Once again, DARE sets an example and provides important role models for youth. Like this officer who drove drunk and crashed the DARE trailer. Good work, officer Newcomb!

Thank you, and good night.

You might should oughta go check out this interactive kaleidoscope, which responds to mouse movements and basically makes the brain go melty.

[Thanks, Mason!]

Someday soon, your fingerprint may be all that's needed to determine if you're high on drugs:

Paul Yates from Intelligent Fingerprinting, a company spun out from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and colleagues, have developed a handheld device that police can use to detect breakdown products from drugs excreted through sweat pores in the fingertips.

The device applies gold nanoparticles coated with antibodies to a fingerprint. The antibodies stick to antigens on specific metabolites in the fingerprint. Fluorescent dyes attached to the antibodies will highlight the presence of any metabolites. The technique was first used to detect nicotine, but now works on a range of drugs, including cocaine, methadone and cannabis.

[Thanks, Smonkey!]

The New York Times has an interesting OpEd from a neuroscientist, who links dopamine-resistant brains, thrill-seeking behaviors, and leadership:

The risk-taking, novelty-seeking and obsessive personality traits often found in addicts can be harnessed to make them very effective in the workplace. For many leaders, it’s not the case that they succeed in spite of their addiction; rather, the same brain wiring and chemistry that make them addicts also confer on them behavioral traits that serve them well.

Provocative. And possibly true.

While visiting family in Georgia this past week, we ducked into a local-ish chain pizza joint called Mellow Mushroom. I was immediately drawn to the attached poster for "Beer Club," which my uncle helpfully explained referred to the 100 distinct brews they kept on hand - you can sample 2 per night, and if you sample all 100 over the course of time, you get your name engraved on a little tiny plaque that gets added to a framed collage on the wall.

But more interesting to me were the overt psychedelic references on the menu, which caught me delightfully off guard, even as a visitor from the west coast. The drink menu included a "Shroom Tea," a melon liqueur infused version of a Long Island Iced Tea; more tellingly, a "Dirty Bong Water," which featured vodka, amaretto, melon liqueur, blue curacao, and raspberry schnapps (plus "fresh juices"); and of course, a "Grateful Dead," which I did not get around to tasting, because I did not need yet one more absurdly boozy cocktail in my evening.

The dessert menu included Dude's Psychedelic Cookie Sundae, the Half Baked Brownie Supreme, and of course, Mary Jane's Double Chocolate Brownie ("this ain't no Plain Jane Brownie; it's an experience!").

I would like to point out, before I forget, that the pizza at this establishment was outstanding.

This delightful video demonstrates what it would look like if the cosmos unfolded according to the rules of an elaborate, metaphysical fusion of Q-Bert and Tetris:

[Thanks, Soma Junkie!]

For no apparent reason, please to enjoy:

The New York Times ran an article this weekend on the Bath Salts epidemic.

Dr. Jeffrey J. Narmi could not believe what he was seeing this spring in the emergency room at Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa.: people arriving so agitated, violent and psychotic that a small army of medical workers was needed to hold them down.

They had taken new stimulant drugs that people are calling “bath salts,” and sometimes even large doses of sedatives failed to quiet them.

“There were some who were admitted overnight for treatment and subsequently admitted to the psych floor upstairs,” Dr. Narmi said. “These people were completely disconnected from reality and in a very bad place.”

Similar reports are emerging from hospitals around the country, as doctors scramble to figure out the best treatment for people high on bath salts. The drugs started turning up regularly in the United States last year and have proliferated in recent months, alarming doctors, who say they have unusually dangerous and long-lasting effects...

Bath salts contain manmade chemicals like mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, or MDPV, also known as substituted cathinones. Both drugs are related to khat, an organic stimulant found in Arab and East African countries that is illegal in the United States.

We've posted on DoseNation about all the weird stuff people strung out on salts get into. No labels, no dosage recommendations, white powder to pass around among the rabble. Express ticket to paranoid psychosis, yup.

[Thanks Sam Hell and Darren!]

Several people have suggested we pass on a link to the new Sam Harris essay called "Drugs and the Meaning of Life," which was recently re-posted on HuffPo. I've been reluctant to, largely because the essay is literally one zillion words long and I wanted a chance to digest it first, but I'm on vacation now and finally got a chance to read it. The essay goes on basically in a style like this:

Many people wonder about the difference between meditation (and other contemplative practices) and psychedelics. Are these drugs a form of cheating, or are they the one, indispensable vehicle for authentic awakening? They are neither. Many people don’t realize that all psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more active. There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug like LSD is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it.

However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. If a person learns to meditate, pray, chant, do yoga, etc., there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending on his aptitude, interest, etc., boredom could be the only reward for his efforts. If, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of LSD, what will happen next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is absolutely no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon our hero like an avalanche. As Terence McKenna never tired of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry. It is, however, a difference that brings with it certain liabilities.

It seems poor sportsmanship to nitpick an essay that seems so well-intentioned, other than to simply notice that it took Harris one zillion words to basically come to the conclusion, "Your Mileage May Vary." Meanwhile, though, I'm a lot more interested in the thinking passed along via Brendan Kiley writing for the SLOG, who hips us to an exploratory FAQ about what a post-prohibition world might look like, penned in 2010 by Mark Haden of Vancouver Coastal Health.