Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who made Ken Kesey’s parties the Acid Tests. It was Owsley who made 300,000 hits for the Human Be-In. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon. And certainly not least, it was Owsley who originally financed, inspired, amplified and dosed the great American rock band, the Grateful Dead (more about that in a bit).

On Tuesday evening my father, Jonathan, sent me an e-mail about Owsley and what it was like to be present at the epicenter of a cultural revolution.

“Owsley Stanley,” my dad wrote. “Didn’t know his first name was Owsley. Just knew that the first few hits of acid were called Owsley. Went with friends to the Fillmore West to see Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, or so I was told. They laughed when I told them that I didn’t know who she was. Had just started U.C. Berkeley and had taken an Alternative Course in creative writing and another course on Gandhi. Dropped the Acid and well what is time and space anyway. The second hit of Owsley was back in Santa Monica where I walked a stairway to the clouds above, or was in the process of doing that when gentle hands pulled me back from the cliff. Rainbow Bubbles streaming across the room from the sounds of the Grateful Dead.”

There was certainly a dark side to the 1960s drug culture. But many people, including my father, considered LSD positively transforming.

[Thanks Mason!]

By the time David*, 35, showed up at his urologist's office in need of bladder enlargement surgery, it had been two years since he first experienced problems urinating. Coincidentally, it was also three years since he started taking ketamine regularly at nightclubs after work.

The memories from last year are still fresh in his wife's mind. "At the time, his condition was really bad. He was constantly in pain, he could not eat, and he was not able to urinate, although he felt like going to the toilet all the time," Sally* explains. "He could barely function, let alone go to work."

David's symptoms were a result of a damaged and shrunken bladder -- a condition doctors are increasingly starting to notice in people who use ketamine regularly since reports first surfaced in Canada and Hong Kong in 2007.

A new legal high has emerged that seems to be replacing the banned substance mephedrone or "miaow miaow," warns a critical care paramedic in Emergency Medicine Journal.

The new drug in circulation is "ivory wave," also known as "purple wave," "ivory coast," or "vanilla sky." And its use has already been implicated in hospital admissions and deaths in various parts of England, says the author.

Ivory wave is usually sold online as bath salts in packets of between 200 and 500 mg, for 15 pounds a pop. It can be snorted or swallowed.

"Whether or not this drug in fact contains illegal ingredients is as yet unclear," writes the author from the Southeast Coast Ambulance Service. "The drug's effects are concerning, however, and have been seen in patients in Lothian, Cumbria, Dorset and Essex."...

Ivory wave can contain the stimulant methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and the anaesthetic lignocaine, analysis has shown. But there doesn't seem to be any "set" recipe, says the author, so it can vary enormously in content. MDPV can have effects in doses as low as 5 mg.

Ivory wave's reported effects include initial euphoria, with other symptoms occurring up to a day after using, and lasting as long as a week.

Now doesn't that sound safe and recreational for kids?

[Thanks Sam Hell!]

The hardback edition of 'Freud on Coke' by David Cohen is due to be published on the 31 March 2011. Writer and filmmaker David Cohen has previously published works such as Home Alone (2010) and The Escape of Sigmund Freud (2009), and while the latter dealt with one of Freud's so-called 'secret histories', this offering deals with another; Freud's use of cocaine and its influence on his most famous work 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1899).

David Cohen justly describes Freud on Coke as "half history, half polemic", which is a fair self-declaration about the book, for Cohen does not try to hide what feels like his dislike for the man. However, Freud's theories certainly hold some weight with the author for they are utilised in his analysis: "Any attempt to understand Freud has to confront the fact that he was, at times, a master of denial. The great unanswered question is whether he was aware of that aspect of himself" (Cohen 27). This illustrates how Cohen uses psychoanalytic method to analyse Freud himself – was he in denial? – there is a seduction of his theory involved; as a measure of the man.

I think this is what a typical work day for Scotto is like.

A couple hallucinating from bath salts nearly cut their 5-year-old daughter with the knives they were using to stab “the 90 people living in the walls” of their apartment, police said...

West Pittston patrolman Leonard Lombardo said he responded to the couple’s apartment at 3:19 a.m. Saturday “for a report of 90 people living in the walls.” He... said the adults were holding knives and other knives were on the floor.

Hospodar and Sutton “exhibited extremely paranoid behavior,” said Lombardo in the affidavit of probable cause to support the charges filed against them. Each one said the other was on bath salts, according to the affidavit.

Update: Forgot to mention that 'Bath Salts' is false marketing terminology for designer stimulants, like MDPV.

A highly hallucinogenic and potentially lethal legal drug was recovered from the vehicle of two Warren County men who were discovered dead in the Allegheny National Forest on Thursday.

According to law enforcement officials, officers recovered drug paraphernalia, including spoons, hypodermic needles and a marijuana pipe, along with empty containers of "bath salts" and a partially filled container.

Bath salts, which can be purchased in corner stores, truck stops and on the Internet, are similar in nature to amphetamines when ingested or otherwise introduced to the blood stream...

On Friday, Warren County Coroner Jeremiah Borden ruled both deaths as accidental, saying Johnson and Sumrow died of hypothermia due to exposure to the elements.

The supposition here is that they froze to death while high on bath salts. They were reportedly missing for two weeks. Let this be a lesson to you all; being high does not make you impervious to the elements.

Been a rough news week for designer drugs. Ouch.

Police reportedly arrested this evening a suspect in connection with the mass overdose of a synthetic drug that left one man dead and 10 others hospitalized in Blaine, Minn.

The group took the drug during a spring-break party at the home of one of the hospitalized boys. The other victims fled the residence and were suffering the effects of the overdose at separate locations before authorities found them and took them to three different hospitals. Two hospitals had released all but one of the overdose victims by early Friday afternoon, the third hospital did not provide an update on its victims, said police.

The hallucinogenic drug is also known as "Europa" and, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, "Tootsie," a play of its chemical name, "Two"-"C"-"E." Officials say the drug was ordered on the Internet.

The drug is illegal. It is an analog, or a close chemical cousin, of 2C-B, a controlled substance that is legally available only to registrants such as researchers, chemists or certain doctors; it is illegal for anyone else to have it.

Because the DEA identifies it as an analog of a controlled substance, 2C-E is also technically illegal.

Bath salts that can produce a methamphetamine-like high when ingested would be outlawed under a bill passed Thursday by the Kansas Senate.

Bath salts containing cathinones, which were being legally sold in the state, have been linked to recent cases of addiction and suicide.

The Senate's version, a substitute for HB 2049, also addresses synthetic marijuana, known as K-3.

Last year, the Kansas Legislature banned a synthetic type of marijuana called K-2, only to find dealers altering the drug just enough to skirt the law, said Sen. Vicki Schmidt, a Topeka Republican...

Schmidt said. "Law enforcement has noticed an increase in activity with these drugs and we needed to address it."

Louisiana, Florida and North Dakota already have bans for these types of bath salts.

And in New Jersey;

Diane Parisio of Cranford said Tuesday that she believes her son William was under the influence of the salts around the time authorities allege he killed his longtime girlfriend, Pamela Schmidt, at his Greaves Place home. Both the victim and her alleged killer were students at Rutgers University.

New Jersey Press Media newspapers broke the story Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, Assembly Deputy Speaker John McKeon, D-Essex, and Stender announced the pending legislation, which would make it a third-degree crime punishable by three to five years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines to manufacture, distribute or possess products containing mephedrone or methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

"I think because it sounds so innocuous -- 'bath salts'-- it's hard to believe," Stender said Wednesday from her Scotch Plains office. "But we're trying to stay two steps ahead of the criminals." Stender noted that the penalties proposed in the legislation, which she said has been in the works for nearly two months, would be similar to those imposed against the manufacture, distribution or possession of so-called "daterape" drugs such as gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and benzodiazepines.

How many permutations of molecular jiggering do we need to go through before we all realize this whole brain-hacking game is absolutely crazy.

One teen died and 10 teenagers and young adults were hospitalized Thursday after an apparent mass overdose on a designer hallucinogen at a suburban Minneapolis home, authorities said.

Investigators said the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has identified the drug as 2C-E. It appeared the hallucinogen, which is sometimes known on the street as "Europa" and has no approved medical use, was legally ordered over the Internet for a spring break party, said Paul Sommer, a commander in the Anoka County Sheriff's Office.

A 19-year-old Coon Rapids man, whose name was not immediately released, died hours after officers responded to reports of an overdose at the house in Blaine, investigators said. Officers found several people there who were ill shortly after midnight. Others who fled the house were later found to also be suffering the effects of an overdose.

Eleven people ranging in age from 16 to 21 were taken to area hospitals. Two remained hospitalized in critical condition late Thursday afternoon. They allegedly took the substance at a party hosted by one of the boys, who is now hospitalized.

Although rare, a handful of deaths have been reported on drugs similar to 2C-E around the country since 2000.

Update: A recent Reuters article lists the substance as 2C-I, as do most media reports today. But an AP article states:

However, officials caution that they have not yet received confirmation from the state crime lab of what compound was ingested.