners everywhere recognize April 20th (4/20) as a day to celebrate their favorite herb, but perhaps nowhere has this “holiday” of sorts entered the mainstream to the extent it has in California’s Bay Area, where the local NBC station reports on celebrations:
The holiest of days in many a marijuana users’ calendar is upon us: The 20th day of April, the hallowed 4/20. There’s much on in the Bay Area today to mark “the stoners’ Christmas,” as the day has been dubbed.
But there’s also much more going on than the annual smoke-outs at 20 minutes past four in the afternoon at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, the University of California Santa Cruz campus, and essentially anywhere else marijuana users are known to congregate (read: anywhere). The time — 4:20 p.m. — is important. In the 1970s, a small group of hippie stoners at San Rafael High School would go out every…
How The CIA Doped San Franciscans With LSD
Did the CIA accidentally turn San Francisco into America’s grooviest city? SF Weekly on newly uncovered details on Operation Midnight Climax, one of the absolute strangest slices of U.S. history:
Wayne Ritchie may be among the last of the living victims of MK-ULTRA, a Central Intelligence Agency operation that covertly tested LSD on unwitting Americans in San Francisco and New York City from 1953 to 1964.
There were at least three CIA safe houses in the Bay Area where experiments went on. Chief among them was 225 Chestnut on Telegraph Hill, which operated from 1955 to 1965. Inside, prostitutes paid by the government to lure clients to the apartment served up acid-laced cocktails to unsuspecting johns, while martini-swilling secret agents observed their every move from behind a two-way mirror. Recording devices were installed, some disguised as electrical outlets.
To get the guys in the mood, the walls were adorned with photographs of tortured women…
Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood | The Disinfocast with Matt Staggs: Episode 03
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In this episode of The Disinfocast I interview Peter Bebergal, who went looking for meaning and found ritual magick, punk rock and hallucinogenics instead. I talk with Bebergal about his new memoir Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, stopping along the way to parse out the difference between magick and mysticism, the mythic power of Marvel Comics and whether or not LSD is a valid tool for enlightenment.
Listen to Peter Bebergal’s journey on the latest episode of The Disinformation Company’s official podcast, The DisinfoCast.
Sex-Deprived Male Fruit Flies Turn to Alcohol
Reports Bloomberg via the San Francisco Chronicle:
Male fruit flies become barflies when rejected by females, choosing alcohol-spiked food more often than their successful brothers in a study that suggests it may be due to a brain chemical also found in humans.
The spurned flies had lower levels of a molecule in their brains called neuropeptide F than the males who were allowed to mate, according to findings published today in the journal Science. Neuropeptide Y, the version found in humans, has been tied to addiction and mental illness, said Ulrike Heberlein, one of the researchers.
The molecule may begin to explain how experience and environment shape human addictions, said Heberlein. About half of a person’s risk of addiction is genetic, and environment is known to play a role. The experiment may help explain the biological triggers that affect certain behavior or cravings and could help research into treatments for addiction …
LSD Gets Another Look As Alcoholism Treatment
Scott Hensley reports on NPR:
You might be tempted to chuckle about some Norwegian researchers peering back at experiments done during the ’60s and ’70s with LSD as a treatment for alcoholism.
But don’t.
Their rigorous analysis, combining data from six different studies, concludes that one dose of the hallucinogenic drug might just help.
The past studies randomly assigned patients to get a strong dose of LSD or something else (another drug, such as amphetamine, a low dose of LSD or nothing special). And the results provide evidence for a beneficial effect on abstinence from alcohol.
For what it’s worth, the analysis, just published online by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, was funded by the Research Council of Norway, not exactly a fringe outfit …
What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About Ayahuasca
It’s the evening of January 25, 2007, and I’m hosting my first Ayahuasca Monologues storytelling event to a packed room at Eyebeam Atelier in New York City. On stage, Breaking Open the Head author Daniel Pinchbeck, who semi-popularized the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca within the spiritual counterculture, brushes aside his disheveled hair, asking in a voice barely audible from laryngitis, “How many of you here have tried ayahuasca?” Out of 220 people, only nine hands lift in the air, and they are mostly the featured storytellers (including myself) that I’ve directed for the show that night.
Cut to February 2012, and the mega-celebrity, Jennifer Aniston, best known for playing perky girl-next-door Rachel in Friends, is tipping a bowl of ayahuasca to her lips in Universal’s newest romantic comedy Wanderlust. In just a few years, the once secret “shamans brew” of the Amazon has snaked its way into the popular consciousness, including the entertainment industry…
Why Booze Is Barely Taxed
Photo: Clock (CC)
Now you might think that’s a crazy headline, but as Frank Bruni points out in the New York Times, “Congress last revised excise taxes on distilled spirits in 1991, [and] the real value of those taxes has declined more than 35 percent”! (Disinfonauts outside the US, let us know how alcohol is taxed in your country)
… excise taxes on alcohol have gone down over the last few decades, when adjusted for inflation and measured in terms of the percentage they represent of the wholesale and retail price of a bottle or a can. The federal government and many states long ago set those levies in terms of a certain dollar amount per gallon — and then didn’t tweak them much as the cost of living went up.
Because Congress last revised excise taxes on distilled spirits in 1991, the real value of those taxes has declined more than 35…
Teenagers Are So Boring
So what do teens do to be different from their parents these days? Write code? From the New York Times:
Every few years, parents find new reasons to worry about their teenagers. And while there is no question that some kids continue to experiment with sex and substance abuse, the latest data point to something perhaps more surprising: the current generation is, well, a bit boring when it comes to bad behavior.
By several noteworthy measures, today’s teenagers are growing increasingly conservative. While marijuana use has recently had an uptick, teenagers are smoking far less pot than their parents did at the same age. In 1980, about 60 percent of high-school seniors had tried marijuana and 9 percent smoked it daily. Among seniors today, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey, which has tracked teenage risk behaviors since 1975, 45.5 percent have tried the drug and 6.6 percent are…
The LSD Portraits: Marc Franklin Spends 25 Years Photographing ‘Psychedelic Pioneers’
Remember the Reagan administration’s “This is your brain on drugs” ads? In response a photographer started a lifelong project of photographing all the living “psychedelic pioneers,” including Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.
“I thought, ‘You know, that’s such a load of horseshit … I’m going to dismantle that poisonous propaganda lie visually… I’m going to portray these people how they are.” He started with the man who invented LSD — Albert Hoffman — on its 50th anniversary in 1988, and at one point drove over 11,000 miles in just 7 weeks (including a 26-hour drive to drink beer with William S. Burroughs).
He’s interviewed by the former editor of High Frontiers magazine (”the official psychedelic magazine of the 1984 Summer Olympics.)”, and the article includes three of his best photos. (He’s exhibiting them this month in Los Angeles). But the strangest fact of all?
He started his career taking photographs…
Is It More Dangerous To Drive Drunk Or Stoned?
Brian Palmer discovers that it’s an open and shut case, for Slate:
A new study suggests that legalizing medical marijuana reduces traffic fatalities. The authors noted that legalizing marijuana reduces alcohol consumption, and people are more wary of driving high than drunk. Which drug is actually more dangerous on the road?
Alcohol, and it’s not even close. It’s hard to directly compare alcohol and marijuana, because driving impairment depends on dosage and the two drugs tend to affect different skills. (Pot makes drivers worse at mindless tasks like staying in a lane, while alcohol undermines behaviors that require more attention like yielding to pedestrians or taking note of stop signs.) Nevertheless, Yale psychiatrist Richard Sewell reviewed the academic literature on driving while intoxicated in a 2009 article, and found that alcohol is significantly more dangerous. Real-world data from auto accidents indicate that a drunk driver is approximately 10 times more likely to cause a…
The Incredible Krystle Cole Trip
Vice presents the wild trip of Krystle Cole as part of its Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia series:
There is no facile synthesis of the events that transpired at the Wamego missile silo between October 1 and November 4, 2000. The available information is a viscous solution of truths, half-lies, three-quarter truths, and outright lies, the fractionation of which yields no pure product. The dramatis personae are many and varied. The chemicals in question often obscure and untested…
Steve Jobs Said LSD ‘Was One Of The Most Important Things In His Life’
Most of the obituaries for Steve Jobs touched upon his creativity, vision, and “think different” thought process at the helm of Apple. Strange then to omit that fact that Jobs used LSD and proclaimed dropping acid to be “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” (This is also the reason iPods come in so many colors.) Via the Fix:
But equally suggestive, is a quote from Steve Jobs to New York Times reporter John Markoff. Speaking about psychedelics, Jobs said, “Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” He was hardly alone among computer scientists in his appreciation of hallucinogenics and their capacity to liberate human thought from the prison of the mind. Jobs even let drop that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” Apple’s…
1950s Housewife Tries LSD
A “stable, well-balanced” housewife describes her experience after receiving a 100 gama dose of LSD-25 as part of government research — she served as a voluntary participant in clinical trials of the drug. She tries to express what she sees but unfortunately “can’t talk in technicolor.” She sums the journey up with, “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty…this is reality.” Luckily, people who attempt such encounters now are jailed.
