The Forest of Dean may not be internationally known for their killer rave parties, but they're working on it. According to local organizers the all-night parties will be back this summer with all they entail: young people, loud music, and drugs. But which are the favorite drugs among the UK forest-festival dwellers this year? You might be surprised:

Ketamine use has been a contentious issue in the Forest for some time, and the free party goers are well aware of the drug.

The 23-year-old said: "All Forest dealers get it from Bristol.

"Youngsters aged 13-14 use Ketamine and people as young as 16 deal it."

The 24-year-old said: "The main attractions of Ketamine for me are the price and availability. It's half the price of cocaine and has a stronger effect. A gram of powdered Ketamine retails at £15-20 and it's very easy to get hold of."

I think I wrote something last summer about how middle-school kids in the UK were now using K like it was no big thing. Is Ketamine becoming the new gateway drug here? More interesting info and comments on the Forest of Dean festivals can be found at the link below.

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While on vacation, trolling antique shops to find a fancy gift for my husband, I found a store that seemed to specialize in old scientific equipment. My first impulse was to go for the home electroshock therapy kit, but when that proved out of my price range, I spotted this Jules Verne looking motherfucker, the Ombredanne Inhaler. Introduced at the beginning of the 20th century to administer ether and chloroform for surgical anesthesia, it looks like it was used well into the 50s. And now it's on my kitchen table. I thought you all would appreciate some antique drug paraphernelia.

ParaTheatrical alchemist Antero Alli alerts us to a new online course that some of you might find interesting, entitled ANGEL TECH: The 8-Circuit Brain in Theory and Practice. From his email:

I have been working with the 8-Circuit Brain model for intelligence increase since 1980 and a couple years ago, I started teaching an online course in this process. It's based on my 1987 book, ANGEL TECH. The next version of this 8-week intensive course starts March 3rd.

This is a hands-on experiential approach that emphasizes safe activation of the circuits in real time through meditations, rituals, exercises, tasks and writing down the results in your lab book. A "circuit" is a term for a specific level of consciousness with its own function of intelligence. The eight "circuits", or functions of intelligence" are: Physical, Emotional, Intellectual, Social, Somatic, Psychic, Mytho-poetic, and Quantum.

The course introduces all new material previously unpublished in Angel Tech using private web pages designed especially for this course. Includes ongoing one-to-one feedback with myself plus interactive group forums at Maybe Logic Academy where the course is presented.

Over at the strangely addictive sci-fi blog io9, Annalee Newitz recently took a look at a new study that seems to indicate depression might have a useful function in combat zones:

Will soldiers of the future be given serotonin depressors to make them depressed and therefore fearless? A new study released Friday shows that people with a low level of serotonin do not "reflexively avoid" bad situations, and are more likely to explore risky and dangerous places. This is a sorry state in everyday life, but might be desirable if you're a soldier and need to venture into spots most people would steer clear of. It's very possible the next "super soldier" drug won't give you superstrength, but just a megadose of depression.

I was reminded of this when I came across a recent Newsweek article about the "anti-happiness" backlash that seems to be sprouting, a movement that - on balance - seems perfectly logical once you stop to think about it:

Lately, Jerome Wakefield's students have been coming up to him after they break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and not because they want him to recommend a therapist. Wakefield, a professor at New York University, coauthored the 2007 book "The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder," which argues that feeling down after your heart is broken—even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression— is normal and even salutary. But students tell him that their parents are pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention—"some Zoloft, dear?"—for their sadness, and the kids want no part of it. "Can you talk to them for me?" they ask Wakefield. Rather than "listening to Prozac," they want to listen to their hearts, not have them chemically silenced.

Of course, it's quite a continuum from listening to your heart in the wake of a break-up to deliberately megadosing yourself on an anti-anti-depressant in order to be more effective in combat. But then again, when I think about some of my ex-girlfriends, I guess it's not that much of a difference after all. HA! (That is totally a joke; my heart is full of peace.)

At any rate, it's very intriguing to watch our culture attempt to correct itself from the recent (decade-long) enthusiasm for SSRIs (and if you want to be cheeky, for MDMA as well). I always held the notion of anti-depressants in great suspicion, at least in terms of my own brain chemistry; I saw that it was effective for friends, but suspected it would dramatically alter my creativity and ambition. Indeed, the Newsweek article seems to suggest that kind of thinking might not be completely inaccurate:

Looking for an interesting "user's guide" to submerging your brain in caffeine? Via the Developing Intelligence blog, please to enjoy "Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired," featuring a variety of tips and tricks, including:

• Consume in small, frequent amounts. Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function.


• Play to caffeine's strengths. Caffeine's effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time. The beneficial effects of caffeine may be most pronounced in conjunction with sugar. For example, one factor analytic study has shown caffeine-glucose cocktails provide benefits to cognition not seen with either alone.

Etc. There's a lot of good material here. Of course, one near throw-away comment caught my eye:

At doses of 600mg, caffeine's effects on cognitive performance are often comparable to those of modafinil, a best-of-class nootropic.

Not that modafinil is particularly hard to get, but caffeine pills definitely seem hella cheaper... At any rate, as someone who seems to alternate between periods of no caffeine and periods of "all the coffee I can stomach," this handy guide offers some practical tips that I imagine I will attempt to implement first thing in the morning...

The fine folks at Slate helpfully weigh in on a recent study that purports to show a link between smoking marijuana and gum disease. Apparently - and this may come as a shock - there were problems with the study's design:

First of all, the absence of information about daily dental hygiene and—much more significantly—other drug use is a serious flaw in the study's design. Cocaine and methamphetamine use are both highly associated with periodontal disease.

Of course, there's been a small flood of "weed is bad for you" stories lately... the fine folks over at the Slog, for instance, recently took a closer look at that study that seemed to show that quitting marijuana would cause bad withdrawal symptoms. The problem with that study:

Everyone [in the study] smoked both pot and cigarettes. The good of this: the effect of withdrawal could be compared between pot and tobacco in the same individuals. The bad: it’s already known that pot and tobacco interact. Perhaps the severe withdrawal seen after stopping pot in this study has more do with the effect smoking pot had on how nicotine was processed in the brain.

There's clearly a lot more to be said about this type of study, but I am waiting for smarter people to post about the topic...

If we wanted to, we could probably fill a few days a week just reporting on the wacky antics of the drug-addled; we spare you that fate because it does wear thin on the soul over time. However, every now and then a story goes past that is too amusing to overlook:

A young woman in Bremerton has learned that credit unions don't accept deposits of methamphetamine.

According to documents filed in Kitsap County Superior Court, an envelope containing an undisclosed amount of money and a bag of meth was found in a Kitsap Credit Union automated teller machine.

Checking on the account, police contacted an 18-year-old customer. Officers wrote that she said she might have mistakenly included the bag when she got money out of her pocket for the deposit.

The woman was arrested Thursday and was charged Friday with possession of meth, a felony.

I love how the last paragraph casually makes sure you're aware that, "oh by the way, possession of meth? That's a felony." I can just imagine dozens of elderly Seattle P-I readers hitting that paragraph and saying to themselves, "Ohhhhh, that's why this story is in the newspaper. Now where's that adorable Marmaduke..."

The New Zealand Herald is kind enough to bring us a story of a tropical paradise located in the Autonomous Region of the Southern Atlantic:

People here don't have to work. Every week, sometimes every day, 35kg sacks of cocaine drift in from the sea. The economy of this entire town of 50,000 tranquil souls is addicted to cocaine.

Bluefields is a creation of the gods of geography. Located halfway between the cocaine labs of Colombia and the 300 million noses of the United States, Bluefields is ground zero for cocaine transportation. Nicaraguan waters are near Colombian territorial limits, making the area extremely popular with cocaine smugglers using very small, very fast fishing boats.

If the news of 2008 keeps up at this rate, we're in for a hell of a year :)