I'm thinking...foe?

Sunday night HBO will air the final episode of The Wire, the gripping and grim tale of the decline of the American city spanning five seasons. It's easily some of the best television ever. The creators of the show have taken advantage of their current moment in the limelight with this piece in Time magazine advocating jury nullification in non-violent drug cases.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy - the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do - and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will - to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty - no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

On a lighter note, fans of the show should check out this clip of the beloved character state Senator Clay Davis:

The World Wide Web is known for hits appearing almost out of nowhere, being made popular by users themselves. The Finnish song "Ievan Polkka", combined with a Japanese anime video, was a great example of such completely unexpected huge popularity. Now a song by a Polish artist is making an international splash, starting with a Filipino TV show and later - together with the accompanying dance - moving to other countries like Japan and Mexico.

Urszula Dudziak is a Polish-born jazz singer, living in the USA since the 1970s. Her 1976 song "Papaya" is a mixture of jazzy vocal techniques and more mainstream funky rhythms. I'm not sure if the "original version" video is also from 1976, but nevertheless it's a lovely piece of eye candy...

I'm sure many of you have heard of the webcomic Perry Bible Fellowship. I've been sick at home all week and have amused myself by reading the back archives of a number of web comics. This one seemed worth posting here.

Here's a hilarious article concerning an over-zealous policeman falling prey to hoax e-mail warning of New Delicious Strawberry Flavoured Meth:

The warning said that the drug was being given to children outside their school gates.

At least 80 schools in west Oxfordshire received an e-mail warning, leading to some holding special assemblies.

Thames Valley Police said the error was down to an officer new in his post who had received an e-mail internally and had acted in good faith.

Not a bad idea though. Here's hoping some entrepreneurial meth-chemist will spot the gap in the market...

The ABC's science program Catalyst featured a report about the differences between us normaloids and the real thrill seekers in the world - base jumpers, hang gliders, mountain climbers and so on - and the function of their brains. Turns out that they lack dopamine and serotonin:

High novelty seekers tend to have low levels of dopamine and potentially what it implies is that people undertake risky or novel type experiences in order to bring up their levels of dopamine.

When it comes to low harm avoidance, the neurochemistry is less clear, though there’s some suggestion it’s linked to low levels of the calming chemical, serotonin.

But what we do know is that people with low harm avoidance are far less prone to the physiological state known as anxiety.

The full article - which you can read or watch online - is full of lots of interesting information about our thrill-seeking friends...

In a paper published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, patients given higher priced placebos reported more pain relief than those given a discounted placebo.

The investigators had 82 men and women rate the pain caused by electric shocks applied to their wrist, before and after taking a pill. Half the participants had read that the pill, described as a newly approved prescription pain reliever, was regularly priced at $2.50 per dose. The other half read that it had been discounted to 10 cents. In fact, both were dummy pills.

The pills had a strong placebo effect in both groups. But 85 percent of those using the expensive pills reported significant pain relief, compared with 61 percent on the cheaper pills. The investigators corrected for each person’s individual level of pain tolerance.

“It’s a great finding,” said Guy H. Montgomery, an associate professor of cancer prevention at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “Their manipulation of price affected expectancies of drug benefit, and pain is the ultimate mind-body phenomenon.”

The appearance of the pill also had an affect on perceived effectiveness:

Previous studies have shown that pill size and color also affect people’s perceptions of effectiveness. In one, people rated black and red capsules as “strongest” and white ones as “weakest.” Other information like the country where the drugs were manufactured can also affect perceptions.

“It’s all about expectations,” said the lead researcher, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke...

The marketing meetings and focus groups at the Big Pharma companies must be really weird, trying to figure out the best color, shape, size, name, and price for maximum perceived efficacy. If bottles of aspirin went up in price by a dollar, would more people use it? Would fewer men get reliable erections if Viagra were pink? Would Vioxx have been as popular if they'd dropped one of the 'X's in the name? Would DoseNation staffers get as high if our 2-C-T-Special-G were free? I can only answer the last question. Yes, yes we do.

In some perverted effort to combat drug crimes, Chicago Alderman Robert Fioretti has advanced a proposal to ban sales of small plastic zip lock plastic bags.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

There's also this priceless "Think of the children!" quote from Lt. Kevin Navarro of the CPD's Narcotics and Gang Unit:

“We see these bags on a daily basis in the street. …We worry every day that little children are coming by and picking them up…They don’t get 100 percent of the drug out. There will usually be some residue in there. That’s the scary part about these bags,” Navarro said.

There would be a $1500 fine for selling the baggies.

What kind of impact do they think this will have on the drug trade in Chicago? Will dealers suddenly give up selling drugs because they don't have neat baggies to sell their drugs in? Will drug users stop buying because their drugs come in sandwich bags or sealed cigarette cellophanes?

It would be interesting to see if bead shops suddenly get busted, or if they start becoming hot spots for dealers in the know to still get their bags when the headshops stop carrying them.

From the land that brought us Infected Mushroom. Here's an article about a Jew that says the people in the bible were way high.

[...] Shanon presents a provocative theory in an article published this week in the philosophy journal Time and Mind. The religious ceremonies of the Israelites included the use of psychotropic materials that can found in the Negev and Sinai, he says. "I have no direct proof of this interpretation," and such proof cannot be expected, he says. However, "it seems logical that something was altered in people's consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden."