Here's a funny article on The Last Psychiatrist that instructs college students on how to best take Ritalin and other stimulants as study aids. The writer is nice and snarky, too:

While amphetamines and Ritalin do stimulate you and keep you awake, using them to pull an all nighter completely subverts their awesome power. If you want a stimulant, drink coffee or Red Bull. Amphetamines should be saved for reinforcement.

You want to set up a study situation that as closely as possible resembles your testing context. Do you take tests in the middle of the night? Using multicolored highlighters? With The Daily Show on in the background and eating Doritos? Then you're a pig, and you deserve to fail. You're dead to me.

Yes, kiddies, two of the most fun things in the world - oral sex and cannabis - can give you cancer! Surprised? Here's what the experts say, as quoted in an appropriately hyperbolic article on the CBS News website:

- Head and neck cancers that were positive for HPV 16 were associated with having more oral sex partners and smoking more marijuana.

- Head and neck cancers that were negative for HPV 16 weren't linked to sex or marijuana. Instead, they were tied to smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, and having poor oral hygiene.

So spit out that penis! Put down that doobie! And for God's sake, don't forget to floss!!!

The nation's sunniest state has been mulling the criminalization of Salvia Divinorum, because, you know, "Won't somebody please think of the children?"

"As soon as we make one drug illegal, kids start looking around for other drugs they can buy legally. This is just the next one," said Florida state Rep. Mary Brandenburg, who has introduced a bill to make possession of salvia a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

As the prison industry continues its dizzying rise toward it's inevitable conclusion - where what's good for the prisons is good for America - it's nice to see that Florida's lawmakers are marching in lock-step toward the day when That Which Is Not Prohibited Is Mandatory. Sigh.

We often hear about all that opium being smuggled around the middle east, but rarely do we ge to see any of the action - this video from al jazeera english should sate your appetite though. (Check out the GARGANTUAN opium bricks)

So if you were paying attention to national news yesterday, you might have come across a shrill AP story announcing to the world that there are DRUGS IN THE AMERICAN WATER SUPPLY! And they weren't put there by terrorists or anarchists - well, not exclusively anyway. The "scoop", such as it is:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

Of course, if you pay attention to the news long enough (which, by the way, is hurtful for your brain and also will make you with the stupid), you realize that they don't call these things "news cycles" for no reason. As it turns out, this story went around last year, as you can see from this quote from a DoseNation post from April of 2007, a post we helpfully titled "Drugs in the water supply" for ease of later reference:

Jokes about dosing the water supply have long been a staple of countercultural troublemakers, but as it turns out, we've all been doing it for a long time now.... People really flush their unused drugs down the toilet? Who told people that was a good idea - was there a campaign back in the misguided '50s, alongside "cigarettes are healthy" and "let's all eat lard", to flush unused drugs instead of stockpiling them for the inevitable nuclear apocalypse?

At any rate, of course it's a terrible situation in some sort of vague, sci-fi fashion in which we all mutate or dissolve into puddles or something. I'm not denying that the idea of absorbing the waste pharma product of zillions of other Americans isn't inherently creepy (although it's obviously accompanied by the secondary idea of "how can we figure out how to distill this waste pharma into a more convenient pill-shaped delivery mechanism?"). In fact, it sounds kind of horrible; these substances are getting an opportunity to build up in the human body in long-term, uncontrolled experiments out in the wild. No FDA study can possibly hope to simulate this situation.

A journal called n + 1 recently featured a great first-person account of a college student's experiences using Adderall as a tool to assist with learning. Her tale is nuanced and well-reported, a nice "slice of life" tale that illuminates how this drug has escaped into the wild and is having a variety of unintended effects - many of them arguably beneficial, most of them clearly variable per person who decides to take the plunge.

The feeling begins about twenty minutes after you take the pill: a mental tightening, as though someone had refined your scope of vision into a narrow and penetrating line. All peripheral distractions disappear (you would make a very poor hunter or soccer player). There is a slight fluttering of the heart, and gentle, persistent waves of warmth that are not distracting unless it is hot outside. This is how I experienced Adderall; some people have panic attacks and others feel nothing at all.

Any actual amount of time spent under the influence is hard to describe, because time passes very quickly. It's a euphoric drug, but also an alienating one. If I took a pill with my morning coffee, it would wear off by early evening. All of my work for the coming week would be finished, and I could take an aspirin, shower, and go to bed. Having missed the transition from day to night as well as all three meals, my dreams would be hysterical, but I always woke the next day feeling chipper and accomplished.

By the end of her account, the student has progressed into a senior year relying on nothing more elaborate than caffeine and a vague sense that this is a superior plateau for studying. Of course, one could assume that by the time her senior year had rolled around, the rigors of academic pursuit had become familiar in ways that allowed her to achieve equal results without using the drugs; couldn't you call that a clearly successful use of the drugs as a tool in the first place? Additionally, many of the people I know who regularly use drugs of many varieties for many kinds of reasons often choose periods of abstinence as a counterbalance. It just seems to make sense.

The upshot, though, is that we continue to see articulate, intelligently reasoned accounts of this variety, whether for Adderall and Ritalin, or more recently Provigil, that help contribute clarity to what still amounts to a "wild west" situation when it comes to so-called "cognitive enhancers." The genie is clearly out of the bottle with these drugs, and the reasons people are taking them; it has become much harder to castigate a generation of Ivy League graduates and academics of stalwart repute into believing that they are somehow the enemies in our ramshackle war on drugs. The times, they are a-changin' - the next act of this story has hardly even begun.

Maybe this is old news, but this is a pretty funny little music video featuring a wide catalogue of drugs.

This story is a week old, but it is so cool I wanted to posted it. Like the guy who wanted to use a modified rabies virus to track neural pathways, another mad scientist wants to re-purpose living bacteria into tiny cancer-killing machines:

Neil Forbes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has received a four-year grant of more than $1 million from the National Institutes of Health to research killing cancer tumors with Salmonella bacteria. Forbes turns the bacteria into tiny terminator robots that use their own flagella to venture deep into tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach. Once in place, the bacteria manufacture drugs that trigger cancer cells to kill themselves.

Although this therapy is purely experimental and only for treating cancer, it users in a new wave of medical bioscience based on the creation of custom symbiotes. I can only imagine that psychic brain-cotrol worms are only a few years off...

I got back from vacation late last week but I'm finding it excruciatingly difficult to settle back into a regular schedule of pretty much anything... here's me dipping my toes back in the water with a hep new music video that I'm sure at least three of you haven't seen yet. The visuals in this clip apparently get so kee-razy that, according to EW, "MTV UK has reportedly held off on airing the video until they can prove it doesn't trigger those who are susceptible to go into convulsions." And yes, that's Justin Timberlake as the music show host, for those of you who are keeping track of such matters.

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss stories, Horton Hears a Who, is coming out in theaters this month as a cgi feature with lots of celebrity voices. For those of you who haven't read it, it is about an obviously high elephant who discovers an entire universe on the top of a flower and starts communicating with them.

After what they did to the Cat in the Hat, I'm not sure I believe in the power of Hollywood to handle something so close to my heart appropriately, but not including Dakota Fanning is a start.