Just got a link to this gallery show in NY that has some interesting goodies to look at. Thanks Bryan!

Thank you Mr. Starborne. Thank you.

A friend sent me this link to an article about the arrest of British DJ Grooverider in Dubai for possession of marijuana. It is notable for the humorousness of that comment, but also for the amazing close-up photo of a marijuana bud that accompanies the article.

I was talking to a researcher yesterday who was putting in a proposal for an experiment on neural mechanisms of disgust. She had found this product, Liquid Ass, and wanted to use it in the experiment. It is supposedly a mind-blowingly awful-smelling mixture of synthetic chemicals that smells like ass. I suppose it's not a drug, but it's certainly a commercially available chemical product that produces a strong reaction in humans...

Since I was sick this weekend I didn't do the video news round-up. But for those of you who can't get enough of inane TV drug news, here's some recent drug-related news clips, from ClipSyndicate.com.

In a strange turn of drug policy, the Colorado police have actually gotten busted for harming live marijuana plants. Yes, that's right, they are being charged with failing to protect live pot plants in their custody:

Police in Fort Follins have returned marijuana plants to a couple wrongly arrested.

Police found the growing operation after a search, but a judge ruled the search illegal.

Police gave back the drugs and the growing equipment, but the plants are dead.

...

The evidence tag says "live plants," but the Masters say they're not surprised to find 39 confiscated plants dead.

The couple's attorneys say Colorado's constitution requires police to take care of seized medical marijuana plants.

The Master's say they use pot legally to treat their own debilitating medical conditions, and grow the drug for other people who have a marijuana waiver.

This could turn out to be one of the wackiest lawsuits ever, resulting in the Colorado police having to pay damages for killing live pot plants being held in evidence. Oops.

There's an interesting tobacco study at Eurekalert.org that links adolescent and college-aged smoking habits to emotional disorders such a depression an ADHD. There's a variety of good information about patterns of habit formation in various at-risk groups, but the money quote from the article is here:

This paper proposes that adolescents with attentional and emotional disorders may be especially vulnerable to start smoking as a result of their brain functioning. Nicotine may “normalize” certain parts of the brain, thereby increasing the risk of nicotine dependence and increasing difficulty in quitting.

In essence, this study suggests that smoking among adolescents is actually a form of self-medication for (possibly) undiagnosed emotional disorders. Not really a surprise, but at least we're getting somewhere on this drug use and addiction issue. It may not be an act of rebellion after all, it may be actually be a "normalizing" behavior.

The trend of drugs that look like candy and candy that looks like drugs seems to be in full swing these days. And now Hershey's has its own model in the candy-drug market:

Police said a new mint manufactured by Hershey's bears a striking resemblance to cocaine.

Ice Breakers Pacs consist of tiny, dissolvable packets filled with white powder.

The mint candy went on the market in November.

Dallas police Senior Cpl. Kevin Janse said the mint looks like a bag of cocaine and is even the same color.

"I've been on the streets 15 years, and I've seen a lot of these, and they've all been full of cocaine," he said.

Other people agreed that the small packets resembled drugs.

One unidentified woman said the mint "looks like a bag of cocaine."

I love the writing in this article, "Looks like a bag of cocaine," That appears to be the whole story.

Erowid recently posted a great article from an old issue of the Extracts newsletter, on the topic of "Photo Geekery: The Art of Photographing Psychoactives." The web version of the article contains an assortment of absolutely lovely imagery, enough to (hopefully) inspire any budding drug geek photographers to get in on the business of capturing such excellent snapshots.

Rolling Stone has a scathing, in-depth piece on the failure of the drug war, starting all the way back with Nixon and walking us through how thoroughly "we" (meaning America) have actually lost this thing. It's got far too much detail and solid reporting to adequately summarize here, so check it out when you get a chance.

Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of ­human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now ­repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

Thanks to Entheogenic Reformation for the heads-up.