Everyone knows that the MP3 revolution killed the album, which makes the whole idea of a "concept album" seem like a thing of the past. This in turn makes the idea of a concept album about a thing of the past, in this case Altamount, even more retro than it might have been. As it turns out, this 2004 release by Australian band Black Cab is a great listen top to bottom and certainly follows the loose narrative of events at Altamount for its inspiration, but it's going to sound just fine on shuffle I'm sure. From the album Altamount Diary.

More rumblings from Amsterdam about how officials want to clean up the city's image, this time by requiring a three-day waiting period before buying magic mushrooms - which is a little bit better than the hysterical shriekings we heard earlier this summer about a complete ban, but not as a good as, say, having mushrooms hand-delivered to your hotel along with a gigantic spliff.

After a spate of injuries to tourists jumping from hotel balconies, [Mayor] Cohen wants to force buyers of magic mushrooms to give three days’ notice in person. Gos Kamsma, who manages a back-alley “smart shop” selling a range of hallucinogenic fungi, said that the measure would only increase criminality. “It will affect me for sure because most tourists come on Friday so they won’t be able to buy mushrooms. But the dealers on the street will be the winners. They will sell it straight away.”

Of course, with such a clear connection between magic mushrooms and jumping off hotel balconies, one wonders if there isn't something particularly dangerous about these balconies - but I guess the hotel lobby isn't about to let their balconies be criminalized, and so innocent mushrooms have to suffer. It's just a shame. At any rate, get your vacation to Amsterdam on before the inevitable march of progress turns that city into just another quaint little town with no actual charm (and a lot less drugs and prostitution).

As crack cocaine sentencing disparities wend their way slowly toward the consideration of reform, Slate takes a good look at the myths that underpinned the disparities in the first place, and the turning point in how judges approached sentencing.

First, the myths and their resulting disparities:

Relying on a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the commission noted that crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically identical and produce "the same physiological and subjective effects." The harm associated with prenatal exposure to the drugs is also the same, and both crack and powder are significantly less damaging in this regard than previously thought. Recent data also indicate that only 10 percent of crack offenses involve violence, and that use of the drug never reached the epidemic proportions that were so often claimed.

What's more, the 1980s laws failed to achieve the additional aim of locking up major drug traffickers. The sentencing commission reported recently that only about one-third of crack offenders are high-level operators. The overwhelming majority are street dealers, couriers, and lookouts. Meanwhile, harsh crack penalties disproportionately affect minorities. Of the 25,000 federal defendants sentenced for crack offenses over the past five years, about 80 percent were black.

And the turning point:

In 2005, the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Booker changed the entire federal sentencing landscape. Before Booker, federal sentencing guidelines were mandatory. Trial judges had to follow them, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Booker chucked mandatory application of the guidelines as an unconstitutional incursion on the right to trial by jury. As a remedy, the Supreme Court restyled the guidelines as "advisory." Courts must now consider them when determining sentences, but they can also consider any other reliable and relevant information.

And that's precisely what courts are doing. Trial judges are testing the limits of the law by refusing to sentence crack defendants to prison terms that comport with the 100-to-1 ratio. As justification, they're relying on Booker to consider the sentencing commission's findings in its multiple reports to Congress, which essentially say that the 100-to-1 ratio overstates the seriousness of crack offenses and misrepresents the harmfulness of the drug as compared to powder cocaine.

Uh.... you think?

Uh oh - you may have heard that the Canadian dollar reached parity with the American dollar recently. Among the casualties of this strange news: pot prices.

A stronger loonie -- so called for the bird engraved on the one dollar coin -- has cut the profit of selling potent "B.C. Bud" marijuana in U.S. markets at a time when producers in Canada struggle with tighter border security and competition in the United States with pot from other sources.

Top quality Canadian pot is selling for $3,500 (1,725 pounds) a pound in the United States, compared with C$2,400 (1,180 pounds) in domestic markets, according to Emery, who is also editor of Cannabis Culture magazine and fighting extradition to the United States.

I guess it's not too late for all you Canadian pot dealers to go into cocaine distribution. Apparently some crack downs in Mexico have affected the supply in America (and consequently the price), although I wouldn't burn the farm just yet:

A gram of pure cocaine cost $118.70 from April to June, up 24 percent from the $95.89 reported for the previous three months, Walters said, citing figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Steven Karch, a forensics expert in Berkeley, Calif., said he had not seen the price figures Walters cited but was skeptical about the decline in supply.

"I hope they're right. Every time we hear this, it turns out to be business as usual," said Karch, author of a series of books on drugs and drug abuse, including "A Brief History of Cocaine."

Mmm... business as usual.

File under: Things to do on LSD.

Police say a University of Colorado student was sexually assaulted in a dorm room by a naked man who apparently took LSD before shedding his clothes and running around the campus.

Nude tripping is a such a popular occurrence, I hear at least one "naked guy on acid" story a year. I can already guess what this guy will say when he comes down: "I kept telling everyone I was Jesus, but the clothes confused people, so I took them off. Clothes are like, so phony man."

File under: Yikes!

CDEX Inc. has developed a device which can instantly detect trace amounts of meth.

Right now it's being tested in Greenlee County, northeast of Tucson.

"When you pull the trigger, UV light comes out of the lamps," says Wade Poteet, the principal scientist behind the scanner.

In an instant the scanner knows if a substance is meth or not. It detects traces of the drug down to one tenth of one millionth of a gram on clothes, skin, and other surfaces.

The sheriff's department showed us how it works on real meth seized as evidence.

"Just point and shoot. Keep it simple," Sexton says.

Big pharma just can't seem to catch a break. Take for instance Bristol-Myers Squibb and its wholly owned subsidiary, Apothecon, Inc. These noble companies have been strong-armed into paying over $515 million to resolve civil charges regarding their drug marketing and pricing practices. Is this story even serious? Since when can a drug company be held liable for lavishing MDs with gifts and freebies in order to promote off-label prescriptions of powerful anti-psychotics to kids and old people? I mean, come on, this is business 101. If you can't find more psychotic patients to feed your anti-psychotics to, you need to "invent" a market of senile old people and depressed kids to push them on. I mean, these pills aren't gonna sell themselves. Let's be real.

This will happen to you.

For those of you who think you're so hip and cool snorting ketamine, I've got news for you: That shit has its own patent now!

Javelin Pharmaceuticals said it has been granted a commercially important US patent, enabling protection of its intranasal ketamine drug candidates into 2023.

Fred Mermelstein, president and founder, said: "Upon approval, PMI-150 will be the only intranasal ketamine product offering physicians and patients a non-opioid alternative for treatment of moderate to severe pain. It will be well-suited for both civilian and military use in medically supervised settings."

Damn straight, yo! Snorting ketamine is now considered "Intellectual Property" until 2023, so remember to kick back a few bucks to Javelin Pharmaceuticals every time you blow a bump, and be sure to call it "PMI-150" instead of "Special K", that's the new slang, for real.

You've probably never heard of it, but your children undoubtedly have, and you can bet they know more than they're telling you about a dangerous new drug called 2T-C-special-G.