As long as we're on the topic of painkillers, I came across a separate article recently in which I learned that Washington state (where I live) has historically been considered "opiophobic." I'm not surprised by this; my wife has had run-ins with substitute general practitioners who haven't even bothered to open her chart and have just flat out denied filling her Vicodin prescriptions, despite a well-documented history that demonstrates why she needs it and a life path that demonstrates she's not just yanking a doctor's chain to get meds. But this recent article posits that this is just another facet of the war on drugs, the increasing tendency to inappropriately judge people based on their prescription drug use:

When Brenda Sutherland stepped up to renew her prescription for her pain medications at a local drug store, she said the pharmacist sneered and made comments about “all of her drugs.”

“He immediately copped an attitude,” the Puyallup resident said. “He started asking me a bunch of personal questions about my medical history. His job is just to fill prescriptions.”

He didn’t lower his voice and made his opinion known to all who were in earshot....

Sutherland later called the pharmacy to complain and received an apology. But she had already been publicly humiliated.

“He had no right to stand there in front of other people and discuss my medical problems,” she said. “He had the attitude that I was drug seeking.”

New prescription guidelines have created a rather Quixotic situation in which doctors must endure arbitrary engagement with a dwindling class of pain specialists in order to prescribe; some doctors are finding it's not worth the red tape.

[John Loeser, Professor of Neurological Surgery and Anesthesiology at the University of Washington,] said the Opioid Guidelines that have stirred up such a huge furor are actually very benign.

“They don’t say that patients can’t have pain medications, they don’t say that,” he said. “They say that if a patient is being given more than 120 milligrams of morphine or its equivalent then a consultation with a pain specialist is required.”

The problem is there is a huge shortage of pain specialists, Loeser said.

“There aren’t enough pain specialists to begin to meet this mandate. It usually requires residency of a year in an accredited pain fellowship program.”

The problem with a relatively arbitrary guideline like 120 milligrams is the widely differing responses to that dose, based on a wide variety of possible causes for prescribing the drug in the first place:

In the wake of all the scandals surrounding "performance-enhancing substances," I came across this article a couple weeks ago about a category of these drugs that should have been obvious to me, but was only so in hindsight: painkiller use. Duh - makes total sense that in addition to enhancing your reflexes and awareness in stimulating or steroidal ways, you might also want chemical help to manage those irritating pain signals your body keeps sending that might slow you down or cost you your edge. This particular article focuses on the prevalence of painkiller use among athletes at the collegiate level:

The NCAA does conduct a periodic survey of drug use among college athletes in a variety of sports, the last one in 2005. The extensive questionnaire asks about anabolic steroids, ephedrine, nutritional supplements, tobacco, alcohol, ecstacy, amphetamines, marijuana, hallucinogens and cocaine.

Everything but prescription narcotics.

"We don't have a targeted effort looking at that issue," said Mary Wilfert, NCAA associate director of education services. "We don't identify it as a category. We don't ban analgesic narcotics, so we haven't focused on that for student-athletes."

Ooops! Gotta love a good loophole. The downside here - well, one downside among several options, I suppose - is the addictive property of common opioid painkillers, which can lead to an appetite for stronger stuff later on in life. Ooops! Admittedly abuse of these drugs is on the rise all across society, but the line is a little blurrier when you start off genuinely wanting to treat an owie, then you move on to wanting to finesse smaller and lighter pains, into full-fledged addiction because - of course - they're fun.

Since my nickname is a paraphrase of a Beatles song, it's time to start posting a bit of (mostly '60s) music every now and then. Today is Jefferson Airplane's famous "White Rabbit" with an amateur video consisting of images from Alice in Wonderland (Disney version). The author of the video, Sirena Black, explains her idea this way:

For this vid I tried to use shots that literally fit the song when possible, and when it wasn't possible I just chose the most psychedelic or neat images I could think of.

So sit back and enjoy the video, in whatever state of mind you may be.

As a bit of background information, a link to Mike Jay's essay "Mushrooms in Wonderland", which discusses the possibility of Alice in Wonderland being a directly drug-inspired book, is included, because both the original Jefferson Airplane song and this video show there is something subversive in this innocent fairy-tale. Was it intended? From Jay's essay it seems that Lewis Carroll probably never tried psychedelic mushrooms, but clearly had some knowledge on this topic. And the Disney movie shows maybe even better that sometimes the dominant culture manages to assimilate subversive psychedelic content.

Here's an interesting report on MDMA, linking the effects of amphetamine-related drug abuse to trauma-induced brain damage:

Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) suggest that drugs and traumatic brain injury release a similar chemical chain reaction in the brain which can cause cell death, memory loss and the possibility of irreversible brain damage

The drug ecstasy, also known as MDMA in its purer form, as well as other forms of methamphetamine, were the main focus of the study. Researchers found that abuse of these substances can lead to the same types of changes in the brain caused by a sharp blow to the head.

This is welcome news for all of us who prefer sharp blows to the head over trendy drugs. Now we can get all the fun of a 4+ head walloping with a single dose of MDMA. Cool! Discuss...

A report in the Melbourne AGE newspaper details research at Sydney's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, where two doctors have been using the narcolepsy drug Modafinil (Provigil) for the treatment of addiction to crystal meth.

More than 80 dependent methamphetamine users took either modafinil or a dummy medication daily for 10 weeks. Those who received modafinil cut their methamphetamine use by more than half, significantly better than those who received the placebo.

My experiences with Modafinil have demonstrated that in the right situations, and the right dosages, it can be very pleasant. Not nearly as much good, clean craziness as a week-long speed binge, but hey, at least you can go to sleep!

A quick link to a recent review of a Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012 from the student paper at Victoria University in Toronto. It starts with Pinchbeck's prediction of a "sidereal movement of consciousness returning us to levels of awareness denied and repressed by the materialistic thrust of our current civilization." Um, yeah. Isn't it interesting how psychedelic gurus always love to pick on other peoples' levels of awareness, and tend to blame a repressive "they" for all of our problems? They also use big words to state the obvious, making sentiments like, "In the future, increased access to unfiltered information will make people smarter," seem really, really deep. Yeah.

The reviewer kind of tears him a new one too...

A little over a decade ago, I had a bona-fide, Grade A, no-shit “mystical” experience—or at least something that felt a hell of a lot like a mystical experience. I have never written about it before, don't talk about it much, but I’ve been thinking about it lately and thought I’d give it a shot here, ineffability and scare quotes and all.

The deal went down, absurdly enough, during a month-long retreat at a Zen center in northern California; even more absurdly, it happened while I was washing a bunch of beets in the garden. I had come to the center to recover and reorient after the agony of finishing the final draft of Techgnosis. I was pretty wrung out. During work period one afternoon, I found myself alone in a shady corner field, rinsing a pile of freshly unearthed beets in a free-standing outside basin. I stood there, in the cool but sunny air, washing big clumps of moist, fragrant mud from the red roots. I hadn’t had any alcohol or drugs in weeks.

What happened next is tough to describe, and I think I need to lay down a bit of background first. One idea you’ll find in esoteric psychology (and elsewhere) is the notion that there is a vital difference between the content of consciousness—sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc—and the subject that perceives or, better, witnesses these feelings and perceptions. (I discuss this idea in the weird light of Descartes and the Matrix here.) On the surface, the Witness might seem to be needlessly “dualistic”—a redeployment of the Cartesian split between mind and body that everybody is always bitching about. But its still kind of true, and meditation, to say nothing of rigorous self-observation, helps clarify the Witness by loosening identification with the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that enmesh our being without entirely defining it.

So I’m rinsing the beets, minding my own business, vaguely enjoying the cool water washing away the moist and pungent mud, when my “I” suddenly rockets like a SciFi space elevator into the highest, most barren and serene realms of Witness consciousness. I became the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher..., a bootstrapping eensy-weensy spider of observer and observation that shed layers of identification as it flip-flopped up the water spout into ever more rarified levels of subjectivity, until there was not much left.

What did this feel like? The analogy that arose most forcefully a few moments later, when I was able to reflect again, was of some sea-farer’s spyglass rapidly being drawn open, an action which extends the reach of the eye even as it, in some sense, increases the distance between the eye and the surface medium where the world inscribes its traces. My eye, my I, was now peering into my experience from Olympian climes.

It’s tough to describe what this new I felt like without leaning on mystic rhetoric, which I really don’t want to do because it sounds like bullshit, and my experience was anything but bullshit to me. One thing is for sure: there was nothing particularly human in it. It felt like a being, but it had no attributes I can really name other than awareness and perception. It felt like diamond, like hard serenity, a clear and crystalline meta-mind that was both individual and, in some ungrokkable, transpersonal way, collective. And ever so slightly amused.

There was a soft but implacably unemotional quality as well, a passionless intelligence I will take the risk of characterizing as “angelic.” I am thinking here of the angels in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, equanimous observers, like long-suffering but interested cosmic shrinks. I also sometimes suspect that my experience may reflect what Thelemite and other Solomonic magicians mean—if they mean anything concrete at all—when they describe the goal of ritual magic as the “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”

Even as I arrived at this adamantine peak, I had also returned downhill, attending to the situation at hand: washing beets in a dappled field on a cool but sunny afternoon. The spacious crystalline entity my mind had become now hovered in infinite approximation to the dude I normally am, watching hands that were no longer exactly “mine” continue to rinse the roots.

At that moment I understood, with an unshakeable clarity, two things: that the causal, billiard-ball flow of the world proceeds absolutely lawfully, and that I suffer because the bright shards of witnessing angelstuff that lie at the root of my being get caught up in attempting to push and pull this procession, to cling and resist and identify.

The word lawful seemed to appear in my mind as the experience unfolded, but it may have popped up shortly thereafter. It’s a funny word. I never use it favorably, for one thing, having a typical lefty counter-cultural prejudice against the law—either religious stricture or the cops or conservative ideals of absolutism and obedience. But that is how I saw our little slice of space-time. As lawful.

Later, as I puzzled over this somewhat odd word, I recalled that one of the meanings of dharma is law. Maybe not law in the sense of the law of karma or the four noble truths or the five amazing thises or the six sobering that’s, but just the way things are. And for those brief moments, the way things are was not causing me the slightest bit of tension or pain, unlike, I could see, pretty much the rest of the time, when the double-binds of agency, choice, and desire set me at cross purposes to the flow.

In the final movement of the experience, I looked up from my hands in the basin towards a row of pine trees and eucalyptus that fringed the edge of the field. This was the universe: the wind moving slowly through the branches. I remember being startled, even at the time, that everything still moved. Despite the extraordinary otherness of my perception, time seemed to mosey along at its usual pace.

Except not so usual, because everything was light and surface and dancing, like sunlight reflecting on an inland sea, like mist in the morning, like Vegas (or the playa) at night. The wind, the leaves, the dappled light, the eucalyptus scent, it all vibrated with a consistency and dynamic togetherness I can only compare to a symphony, and like music it seemed to be fundamentally incorporeal, diaphanous, all void of substance, of that inertial stuff that gravity drags down. It was marvelous, beautiful, bittersweet, and just the way things are.

Then, about maybe thirty seconds after it had begun, the cosmic boomerang was back. I slipped on the heavy duds of good ole anxious and horny me, finished up with the beets, and shuffled back to the zendo for the next period of sitting, more dazed than confused.

Nothing even remotely similar has happened to me in the years since, though I sometimes get a gnostic whiff of the angel hovering over my shoulder. I could try to say more about the experience, about how it changed and, mostly, did not change me, but this little tale will have to do. I’ll say this though: even if what happened to me was a neural hiccup, then I know, in the way we know the mad unions of love, that we carry something cosmic within us, that the self is a doorway to another Self, and that death just might swallow us in glory after all.

I realize it's not particularly sporting to take swipes at rock stars who can't seem to get their lives under control, but then there's our unofficial DoseNation heroes, Queens of the Stone Age, who recently snuck a little bit of Amy Winehouse's hit song "Rehab" into their drug-soaked anthem "Feel Good Hit of the Summer":

Before charging into their own song's climax, the band paused as Homme told the sold out audience: "They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said 'no, no, no'... because that's the kind of guy I am, baby. Rehab? We could hang out on Thursday, but I'm so busy. I'm so busy with with... nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol. We could hang out on Friday, but then there's the..." as Homme then burst into the song's refrain, loudly shouting "C-c-c-c-c-cocaine!"

Teehee!

This sounds like my kind of mayhem: run around the streets of San Francisco, film crew in tow, and attempt to get people to skip work and head out on an impromptu pub crawl:

The eight-hour Pied Piper of Booze project kicked off Tuesday morning in San Francisco, with folk singer-songwriter Colin Stuart starring in the title role and attempting to entice onlookers to join in a citywide booze crawl. A film crew is documenting the tipsy traveler's exploits, uploading video and photographs to microblogging service Zannel (think Twitter, but with photo and video capabilities).

Armed with just his charm, a guitar and his self-described "over-the-top exuberance," the success of Stuart's pub crawl depends on his ability to recruit participants, both on the street and online, who are willing to ditch work and pick up a pint glass.

Anyone who goes by the name "Pied Piper of Booze" is clearly playing on the right team, even if the whole thing wound up getting "microblogged" or whatever the fuck.

Anyone planning on going to the 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference early next month in New Orleans? If so, please drop us a line; we'd love to have some on the ground impressions.

In the neighborhood? Here's some of what's on the agenda:

The 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference will address a wide range of policy, legal, political and scientific issues including:

* Drug Sentencing Reform
* Treatment
* Drug Testing
* Race and the Drug War
* Marijuana
* HIV, Hep C and Overdose Prevention
* International Developments
* Drug Education
* Entheogens-Science, Spirituality and Law
* Alternatives to Prohibition
* Pragmatic Steps for Ending the Drug War