Some things just never go out of style. Take teen huffing for instance, which has spiked recently in El Salvador, according to a recent government report.

The police and attorney general told deputies of the Commission of the Family, Women and Children that currently there are more 14 to 17 year olds drugging themselves with shoe glue and other products.

In addition to glue they use hair sprays, nail removal solutions, deodorants, air fresheners, erasers, paint, solvents, gasoline and others that act as depressors of the nervous system according to scientific sources.

Apparently the problem has gotten so bad they are recommending passing legislation which prohibits sales of these products to minors. My take on huffing has aways been that it's what teens do when they can't find real drugs. I would love to do a larger study which pegs the popularity of huffing to prohibition and the lack of access to safer recreational drugs, but I doubt your gonna see anyone rushing to fund that one...

In one of the first "push-back" stories to the recent news that amphetamine-based ADD drugs will be scrutinized by the FDA for heart risks, the industry which supplies these drugs is quick to point out that ADD drugs help boost grades in school!

"This is the first study that shows that taking stimulants for ADHD improves long-term school performance," said lead researcher Dr. William Barbaresi, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "This includes reading achievement, being absent from school and being retained in a grade -- stimulant treatment was associated with better outcomes," he said.

I find this particular study to be hilarious. When talking about my own Ritalin-fueled childhood people always ask me, "Did it help?" and I reply, "Well, I did better in school. But then again, you give any kid speed and they'll do better in school."

So, if stimulants help kids perform better in school (they are "performance enhancing drugs" in case you didn't know), why don't we give them to all kids? Oh right, I forgot to mention the racing heartbeat, the insomnia, the not eating, the waking delusions, and the recurring daily nose-bleeds. But other than that I was awesome in school!

If I were Jonathan Ott, I would have translated Albert Hofmann's "LSD - My Problem Child" differently, and perhaps would not have lost the fact that Albert Hofmann's unnamed "assistant" on the fateful Bicycle Day was actually a woman.

Before I report it to the English-speaking audience, I'm warning you: caution, feminism! OK, here we go.

What would have happened on Bicycle Day without Hofmann's assistant? What if the researcher got lost in the fields or if some accident occurred at home? The assistant, by the very meaning of the noun a secondary figure, turns out to be more important than it seems. Maybe it would be nice to know who he was, to praise him for having protected Hofmann and the Discovery? But he was most certainly not a "he." From the German:

"Ich konnte nur noch mit größter Anstrengung verständlich sprechen und bat meine Laborantin, die über den Selbstversuch orientiert war, mich nach Hause zu begleiten." (Hofmann, "LSD - mein Sorgenkind", Munich 2004, page 29).

Fragments in bold reveal the detail: the assistant's gender as a woman. And for me women's presence in culture has become an intellectual obsession, I immediately fall into some feminist euphoria when I see some part of culture, claimed to be a man's world, pulsating with women's forgotten existence. OK, you have been warned.

Further everything is dissolving into a shimmering haze... An imaginary image of the assistant racing through the fields, hardly keeping pace ("my assistant later told me that we had traveled very rapidly"), summoning the doctor and probably Anita Hofmann ("Late in the evening my wife returned from Lucerne. Someone had informed her by telephone that I was suffering a mysterious breakdown"), probably sitting somewhere close during almost the whole experiment, her face obscured by darkness, disappearing into the shadow of time... Maybe those who say that women have a "psychedelic consciousness" are in some paradoxical way right; we certainly don't need a psychedelic to dissolve, every day we dissolve into a culture which isn't our home, our traces disappear, only wet soil remains for future archaeologists of women's history.

A photocopy of Hofmann's report reveals the assistant's name: "Miss Ramstein". That's all we know. How to turn a shred of personal data into an image of a living woman, tear her out of the time that's obscuring the view?

Who was she? What did she feel when breaking on through towards a professional career of her own in a world which still wasn't sure if girls really needed knowledge? Was she happy to be living in a country which at least was one of the pioneers of academic education for women? What did she feel about being deprived of electoral rights and did she live up to the day they were awarded to women? Didn't she feel helpless when the situation forced her to become the first ever sitter during an LSD trip? Has she ever tried this substance herself?

World traveler and Strange Attractor contributor Mike Jay is one of the UK's most interesting history writers'a freak at heart but a pro in every sense: a great researcher and story-teller, a prolific scribbler, and a fine stylist to boot. Jay cut his book publishing teeth on trippy topics, starting with the intriguing Blue Tide, and continuing on to the best book on drug use in the nineteenth century, Emperors of Dreams. Then he wrote my favorite book of his, The Air Loom Gang, a marvelous and insightful Oliver Sacks-worthy yarn about an eighteenth-century madman named James Tilly Matthews who was the first person to believe that a remote machine was directly controlling his behavior. Currently Jay is writing the marvelously titled Wild Gas, a history of the Pneumatic Institute, the unconventional scientific/cultural laboratory where British poets and doctors and rabble-rousers first discovered nitrous oxide in the 1790s.

Jay just launched a new website. It's not a blog - unfortunately for us, perhaps fortunately for a book author with lots on his plate - but it does include a number of fascinating articles. Particularly relevant for DoseNation readers are the following:

"Enter the Jaguar": an exploration of the drug-saturated imagery and shamanic lore surrounding the mind-blowing and obscure temple ruins of Chavin in Peru.

"We Burn to Remember." Burners take note: Every year in November, a small town erupts into Bonfire Night, which for sheer mythic Viking fire chaos may outpace that Labor Day Nevada camping trip.

"Mushrooms in Wonderland." This older article anticipates Andy Lechter's Shroom book by questioning the assumptions many heads make about the real psychoactive fungi use presumed to lay behind between nineteenth-century fairy lore.

As our culture continues its quest for the perfect anti-obesity pill, researchers are starting to uncover hints that - yes, you guessed it - food might actually be addictive.

Brain imaging soon may provide answers. At Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow and her colleagues map dopamine receptors on brain cells. This neurotransmitter plays a key role in addiction. Dopamine systems are disrupted by addictive drugs, from alcohol to methamphetamine, which hijack the control of volition and the quest for rewards.

It turns out that food also affects the brain's dopamine systems. When Dr. Volkow, who is also director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, compared brain images of methamphetamine users with those of obese people, she found both groups had significantly fewer dopamine receptors than healthy people. Even more interesting: The higher the body mass index, the fewer the dopamine receptors.

Does this open any significant doors for treatment? Not necessarily, but every little bit helps in the sense that we can get even more research dollars applied once we get this properly and fully described as a medical abnormality at the root and not simply at the level of a set of unhealthy symptoms.

Uh oh, this sounds like trouble. If you're not eating enough family dinners with your children, they are likely to become drug abusers, at least according to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University:

"Compared to teens who have frequent family dinners (five or more per week), those who have infrequent family dinners (two or fewer) are:

- Three and a half times likelier to have abused prescription drugs.

- Three and a half times likelier to have used an illegal drug other than marijuana or prescription drugs

- Three times likelier to have used marijuana; more than two and a half times likelier to have used tobacco."

What can you do about this? Well, for starters, next Monday is Family Day, so it's time to bust out the salisbury steak TV dinners!

CASA created Family Day — A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children™ in 2001, as a national movement that encourages parents to frequently eat dinner with their kids and be involved in their children’s lives as simple, effective ways to reduce substance abuse among children and teens. Family Day is celebrated on the fourth Monday in September.

Actually, maybe it was just my house where we dug the salisbury steak TV dinners. The point is, the family that dines together, uh, apparently saves more of the household pharms for parents. Or something. Obviously the raw "dinner to drugs" spectrum is not so concrete; presumably eating dinner together is the most tangible symptom of an entire lifestyle that creates family cohesiveness and thereby keeps kids off the soul-destroying path of drug use. I don't get it myself; I rarely ate with my family and I didn't turn to a life of soul-destroying drug use until my college years, but hey, surveys and statistics don't lie.

Meanwhile, I had the misfortune of stumbling across a blog post from a concerned parent who realized that a number of her peers - get this - still smoked marijuana. It's true!

As it soon became apparent, and as a complete shock and surprise to my wife, it appears that most of her "so-called" friends are casual and/or recreational users of marijuana. :0 Folks, these are 40+ year old mothers with children in elementary and middle school. A few are stay-at-home-moms, and others are your typical working-class professional type moms. Other "marijuana moms" names were mentioned who weren't at this event (I would consider that getting thrown under the bus), and it was suggested that my wife should try it to help ease her stress and calm her nerves from the hectic pace of raising a family.

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This is all over local news here in Seattle, but I wasn't sure if it was getting much play nationwide. It fits into the general category of "drug dealers do really stupid stuff" - we could turn all of DoseNation into a "funniest drug dealers!"-type blog if we wanted, there's so much bozo-ness going on. But this one was particularly hilarious: apparently a cocaine dealer, already under suspicion by the authorities, lost track of a backpack with 68 pounds of cocaine near the border, and decided to call the feds to ask for help finding it.

According to the complaint, he told agents that on Aug. 3, he had stashed two blue backpacks containing 68 pounds of cocaine by the entrance to a Boy Scout camp near the Canadian border. When he returned the next day, they were gone, he said.

Carr, of suburban Federal Way, asked if ICE could put out a news release saying that federal agents had seized the drugs. That way, according to the complaint, the organization he was working for would believe his statements that he hadn't stolen them.

Two weeks later, a Boy Scout ranger found the backpacks, which were dry and in good shape, and called police.

Carr was arrested last weekend on a federal charge of cocaine possession with intent to distribute.

You see, this is what's wrong with the war on drugs: we shouldn't be sending Boy Scouts out into the wilderness to recover missing cocaine, not without giving these poor kids a badge. At any rate, I've seen enough crappy gangster television to appreciate that someone who, uh, misplaces 68 pounds of cocaine might just possibly get into trouble with his bosses. It's probably not as bad, though, as the person or persons who left an entire school bus worth of marijuana by the side of the road after the engine broke down. Imagine explaining that.

Via Warren Ellis, check out this online archive of videos from a symposium on the topic of Hunter S. Thompson:

Juan Thompson and the Aspen Institute hosted a symposium on July 21, 2007 on the work of the late writer Hunter S. Thompson.... Journalists Carl Bernstein, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Loren Jenkins of NPR, John Nichols of The Nation and others came together in a symposium moderated by Professor Douglas Brinkley to discuss the effect of Hunter's work on political reporting and American politics.

In a follow-up to a previous story on the growing scandal that is doping and golf (not really), the organizations leading the charge have finally started drafting anti-doping regulations for the pro golf circuit.

A list of banned substances has been drawn up and the methods by which each organisation will administer the programme are expected to be finalised by the end of the year.

PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem told a teleconference the anti-doping measures had been specifically coordinated on a global basis.

"If a player was disciplined, including suspension, in some part of the world, that action would be recognised under a reciprocity agreement with the other organisations since players play on multiple tours in multiple tournaments," he said.

The list of banned substances includes anabolic agents, hormones, diuretics, stimulants, narcotics, beta blockers and masking agents.

Diuretics? Can someone please tell me, WTF?

Operation Green Acres is a major marijuana eradication effort currently underway in northern California. Second- and third-hand reports are saying that the raids have moved into neighboring Trinity County as well.

Apparently 10,000 lbs of marijuana have been seized so far. *sigh*

Funded by the DEA, the joint task force (hehe, joint) includes representatives from the Shasta County Sheriff's Marijuana Eradication Team, SWAT team, the California Department of Justice Campaign Against Marijuana Planting Task Force, the National Park Service, the Department of Fish and Game and the Bureau of Land Management.