A high-level international commission has declared the global "war on drugs" to be a failure, and has urged countries to consider legalising certain drugs, including cannabis, in a bid to undermine organised crime.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, in its report released on Thursday, called for a new approach to the current strategy of reducing drug abuse by strictly criminalising drugs and incarcerating users.

It said the new approach should focus on battling the criminal cartels that control the drug trade, rather than targeting drug users.

"The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world," the report said.

The study urged "experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs", adding: "This recommendation applies especially to cannabis, but we also encourage other experiments in decriminalisation and legal regulation."

[Thanks Luke!]

Trippy music videos are a dime a dozen today*, but I like this one for the simplicity of the way it's made from just one video effect, applied to cleverly-used props in a single shot.

The song is WTF by band OK Go. They are famous for their videos, so this probably isn't news to anyone either, but I only just found out about it.

* Such as Pon The Floor and Keep It Goin Louder by Major Lazer, which I just saw for the first time, but which are also probably old news to everyone else.

A movie about the hippest pot dealer in the world, the UK's 'Mr. Nice' crosses the pond and opens in New York this weekend. Best hash smuggling movie ever.

Mr. Nice tells the story of Howard Marks (Rhys Ifans), a Welsh-born Oxford University student whose dabbling in a marijuana dealing led to a career as an international cannabis smuggler with supposed connections to the IRA, MI6 and the Mafia -- all amid side jobs such as travel agent, teacher and spy.

Marks' adventures, conducted under countless alibis, brought him everywhere from London, Ireland and Germany to Pakistan, Thailand, Spain and America, and eventually to prison.

At the height of his career, he was said to have controlled 10 percent of the world’s hashish trade.

Mark, a software developer, had ordered [10 tabs] of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out." He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins -- untraceable digital currency -- worth around $150. Four days later, the drugs (sent from Canada) arrived at his house.

"It kind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said.

Bitcoin is a very interesting phenomenon which could revolutionize global currency and trade, or else it could soon become the object of an incredibly harsh crackdown by most major governments, which seems increasingly likely now that it's associated with drugs in the mass media.

I hesitated before posting this here, not wanting to contribute to the hysteria, but in the end, this is probably an irrelevant drop in the bucket.

In case, like me, you're just now exploring the comedy of Patton Oswalt.

Download: Mp3 File

Thank you Lorenzo & Diana @ www.PsychedelicSalon.org

Also time is running out to help KickStart Dennis McKenna's book project
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
Please help if you can.

With the publication of 'The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide', James Fadiman has inaugurated a new era of spiritual and practical exploration of inner space. Mind you, he didn’t invent or even rediscover the spiritual use of entheogens, nor the psychotherapeutic exploration of psychoactive plants and chemicals, but this guidebook represents a bold re-emergence of an ancient healing practice.

Fadiman, a co-founder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and author most recently of an undergraduate psychology textbook and 'The Other Side of Haight: A Novel', is a champion of psychedelic guiding. He’s been around since the giddy big bang of psychedelic culture, and now, gladly, and with hope, turns the keys to guided journeys over to the grandchildren of that distant revolution. There’s plenty by and about him on the web, if you’re curious.

Fadiman gets right to the guided session instruction without disclaimers and apologies -- a courteous gesture considering we’ve waited for more than a generation already. The guidebook is replete with suggestions for both guide and voyager regarding everything from music, food and lighting to finer aesthetic points. The six aspects of the well-conceived voyage are set and setting (which you knew), but also: substance, sitter, session, and situation. The six stages of a voyaging session are all simple and easily spelled out, as well, but this is rather like saying most of the paintings in the Louvre are made with canvas, brushes and paint: within Fadiman’s simple protocol exists a universe of possibilities.

Mike Barrett, a corrections officer, ripped open an envelope in the mail room at the Maine Correctional Center here and eyed something suspicious: a Father’s Day card, sent a month early. He carefully felt the card and slit it open, looking for a substance that has made mail call here a different experience of late.

Mr. Barrett and other prison officials nationwide are searching their facilities, mail and visitors for Suboxone, a drug used as a treatment for opiate addiction that has become coveted as contraband. Innovative smugglers have turned crushed Suboxone pills into a paste and spread it under stamps or over children’s artwork, including pages from a princess coloring book found in a New Jersey jail.

The drug also comes in thin strips, which dissolve under the tongue, that smugglers have tucked behind envelope seams and stamps.

[Thanks Jim!]

Despite the US government's staunch opposition to medical cannabis farms in Oakland and elsewhere, the feds have begun licensing a whole lot of large legal pot grows throughout the country. But this weed is not for cannabis dispensaries and their patients; it's for Big Pharma.

The Drug Enforcement Administration told Legalization Nation in an e-mail last week that 55 unnamed companies now hold licenses to grow cannabis in the United States, a fact that contradicts the widespread belief that there is only one legal pot farm in America, operated under the DEA for research purposes. It appears as if the upswing in federally approved pot farming is about feeding the need of pharmaceutical companies who want to produce a generic version of THC pill Marinol and at least one other cannabis-based pill for a wide variety of new uses.

In other words, if big corporations grow dope with the government and put it in a pill, it's medicine. But if you grow it at home or at a city-permitted pot farm and then put it in a vaporizer, it's a felony.

[Thanks Maynard!]

As a sign that reefer madness may be subsiding; attitudes about the criminalization of marijuana may be changing among the elders of our society, as the more than 70 million of the baby boomer generation, one to widely experiment with recreational drug use, have and will become grandparents.

GRAND Magazine, the online magazine for today's grandparents, released today results from their poll question which appeared in the March/April issue. It asked readers if it was time to legalize marijuana. 85% responded that they agreed it was.

There you have it. All we need to do to win the drug war is keep getting older and make sure our kids procreate. Or something.