Before Borat, of course, there was Ali G, a "gangster" character who interviewed unsuspecting folks from all walks of life for comedic effect. In this instance, he's interviewing a "UK official" (identified as a Professor John Henry in the YouTube comments) on the topic of "dangerous drugs" - to pretty comedic effect.

Via MilkandCookies.

In the middle of all the hubbub about increased FDA oversight over the pharmaceutical industry, there's still a weird loophole open that allows doctors to write prescriptions for drugs that haven't even been approved yet, and allows manufacturers to supply these drugs through a seemingly legitimate process:

Every year, doctors write approximately 65 million prescriptions for drugs not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that regulates prescription drugs....

When a pharmaceutical company submits a new drug for approval, the FDA gives it a 10-digit number called a National Drug Code. The FDA provides the number before the drug is approved in order to track it through the approval process. But pharmacies use this same number as an order number that works whether or not the drug is FDA-approved....

"I think most doctors, maybe all doctors, assume that if a medication is on the market, it has been approved by the FDA, it must be safe and effective," American Medical Association President Ron Davis said.

Pharmacists would appear to be no better informed about the status of their drugs. A recent survey showed more than nine out of 10 retail pharmacists didn't know they could be dispensing drugs not yet approved by the FDA.

Apparently the FDA has known about this for, oh, 40 years, but hasn't really bothered to do anything about it until now. Awesome! Have people been killed by taking these unapproved drugs? The FDA's official response is "go away, kid, you're bothering me," but anecdotally, it's clear that certain drugs linked with adverse events (including death) were sold this way.

The best part of this article, of course, is the response of a man who heads up two small pharmaceutical companies, and who thinks the whole thing is overblown:

Malik said he believes concerns about unapproved drugs are overblown. He thinks the FDA's testing procedures are too expensive and cumbersome for small companies like his. And despite the lack of FDA approval, Malik said he's not ashamed of his drugs and believes some of them should be brought back to market.

"I'm a man of integrity," he said. "And I'm morally obligated to give you a product that is good."

Whew! Thank god moral obligation will protect us while the FDA putters around for another 40 years until they get around to plugging up a loophole.

Unfortunately, the FDA will not provide a full list of known unapproved drugs that might be working their way through the system. The article does try to help, though, noting, "Some common unapproved drugs include phenobarbital, an anti-convulsant, and chloral-hydrate, a sedative." So there you go, all you phenobarbital and chloral-hydrate users: the FDA is on your trail... probably... I mean, you know, eventually...

TimesOnline columnist Caitlin Moran put together a pleasingly grumpy rant recently about our society's confused reactions to certain drugs. He's a bit moralistic in tone, but he's also pretty funny and frankly, he does have some interesting (and entertaining) points buried under his curmudgeonly affect.

A primary highlight, on the topic of how the middle class is changing how drugs are sold:

Drug-related charities have been observing some recent, modish shifts in the British consumption of drugs – particularly in cocaine. Apparently, there is now a “two-tier” market in place. You can get cheap, cut, “commercialised” cocaine – perhaps we could refer to it as Lidl coke – for £30 a gram. More affluent customers, meanwhile, go for a much higher quality Peruvian cocaine – or Waitrose cocaine – for £50 a gram.

I love the idea of there being middle-class cocaine. Even though it’s an illegal street-drug sold by blank-eyed people, wrapped in torn-out pages of We Love Telly! magazine, which can make your nose fall off or kill you, the middle-classness of its renaming still occurred. Specifying “Peruvian cocaine” – like it’s “Madagascan vanilla essence,” or “the wines of the Loire”. It makes you sound like you know a little bit about the provenance. Like you might have had a driving holiday and found a lovely local strain of drugs that goes nicely with lamb.

This splitting of the market along class lines happened with marijuana a couple of years ago, as I recall. While all the kids on council estates were fostering psychotic disorders on ludicrously strong skunkweed – the psychotropic equivalent of parking a helicopter in your mind and revving it – the middle-classes started smoking pure, “euphoric”, £200-an-ounce, hand-rubbed “gourmet” weed, such as charas and AK47.

Bless the middle classes. They’re always so . . . middle class. I can’t wait until they all get into ketamine – the horse tranquilliser so popular in clubs – and start the one-up-manship about the poshness of the stable it was stolen from. Imagine if you got hold of a supply of paralysing horse medicine stolen from Earl Spencer’s stables! Or Madonna’s! You’d be the best middle-class ketamine user ever!

Teehee. One additional highlight:

Except the only problem is, this lethal new drug is called Cheese. Really. Apparently, when you mix up powdered headache medicine and black tar heroin, it resembles crumbled Parmesan.* So far, there’s been notably little national publicity or action in America over the rise of Cheese – because, I would suspect, it’s very difficult for any campaigner to stand up and, in all seriousness, say: “People of America, there is a new menace that stalks our streets – and it is Cheese. Cheese is coming for our young. Part of the war on drugs must also now be the war on Cheese. Look out for Cheese. Cheese kills.”

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Erowid pointed out a gem of an article: a renowned Canadian journalist, Stanley Katz, recently passed away, and to commemorate his passing, Maclean's is re-running in its entirety an incredible article called "My 12 hours as a madman." In it, Katz recounts his experience volunteering to take 200 micrograms of LSD in a clinical setting, in order to participate in studying how the drug's effects might be similar enough to schizophrenia to offer treatment insights. The article appeared in an October 1953 edition of Maclean's, and is credited as being "the first detailed, first-person account in a general magazine of the effects of LSD."

Katz is an astonishingly eloquent narrator, buttressed in part no doubt by four hours of audio recordings captured during the most heavily hallucinatory phase of his experience, as well as an array of notes from researchers (including Dr. Humphry Osmond) and photographs from the events. In essence, whether he was first or not, he certainly demonstrates the template for an ideal experience report, capturing an array of details large and small that help characterize what seems to have been an intensely powerful experience - far beyond how most people seem to characterize similar doses of LSD.

From his own introduction:

I saw the faces of familiar friends turn into fleshless skulls and the heads of menacing witches, pigs and weasels. The gaily patterned carpet at my feet was transformed into a fabulous heaving mass of living matter, part vegetable, part animal. An ordinary sketch of a woman's head and shoulders suddenly sprang to life. She moved her head from side to side, eyeing me critically, changing back and forth from woman into man. Her hair and her neckpiece became the nest of a thousand famished serpents who leaped out to devour me. The texture of my skin changed several times. After handling a painted card I could feel my body suffocating for want of air because my skin had turned to enamel. As I patted a black dog, my arm grew heavy and sprouted a thick coat of glossy black fur....

But my hours of madness were not all filled with horror and frenzy. At times I beheld visions of dazzling beauty—visions so rapturous, so unearthly, that no artists will ever paint them. I lived in a paradise where the sky was a mass of jewels set in a background of shimmering aquamarine blue; where the clouds were apricot-colored; where the air was filled with liquid golden arrows, glittering fountains of iridescent bubbles, filigree lace of pearl and silver, sheathes of rainbow light—all constantly changing in color, design, texture and dimension so that each scene was more lovely than the one that preceded it.

A collection of eight Roger Corman movies were recently released in a DVD collection, and what should make an appearance therein but that classic tale of excessive psychedelia: The Trip. Witness this trailer that will "blow your mind":

According to one reviewer:

One of the essential 1960s films to look at the popularity of psychedelic drugs, this stars Peter Fonda as a young man who takes his first LSD trip under the tutelage of Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper. [Jack] Nicholson, who had appeared in eight Corman movies, wrote the screenplay. The movie itself is full of groovy colors, far-out designs, distorted images, tinted lenses and kaleidoscopic views.

Made for $400,000, “The Trip” took in more than $4 million within a year of its release, according to Corman biographer Beverly Gray.

Amazingly, I still haven't gotten around to seeing this thing yet. I suspect that day will come eventually...

Oliver Sacks has a new book out called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, and Wired is running a nice long interview with him in which the reporter asks a question that's rather topical to DoseNation:

Wired: You write that there was a time in med school when you took a lot of amphetamines. What's the most vivid experience of music you ever had on drugs?

Sacks: Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall — the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.

Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo — they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.

It took a mountain of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis to launch me into that space. But Monteverdi did it too.

Apparently the DEA just spent two years on "Operation Raw Deal," the biggest steroid ring bust in American history:

"Operation Raw Deal," cracked down on every aspect of the underground network from manufacturing to distribution to the actual buyers, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said in a statement.

During the operation, which began in December 2005, some 56 steroid labs were closed, 11.4 million steroid dosage units were seized, as well as 242 kilos (534 pounds) of raw steroid powder "of Chinese origin," the DEA said....

DEA agents "successfully attacked the illegal steroid industry ... from the manufacturers in China who supply the raw materials, to the traffickers in the United States who market the deadly doses," said DEA Administrator Karen Tandy.

That's right, folks: it was "the biggest illegal steroid ring in US history," and now it's history. Whew! Now the world of professional sports will go back to being a spotless paragon where role models must rely on sheer tenacity to compete at the highest levels, with sportsmanship and respect all around. A tear is forming in my eye at the thought of those countless students all over the country who have now been spared the horrible physical atrophy that lay in wait as these demonic substances took control of their young lives. Thank goodness order has been restored.

Also, this probably means they weren't busting as many MDMA dealers for a couple years, so you know, that's pretty cool.

(Via Smokedot.)

In our ongoing coverage of the 'Teens like to party' phenomena sweeping our nation, we bring you this a report on a report from CBSNews, that suggests Hispanic teens may like to party hardest of all.

The report, Hispanic Teens & Drugs, warned that while overall illegal drug use among U.S. teens was down, Hispanic teens' use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine outpaced use by their white and black peers. The report blamed drug use among Hispanic teens, in part, on their adaptation to new culture in America.

Say what now? Hispanic teens take more drugs to be more like Americans? The culture wars are now officially over. Drugs won.

Is this really news? I mean really...

Young Australians continue to view ecstasy as a "fun drug" which can help them relax, a report on illicit drugs to be released today shows.

The report shows warnings about the illicit substance are failing to resonate with the younger generation, with 33 per cent of those surveyed describing ecstasy as fun and 19 per cent saying it is a good drug to share with friends.

Shocking. Where do these perceptions come from? I blame the drugs.

I don't know how I missed this delightful video from... uh... some group called "Consumers Union." It's intended to help sway the public in favor of the improved drug safety legislation that got passed recently; I could care less about the politics of the vid, though, because I will always think dancing pills are hilarious.