Anyone had a look at this new AMC show called Breaking Bad? Sounds like Weeds, but for meth dealers:

Meet Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher sleepwalking through life when, boom, a terminal diagnosis changes everything. Liberates him. Empowers him to use his chemistry skills anew: to man a rolling drug lab and finance the future for his struggling family. It's an uncontrolled experiment with the American dream. And it finally wakes him up.

Here's a look at the opening sequence of the first episode, in two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

Ulp... you mean antidepressants might not be as effective as we thought? Apparently that might be the case:

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found.

In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Of course, no one is suggesting that antidepressants aren't a useful tool to have around, but this kind of reporting bias has been around for a while, and yet it's still surprising to see it surfacing over such a significantly prescribed class of substances.

There's nothing like a little LSD bust to get local law enforcement and local media all up in arms about the possibility of a SERIOUS! ACID! SCARE! in some little community. In this case, $8300 worth of acid was apparently seized in a bust, prompting "local experts" to warn that acid could become a "drug of choice" at any minute. And what would be so bad about that? you might ask. Well, for starters, here's the first line of the article:

Ron Fitzpatrick says LSD is such a nasty drug, even biker gangs have given up on it.

Do you hear that? EVEN BIKER GANGS... that's right, the horrible scourge of biker gangs in St. John's, Newfoundland, has gone to the trouble of phoning the local treatment centers and making it clear that LSD is just too nasty.

But that's not all:

"We have to be prepared. It's better to be prepared. I don't want to wake up in the morning, turn on the radio and find out that two police officers were shot trying to apprehend two guys stoned on LSD."

See, this is why I can't get behind moving to Canada. Oh sure, it's all "socialized medicine this" and "tolerant policies that" but when it gets down to brass tacks, the acidheads are armed.

An interesting case is working its way through the courts in Fort Collins, Colorado: a couple was arrested for possession of a large amount of medical marijuana, which was intended both for personal use and for their medical marijuana association, the Colorado Compassion Club. However, an interesting thing happened:

In June 2007, Larimer County Chief Judge James Hiatt dismissed charges against the couple and ruled that the 2006 raid was illegal. With that decision he set into motion a test of Article XVIII, Section 14 of the Colorado Constitution, which calls for the immediate return of any marijuana "seized by state or local law enforcement officials from a patient or primary care-giver."

In November Judge Hiatt ordered a return of the Masters' property, including the medical marijuana plants. In December the Masters went to pick them up, but after more than 16 months, their medicine was unusable.

"We are not equipped with hydroponic growing equipment," police spokesperson Rita Davis explained. Few evidence rooms are, but Colorado law states that "any property ... used in connection with the medical use of marijuana... shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed while in the possession of state or local law enforcement officials."

The couple is asking for a tidy $202,800 to replace their crop. Let that be a lesson: that's not just evidence, it's medicine!

A new study is suggesting that pregnant women who consume over 200 milligrams of caffeine per day are at increased risk of miscarriage:

Dr. Li’s study included 1,063 pregnant women who were interviewed once about their caffeine intake. At the time of the interview, their median length of pregnancy was 71 days. But 102 had already miscarried — not surprising, because most miscarriages occur very early in pregnancy. Later, 70 more women miscarried, for an overall miscarriage rate of 16 percent for the group — a typical rate.

Of 264 women who said they used no caffeine, 12.5 percent had miscarriages. But the miscarriage rate was 24.5 percent in the 164 women who consumed 200 milligrams or more per day. The increased risk was associated with caffeine itself and not with other known risk factors like the mother’s age or smoking habits, the researchers said.

The general advice that pregnant women should avoid caffeine is not particularly new, although this study seems to be the most current and most specific. But contrast this with another recent study we talked about last year:

At the beginning of this year, a Danish study published findings on this subject: 1,200 women were surveyed, which is more than double the sample of the next largest study. The adjustments for confounding factors were comprehensive, and the conclusion was that no significant differences occurred between the caffeine drinkers and the decaff drinkers, in the birthweight of their babies or the frequency of preterm delivery: even among women who drank more than seven cups of coffee a day.

The new study does have its critics:

Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and of epidemiology, at Columbia University Medical Center, had reservations about the study, noting that miscarriage is difficult to study or explain. She said that most miscarriages resulted from chromosomal abnormalities, and that there was no evidence that caffeine could cause those problems.

“Just interviewing women, over half of whom had already had their miscarriage, does not strike me as the best way to get at the real scientific question here,” she said. “But it is an excellent way to scare women.”

What's the take home message?

“Moderation in all things is still an excellent rule,” Dr. Westhoff said. “I think we tend to go overboard on saying expose your body to zero anything when pregnant. The human race wouldn’t have succeeded if the early pregnancy was so vulnerable to a little bit of anything. We’re more robust than that.”

Normally I can't be bothered to post anything about the current presidential campaign, but this enlightening video was too high-larious to avoid. Watch! as Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates dodge hard questions about medical marijuana. Hear the hard questions asked as they really should be asked... in song. Apparently this actually aired on Al Gore's upstart TV network. As DN tipster Mari comments, "They've been doing some good work on medical marijuana and other progressive issues, but this is way beyond that. I'm shocked, I wonder if Al knows/approves of what they're promoting on his channel--I like to think he does."

The 2007 International Drug Policy Reform was held in early December of last year, and MP3s have been posted of all the talks held throughout the three days of the conference. Some of these sound highly interesting, such as:

• Physically, Mentally, Emotionally Better: Psychedelics as Healing Agents


• No Child Left Untested?: Fighting Back Against Random Student Drug Testing


• Drug Warriors Against the War


• A Diamond in the Rough or a Model for Change? One City’s Experiment in Taking on Racially-Biased Drug Enforcement


• Marijuana & Health: Risks and Benefits


• IBOGAINE - An Effective Therapy for Chemical Dependence


• Campus Change Campaign: Colleges as Laboratories for Reform


• Beyond Prohibition: Describing a Drug War Exit Strategy

In general, it's never particularly a good idea to spike anyone's food or drink with a psychoactive substance... but you could argue that it's even less of a good idea to spike the hamburgers of a pair of police officers with kind bud. Nevertheless, two hapless Burger King employees are facing trial for doing exactly that. Of course, the actual burger cook is claiming he didn't know who his boss intended to hit with the BK Pot Burger, but that's no excuse.

One tidbit, though, stands out:

Officer Gabaldon said that after eating more than half of his burger, he noticed a taste in his mouth that he recognized as marijuana, court papers say.

Both officers looked in their food and found several small pieces of a green leafy substance, which later tested positive as marijuana. The two officers also tested positive for marijuana when they were tested the next day, Lopez said.

Now wait just a minute. How would an officer of the law recognize the taste of marijuana, unless... OH NO! Society is crumbling!

The reports in today that Heath Ledger has been found dead:

Actor Heath Ledger, 28, was found dead at a Manhattan residence Tuesday. Police told ABC News' Richard Esposito that prescription drugs including sleeping pills and two anti-anxiety medications likely played a part, and the death appeared to be accidental.

Was Heath Ledger addicted to downers? Who knows? Yet another sad loss for the entertainment industry and the world thanks to prescription pharmaceuticals. We can only hope his turn as the Joker in the upcoming Batman film is all it was hyped to be...

In somewhat related news, actor Brad Renfro, 25, was buried today. His body was found last week. Another suspected overdose.

Ten years ago, I came out with the first edition of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Information Age, which for its novelty alone still stands as probably the most “important” thing I’ve written. Lots of things have happened in the last decade to the media ecologies I looked at back then, but I am happy to say that, though the book was written at the height of the dot.com mania (which also explained the advance that allowed me to take a few years to write it), most of the stories and concepts and critiques I sling around still retain something of their original spark. More importantly, the book helped set the stage for a number of ongoing and often heretical discussions about the interpenetration of consciousness and its communicating tools.

One sign of the vitality of these discussions is Steven Vedro’s cool new book Digital Dharma: A User’s Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere. It is, if I may say, a deeply techgnostic text, almost a workbook of IT mysticism. Using a perspective loosely inspired from Ken Wilber’s integral thought, Vedro looks at a variety of electronic media technologies as expressions and reflections of the evolution of consciousness (which I tend to think is really a mutation). With not a small amount of audacity—especially for a telecommunications consultant—Vedro maps seven different communication regimes (telephony, peer-to-peer networks, pervasive computing, etc.) onto the classic system of the Hindu chakras. The muladhara chakra at the base of the spine, associated with security and earthly reality, gets linked to radio telegraphy, which not only needs a good ground connection but which formed the infrastructural basis of the electronic universe in the late nineteenth century. Later in the book, Vedro also connects the visionary third eye with digital compression, the array of algorithmic processes that drive the vast multiplication of concocted worlds that now make up the multi-perspectival matrix of digital reality.

Digital Dharma was published by the high-quality Theosophical press Quest, and it is unquestionably an example of the spiritual self-help genre. It’s got a blurb from the What the Bleep?! physicist Amit Goswami, and includes a number of “teleconsciousness visualizations” like “Reediting your Emotional Videos” and “Checking your Inner Voicemail.” But Vedro is a smart and grounded guy, as well as a compassionate and imaginative one, so even though I have no attraction to such practices, I am intrigued to see what he’s doing, and his lessons always seem less silly once I've read the section. Vedro also knows what he’s talking about, and provides clear-eyed explanations of contemporary technologies that everyone should be familiar with these days. He goes into more helpful detail than you might expect, and despite the Goswami quote, does not really muck around the nebulous waters of quantum mysticism. That's the thing about electronic tech: if you look closely enough, you realize this stuff is weird enough you don't even need to talk about quantum entanglement.

Most generally, you can read Digital Dharma as a creative and insightful study into the metaphoric connection between technological regimes and consciousness, in its social, perceptual and “higher” aspects. With his technical detail, Vedro only deepens the fundamental point: that the technical properties of these technologies hold lessons for us, regardless of how we use them on a social level, because they emerge from and reflect our consciousness in the first place. He also acknowledges the dark side of these regimes, and is admirably sober about some of the deep difficulties—psychological as well as social—that lie ahead as we wrap ourselves in a cocoon of interconnectivity. In intensifying the feedback loops that fringe and compose consciousness, media technologies have let loose a process that, in cultural and spiritual terms, can perhaps only be called apocalyptic. Vedro does not shy away from the hypermediated Omega Point glimmering from around the bend, though he does not spend as much time with it as I would like. I only wish I could share Vedro’s fundamental optimism, which is, nonetheless, refreshing.