An aging ex-hippie reports on how his experience knee-deep in the Summer of Love set him on a quest for a different kind of spirituality later in life:

October 1967: The "Death of Hippie" celebration. We wheeled an empty, open coffin down San Francisco's Haight Street and thousands of people threw symbolic items into it -- beads, swatches of long hair, patchouli-scented incense, tabs of LSD.

For me, the burial of the media-created concept of "hippie" -- exactly 40 years ago -- signaled the end of the "Summer of Love" and the beginning of a new phase: looking for ways to recreate, without drugs, those intense, life-changing experiences I'd had.

During the next few years, I, like many others -- including lots of Jews -- embarked on a search. I breathed deeply at yoga ashrams, meditated at Buddhist retreats and lived in communities where I hoped to be spiritually nourished. If these places had at their core a faith that was alien to me, it didn't matter. What mattered was whether or not they brought me closer to what I was looking for: wonder, mystery, connection....

For me, the itch for mystery and connection never waned. At 67, I find myself still yearning for a real-life place of stories and myths that reveal life's hidden depths; a place intent on repairing the world and repairing ourselves; a place of music and healing, of connection to others and to something larger than ourselves. A place where I would feel my soul resonate, where I could experience a current version -- a Jewish version -- of that individual and communal joy I remember from 40 years ago.

Warning: this article contains an intelligent, in-depth analysis of this individual's approach to his evolving Jewish faith. If you're one of those people who bristles at all things religious or spiritual, this isn't the article for you. But if you're on your own quest, or if, like me, you're simply interested in good descriptions of other people's mystery quests, then you might just be interested in this lovely piece.

File under: It was too good to last. The Dutch government is banning the sale of all magic mushrooms after a series of high-profile incidents involving drug tourists.

"The problem with mushrooms is that their effect is unpredictable. It's impossible to estimate what amount will have what effect."

Calls for a re-evaluation of the drug grew after a 17-year-old French girl jumped from a building after eating magic mushrooms during a school trip to Amsterdam in March.

Other incidents involving the drug have included an Icelandic tourist jumping from a balcony and breaking both legs and a Danish tourist driving his car wildly through a camping ground, narrowly missing sleeping campers.

Oh those crazy trippers. The ban is supposed to go into full effect within a few months, so get to Amsterdam and start jumping off of balconies while you still can!

[Ed. note: Nowhere Girl is our Polish correspondent; the news articles she quotes within have been translated from Polish news sources. Dig it!]

Whether we want it or not, psychedelics are a part of our culture. A direct psychedelic practice is demonised, labeled as "moral turpitude" and fought with groups of agents versus a citizen's brain; but a static substitute of the experience, a design object with quite clear psychedelic associations, can often be acceptable enough to be even suitable for kids.

Last Sunday I cycled about 8 miles to get to a funfair - I'm childish enough to really enjoy it. I tried a roller coaster simulator: a "box" is moving to give you an impression of riding a real one and inside, in near darkness, a clip shown on a screen presents a ride on a roller coaster in outer space as seen from a passenger's view.

In April (accidentally, very soon after the anniversary of the discovery of LSD) a British art foundation put up a labyrinth made of bright-coloured rubber in a park in front of one of Warsaw's palaces. It became very popular; one had to wait over an hour to enter because "only" 60 people are allowed to be inside at the same time. Press articles add yet more psychedelic flavour to the whole installation...

The labyrinth is quite large: 40 square meters. It has 60 rooms of various shapes where one can feel like being in a magical world, where our clothes change colour and we can hear music being performed live by musicians encountered along the route or played from special loudspeakers.

From the outside the labyrinth resembled a huge honeycomb made of identical colourful modules and wasn't too attractive - just a plastic or rubber inflated toy. That's why the inside was so surprising: the number of rooms with various shapes, nooks and corners, and first of all a blow of bright colour, a different one behind every turn. Parents and children were wandering around the labyrinth, rolling on rounded walls, laying down in small rooms. They all looked like aliens in some town of the future, wearing identical clothes, barefoot, filming the surroundings with mobile phones, as if in a trance.

Of course children liked it best - it's like in the Teletubbies! And I feel like Alice in Wonderland! "It's lovely, I could live here!" the kids were shouting over each other.

In another article, a young woman operating the labyrinth said that "you can feel as if all the colours were painting your skin. It's a magical feeling." Doesn't she sound a bit like a girl named Clair Brush relating her Acid Test experience?

Follow the link to see what OTC recreational drugs would look like in a perfect world... Thanks David (and BilboBarneyBobs)!

I've never seen the movie Half Baked starring Dave Chappelle, but this clip featuring Jon Stewart as an "enhancement weed smoker" certainly rang a bell or two. Anyone care to comment on whether the rest of the movie is as entertaining as this cameo?

Via MilkandCookies.

A couple recent stories highlighted the conflicts of interest inherent in the pharmaceutical industry's current approaches to marketing its wares. In the first case, Congress is starting to consider requiring increased disclosures of the payments that pharmaceutical companies make to doctors:

The drug industry spends an estimated $19 billion a year marketing its wares to physicians, in the form of gifts, speaking fees, classes, trips and meals, according to watchdog groups.

“You ought to know what the relationship is between your doctor and a medical supplier or pharmaceutical company,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, who co-authored the bill with Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.). Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) introduced a similar bill in the House.

If the effect of the disclosures is to reduce industry marketing efforts, Grassley said, “pills will be cheaper.”

The purported problem extends beyond the case of direct marketing to physicians. Slate recently reported on a disturbing connection between the work published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and the amount of advertising and other revenue that drug companies were responsible for:

Just as pharmaceuticals fund studies and pay doctors to give lectures, so too do they buy journal ads and reprints of favorable articles—lots of them. Often a drug company may find one of its products featured in a scientific article while another of its products is dolled up in a high-gloss ad a few pages later. Yet the journals keep quiet about these financial arrangements. When an article is published that shows a specific drug at great advantage, the reader may learn plenty about the author while nothing—absolutely nothing—is disclosed about the medical journal itself.

The public deserves to know about the extent to which every medical journal relies on pharmaceutical advertising revenue to run its business. In 2003, drug companies spent almost half a billion dollars on advertising in medical journals. The two lead general medical journals in the United States—the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association—receive about $18 million and $27 million each year, respectively, for display advertisements (as opposed to classified ads placed by individuals seeking jobs or institutions seeking qualified candidates). The display ads represent 10 percent to 21 percent of the journals' overall revenue, according to one study.

Slate has a semi-regular feature called "Hot Document," and a recent edition showcased a physician's recommendation letter that medical marijuana would be helpful for a California patient's condition:

Below is a one page "physician's statement"—in effect, a prescription, though the text, for legal reasons, disavows that definition—from medicinal cannabis proponent David Bearman, MD, former medical director of the Santa Barbara Regional Health Authority. The patient (whose name Slate removed to protect privacy) will require a "repeat visit in approximately 12 months." The particular medical condition benefiting from "therapeutic use" remains confidential between patient and doctor. Doctor Bearman's statement does not specify whether this patient's symptoms are physical, emotional or cognitive, but notes that "literature supports the medical benefit of cannabis." As a caveat, Dr. Bearman points out that neither the California statute nor his considered medical opinion provides any immunity from U.S. drug laws, which classify marijuana as an illegal Schedule I drug.

That "caveat" is as long as the main body of the recommendation letter itself, featuring a range of gesticulations and contortions to try to stay out of the way of federal liability. Good stuff - click through for the full letter.

Earlier this week, I tried to recall the events in the "psychedelic Olympics," to no avail, but thankfully, Eddie Izzard has his own take on the subject: the "stoned Olympics."

Via MilkandCookies.

Here's a strangely delightful image: an Italian tourist was recently administered an IV drip of 100-proof vodka after a hospital ran out of medicinal alcohol:

The 24-year-old man, who was not named, ingested an antifreeze ingredient, ethylene glycol that causes renal failure. It was believed he was trying to take his life.

Pure alcohol is given in treating the toxic effects of ethylene glycol, but when the hospital ran out of the pharmaceutical-grade, doctors did the next best thing and put the dying man on spirits through a naso-gastric tube.

The drip-feed of vodka equaled out to about three drinks an hour for the three days the man spent in intensive care.

It's this kind of ingenuity that really, truly warms the black hunk of granite currently masquerading as my heart. Plus, it gives me ideas for how to spend my retirement days.

In remarks that will shock approximately no one, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom recently delivered a "ten minute tirade" against the war on drugs:

"If you want to get serious, if you want to reduce crime by 70% in this country overnight, end this war on drugs," he told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. "You want to get serious, seriously serious about crime and violence end this war on drugs."

The mayor maintained local jails are overcrowded with people incarcerated for drug offenses, taking up room that could be used to hold more violent criminal offenders. He said violent criminals with lengthy felony records are being turned loose, too often....

"It's laughable that anyone could look at themselves with a straight face and say 'oh,we're really succeeding.' I mean it's comedy. And as I say, shame on my party, the democratic party, because they don't have the courage of their private thoughts, because we don't want to appear weak on this topic," Newsom said.

It's always nice to see a politician with a national profile of any sort coming out against the war on drugs, even if that politician is the mayor of a city still renowned decades later for its lingering psychedelic afterglow. Of course, Newsom then goes on to backpedal slightly by claiming he's not for legalization:

"I'm not saying (legalization). I'm saying get real about it," he explained. "So what does that mean? Well, it means a lot of things. It means this war on drugs is an abject failure."

Fair enough. "Legalization" has built up negative connotations, as its detractors try to paint the concept with the broad strokes of rampant drug use in the streets and children hopped up on goofballs. However, "legalization" can just as easily mean "regulation," and clearly that's the middle path between drugs available in vending machines and our current situation. It's unclear, then, how helpful Newsom is actually being by simply asking his fellow politicians to "get real about it." Typically getting real involves proposing a solution that could actually work in the real world. Newsom seems to be leaving that part - the hard part - up to someone else.