An extremely well done video documentary on medical marijuana in California, and the DEA's attempts to shut it down. Hosted by Drew Carey? Okay then.

Today I went diving in Hawaii - near Kona on the big island.

While floating along a few feet above myriad patterns of coral I thought how wonderful it would be to be able to return to this world any time I wanted, un-aided by any technology; to be able to plunge into cool blue depths and explore an endless world of interconnected life. A world having at least one extra dimension to the one I am used to.

As washes of cool and cold pass over my body my breath is deep and steady with the rush of compressed air forced into me through my regulator. At a depth of sixty feet every breath contains about five times as much air as I would breath on the surface. From sea level to space air pressure drops off exponentially to zero. From sea level downward it increases linearly. Only on the surface of the planet do I walk on two legs against gravity. Just a short distance above or below, and I float or fall. I feel vaguely disembodied, but my breath reminds me that I am a living thing.

The bulbous, brain-like coral stands mostly rigid, but within the folds is covered with minute teaming life-forms. If the current that urges me along stood still I could expend all my air chasing down the details of one cluster and fail to take in most of it. By changing my depth my field of view dramatically expands to engulf me in the overarching immortal web.

Here and there the coral is dead, like a burn spot on a living brain. It lies all broken up and contains only shades of black and gray. It lies in stark contrast to the living coral around it. Whatever is happening at the edges between the dead and living is too slow for me to see. I don’t know if the spot grows or shrinks. I don’t know if it was caused by disease or inflicted by man, or what it portends if anything.

When I cast my eyes down the steep slope the coral gives way to blue depths. Greater and greater relentless pressure lies that way, rapid consumption of my remaining air, nitrogen narcosis. It is unlike standing on the edge of a cliff because there is no binary decision point. You can always push a little further. Fortunately, I am sane and still love my life, and I have a guide who watches over me.

Back on the boat, the dive master tells innumerable bad jokes. One is something about the accidental swapping of someone’s meds for “cat medicine”. I keep the book I have been reading of late – Karl Jansen’s Ketamine: Dream and Realities – securely in my bag. I missed the punch line.

I saw this image while browsing the latest Erowid announcement. There are many things I could say about this image, but I am mainly struck by how familiar the elements are. Closed-eye tryptamine visuals always give me curved line motifs, mandalas, repeating patterns, and DNA spirals, and this image captures that tryptamine flavor quite well. Reading fully into this image, it implies that DNA is the divine messenger of the creator's will, and that full understanding of this message can be found through meditation and psychedelics. While spiritual in nature, to me it seems more of a meditation on sacred geometry and the way proteins fold and express themselves through time. But that's the materialist view I suppose.

A curious reader writes:

I was interested to learn while reading about the occult studies of Isaac Newton that there are different 'stones' in alchemy, not just the philosopher's. The WikiPedia article mentions an animal stone, a growing stone and a perspective stone. Then I did a search for the origin of the term stoned. It seems no one really knows for sure, and just figures it comes from stone-drunk; meaning drunk and as unresponsive as a stone. But I'm thinking there might be something to this alchemy connection. Perhaps back in the day our ancestors were cooking up actual crack rocks or morphine crystals or who knows what. Or maybe it was just a code word. Either way, keep an eye out for old alchemical stone recipes.

The alchemical stone riddle has been picked apart from so many angles it is impossible to say. However, a stone is essentially any lump of material. A block of slow-release nitrogen fertilizer could be considered a "growing stone," so the whole concept of alchemical stonery comes down to how far you are willing to push the metaphor.

In the old days, "getting stoned" meant being pummeled to death by hurled rocks, not a very fun or pleasing thing. However, if you consider the context of "stoning oneself," then you could take the metaphor to mean the application of a stone to your head with enough force to produce pleasing (though painful) disorientation. I would apply this metaphor also to the term "getting hammered", as if instead of using drugs or alcohol you were actually applying a hammer to your cranium, presumably multiple times to achieve the desired effect. Isaac Newton may have indeed experimented with the hammer-to-the-head technique of occult insight, the most extreme form of which is trepanation, or the cracking of a hole in the skull with a drill or hammer to produce mystical euphoria.

So, in short, it is my estimation that the euphemism of getting stoned applies to the exercise of producing euphoria, inebriation, or disorientation through the application of brute force, such as a swift blow to the head. Now don't laugh, this is a time honored mystical tradition.

SF Weekly is running a great piece on how Fernet-Branca has become a cult phenomenon in the bars of San Francisco. I'd never heard of this peculiar classic before:

As a bitter Italian aperitif of more than 40 herbs and spices, it most often gets compared to Campari and Jägermeister, though by measure of accuracy, it's equally similar to Robitussin or Pennzoil.

Sound appealing? The description of the beverage's taste is no less welcoming:

If you can imagine getting punched squarely in the nose while sucking on a mentholated cough drop, you'll have an idea of Fernet-Branca's indelicate first impressions....

"I thought I was going to die the first time I tasted it," says Antoinette Cattani [the West Coast's Fernet-Branca marketing impresario].... "I thought I was going to die. I actually might have gagged. It was terrible."

Even in the crowd of Fernet zealots her story is standard.

"I have to admit, my first experience was like, 'What the fuck?'" says 26-year-old Becky Licu, who with Cattani co-owns Barfly Promotions, a company that works with Fernet-Branca. "I wasn't prepared for something like that."

But since before Prohibition, Fernet-Branca has enjoyed a carefully cultivated reputation as a miracle aperitif, curing a range of maladies and actually surviving in drug stores during the height of Prohibition (needless to say, it was extremely popular). With the passing of the Drug Regulation Reform Act in 1978, the BATF was forced to step in and demand one of the few changes in the secret recipe of the drink in its history, substantially lowering opiate levels to just a trace amount.

And as for that secret recipe?

But on the ingredients, he has less to offer. "Oh, boy," he says. "Fernet-Branca has in it many wonderful things!"

Precisely which wonderful things has been a closely guarded secret of the Branca family for generations, but it's known that the grape base is infused with aloe, myrrh, chamomile, cardamom, and a hearty offering of saffron, a key ingredient. By accounting for an estimated 75 percent of the world's saffron consumption, the Branca family essentially controls the market price of the spice -- which at about $900 a pound is easily among the most expensive edibles in the world. A spice that also, in great enough quantity, can be made into a little something called MDMA, known to club kids as Ecstasy.

The wonderful things rumored to be in the liqueur include codeine, mushrooms, fermented beets, coca leaf, gentian, rhubarb, wormwood, zedoary, cinchona, bay leaves, absinthe, orange peel, calumba, echinacea, quinine, ginseng, St. John's wort, sage, and peppermint oil. If you ask most self-schooled Fernet authorities to list the 40 ingredients, you'll get 100 certain answers.

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We've previously discussed how ambien helps reactivate certain functionality in brain damaged individuals. The most recent development on that front seems to be that ambien can help stimulate the brain back toward consciousness after slipping into a coma. UPI reports on ongoing research:

A British woman who slipped into a coma six years ago after taking heroin is reportedly regaining consciousness after being given an Ambien-type drug.

Amy Pickard of Hastings was given zolpidem, the drug marketed in the United States under the name Ambien, The Daily Mail reported.

"When she takes the pill, I see her face relax and the old sparkle return to her eyes," her mother, Thelma Pickard said. "It's incredible."... She is one of 360 patients around the world in a trial on using zolpidem for coma patients.

Ambien is marketed as a sleeping pill. But in 1999, a young South African, Louis Viljoen, who had been comatose for five years, was given a pill because he was restless. Instead of going to sleep, he spoke for the first time since he had been hit by a truck.

Exciting stuff. If you need a refresher, James earlier posted a link to a New Scientist article that illuminates some of the existing theory behind findings like these.

If you've ever had one of those "this acid is weak, we'd better take a lot more" experiences and lived to tell the tale, you might appreciate this recent Erowid experience report. Set (where else?) at a Grateful Dead concert, our intrepid narrator scored some unperforated blotter, concluded it was either fake or very weak, and swallowed "ragged chunks the size of postage stamps or matchbooks." As you might expect, hijinks ensued:

It was about this time that I realized, as I looked in the rearview mirror, that I did not know my name or anything at all about myself. I literally had no idea who was staring back at me. Ego death, i believe they call it...It should have been terrifying. Instead it felt wonderfully liberating. It gave me the freedom to concentrate on other, more important things. Things like the sentence I was hearing over and over in my head, drowning out even the buzzing screams of the trees, a sentence not in English or any other earthly tongue but in some older, more primal language. I could never attempt to transcribe it but to this day, if I concentrate, I can hear a faint memory of it. This sentence goes around and around in a vast wheel, a carousel or Ferris Wheel of light, sound and knowledge. This sentence contains every bit of information that has ever been and will ever be known to man and to God. I realized that if I could just figure out where to put the PERIOD, where to make it stop, I could read it out clearly and thus would become the most knowledgeable, powerful being in the universe.

I have no idea for how long I rode this wheel, listening to the sentence repeat and blend and swirl around me, desperately focusing on finding its beginning and end. At some point I realized that if I did not stop, I might never be able to get off of the wheel. Some blessed part of me recognized a potential future life at the Shady Acres Home for the Incurably Psychotic, and forced me to jump off. When I landed it was dark and J and B were gone. There were huge fires raging out in the human wilderness and electric snakes shooting through the sky. I set out again into the chaos, with my name and identity now recovered, and had a blast.

Steven Colbert recently had a few choice words about the rise in the use of absinthe on college campuses throughout the US, coming up with an "Absinthe pledge":

I, state your name, do hereby pledge to practice absinth-tinence by remaining absinth-tinent from Absinthe. Since Absinthe incidents in many instances induce incipient synthetic inspiration and sinister synthetic insistence on sin, I sincerely insist I will be absent from instances of Absinthe ingestion, this instant.

There's a full clip of the video from The Colbert Report in the link.

I stumbled across this book chapter online while looking for something unrelated. Well, maybe a little bit related. It contains a wealth of interesting information about stimulants. For example, amphetamines are fairly highly neurotoxic, but cocaine isn't, even at doses (in animals) up to 250 mg/kg/day. (That would be 25 grams a day for me. Holy shit!) On the other hand, cocaine may be more likely to stop your heart outright, so there's definitely a downside to that.

Also, if you're interested in the mechanism of action of amphetamines:

Amphetamine has several interactive effects on catecholamine release. We will primarily focus on dopamine (DA) as an example. Amphetamine acts in at least three ways: 1) reversal of the DA uptake carrier, 2) interference with uptake into the DA vesicle, and 3) inhibition (at higher concentrations) of monoamine oxidase. The best known mechanism is binding of extracellular amphetamine to the uptake carrier and its transport into the terminal. It is subsequently dissociated into the cytoplasm, while the carrier binds cytosol DA with its transport out of the terminal (66, 169). More recently, a weak base model (208. 209) proposed that amphetamines, as weak bases, redistribute catecholamines from synaptic vesicles to the cytosol by collapsing the vesicle proton gradient that provides free energy for catechol accumulation. Even non-stimulant weak bases work in this model (208). The excess cytosol DA is thought to promote reverse transport of DA via the membrane transporter (i.e., release). Amphetamine-induced release of DA is accompanied by a decrease in DOPAC, an effect thought to be due to a reduction of monoamine oxidase activity by amphetamine. Direct assessment in vivo suggests that MAO inhibition occurs at relatively high amphetamine concentrations (84, 149).

There you have it. Amphetamines are taken up into the presynaptic terminal by the dopamine transporter, where they wreak havoc on the dopamine vesicles and everything else, leading to non-vesicular (i.e. not controlled by the neuron's signalling) release of dopamine. Something similar probably happens with norepinephrine.

The book that this chapter is from has an impressive table of contents. In addition to several dozen chapters on the hard-core neuro side of neuropsychopharmacology, there are chapters devoted to a number of different recreational drugs, such as cocaine, opiates, marijuana, PCP, and others. Almost all the chapters are available online. The sequel is also available online.

This is an amazing wealth of information for anyone interested in the science behind drugs!

Four guys were pulled over in Marysville, CA recently in a stolen truck because the truck didn't have mudflaps. It just so happened that they were watching a DVD on the dash DVD player at the time as well. A DVD that was giving instructions on how to grow and smuggle marijuana without getting caught. Marijuana like the 90lbs they had in garbage bags in the back of the truck. I think they shoulda watched the DVD BEFORE they started a drug smuggling operation, but that's just me.