Ever wished there were any killer crack bedtime stories for kids? The crack fairy has granted your wish, in digital form. Enjoy "The House that Crack Built", written by Clark Taylor, illustrated by Jan Thompson Dicks.

Thanks to Sunshine for the heads up!

We already use mobile devices to provide on-demand escapism, channeling movies, music, and other distractions. Increased processing power and emerging technologies will enable holistic computing systems to be stored in wearable devices, providing a more immersive personal media experience. In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.

Jolly ole' Engerland, In the midst of sleepwalking into other unsavory forms of social order (is it too early to say the F word (and by that I mean Fascism) is also sleepwalking into a prohibitionist society. A neo-prohibitionist society says Mr. Pete Brown:

• Boris Johnson's first policy announcement as London mayor: drinking to be illegal on public transport from June 1st
  
• Westminster council to prohibit all outdoor drinking (including in Soho)
  
• Tesco to ban alcohol sales to parents shopping with their children to discourage under-age drinking
  
• Glasgow Celtic and Rangers to remove Carling logo from replica kits sold to children to discourage under-age drinking
  
• Binge drinking blamed for 10% rise in crime among girls as young as ten

Because prohibition of all those other kinds of drugs has done soooo well, why not add alcohol to the pile? What could possibly go wrong?

More on Mr. Pete Brown's blog.

Despite fairly draconian laws against the possession or cultivation of Cannabis in Australia's state of New South Wales, the Health Minister has decided to trial the use of cannabis for pain relief:

NSW Health Minister Reba Meagher will write to Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon in the next few weeks for permission to import and trial a drug expected to be Sativex, which delivers cannabis compounds through an oral spray.

"While the Iemma Government is opposed to the legalisation of marijuana, we do support a therapeutic trial of a cannabis-based drug," a spokeswoman for Ms Meagher said.

This comes just two days after a series of raids in Sydney's outer suburbs which uncovered a network of houses that had been used as hydroponic farms for a multi-million dollar cannabis crop.

Jacob Sullum of Reason goes over a series of statements Obama has made about medical marijuana policy. His conclusion:

Obama now has unequivocally promised to back off and allow states to make their own policy decisions about the medical use of marijuana within their own borders. He also seems to be saying the federal government should consider rescheduling marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act so that doctors can legally prescribe it. Even if that second part never materializes, on this issue Obama is much better than John McCain, who (as the Times notes) has repeatedly flip-flopped between federalism and drug-war dogmatism, with the latter at this point winning out.

Scientific American seems to think it's funny that old people do drugs. So funny that they wrote a whole funny article about it:

It’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek concept that might have percolated out of the subversive imagination of R. Crumb, underground cartoon chronicler of the 1960s. Grandma and Grandpa are passing the time in their rockers—and passing a joint back and forth as they recall their youthful marijuana-smoking days in Haight-Ashbury. In fact, according to three investigators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the image is no joke.

Writing in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Gay­athri J. Dowling, Susan R. B. Weiss and Timothy P. Condon warn that many aging baby boomers, long accustomed to using illicit drugs for recreation and medicinals of all kinds for treating whatever ails them, will carry their love affair with drugs into old age. Medicine is only beginning to appreciate the consequences.

All they have is this teaser on their website. I suppose if you want actual pictures of old folks swapping Oxycontins for blunts, or a recount of grandpa's latest pants-off acid freakout, you just have to go and pick up the rag.

The SF Chronicle wrote a review of the presidential candidates' positions on medical marijuana Monday. Here's the bottom line summary:

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has become an increasingly firm advocate of ending federal intervention and letting states make their own rules when it comes to medical marijuana.

His Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is less explicit, recently softening a pledge she made early in the campaign to halt federal raids in states with medical marijuana laws. But she has expressed none of the hostility that marked the response of her husband's administration to California's initiative, Proposition 215.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, has gone back and forth on the issue - promising a medical marijuana patient at one campaign stop that seriously ill patients would never face arrest under a McCain administration, but ultimately endorsing the Bush administration's policy of federal raids and prosecutions.

Jacob Sullum at Reason digs in a little deeper to Obama's position in particular. His conclusion:

Obama now has unequivocally promised to back off and allow states to make their own policy decisions about the medical use of marijuana within their own borders. He also seems to be saying the federal government should consider rescheduling marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act so that doctors can legally prescribe it.

He's right that seemingly innocuous statements about marijuana should be "controlled and prescribed in a way that other medicine is prescribed" and "subject to [FDA] regulation like other drugs" could be a lot more radical change than people might realize. Wouldn't that mean getting access to that legendary government grown pot? Or to strains certified with certain THC and cannibidiol levels. Or at least stuff that doesn't have freakin' lead in it.

It's not clear quite what that would mean, or whether Obama could really make it happen. But it sure does sound better than what we got now.

A new story from TIME magazine reports that half of all Americans are now on drugs. The same report also found that Americans spend more per capita buying drugs than any other nation which provides data. (Of course, the places where people are *really* high are the same ones that aren't exactly keeping records).

This kind of bender does take its toll, though:

"The only way I can do it and keep my sanity ... is I use pill boxes" to organize pills for each morning and night, said Walker, 57, a full-time nurse at an HIV clinic.

But different folks take other strategies. For example, Mrs Walker's husband just takes lines of drugs right off his bureau.

From our good friend Sheldon Drake at sheldondrake.com:

An original composition, almost an hour long. A friend is making a DVD of a movie of Yoga for New Mothers originally in French. I was editing the English voiceover for her and asked if she had the music without the French VO.
No? Well, I can help.

And, thus, whaddya know: i made an hour of soundscape.
Its original purpose is to be background wallpaper, not foreground stunningness, but i think it's quite listenable. Woot.

Hope you like. it's a nice space to inhabit for a while.