In case you don't follow our comments (which, why the hell not?), one of our readers, Aumdoc, has provided a great account of his experience administering atropine & scopolamine smoking cessation treatment:

I have experience administering atropine/scopolamine injections for nicotine addiction. I took the job at the clinic two days a month to make some additional income. I found out about the clinic because my dear friend, S, was successful quitting smoking through the clinic. I had watched S literally torment himself for 2 years trying to quit smoking. Every method he could try he did... patches, Zyban, cold turkey... all without success. It wasn't really his trying to quit that got to me; it was more the self recrimination when he failed.

S has quite an interest in plants, especially those with a history of psychotropic human interaction. Among the many cactii on his back deck there are many tree daturas in pots with beautiful trumpet flowers. He loves those plants. To both him and me it seems no small coincidence that he ended up quitting using alkaloids found in these plants (and others as well; brugmansia & jimson weed come to mind). He was assisted by his plant allies.

Whenever one reads about "recreational (!?!)" use of these plants on Erowid, the reports almost always end with uncontrolled bizarre behavior that usually calls the attention of authorities. Dosing from the plant source is very unpredictable and overdosing seems common with trouble that follows. These plants are used in indigenous shamanic settings as admixtures in ayahuasca or smoking mixtures. I think the indigenous shamans have a better handle on how to use them than the average American drug user.

I was so impressed by S's success that when I needed a few days extra work each month I contacted the clinic. Now S kids me about shooting "Datura Darts". In this therapy the individual is screened medically (history and physical, EKG, pulmonary function tests) to make sure they are a safe candidate for the therapy. They then receive injection therapy, with specific weight-based doses of atropine and scopolamine, to provide anticholinergic effects on nicotine receptors. Once processed through the clinic (they watch videos and receive behavioral counseling) they continue scopolamine and atropine orally for 2 weeks.

We discuss that these are not new medications and have been and are used in many different ways in medicine.

Patients routinely have a "big experience" with the shots.... meaning they feel something... ("ooooooooooooo this must be powerful medicine if it makes me feel this way")... I can't help but feel this has something to do with the effectiveness of the method. I tell people what to expect from the shots: "You may feel dizzy or lightheaded and off balance; your pupils will dilate making lights bright and it difficult to focus (like coming out of the eye doctors); you will have a very dry mouth; it is most common for people to be sedated and fall asleep on the ride home; it is very common for people to describe feeling stoned, drunk or intoxicated. Some people like it and some don't. Often times people look drunk as they walk out of the clinic."

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Apparently Archie comics used to run a regular feature where readers wrote in with their thoughts, their dreams, their goals, their insights... in the hopes of winning up to ten dollars American. For some reason, the weirdos at WMFU's Beware of the Blog have been running a selection of these letters. A recent post highlighted letters on the topic of drugs; they're just so charming, these young drug warriors in training. A sampling:

Dear Archie:

We have a very large problem to confront - DRUGS!!! So many people make the mistake of taking drugs and that mistake takes many lives. Even if you take drugs for the first time, you may get hooked or addicted. Whether you try marijuana, pills, or alcohol, the results can be very dangerous. They can kill you! People who sell drugs are known as "pushers" and they will tell you that drugs are great, but do not believe them ... I would like to tell all the Archie readers that the decision is theirs, but if you value your life, you will "SAY NO TO DRUGS!"

Stephani Anderson
Altadena, CA

Of course, BOTB points out, "Stephani's letter ends with a surprising 'Libertarian' turn as she reminds Archie fans that 'the decision is theirs.'" Everyone knows the decision is the government's! Anyway, it's always good to see that the promise of a cash prize can motivate people to spread the word about the evils of drugs.

One of our agents in the field pointed us to this exciting new development in the war on drugs: $15 billion worth of it is being outsourced to military contractors, including the ever notorious Blackwater USA:

“This gives us the opportunity to bid on this work,” said Linda Hartwig, an ARINC spokesperson. “We don’t have a lot of details yet, but we do know that this is an expansion of what [the U.S] is already doing to fight drug trafficking, and that 80 percent of the work will be overseas.”

Hartwig said the other participating vendors are defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, and security contractor Blackwater USA. Blackwater confirmed its participation, but the other vendors did not respond to inquiries.

The vendors will compete for a series of task orders covering a wide range of products and services. These could include anti-drug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems, and in-field support.

I'm having a hard time parsing my own reaction to this news. I guess it shouldn't come as any surprise that the war on drugs can actually get demonstrably worse by some significant measure. I guess.

Since posting my two-part exploration of the Great Prank of 2007, I have had a number of thoughtful and substantial email exchanges and conversations, mostly with DPW folks. Larry Harvey also gave me a buzz. Inevitably, these conversations gave me new perspectives and fresh insights on this complex, multilayered affair.

The most significant ethical issue remains the issue of risk to human life. According to Harvey, there were not only people beneath the structure when the man was set aflame, but some people who were kinda out of it and needed active assistance from the Rangers who had entered the structure beneath the burning figure—Rangers Harvey considers heroes. The deeper question, then, is this: if we still want Burning Man to be a dangerous place, what sort of danger is desirable and what sort is not (and how you enforce the difference)? Epiphany Heiermann, who had herself been injured from an aggressively dangerous prank at a regional burn, wrote the following to me:

I think burn events should be more dangerous. I think people need a space where they can challenge themselves, put themselves in danger and push their boundaries. But it is not okay for people to put others in danger because they think it's fun, and they feel that others need their boundaries pushed. It's akin to giving somebody LSD without telling him/her that you are going to do it.

The LSD analogy is quite apt. Still, the lingering chaos question remains: if you find that you have ingested LSD you were not made of aware of, or been injured in a wayward prank that was not individually targeted at you, how do you respond? What sorts of authorities do you invoke to step in? And how does a community deal with the sort of abusive people who get off on exploiting these very ambiguities?

These are complex questions, and they ride that important line between community mores and legal categories. Epiphany believes that the lack of response from the organizers of the regional in question "came from trying to hold onto an idealized anarchist image of their event where everybody gets all the freedom they want." "Anarchy" too can become an easy dodge.

Another one of my impressions that stirred some response was that the rebuilding of the man was an utterly prosaic act beyond the camaraderie experienced by the build crew itself. But there was more poetry than met the eye, or my eye anyway. According to one email, the carpenters took the lowest 'rib' of the burnt man and used it for the new man; other chunks were handed out to folks who were close to the event, including the Ranger who caught the perp. The build crew also took a panel that was scorched, carved out a silhouette of a phoenix and used it for the new man's face. According to Harvey, the biggest act of poetry was the build crew's insistence that they reconstruct the man on the white-out-plagued playa rather than from the safety and relative comfort of the Ranch. The rebuild itself was a performance of commitment.

Another great drug story from New Zealand. File this under "Technology at work for you":

Teenage girls are offering sex for drugs on social networking website Bebo, police say.

Officers said teenagers were using the site to find drug dealers and offer sexual favours in exchange for alcohol and drugs, The Nelson Mail reported today.

Nelson Youth Aid officer Constable Kathy Pomfrett said that while most teenagers used Bebo safely and like a chatroom, a growing number were using it to trade in sexual favours.

Miss Pomfrett said teenage girls are putting nude photos of themselves on the site and offering a range of sexual favours in return for alcohol and drugs ranging from cannabis to methamphetamine.

Isn't free trade a wonderful thing?

A while back, I posted about an Erowid experience report in which a kid's LSD trip kind of went haywire after watching an old science fiction movie called "Message From Space." By the sounds of it, at some point the movie took on a sinister turn for the intrepid tripper:

At some point it dawned on me – this wasn’t a movie called “Message from Space”. This WAS a real message from space. It was something that beings “out there” have been trying to tell us humans all along, and I was only now getting it. It was a profound essay on creation, birth, and death that I could barely grasp.

The sad news, along with their statement, was that it was time for all of us earthlings to die.

Mayhem followed, including a whole mess of delusional behavior, and I remarked at the time:

This experience report makes clear the value of having an experienced sitter on hand; if just three hits of LSD can cause such psychological turbulence, it's worth having someone on hand who can remind you that, no, it really was just a crappy Japanese sci fi movie.

One of our readers, Legitimo, responded to that post with the following comment:

An experienced sitter? I think an experienced *guide* would be much better. It seems to me taking LSD just to watch crappy sci-fi movies is like making fire with books, it works, but that just isn't the best use for a book....

I mean if you are going to be in a highly suggestible state wouldn't it make sense to be VERY careful with what stimuli you choose for the experience? Anyone who has been in a legitimate session with a real traditional professional and has been "suggested" into deep stuff knows there is just no comparison. After that you can't really go back to party, laughs and giggles, it just seems... I don't know, kids stuff?

Legitimo posted a link in that comment to a YouTube video, part of the phenomenon of kids videotaping themselves getting high and posting it on the net. In this case, the kids are apparently ingesting ayahuasca. The effects have yet to come on, and at some point, they wind up discussing methods to distract themselves from the onset of nausea; one person suggests watching The Simpsons.

WMFU's Beware of the Blog brought to our attention an insane old movie called It Takes Two To Skidoo, an Otto Preminger "comedy" that sounds like a demented sliver of weird:

An "acid comedy" with Jackie Gleason as an ex-mobster who hates hippies, Carol Channing stripping down to her underwear, Groucho Marx in his final film role as "God", a score from Harry Nilsson, an acid-tripping prison where the guards see naked football players and dancing garbage cans, and cameos from Frankie Avalon, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Frank Gorshin, George Raft, and Slim Pickens...to name a few.

I'm embedding a YouTube clip of Gleason's acid trip, although if you follow the link through to the actual Beware of the Blog post, they're hosting their own version of the same clip with a few extra minutes tacked on to the beginning for, uh, "context." Preminger and Marx are both said to have experimented with LSD as some form of preparation for this film (Paul Krassner would later document Marx's experiment in his article "My Acid Trip with Groucho"). It's always interesting to me to see what filmmakers come up with to try to express aspects of psychedelic experiences, but honestly, the floating head of Groucho Marx on a screw would never particularly have occurred to me. If you're in the mood for more, YouTube has got huge chunks of the movie up right now; dig it!

In case you missed it, Boing Boing recently came across a TV news piece about the evils of scopolamine. One of their readers summarized the piece:

This stuff is as close to pure evil as it gets, a tiny amount of the powder administered to the victim causes one of two effects, a) death, or b) complete loss of free will. Criminals are usually hoping for the latter, as it enables them to tell victims to empty their bank accounts, give away their car, perform sex acts, basically whatever the criminal dictates.

This is where Scopolamine has got its reputation as the "zombie drug", victims appear completely sober and rational, but they're really just automatons.

Xeni goes on to describe scopolamine's use treating motion sickness, and the comments thread that follows is pretty spirited. But nowhere do I see any mention of scopolamine's use as a smoking cessation agent. I heard about this from some friends on the east coast who were pretty enthusiastic about it, although it also sounded a little on the zany side. Here's one description of the treatment:

Atropine and scopolamine combination therapy: Some smoking cessation clinics offer a program using shots of the anticholinergic drugs atropine and scopolamine to help reduce nicotine withdrawal symptoms. These drugs are more commonly prescribed for other reasons, such as digestive system problems, motion sickness, or Parkinson’s disease.

The treatment usually involves shots given in the clinic on one day, followed by a few weeks of pills and wearing patches behind the ear. It may include other drugs to help with side effects as well.

Possible side effects of this treatment can include dizziness, constipation, dry mouth, an altered sense of taste and smell, problems urinating, and blurry vision. People who are pregnant or have a history of heart problems, glaucoma, or uncontrolled high blood pressure are not allowed to participate in these programs.

Some clinics claim high success rates, but there is no published scientific research to back up these claims. Both atropine and scopolamine are FDA approved for other uses, but they have not been formally studied or approved for help in quitting smoking. Before considering such a program, you may want to ask the clinic about long-term success rates (up to a year). Because these medicines are directed only at the physical aspect of quitting, you may also want to ask if the program includes counseling or other methods aimed at the psychological aspects of quitting.

Maybe some of you who have undertaken this program would care to chime in?

Salon recently reviewed a couple of books on the history of methamphetamine. That's not exactly my favorite topic, so I won't necessarily be digging into these tomes, but the review does do a great job of summarizing the subject matter in a quick and easy to digest fashion. Ah, the intertubes - continuing to substitute for actual substance. At any rate, check it out for such interesting tidbits as:

When the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act finally went into effect in 1989, its impact was muted. Like the mythical hydra, the meth industry almost immediately sprouted new and improved means of manufacture, through the Mexican drug cartels that wrested distribution from long-established U.S. sources such as the Hell's Angels. Factories as far away as India, Pakistan, China and the Czech Republic began shipping tons of ephedrine powder to facilities south of the U.S. border. Owen writes, "'The Mexicans do it so simply, so quickly, and their network is so mobile and tight that they can make meth today and have it sold in the Midwest tomorrow,' a top official from California's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement told the Los Angeles Times in 1995." Even more troubling, Mexican ice is rumored to be 98 percent pure, rather than the 20 percent to 80 percent found in most home-manufactured meth.

Mmm... 98 percent pure. Apparently when one of the authors actually gets a chance to try the 98 percent pure stuff, it turns out to be quite a revelation:

"Right from the first line, I could tell this was as different from the old biker meth I used to do as the biker meth was from the adulterated amphetamine sulfate of my teenage years." His experiment turns into a sleepless, five-day hallucination that involves wild sex with floating holograms and the appearance of FBI agents who accuse him of aiding terrorists. When he comes to, he muses that "the fantasy elements were so seamlessly intertwined with reality, I had spent the last four days living in a David Cronenberg movie and I couldn't tell the difference."

Yowsa!