Thanks for the great cartoons Rob!

You all know what turbo-e is by now, right? It's MDMA laced with meth, and it's supposedly coming from Canada, and it will KILL YOU! (probably not, but just checking to see if you're paying attention). Well, leave it to Slate to say, "Duh" and file this under "non-news". The article quotes Canada's National Post rebuttal to the original NY Times story:

"[Drug Czar Walters] is not wrong. But this is nothing new. We've been telling them this for years," said Superintendent Ron Allen, head of the RCMP's Drug Section for the Greater Toronto Area.

In the summer of 2006, for instance, Canadian police seized 10,000 pills sold as Ecstasy that were destined for New York, and a laboratory test found they contained 80 percent methamphetamine.

What this article points out is what we here at DoseNation know all too well: A vast majority of the "E" being sold on the street in pill form is adulterated with something, but there are no reliable statistics. For a while it was caffeine, then DXM, then ephedra, then PMA, then K, now meth. Who knows what's in that party pill? Ask Slate.

Being a drugged-up superstar just doesn't hold the kind of cred it used to. Imagine that, on the day Amy W. leaves rehab look fit and visits her beau in the pokey she finds out she can't even come to the Grammy's. Time to call Pete Doherty and hit the crack pipe?

Egads, the picture tells the story.

Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss was arrested Thursday on charges of illegal possession of prescription drugs and driving under the influence, authorities said.

...

Fleiss was arrested on four counts, including possession of dangerous drugs without a prescription and driving under the influence. Owen, 53, was arrested on charges of being under the influence of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana.

Big long interview, but worth the read. Hits all the bases from counterculture to politics to transhumanism to Leary to VR to McKenna and beyond. Although the level of intellectuallism rises dangerously close to BS in this particular interview (Reality Sandwich!), I always like to hear what RU Sirius is thinking about. He's got that hipster zeitgeist thing locked-up you know...

Can you believe it? We here at DoseNation have been going for almost a year now and everyone involved has been on super behavior! Since you have all played so nicely we have decided to open comments up for "guest" posting, so now you can post that smart-ass comment anonymously and without fear of retribution! To post a comment on an item, make sure you are on the permalink page of your article (not the homepage), scroll down to the bottom, and type!

Play nice please. No spamming and please don't write a book in the comments field. If you have something to say that's longer than a paragraph, create a user account and post your own article. It's easy!

Promo description of a new video game called Tetripz:

"Imagine playing tetris under influence of LSD, but without the LSD. You can choose between different player setups (one player, two player, two pit or tetripz android), several drugs (coffee, ganja, 2cb, lsd, dmt) and the dose of this drug. When you start to play, you'll see tetris as if you had actually taken this drug ...There are eleven different songs inside this -100k exe. Every level is completely music synchronised, with the screen bumping up and down, rotating, zooming, lenzes or lights moving over, beautiful graphics and cewl music-synchro."

Imagine pitching this to acidheads: "Ever wondered how games would look like when under your favorite drug, but have always forgotten to take your laptop with you when tripping? Here's the solution - the ultimate psychedelic tetris game!"

Or parents: "Anxious about your kids' choice of activities? Checking their pockets for remains of crushed plant material? Search no more! This trip simulator game will leave them so wasted they won't even think about trying real drugs!"

Or the undecided: "You've read tons of paper on drugs, but still feel insecure and unsure what to try? This game will let you sample the effects!"

Some players believe that the game could run better through Dosbox. I have a different opinion on this topic. Dosbox, simply speaking, is a program which makes your hi-tech computer believe it's still 1990 and that he's an old, slow machine which thinks that Windows are those big transparent screens behind him. Dosbox may be necessary for playing some old games on more modern computers. However, at least in my case the game runs much better when just opened with its .exe file without using Dosbox. I had to try it out to make a screenshot myself and the game was running incredibly slowly. Apart from that, when I open it without using Dosbox, I can't hear the music and it's great for me since techno is definitely not my cup of tea. If the music doesn't work on your computer too, you can play any CD or file you choose before launching the game.

The game is available for download at the Mute Fantasies website.

DID YOU KNOW! that Roger Waters stopped doing LSD after he found himself in the middle of traffic? IT'S TRUE!

Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters has vowed never to use drugs again following a near-death experience while using acid.

The rocker took the hallucinogenic LSD while staying at the Hotel Chelsea in New York and, shortly after, discovered he had stepped in front of traffic in the middle of Eighth Avenue, according to New York gossip column PageSix.

Mark Blake, author of Pink Floyd biography Comfortably Numb, explains, "He found himself frozen, unable to move. It was his last experience with the drug."

And DID YOU KNOW! that Lost star Naveen Andrews used to be hooked on SMACK?

The actor who plays Sayid on the popular TV show said: "There was a danger of me copping it… I lost two years to heroin.

"I was able to work; I don't know how I did it. You can take incredible abuse and still work… I collapsed on a job because of booze."

Andrews also revealed how he was warned of his behaviour while filming The English Patient.

"The turning point was I drove my son when I was drunk and he was scared, and that's when I decided to go into rehab in LA," he said.

And this may come as a COMPLETE SHOCK, but DID YOU KNOW! that Snoop Dogg enjoys MEDICAL MARIJUANA?

We fear that after Snoop's flawless performance as a warm and fuzzy "gangsta" on Larry King this past Friday, the ol' suspendered geezer/legend is gonna call one of his 89 doctors and request some of this "medical marijuana" Snoop waxes silkily about in this clip. In the final moments of the show, King, as usual, saves the only question we actually care about for last: Snoop, what's the deal with you and this 'pot' you continuously speak of? After a stoned-out-of-his-gourd grin, the father of three responds with, "I'm on medical marijuana as we speak." Righteous!

What do all these important celebrity tidbits have in common? PRACTICALLY NOTHING! But I came home tonight, found all three of those stories sitting open in Firefox tabs, and decided it must be a sign - you can have celebrity drug news in today's world that does not involve Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. Plus that guy from Lost is a stone fox!

Many of you probably know already that Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an avid supporter of the use of LSD to treat alcoholism. I found this biographical article online (in Modern Drunkard magazine, "Standing Up For Your Right to Get Falling Down Drunk Since 1996", which I have never heard of before now but which seems quite relevant itself) which is brief, catchy and fascinating. It reminds me of several interesting and widely applicable points, not the least of which is that the popularity and longevity of any movement, whether a cult, a philosophy, or a therapeutic technique, ultimately depends as much on the charisma of the initial promoters as it does on any qualities of the core idea. Just think what the world of addiction treatment would be like today if Bill Wilson hadn't been such a character!

This is my favorite part of the article:

One of his therapeutic journeys lead him to Trabuco College in California, and the friendship of the college’s founder, Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception introduced Wilson to LSD-25. The drug rocked Wilson’s world. He thought of it as something of a miracle substance and continued taking it well into the ‘60s. As he approached his 70th birthday, he developed a plan to have LSD distributed at all AA meetings nationwide. The plan was eventually quashed by more rational voices, and a few years later the Federal government made the point moot by making the drug illegal. (That Wilson’s plan was shot down is probably fortunate. LSD is a beautiful thing, but nothing sounds more horrifying to me than a roomful of chain-smoking, frightened, needy drunks tripping their heads off in the basement of the local Y.)

A recent experience report posted to Erowid offered this suggestion for consuming drugs via gel capsule:

I have recently noticed that my usual process of taking gel capsules has a flaw to it. Standard gel caps appear to delay the onset of symptoms with any psychedelic by about 20-30 minutes. This was determined by comparing the timelines of a 4-AcO-DMT gel cap experience with an experience taking 4-AcO-DMT powder mixed with water and swallowed directly. Dropping a 'test capsule' into a cup of acidified water also confirms, it can take quite a while for a capsule to break open and release its powder in a stomach-like environment.

Starting with this report, whenever I use gel caps, I now puncture each capsule with a needle immediately before swallowing it. I believe ‘punctured pills’ lead to a more immediate onset, as the powder spills right out into the stomach. It works the same as parachuting without the unpleasantness of swallowing toilet paper, and it allows for more accurate time lines.

Which of course begs the question of, swallowing toilet paper wha....?