Via Dangerous Minds:

Music video for “Guassian Castles” from the album Transmalinnia from our space-rocking pals from the Bay area, Lumerians. Shot and Directed by Curtis Tamm

There are some stroboscopic effects here, so they asked me to add “WARNING: May cause seizures or momentary loss of consciousness in susceptible viewers.”

[Thanks Mason!]

[Via Jessica F.]

Knowdrugs.net has a great article on the rapidly expanding research chemical movement and the attempts by all to keep up with the pace of psychoactive innovation. From Dr. Caspar Addyman, a developmental psychologist and co-founder of YourBrainonDrugs.net.

Ever heard of dimethocaine, methoxetamine or JWH-18? They are ‘research chemicals’ similar to cocaine, ketamine and cannabis respectively. They were all first synthesized in the last few years and are being produced in large quantities in Chinese factories. They are quasi-legal and readily available over the internet. As a consequence, they are already widely taken. Like mephedrone before them, it probably won’t be long before they are banned. And, like mephedrone, no-one really knows if they are safe or not.

People haven’t been taking these new drugs for long enough for us to know. Scientific research is lagging far behind casual self-experimentation. Science can’t keep up. In 2010, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction, 40 completely new substances were taken by UK recreational drugs users. In the same year, 1,700 new medicines and drugs were licensed for the UK market. Many of these are psychoactive and some are liable to be abused. Psychopharmacologists and drugs professionals have a full-time job trying to keep up with the pace of change. So what chance does the weekend clubber have?

In my view, when it comes to new recreational drugs, casual users might well be better informed than the professionals. We experiment on ourselves and we see the effects on people we know well. We share information and develop our own jargon. We have a good idea what ‘monged’ means and we know how this differs from ‘spangled’. The internet ‘helps’ too. Sites like Bluelight, Erowid and urban75 seek to capture and spread this 21st century folk wisdom. And, Frankly, I’d recommend them as a more reliable source of knowledge than any government funded drugs ‘information’ service.

We all know that poppy seeds contain trace amounts of morphine, enough to throw a false-positive drug test result just from eating a poppy seed bagel. But is it possible to get a full dose of morphine just from eating poppy seeds? Icanhasscience.com investigates:

One report in the Journal of Forensic Sciences found that the morphine content of poppy seeds varies widely with poppy seed source. Spanish poppy seeds seem to have the most morphine -- about 251 micrograms of morphine per gram of seeds. This translates to about 0.025% morphine by weight.

Thus, to get a medically relevant dose of morphine (10 mg) from Spanish poppy seeds you would have to consume... About 40 grams of poppy seeds! It seems like a lot, but how hard would that actually be? A standard baking conversion for dry ingredients is about 8 grams per tablespoon, and one poppy seed bagel probably has, what -- a teaspoon or two? By that math, you'd probably have to eat around a dozen poppy seed bagels all at once.

And if that's not enough for you, the poppy bomb of the culinary world is the fabled lemon poppy seed cake, which includes up to an entire cup of poppy seeds, enough for three doses of morphine per cake. This is surely what America needs most, cake laced with morphine! It is the answer to all of our problems.

Remember kids, don't try this at home. Cooking with morphine is for professional bakers only!

[Thanks Mason!]

Blunts for breakfast anyone? Dope fiend rapper Ominous Words sends us news of his latest track hitting the online radio charts, 'Hot Box the Planet', featuring ThoughtsArizen and Ariano. This track is a call to smoke out the entire world. Dare to dream big.

Fractal art from deviantart.com. Reader Rob says:

WoooEeee! Aye got me a fine still up there in the hills of the fifth dimension!

I'm makin' me some mighty fine 2-(1H-indol-3-yl)-N,N-dimethylethanamine.

G'wan, take a sip! Dat's right! It's got a kick don't it?

Although hilarious, this story is also sad for the goat and the man, who has been described as mentally unstable. Yes, 'bath salts' are the perfect drug for mentally unstable cross-dressing goat molesters. For the rest, stay away.

An Alum Creek man has been arrested after neighbors allegedly found him standing over the dead body of a stolen pygmy goat while wearing women's underwear.

Mark Lucas Thompson, 19, of Greenview Road was taken into custody early Monday at his home. Deputies had dealt with the man before and believe him to be mentally unstable.

Thompson told deputies he had been high on bath salts for the last three days... and was not in his right mind.

Thompson [was found] in a bra and woman's panties standing three feet from the goat's body.

The detective said the goat had a single stab wound. The body was taken to a veterinarian to determine the cause of death and whether it had been sexually assaulted.

[Thanks Jonathan!]

For a great overview of psychopharmacology, check out the free MP3 downloads for the course lectures from University of California Berkeley class Psych 119: Drugs and the Brain, with Instructor David Presti, Ph.D. Presti is a Senior Lecturer of Neurobiology, his areas of expertise include the chemistry of the human nervous system, the effects of drugs on the brain and mind, and the scientific study of mind and consciousness.

Psych 119 is a survey course exploring the basic principles of psychopharmacology. The major focus of the course is on the relationship between behavior and the physiological actions of drugs. Emphasis will be placed on effects of pharmacological agents on complex mental processes such as attention, motivation, learning, and memory. These lectures are from 2006.

You can download the entire course lectures at the link below, or grab the Podcast RSS to get them all at once.

A track from 2007 set to video shot in the creepy back alleys and flop houses of Nepal, recently uploaded to youtube by okayplayer. The original video for this song was a montage of political and surreal images cut together by Jay Electronica himself, this video was produced by Decon and Jason Goldwatch, and almost perfectly matches the tone of at least two vivid DMT dreams I have had.

A film inspired by the woodland acid trip sequences in the memoir 'The Mad Artist: Psychonautic Adventures in the 1970s'. Shot in the actual location of one of the trips, it replicates the unique primal intensity of woodland tripping, using extensive muti-layered video effects and complementary sound design.

This seven-minute film is the first in a projected series of 'trippy' films, which in various ways will celebrate aspects of the psychedelic experience. Actually it came about as a happy accident, an afterthought. The footage was shot as part of a more extensive project -- an illustration of a reading of the first trip sequence in 'The Mad Artist' -- which would also involve some night shooting in other locations. I was unable to complete the night shooting in my available window, and now the trees have come into leaf, so it might all have to wait till next winter, as the trip takes place in December.

However, in playing about with the shot footage, I experimented with various visual effects and an idea sparked: to make a trippy film in its own right, independent of the text of the book, though guided by the experiences it describes. So ‘Tripped in the Woods’ evolved as a notional, subjective point-of-view trip film, involving no people and no words, only the wood itself, progressively metamorphosing by means of trippy visual effects and complementary sound design.