Here's the conclusion of my 2-part all-psychedelic rock (nu-skool/ole-skool) mix set.

[80-minutes in length for easy CD transfer]

192kbps download link:

Download Now

1. North Mississippi Allstars - 'Shake 'em on Down'
2. Santana - 'Jin-Go-Lo-Ba' (live)
3. Widespread Panic - 'Untitled drum jam'
(live at Memorial Auditorium - 4.27.97, Burlington, Vermont)
4. Dubtribe Sound System - 'Equitorial'
5. String Cheese Incident - 'Under African Skies' (live)
6. Tao - 'Jinn'
7. Phish - 'Taste'
8. The Grateful Dead - 'Sugar Magnolia'
(live at Olympia Theatre, Paris, 1972)
9. The Steve Miller Band - 'Wild Mountain Honey'
10. Laraaji - 'The Dance #2'
11. The Dave Matthews Band - '#41" (Listener Supported live)
12. The Doobie Brothers - 'Black Water'
13. The Allman Brothers Band - 'Blue Sky' (live)
14. Gomez - 'Tijuana Lady'
15. Pink Floyd - 'Pigs on the Wing (part 2'

John Walters tacitly admits that the free market has done more to stem the flow of Colombia's favourite export to the USA than the DEA ever did.

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best article on drugs - ok, probably on anything - in this usually toxic right-wing organ. Bravo, Sir!

Another person in Australia has died from paramethoxyamphetamine (PMA) sold as Ecstasy.

The death of a 20-year-old Canberra man from the illegal designer drug PMA has raised concerns among doctors of a possible shift in drug use towards the "more lethal" substance.

The man, who was recently admitted to Canberra's Calvary Hospital with a suspected overdose of MDMA, died 10 days after ingesting paramethoxyamphetamine, which goes under the street name PMA, Death or Dr Death, and which is often passed off as ecstasy.

PMA has been sold as 'Ecstasy' for a long time. There were a slew of deaths in Florida back in 2000, and there were deaths from presumably the same batch in France shortly thereafter. The substance has been seen in Canada, Spain, and since 2001, Australia. Our theory then and now has been that one or two really large batches were made and that batch has been shopped around again and again as dealers attempt to make their money back on the bunk they bought. Tellingly, the initial PMA scares in the US revolved around the tan/off-white colored pills stamped with the Mitsubishi logo. Last year's PMA-related deaths in Australia were caused by pills referred to as Red Mitsubishis. Red Mistubishi is also the name of the PMA pills that killed several Australians back in 2004.

Unfortunately, a lot of the media surrounding this has said that PMA is added to Ecstasy, or that PMA is a stronger form of Ecstasy, or that users are seeking the drug out. These are not true, as nearly ALL trip reports of the drug have been negative, and all lab testing that has been made available publicly has shown that PMA is the only active substance present.

Short of a gas chromatograph, the best means of differentiating PMA from true MDMA is with a Marquis Reagent testing kit such as those offered by DanceSafe in the US or the Green Party in the UK. Using a Marquis Reagent, MDMA will turn purple/black relatively quickly, PMA will have no reaction.

I experienced this first-hand at Burning Man 2000 when I and another DanceSafe volunteer took testing kits with us. A lad came up to me and asked to test some pills he'd gotten at the festival. They were cream-colored tablets stamped with the Mitsubishi logo with dark flecks, double thickness and kinda large in diameter. They had no reaction and the guy chose not to take them.

Flying Rhino, one of the first Psytrance record labels, has put up a bunch of tracks from their back catalogue for free download as mp3s. Artists include Green Nuns of the Revolution, Hallucinogen, Slinky Wizard, Technossomy, and others.

It's good stuff, with lots of yummy analog bleeps and bloops to get your mind and booty racing.

Thanks Flying Rhino, and thank you DJ Amanita and NW604 for the headz up.

With all the recent hubbub about scientists and their stimulant predilections, it only makes sense that eventually the advantages of "performance-enhancing substances" will start to trickle into all walks of life. Witness this recent question for an advice columnist over at Wired:

One of my coworkers, a rising star at the firm, is using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive. Should I tell him about my coworker's pharmaceutical enhancement? Or should I start taking modafinil, too?

Who cares what Wired's answer was - what do you, the readers of DoseNation, have to offer this hapless wage slave for advice?

An interesting entry on the Huffington Post highlights how easy it is to create a black market, and how ineffective it is to try to shrink demand by reducing supply:

Sugar has long been a popular drug consumed and even sold in schools nationwide. But concerns over health, obesity and the risk of diabetes have led some schools in California to institute a ban on sugary snacks. In response to these candy sales bans, some students are starting to deal candy bars on the "underground market" at a marked up price....

Despite their schools' junk-food ban, Jim Nason, principal of Victorville High School, says he sees as much soda and candy as ever. The ineffectiveness of Victorville High's ban on chocolate is not surprising when we consider the much more intense effort by all levels of government to prohibit other potentially harmful substances like illicit drugs.

A personal anecdote posted to the Drug Policy Alliance blog illustrates the situation even more clearly:

My "peers" spent two dollars and fifty cents at one lunch "meal." I didn't have high aspirations to be like them - but I wouldn't mind being able to spend two dollars and fifty cents a day, which I thought of as being rich. Bear in mind, I was a youngster then, not well versed in the ways of money.

But I knew a simple scheme when I saw it, and it came in the form of a candy known as "gum dingers." It was generic bubblegum wrapped in a hard, strawberry candy shell. And rich kids would buy them two for a quarter like they were party pills at the local college. I could buy them bulk at the local supermarket for about twenty to the dollar. Guess where my two-fifty went?

The scheme worked out great, and I became a drug dealer at the local junior high, slanging that candy. It brought me money, and it brought me the drug dealer's friends - people looking to score. They didn't like me, really, but they liked my product, so they had to be nice to me. Which, considering I was that "poor kid," was a big change.

It's just that easy, ladies and gentlemen.

Tim Kring of Heroes is getting paid a bajillion dollars to write three sci-fi books about a man who gets superpowers after LSD experimentation. Hell. Yeah.

The Telegraph recently ran a fairly harrowing piece on the rise of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. We've known for a while that buying meds off the Interweb is not necessarily the safest thing in the world. But the production of fake pills has been scaling up in some fairly dangerous ways, killing as many as half a million people worldwide each year:

The trade extends far beyond Viagra and other 'lifestyle' drugs. Virtually all medicines have been counterfeited - increasingly, criminal gangs have moved into lifesaving medicines including antibiotics, antiretroviral drugs for Aids, and expensive cancer and infertility drugs. At the height of the bird-flu scare, fake doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu were unleashed on to the world market that contained just vitamin C and lactose.

Bogus pharmaceuticals come in all combinations - some with no active ingredient, some with too little active ingredient, others with too much, some with toxic constituents. One seized consignment of phoney Ponstan, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, had no active ingredients at all; but it did contain boric acid, a pesticide that can cause renal failure. (The pills' colour came from leaded road paint.) Fake antibiotics have been intercepted that are made of talcum powder, as well as birth-control pills made of rice flour. Other ingredients have ranged from floor polish to rat poison.

The developing world still records the majority of deaths. In China, between 200,000 and 300,000 people are estimated to die each year because of counterfeit or substandard medicines. The WHO estimates that 200,000 of the one million malaria deaths a year would be prevented if all the drugs were genuine.

Don't assume you'll be immune forever, just because you don't live in the developing world:

The temptation for counterfeiters to attack the legitimate chain in preference to selling direct to the public is huge. 'Why sell a single packet to John Smith when I can sell 400,000 to John Smith and Company?' Graham Satchwell asks.

Production is not difficult. 'You really don't need a huge amount of skill,' one pharmaceutical company investigator says. Most counterfeiting takes place in south Asia and the Far East, with China the biggest source. The scale varies from small-time entrepreneurs turning out 100 tablets a day to vast factories. Both producers and distributors have become more expert. 'It's a cat-and-mouse game, permanently escalating,' Thomas Thorp, the manager of government affairs for Eli Lilly, says.

Read Full Post »

So we can go after drug dealers who put LEAD in their product to increase sales weight:

The cases, documented in an article in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, involve 29 young adults, ages 16 to 33, who were hospitalized in Leipzig, Germany, with lead poisoning during a period of several months.

While doctors were initially baffled by the rash of poisonings, they eventually determined that all had smoked marijuana that had been tainted with small lead particles.

That's some heavy shit, man.

UPDATE: Here's the NEJM article with pictures of one of the tainted bags of weed.