Cocaine addicts may soon have a new option for treatment in the form of a new vaccine:

The vaccine, currently in clinical trials, stimulates the immune system to attack the real thing when it's taken.

The immune system — unable to recognize cocaine and other drug molecules because they are so small — can't make antibodies to attack them.

To help the immune system distinguish the drug, Kosten attached inactivated cocaine to the outside of inactivated cholera proteins.

In response, the immune system not only makes antibodies to the combination, which is harmless, but also recognizes the potent naked drug when it's ingested. The antibodies bind to the cocaine and prevent it from reaching the brain, where it normally would generate the highs that are so addictive.

"It's a very clever idea," says David Eagleman, a Baylor neuroscientist. "Scientists have spent the last few decades figuring out reward pathways in the brain and how drugs like cocaine hijack the system. It turns out those pathways are difficult to rewire once they've seen the drug. But the vaccine just circumvents all that."

Go Team Science! Of course, at some point the government will start spiking the water supply with this kind of thing, but hopefully my dessicated corpse will be long forgotten by that point.

When I popped this review CD into my player I immediately thought it was Pink Floyd, but no, it is Telestrion, a bombasitc psychedelic rock band from Atlanta, Georgia. Loaded with chunky epic guitar riffs and screaming solos, this Telestrion debut could have been teleported directly from 1972. The sound rocks with echoes of Black Sabbath, Soundgarden, Pink Floyd, and many others of that riff-laden classic style, This is indeed an impressive album for a debut; telestrion has the space-rock formula wired. Put on the headphones and turn it up to 11.

Um, yeah. That's what it is. Really.

For those of you who ever wondered what it was like to travel to Peru and do ayahuasca in a traditional setting, this is it!

There is a whole gallery of cool fractal art showcasing the winners from this years Mandelbrot contest. Check it out if you like that sort of thing...

Thanks Sheldon!

Anyone who's ever worked in an ER can tell you that one of the biggest hassles is junkies coming in looking for pain meds. So what's the best way to con these meds out of the ER staff? According to a recent report making the rounds today, it helps to be white.

Emergency room doctors in the United States are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds.

Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites.

In the study, opioid narcotics were prescribed in 31 percent of the pain-related visits involving whites, 28 percent for Asians, 24 percent for Hispanics and 23 percent for blacks.

Minorities were slightly more likely than whites to get aspirin, ibuprofen and similar drugs for pain.

In more than 2,000 visits for kidney stones, whites got narcotics 72 percent of the time, Hispanics 68 percent, Asians 67 percent and blacks 56 percent.

The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Hear that minorities? There's another lesson to be learned. When you need to score meds from the ER, ask your white buddy to do it for you.

2007 blah de blah, stories, hoaxes, hype, you know the drill. Without further ado:

Absinthe made a comeback after 4 brands were proven thujone-free and allowed back on the market in May. After nearly 100 years of prohibition of the Green Fairy, would-be Impressionists and the feckless hipsters who love them can order the stuff at their favorite upper-crust drinking establishment for $12 a glass.

Salvia Divinorum took the dubious honor of most-hyped drug scare of 2007. Numerous communities and even whole states banned the herb after thousands of media stories of reckless teenagers getting high on the minty extract. Some even bought theirs ON THE INTERNET!!

Jenkem was a hoax created by a Totse.com poster that was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the Collier County, Florida Sheriff's office. Scotto told us we could stop work on the jenkem still after he read the Salon article that busted the myth. There're two days I'll never get back.

While the Feds continue to put pressure on California medical marijuana dispensaries through raids and threatening letters to landlords, New Mexico became the 12th state to allow medical marijuana use and Connecticut's governor vetoed a bill to allow medicinal use in that state.

Sometimes stimulant, sometimes anti-depressant drug Modafinil (brand name Provigil) hit the big time in 2007, with numerous stories of athletes using the drug for it's ability to combat sleepiness and foster mental alertness. Performance-enhancing drugs aren't just for the pro-sports set anymore, as academics find the drug just the thing for those 7am lectures. Some are decrying the unfair advantage this drug gives some students and the ensuing arms race it implies. Others see it as the new Benzedrine and would yawn if they weren't using Provigil themselves.

Oh, and the US again reached an all-time high in number of drug-related arrests and number incarcerated on drug charges, Afghanistan churned out 93% of the world's illegal opiates, the drug war explodes in Mexico and the US starts Plan Mexico, where we'll funnel billions into the country since it worked so well in Colombia.

Happy New Year!

In a forum like this, partly thanks to the DMT/ketamine axis of evil, there is generally an awareness of "entities" or whatever you want to call it. There is also usually a wide range of different beliefs about what's "really" going on. There are the die-hard materialists, who will talk about the parietal lobe and projected identity, and there are the die-hard spiritualists, who will take every entity at the same face value they take their taxi driver. My feelings and thoughts about this have been heavily informed by a story I heard from Tibetan buddhism last year.

I was at a weekend of talks by Robin Kornman, a senior student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was one of the first of the Tibetan buddhist masters to come teach in the West. (Robin died a few months ago of cancer, I feel really sad I didn't get more of a chance to get to know him.) Robin was talking about "drala" or "the dralas", which is similar to Japanese Shinto "kami" or Native American totem spirits. Think spirits of a place or of an animal, a guardian or some such thing. Not gods, but, you know, entities. At first Robin was talking about drala in a metaphorical way, as if it were just the particular self-consistent feeling of a place, or the tendencies of something. But he would also talk about "the dralas" and how they would come sometimes. Sort of wavering back and forth between whether they were metaphorical or real, and we were getting confused, and eventually someone asked him "Wait a minute, are the dralas supposed to be real, or is this just a metaphor??"

He laughed and said he asked Rinpoche that question once, and learned that you can't ask a Buddhist master whether something is real and expect to get a straight answer.

"Rinpoche, are the dralas real?" he asked. "They're as real as you are", said Rinpoche.

"Then, how real am I?"

"Not real at all."

So that's how I think about entities...

Since everybody loves year-end lists, and most people love a good mystery, it is my pleasure to bring to you the top scientific mysteries of 2007, and what the chances are that these mysteries will be resolved within the next 50 years. This list has been compiled by experts (me) after lengthy (none) research on the subject. So without further ado I give you our world of mystery...

1. Dark Matter/Dark Energy

Okay, you know science has a problem when we can't accurately describe what 96% of the mass of the universe is made out of because it is non-visible and non-reflective. Is it neutrinos, baryonic protons and neutrons, cosmic dust, dark stars, the breath of God? No one knows. Also, about 74% of that missing mass is most likely in the form of Dark Energy, the force which may be fueling our universal expansion, or maybe it's a math glitch due to our poor understanding of the effects of gravity at a cosmic distance. Who knows? Odds that this mystery will be adequately resolved within the next 50 years: 1000 to 1.

2. The Higgs Boson

The standard model of physics by which we explain all reality is complete with the exception of one fundamental quantum particle: the Higgs Boson. The standard model predicts that this particle exists, in fact it relies on the mysterious Higgs field to generate mass for all particles in the universe. However, while we can assign all sorts of properties to this field, and infer its existence from theoretical models, there is no demonstrable proof that the Higgs boson actually exists. Because the Higgs field presumably permeates all space and time and gives rise to quantum particle mass (which allows the rest of the universe to function), the Higgs Boson has been dubbed the "God Particle". While high energy particle collisions are being studied to find this elusive Higgs boson, it is far from confirmed that it exists at all. Odds that this mystery will be resolved within the next 50 years: 5000 to 1.

3. UFOs and Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Casual witnesses claim to be abducted by aliens, groups of people see UFOs hovering over major cities, and SETI scans the sky and finds nothing. While the size of the universe dictates that intelligent life must exist on other planets around the universe, the size of the universe dictates that we will never meet them, or they will be long dead by the time their first radio signals hit Earth. UFOs and grey aliens aside, all the research in this area points to a big question mark. Are we alone? No, there are almost surely extremophile bacteria living on planets and asteroids out there in the soup. But are there other complex sentient beings out there? Who knows? Odds that this mystery will be resolved within the next 50 years: 10,000 to 1.

For no reason other than I'm listening to it right now and digging it, here's Chillage People vs the Vulture Squadron doing "Dr. Whooo (Live At Destination Venus)". It's off the compilation "Unity Dub's Voyage Into Paradise" on the label LSD (Liquid Sound Design). They do fun stuff w/ the classic theme, keeping the spacey feel while adding enough noise and gee whiz sounds to keep it interesting. If you like bleepy bloopy, you should get a kick out of this. I like the bubbly synths around the, hehe, 4:20 mark and the bombast (well, for dub anyway) when the main theme comes back in.