Some people may still remember the 60s drug STP - three-day-long trips, and this enigmatic name, sometimes read as "Serenity, Tranquility, Peace" or "Salvation Through Psychedelics"... What about some new interpretations of these initials?

(Photo 1: taken at the station of a chair lift in Rokytnice nad Jizerou, unfortunately very bad quality)

Here STP stands for "Central Czech Liquid Fuel".

(Photo 2: taken at a bus stop next to the station described below)

Here STP means "Technical and Parking Station" - the "brain" of the Warsaw subway, located in Kabaty, the southernmost settlement of Warsaw, next to the forest.

The abbreviation STP is now innocent, hardly anyone associates it with a drug. "Kabaty-LSD" would sound completely different...

Mark Morford, the gonzo columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle writes in a lovely screed about Pfizer's latest wonder drug, Lyrica, which doesn't seem to do anything at all:

It apparently works only about half the time, if that, and even then it doesn't work very well and it certainly doesn't actually cure anything or treat any of the potential causes of your illness or address any of the deeper biological/psychological issues at hand and, in fact, only "works" (they guess, but don't actually know) by essentially numbing the central nervous system and therefore merely blocking out what your body is trying to tell you. Sort of like saying the light hurts your eyes and then taking a pill to make you go blind. There now, all better.

This, Morford writes, makes very little sense - especially when compared to another drug - sadly, off-patent, and - quel horror - illegal, which clearly has some astoundingly positive effects:

Its positives border on miraculous. It can effortlessly break down long-held psychological barriers, remove obstacles to communication and stifled emotion, make patients/users feel open and happy and much better able to handle stress, anxiety, all manner of trauma.

And then Morford brings it home:

I know what you're thinking. That's a dangerous oversimplification, Mark. Read the literature! Ecstasy is scary! People can overdose! "Moderation" is not in America's DNA! With the possible exception of extreme PTSD cases, we should probably keep MDMA illegal forever — you know, just like that other toxic, wildly addictive drug that causes thousands of deaths every year, along with liver disease and violence and spousal abuse and trauma and impaired judgment and unwanted pregnancy and frat boys and which you can order as much as you want right now in any bar in the world. Oh wait.

Maybe it really is just that simple, just that odious. One drug, nasty and of hugely questionable value, essentially designed to numb your body and mock your spirit and shut you down like a land mine shuts down a cat, is legal. Another drug, relatively safe, enormously effective in how it opens you up like a flower and pours white hot life straight down your throat and helps you feel God without forcing you to kneel before, well, anything at all, is violently illegal. And thus doth the brutal irony of the capitalist machine floweth over once again.

Have a read. You won't regret it.

Today's Crikey.com.au reports about a study just completed and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It's worth quoting the piece in full:

It’s official: the world has been fundamentally misled about the benefits and harms of extremely popular anti-depressant drugs, including Prozac, Zoloft and Aropax.

A study in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine found roughly one third of all the scientific trials of these antidepressants were never published. Why? Because the trial results did not show the drugs in a favourable light.

The study published this week examined data from the clinical trials of anti-depressants that drug companies had submitted to the United States Food and Drug Administration in recent decades.

They found that of 74 scientific trials of the anti-depressant medicines, 31% of them were never published in the medical literature. Some of the trials had positive, favourable results and some had negative, unfavourable results.

Almost all of the trials with positive results ended up being published in medical journals. Almost all of the trials with negative or questionable results were not published - or were published in a way that tried to portray the results in a positive light.

What this means is that doctors, patients and the public all over the world have been grossly mislead about the true value of these widely prescribed medicines. This is of course the class of anti-depressants that has been enthusiastically championed for more than a decade by psychiatrists closely tied to the drug makers, and widespread prescription of the drugs has cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, if you look at what’s been published, 94% of the trials of these antidepressants that have been published were positive. But if you look at the real evidence, including the published and unpublished trials, as the authors of this week’s papers did, only 51% of the anti-depressant trials conducted were actually positive.

It's not clear exactly how negative trials were buried -- drug companies may have suppressed them, authors may not have submitted them, or journals may have decided not to publish them.

In recent years, concerns about buried trial data have led to the creation of new registers of all clinical trials, which the pharmaceutical industry is now actively involved in.

Given that I know several people who claim to have been "restored to themselves" because of healthy and regular doses of SSRIs, this report - like everything else in the world - needs to be taken with a dose of salts (preferrably lithium salts). Still, it should give everyone in the psychopharmocological community more than a moment's pause.

We all know it's trendy to get high on OTC cough syrups containing DXM, but what are the real numbers? A recent report from SAMHSA gives us the dirt:

About 3.1 million people between the ages of 12-25 have used cough and cold medicine to get high, the government reported Wednesday.

The number of young people who abused over-the-counter cold medicines is comparable to use of LSD and much greater than that for methamphetamine among the age group, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The agency's 2006 survey on drug abuse and health found that more than 5 percent of teenagers and young adults had misused cough and cold medicines and indicated that these people also had experimented frequently with illicit drugs.

Nearly 82 percent also had used marijuana. Slightly less than half also used inhalants or hallucinogens, such as LSD or Ecstasy, the agency said.

The cough suppressant DXM is found in more than 140 cough and cold medications available without a prescription. When taken in large amounts, DXM can cause disorientation, blurred vision, slurred speech and vomiting.

Since this is a story about drugs anyone can buy in any drugstore, a 5% rate of abuse seemed lower than I expected. The startling number is that 82% of robotrippers also reported using marijuana. What, is that stuff OTC now too?

Slate has a piece in which a former prosecutor argues why the major league baseball steroid scandal is different from typical drug investigations and needs to be handled differently by the DoJ, but the changes the investigators have made are the wrong ones.

Federal prosecutors customarily prosecute dealers rather than users primarily because dealers are considered more culpable. Dealers are the rich, bad-guy beneficiaries of others' weaknesses, while users are destitute victims or inconsequential saps. Dealers affect many people. Users affect only themselves.

The hierarchy of the performance-enhancing drug market for professional athletes is exactly the reverse. ... The nobody suppliers made a few thousand in pin money for supplying the juice. But the real financial gainers were the players: Drugs allowed them to cheat their way into the majors or to enhance and prolong careers worth millions of dollars. If relative culpability is to determine who is prosecuted and who is allowed to go free, it's the players who should be indicted.

The other reason federal prosecutors ordinarily go after dealers, not users, is to have a greater effect on drug markets. But if one really wanted to stop the use of steroids in baseball, which is likely to be more effective—cooperation deals with a few locker room enablers, or the spectacle of big leaguers in prison stripes rather than pinstripes?

Australian current affairs website Crikey.com.au reports:

An email from the "club drug project" was recently sent out to people having previously done a survey on party drugs in clubs about 12 months ago, inquiring as to whether these previous participants wanted to take part in this year's survey. The idea isn't a bad one - get real info on drugs from the people taking them and being exposed to them. All anonymously, too. The bad news though? The email addresses weren't sent blind, and were instead visible to every other person who got the email. Not so bad for the people with nondescript email address, but not so great for those who used their work addresses. They did realise their mistake and try to recall the email, but arguably, the damage was already done.

At least all those kids know who to email for their next pills...

Wretch comedy.

Some news simply capture the imagination in ways that others can't. Take for instance this recent report from New Zealand:

Richard Gunn (52) was driving the lawnmower down a street in the northern New Zealand town of Dargaville late on Monday evening when police stopped him, police spokesperson Sarah Kennett said.

Gunn's breath alcohol level was at more than twice the legal limit for drivers, police said, and he previously had lost his driver's licence.

Gunn said he had been using the lawnmower to get around town since losing his licence.

Is this the tale of an oppressed hero cannily exploiting a loophole in civil code, or a whimsical yarn about a durn drunken fool? Either way my policy is to steer wide of drunks on riding lawnmowers.

It is what it is...