Hmm, as long as the topic is cocaine... I came across a news story yesterday that helped round out my understanding of how cocaine is trafficked. This is probably old news to many of you, but I didn't realize they were making "black cocaine" now in order to throw off Smokey and his K-9 units. But as recently as a couple days ago, law enforcement in a Louisiana town stumbled across some of the substance, which was initially mistaken for heroin.

Local news was mystified:

There is little doubt, [State Police Troop C spokesman Gilbert] Dardar said, that “black cocaine,” which has roots in south America, is not being developed locally.

Many details surrounding “black cocaine” are a mystery at this point, Dardar conceded, even to local police.

The drug’s side effects – both long and short term – are unknown. Investigators also do not know its estimated street value. [Note: this article vanished from the site, but Google's cache still has it: from Houmatoday.com, "Crime Lab finds drugs were black cocaine, not heroin"]

Of course, a quick web search later and I had unraveled at least part of the mystery:

Black cocaine, also known as Coca Negra, is a combination of regular cocaine hydrochloride and various chemicals, such as potassium thiocyanate, usually added at 40% admixture. This renders it undetectable to drug sniffing dogs and the regular chemical tests. Since the result is usually black, it is generally smuggled in as toner in fake IBM brand toner cartridges, fingerprint powder, fertilizer or pigment.

Well, there you have it! Wikipedia says this first popped up in 1998, showing that I am a full ten years behind the curve when it comes to appreciating all the glorious varieties of cocaine. I guess it's never too late - knowledge is power! Or something.

It's not nearly as exotic, but if you don't think you can make it to Bluefields, Nicaragua, you may want to try Cornwall:

Frank Partridge is partial to a spot of beachcombing. He likes to pop down to Pentreath Beach on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall and find out what odds and ends have been washed in by the tide.

But rather than the usual hunks of weather-beaten wood and pieces of broken lobster pot, Partridge's latest expedition yielded a rather more valuable haul - a package of cocaine with a street value of more than £1m. As a law-abiding citizen - and clerk of the local parish council - Partridge knew he had to had to prevent the drugs from falling into the wrong hands. "I thought if I didn't take it, someone who might not go to the police would." So he dragged the 25kg (55lb) package off the beach and rolled it home in a wheelbarrow.

This totally unsurprising news just in: The FDA is beginning the legal process against the makers of 'Blow' energy drink mix:

FDA officials contend that "Blow" is an unapproved drug that is being marketed online in a way to draw comparisons to cocaine. In a warning letter, Alonza Cruse, director of the FDA's Los Angeles office, charged that the white powdery mix is packaged "in a vial suggestive of street drug paraphernalia" and that photos of the product make it appear that the mix has been cut into "very fine particles to increase the efficiency of nasal absorption prior to insufflation, i.e., snorting."

Looks like Blow is going to go the way of Cocaine... better head over to the iloveblow.com site (in all its pornographic glory) and order up a 12-vial brick (includes stickers and tattoo!) before it's too late!

Identical twin lead singers and a song about MK ULTRA. What more can you ask for? Don't answer that.

Here's an interesting little tidbit: apparently certain California vintners are experimenting with higher alcohol wine. Not on purpose, necessarily: they're going for a bigger, bolder flavor, but see what happens in the process:

A number of wines have been creeping past 14 percent alcohol and even into the 15- to 16-percent range, as opposed to the tamer 12- to 13-percent of years past. This is largely because vintners wait longer to pick their grapes. More mature fruit is thought to make tastier wine, but it also means sugar levels have a chance to rise, which comes with the side effect of pumping up the alcohol volume. Warmer harvests only increase the phenomenon.

Although some folks seem to think these wines are quite delicious, never mind the "bonus" of the increased percentage points, there are (of course) also detractors. This definition threw me for a loop:

One definition of the "right" alcohol level is if two people can finish a bottle and "wish there was a little bit more," said Randy Dunn, founder of Dunn Vineyards. "You don't do that with a 15.5 percent or 16 percent alcohol wine," he added. "You'd be lying on the floor."

Uh... suuuuure I would. Okay, maybe that's true for some people, and I shouldn't be so flippant. Nevertheless, if the flavor is right, an extra percentage point or two (or three) doesn't seem all that complicated to adjust for as you're sipping. Anyone out there have any opinions on this matter? The wine snobbier the better...

An interesting new article in The Guardian examines the pros and cons of "the Viagra revolution," ten years after the little blue wonder pill's introduction to the world. On the one hand, sure, Viagra has helped people. On the other hand:

[I]t has also had - in many cases - a destructive impact. 'Now men have a drug to help them get it up and get going, they have also shown a worrying tendency to get up and leave - for younger women,' as one sex counsellor put it.... 'Older men are more able to perform again, so they're going elsewhere - to younger, greener pastures,' said New York divorce lawyer Raoul Felder, who recently acted for the wife of a 70-year-old man who began cheating on her days after taking Viagra. In Florida's retirement communities, rates of sexually transmitted diseases among elderly men - who have started visiting prostitutes after taking Viagra - are soaring, it emerged recently. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the US. 'I have seen an exponential rise in divorce cases sparked by Viagra-fuelled adultery,' said James Stewart, of the London law firm Manches.

As if that weren't bad enough, another article in The Guardian points out that it might not be so good for your chances of conceiving:

Using Viagra may be damaging men's fertility, researchers have warned. Experiments suggest that the anti-impotence drug can harm sperm and may prevent some men from fathering families. In particular, young men who use the drug recreationally could impair their ability to have families. And fertility clinics that prescribe Viagra to help men produce sperm for IVF treatments could be preventing some couples from conceiving.

As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out Cialis is emerging as the preferred choice anyway. It's been known for a while that men preferred it, but a recent study took the novel approach of - wait for it - checking to see which drug women preferred, Viagra or Cialis, and the results were pretty clear:

New Zealand researchers road-tested two of the biggest-selling drugs on 100 couples affected by erectile dysfunction. They found women preferred Cialis, which can help men achieve erections during arousal for 36 hours, over Viagra, which works for about four hours. "The lack of time pressure with the longer-acting medication just seemed to make the women feel more relaxed and less stressed or pressured to get on with things in bed in an allotted time,'' said University of Waikato researcher Dr Helen Conaglen, who collaborated with her husband, Professor John Conaglen, of the University of Auckland. "As a result of the slower pace, there was more sexual satisfaction and more intimacy and romance.''

If you're thinking of getting a head start in the burgeoning field of cultivating medical marijuana, look no further than Oaksterdam University in Oakland, CA:

The school prepares people for jobs in California's thriving medical marijuana industry. For $200 and the cost of two required textbooks, students learn how to cultivate and cook with cannabis, study which strains of pot are best for certain ailments, and are instructed in the legalities of a business that is against the law in the eyes of the federal government.

"My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol," said Richard Lee, 45, an activist and pot-dispensary owner who founded the school in a downtown storefront last fall.

Of course, the best part about this particular article is the delightful pun included here:

At the end of the class, students are given a take-home test, with the highest scorer - make that "top scorer" - earning the title of class valedictorian.

HAR!

Wired has a piece on a recent study of psilocybin. The study, Effects of Varied Doses of Psilocybin On Time Interval Reproduction in Human Subjects, published in this month's issue of the journal Neuroscience Letters, demonstrated the subjective time effects of 5mg of psilocybin, one of the active psychedelic compounds found in magic mushrooms.

The duration reproduction task (DRT) followed the same design in both experiments. A 500 Hz tone was presented to subjects via headphones for a defined duration s (presentation phase); after a constant interval of silence, w = 2 s, the same tone was presented again and the subjects had to switch off the tone by pressing a key when the duration of the second tone was subjectively equal to that of the first tone.

In the study, participants who had been given psilocybin switched off the tone earlier than they should have, which indicates they experienced the elapsed time to have been greater than it actually was. Ergo, people under the influence of mushrooms feel that time passes more slowly.

Tip of the Hat to four2oh for the heads up.

Over on the fascinating Xenolinguistics blog, if this is your kind of thing you can find a deep dive into the subject of "hallucinations as alien art", in a dense essay that first pitches us the premise that our psychedelic visuals are not just stochastic firings but potentially an actual vocabulary:

The key to this discussion is a conceit of the extraordinary vision-producing ability unleashed in consciousness by psychedelics, as alien art: aesthetic productions of an unknown, hence alien, source. Whether the alien is an unknown (normally unconscious) aspect of the Self, an Other, or a blended configuration of Self and Other, can be held in abeyance as part of the high strangeness of the experience.... Alien art begins with conditions of extended perception, an ascending scale of effects from the sensory amplifications of cannabis and hashish through the full-scale wraparound realities of high-dose sessions of DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, and LSD. These visionary states and content are frequently experienced as going beyond the pleasures of “great visuals” or “psychedelic eye-candy” to their rhetorical and noetic function, with aesthetics and visual languages employed to deliver a teaching, an insight, a revelation or prophecy, or the sought answer to a problem.

And if you buy that, then you can start connecting the dots to move on in this direction:

Part of the phenomenological epoche or bracketing in this effort consists in setting aside the drive to determine the ontological status of the experiences, especially since abstractions such as “reality” can themselves be radically re-configured in the psychedelic sphere. Further, I examine the reports of others, however unsettling, with the same good faith, engaging in a comparison of texts, essentially a literary and rhetorical activity, with no claims made as to the “reality”, in baseline terms, of the findings. The correlations among texts provide sufficient intrasubjective validation to indicate the possibility that the authors of the reports have spent time in realities sufficiently similar to establish, not a consensus—there are far too few in-depth reports gathered over multiple sessions—but perhaps a set of recognizable landmarks that can form the first sketches of maps of a “reality” that includes these experiences.

This is not new territory - indeed, the author, who goes by mazerunner on her site, pulls in "the usual suspects" to help flesh out this extrapolation, but what's enjoyable about this essay in particular is simply the skill with which it's all laid out, examples presented, and in such a rational frame of mind. We used to call ourselves "ontological cartographers" all the time, without really unpacking what that meant in any useful fashion. But I resonate pretty strongly with the notion that you can have your far out alien DMT entity encounters without passing any judgments about their "actual" existence, and still draw some pretty alien conclusions that might survive the light of cold hard reason.

The Economist recently ran an excellent profile on Esalen, the California retreat center that refers to itself as “an alternative educational centre devoted to the exploration of the human potential”. Back before holistic medicine and Tantra were relatively common parts of the American vocabulary, Esalen was in the midst of a spiritual exploration that ranged from the extremes of New Age platitudes, to hedonistic revelry, to some very serious intellectual and mystical pursuits. These days, apparently, the mainstream has co-opted so many of Esalen's pursuits that Esalen itself seems relegated to the fringe more than ever - or so the article's neat summary would have us believe. Regardless, it's an intriguing look at a joint that served host to more than its fair share of psychedelic wizardry in its day.