Meth Coffee isn’t welcome in Illinois, Attorney General Lisa Madigan said today. The coffee is the latest drink with a name that sounds like a drug but isn’t.
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The product’s packaging claims consumers can "snort the powder dry, cook it in a lighter and huff ... or just forget the caboose and mainline."
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The product violates the Illinois Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and the state’s fraud act, due to the product’s comparison to illicit drugs, Madigan said.

Allow me to quote our marketing materials:

In this epic blend of science-fiction and fantasy, a mysterious amnesiac finds herself in the lobby of an infinitely tall building located in the center of the multiverse, the headquarters of the United Association of Interdimensionary Travelers. Her unexplained presence sets off a series of increasingly catastrophic events that not only compromise the security of the Association, but threaten to unravel the entire fabric of creation itself! Can a superhero with a divine pedigree, an android companion, and archangels and devils together combine forces to help "Andrea Change" find her true identity, and prevent the impending apocalypse? Drawing on influences as diverse as the metaphysical explorations of Philip K. Dick, and the scrappy tradition of low-budget sci-fi television, interlace [falling star] is a unique saga of love, loss, and redemption.

I know, doesn't that sound ridiculously exciting? Tickets are now available for this fringe theatre sci-fi extravaganza!

As an orientation kiosk helpfully explains to our mysterious amnesiac, "The United Association of Interdimensionary Travelers is comprised of thousands of cultures working in cooperation to improve the state of the multiverse. We offer a wide range of services, including biological and morphological engineering, technology seeding, aesthetic realignment, strategic catastrophe deployment, and paradigm reorganization." Its headquarters - and the setting of the play - is "an infinitely tall building, an immensity of transdimensional architecture! Association operatives from around the multiverse gather here to receive their assignments, engage in training, conduct important research, and even make homes for themselves on the residential floors." Unfortunately, without proper identification, the nameless woman is shuffled into the bureaucracy of the Association: first scrutinized by a psychic member of the Security branch, who discovers a powerful block on her memory; then shunted to the Medical branch, which manages to determine she's a human from planet Earth (a non-Association world) but not much else. She befriends a superhero who calls himself The Amazing Dr. X (with a straight face, even) and an android companion named Trickle, who ally themselves with her on what becomes a wild quest throughout the building. Trickle dubs the woman "Andrea Change."

The Langton Centre, a specialist outpatient clinic for drug and alcohol treatment attached to Sydney Hospital, initiated a study this year of a possible new drug treatment for cannabis addiction. Currently the only treatment is counselling.

The drug, Rimonabant, is a cannabis-receptor antagonist marketed in Australia as the weight loss drug Accomplia. It blocks the receptors in the brain where cannabis acts, so cannabis has a diminished or no effect when people are taking it. Twelve volunteers enrolled, all of whom are participants in rehabilitation programs run by the Ted Noffs Foundation and three government treatment clinics. Participants, whose average age was 26, were offered a daily 20-milligram tablet of Rimonabant for up to 3 months.

Dr Mark Montebello and Dr James Bell, who initiated and conducted the three-month study, knew it was fraught with difficulties. They recruited mainly people with a history of mental illness - heavy cannabis users, smoking on average 26 out of 28 days before they joined the rehabilitation programs. Although Rimonabant is available in Australia, the US Food and Drug Administration has so far refused to approve its use because of adverse side effects in clinical trials, including an increase in anxiety and depression.

Bell, an addiction medicine physician and director of the drug and alcohol program for the South Eastern Sydney Area Health Service, says there has not been a clinical trial reported anywhere of Rimonabant's potential as a treatment for cannabis addiction.

Two volunteers were hospitalised for psychiatric illness during the study, but Bell does not believe Rimonabant was the cause. Those remaining in the trial were tracked for six months, and the results, reported late last year at a conference in New Zealand, showed that most participants had a marked reduction in cannabis use (which was verified by urine tests).

Bell and Montebello are evaluating the results, which appear encouraging, and preparing them for publication. "I am not trying to talk up this drug as a treatment. Treating cannabis dependence is difficult, and while in our trial Rimonabant helped some individuals to interrupt heavy cannabis use, it also caused many side effects, and people took it mostly for short periods. I don't want mothers ringing me, hoping it's a cure for their sons. If we are to proceed to larger clinical trials, against a placebo, we would use it as a short-term initial intervention, to be followed with longer-term counselling."

Although it is used in Australia, Acomplia did not meet FDA approval for use as a weight-loss aide in the US.

A 30-year-old became the first person ever to drown in a floatation tank, an inquest heard yesterday.

James Richardson, of Woodley, died in Floatnation in Oxford Road after taking the drug ketamine – used to tranquillise horses.

His body was discovered in a floatation tank – intended for rest and relaxation – by his girlfriend Sarah Waters who was in a tank in the next room when he died.

Berkshire coroner Peter Bedford recorded a verdict of misadventure – meaning Mr Richardson did not intend to die but it was his own actions which led to his death.

Read the full article if you're interested in details on how this happened. It was apparently a large dose of K and the victim drown in about a foot of salt-water, face up. As someone who has studied Lilliy and used both K and floatation methods, this is really very sad and perhaps the first known case of this kind of death. My only guess is that he got a small amount of water in his lungs and was unable to cough it up because he was too sedated. He is reported to have looked "very peaceful".

The DSL was created as an art experiment to see if I could make decent downtempo music on very tight restrictions. The main restrictions are:

1. Songs must have no more than four parts, instruments, or samples per arrangement.
   
2. Songs must be completed in under three hours.
   
3. Songs must be under 3 minutes in length and conform to standard pop format.
   
4. Songs must be well produced, relaxing, and easy for anyone to enjoy.

I've been at it for about a week now and it is going pretty well, there are four completed tracks and many others awaiting final arrangement. I've included the first track below, the rest can be downloaded on MySpace with more to come as I complete them. Take a listen at your leisure.

Captain Blue is a pot broker. More precisely, he helps connect growers of high-grade marijuana upstate to the retail dispensaries that sell marijuana legally to Californians on a doctor’s recommendation. Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder.

The thirteen-page article(??) details the ins and outs of Captain Blue's life, right down to the ornate equipment he uses to get high. If the New Yorker is now celebrating this lifestyle, pot has officially gone mainstream.

To what extent do drugs play a role in your creative process?

They were very big in The Invisibles. I was a very straightedge kid until I was 30 years old — I didn't touch anything, and I was anti-drinking, anti-drugs, everything. But I got to 30 and I kind of decided to treat myself as a laboratory and become something else — I wondered how much you could mess with your own personality. I became a tranny for awhile; I used to dress up as a girl, and I was beautiful! I just started to take tons of psychadelic[sic] drugs, though I was never into amphetamines or anything. But I'm getting old now, so I don't do so much of that.

Did that also have a role in your experience in Kathmandu?

The Kathmandu thing was really weird. I had taken a little bit of hash — but just a very little bit. That experience was so profound — nothing like that has ever happened to me again. Part of taking so many drugs in the 90s was trying to recreate the experience: the clarity of everything was so much more real, the way things are made ... all this is just cheap dream compared to the place I was. I've taken DMT, high doses of mushrooms, high doses of acid — nothing took me back. I've never been able to go there again.

Thanks for the tip Gene!

The main argument proposed by the article's author is that cocaine and heroin are themselves not inherently addictive. Because these drugs are perceived to be the most addictive, he extrapolates his hypothesis to all drugs.

Claim A: All or most people who use heroin or cocaine beyond a certain minimum amount become addicted.

Claim B: No matter what proportion of the users of heroin and cocaine become addicted, their addiction is caused by exposure to the drug.

Claim A he refutes with a number of seemingly good studies, while Claim B proves itself hard to deny out-right, and still hard to endorse.

The article is an interesting read, if not particularly enlightening, it at least provides some food for thought. The Rat Park experiments are particularly interesting. Would you use less if you had more?

On another note, Fentanyl would make a good lethal injection 2.0 candidate. Ya think?

BTW - The "Fentanyl Lollipop" is from designer-drugs.com. I haven't quite figured this site out yet, but it is a trip.