Good news on the alcohol front: alcohol may reduce risk of kidney cancer, hurrah!

The team found that the odds of developing kidney cell cancer was about 40-percent lower among those who consumed 620 g ethanol per month compared to those who did not drink at all.

Drinking more than two glasses of red wine per week was associated with a 40-percent reduction in kidney cell cancer risk compared with drinking no red wine, the investigators observed, and there were similar trends for more than two glasses per week of white wine or strong beer.

Meanwhile, bad news on the alcohol front: alcohol may increase risk of endometrial cancer, boo!

Postmenopausal women consuming two or more alcoholic beverages a day may double their risk of endometrial cancer, suggests a study led by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC).... “This is the first prospective study to report a significant association between alcohol and endometrial cancer,” says Veronica Wendy Setiawan, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “Previous studies have shown that alcohol consumption has been associated with higher levels of estrogens in postmenopausal women, which could be the mechanism by which daily alcohol intake increases one’s risk of endometrial cancer.”

Right, so for those of you keeping score at home, just remember, even if alcohol is good or bad for you on the cancer scale, it's still hella bad for you on the overall life expectancy scale if you drink it like I do, which is to say, in industrial drum-size volumes.

If you're not getting enough caffeine delivered to your nervous system via your daily grande quad espresso bombs or your twelve-pack of Cocaine energy drink, there's hope for you yet: someone's decided to start manufacturing caffeine-soaked potato chips.

NRG Phoenix Fury Potato Chips taste like extra-spicy barbecue chips, but they come with a caution label: not recommended for preg­nant or nursing women, young children or anyone who is sensitive to caffeine.

The largest bag of Phoenix Fury chips weighs 3 1/2 ounces, and the chip maker says downing the whole thing would be the caffeine equivalent of drinking 3 1/2 big cups of brewed coffee.

Goodness. Of course, if even this method of administration seems inadequate, you might be tempted to go for broke and start snorting caffeine pills. But if one recent Erowid experience report is to be believed, you might be in for more than you bargained for. After performing a basic extraction on a pile of No-Doz caffeine pills, a college student insufflates a bunch of caffeine before a test, only to discover the rewards are not all he/she imagined:

I came to the class, set up, and began the exam. I started out strongly, and got through the first half of the test in about twenty minutes. Soon, however, I faltered. I proceeded recklessly, not checking my answers. About half way through the hour-and-a-half long test, the positive effects of the caffeine seemed to be wearing off. I was getting lost, unable to think clearly, and too shaky to draw a proper diagram let alone think about what was going on in the question. I asked to go to the bathroom, where, parched and flustered, I sucked water from the grimy tap and poured it on my face. I tried to calm myself, to focus myself. I tried, but to no avail. I was tense; muddled.

On the topic which I was instructing the others in just a day before, I got the second-lowest score in the class. The errors that set me back were the stupidest errors that I have ever made. I got vertical and horizontal mixed up in my mind. I used 2.4 for the value of half of 5.4. I couldn't count squares, for christ's sake! It was so foolish of me to use this drug for the first time before an exam. If I had just had faith in my natural ability to know what to do, if I had been calm and centered and able to stand back, examine, and visualise the probem, I may have gotten a near perfect score - there was nothing that I didn't understand. I tried to comfort myself, telling myself that it was just an exam, but I felt seriously down about it for the next couple of days.

I was still reeling from my ill-fated Burning Man vacation when this news came across the wire: a federal grand jury has been denied access to patient records held by "Oregon's medical marijuana program and a private clinic." As Dominic Holden reported in the Slog:

On May 24th, the feds had had enough—federal prosecutor James Hagerty, at the behest of the DEA, filed a subpoena for the records of 17 individuals, 14 of whom were patients with marijuana permits from doctors at the clinic. But the subpoena had broader implications, too. 11 of those named were registered patients with Oregon’s Department of Human Services medical-marijuana program, and the subpoena also demanded that the State of Oregon turn over those patients’ private medical records to the feds.

But in a formal rebuke yesterday afternoon, a federal Judge sided with the state and the clinic, granting a motion to quash both subpoenas. “Absent a further showing of necessity and relevance, compliance with the subpoena would impact significant State and medical privacy interests and is unreasonable,” wrote Judge Robert H. Whaley of the U.S. Court Eastern District of Washington. The ruling represents a major defeat for the DEA and a victory for states with dissenting drug policies.

What I found particularly interesting about the judge's decision was this comment:

"There is an obvious tension between the state's authorization of the production and use of marijuana as a medicine and the federal authority to make such activity a crime," Whaley wrote. "The point at which that tension should be broken by the compelled production of records to a federal grand jury has not been reached with these subpoenas."

I suspect we haven't heard the last of this "obvious tension" - it's quite possible the "point at which that tension should be broken" will be defined sooner rather than later, assuming the feds choose to appeal this decision. This overall tension between state and federal law is only going to increase over the next couple years. The outcome is still quite uncertain, but here's hoping decisions like this continue to add weight to the notion individual states can chart their own course when it comes to determining rational medical marijuana policy.

Well hello there. I haven't posted on DoseNation in quite some time - and I'm most certainly not content with that. Hopefully I can help the post-Burning Man lull - that horrifying hangover/reintegration into society period of your lives that makes you question everything and wonder what really is real. Actually, this is just going to make it a lot worse, but who cares, because we're all already way the hell out of our minds anyways!

My first issue to address is my new book. Here's part of my post on that:

"It's tentatively entitled State of Ascension: The Impact of Politics, Drugs, Religion, and Society on Personal Belief Systems, and the Downfall of Contemporary Civilization. The book is full of cynicism and hilarity, political and countercultural hijinx, spoon-bending Zen philosophy, the sobering reality that we may be doomed as a society, and more! Who knows if/when it will ever be published, since getting anything at all past the corporate media stonewall is hell these days - but I'll keep you updated. Perhaps I'll put it out through this site in installments - we shall see."

Anyways, the book is an attempt to quantify one person's reality through the usage of universal Jungian archetypes and Taoist light/darkness to illustrate a psychedelic or mind manifesting spiritual journey through life. It's a metaphor for the universal microcosmic experience that we are all currently having, in other words, what we perceive as life. So I thought I'd put that out there, take it for what you will.

My second issue to address is The Mothman Prophecies, which changed my life... for the worse probably, but it's still awesome to watch after drinking a bottle of Robotussin, that's for damn sure.

In the movie, after a horrifying time loop subsides, a daemon of pure energy that refers to itself as "Ingrid Cold" manifests itself as the fabled "Mothman," which, according to dozens of actual eyewitness testimonies from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a nebulous black being capable of flying over a hundred miles an hour without moving and has two giant red beams of light for eyes embedded on its chest. The Mothman is seen in a blinding flash of intense light, and frequently leaves burn marks on organic material in the area where he has manifested himself. Those who bear witness to the Mothman's manifestation frequently begin bleeding from the eyes and ears and/or go insane, presumably from either radiation sickness or simply from witnessing something so horrifying that their minds and bodies cannot handle it.

From The Happiness of the Katakuris

If you're so high that you're exclaiming "I can see time!" (yes, this is a Tales from the Tripside reference) then why not head on over to the Wikipedia entry for "time" and see if their story matches what you're seeing? I got linked to that page from an article about something I was looking up for a class (a molecular neuroscience class.) I saw a link for "time", and thought, Good God, what does Wikipedia have to say about time? Enough, as it turns out, that I didn't bother reading any of it, but amusingly they illustratively use a similar animated image of the tesseract to the one which appeared in a recent DoseNation posting called Behold the Tesseract.

I figure anything I can link in with a Tripside reference and a previous posting is a safe bet. Besides, if you're high enough, this will all make perfect sense.

We've secretly replaced this helpless speed addict's next fix with a heaping dose of drain cleaner. Let's see if he notices the difference! From the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside

On a separate note from the big ol' painkiller study, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) announced that while overall illicit drug use amongst adolescents is declining, LSD and Ecstasy use is on the rise! An Associated Press that was widely syndicated had the goods:

The use of hallucinogens among youth remained stable last year, the survey indicated. But there was a statistically significant increase in the use of ecstasy among those ages 18 to 25. In that camp, 3.8% reported the use of ecstasy within the past year. The year before, 3.1% acknowledged ecstasy use.

The report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that the estimates on ecstasy and LSD should not be considered conclusive. Nevertheless, the consistency of results from two independent surveys "serves as evidence of a possible increase in hallucinogen use."

If you go to the trouble of reading the actual AP article, you won't see detailed LSD data; you basically just have to take the article's word for it, or go digging into the actual survey data for verification. But it's true: the survey results purport to show that LSD use saw an uptick from 2005 to 2006 amongst the same age group. It seems small to me, but who the hell am I to make judgments on what's "statistically significant"? (No fucking body, that's who.)

Personally, I'm kind of heartened to see LSD use on the rise, and I'm not particularly irritated about a rise in Ecstasy use either (even if it's dirty nasty street Ecstasy all full of poison and radioactive waste and ground up evil). Oh sure, LSD is an incredible loaded weapon of a drug, aimed right at the heart of the unsuspecting young psyche. And I personally would, in all seriousness, never particularly recommend that a young adult who hasn't taken LSD should ever bother to start, given the near impossibility of properly controlling for set and setting when you're that age and you've got little experience to draw on; taking LSD can be a risky gambit in the best of times, let alone when you're still formulating your personality.

But still, I can't help but think that every young adult who comes across LSD and winds up stumbling into the vein of "think for yourself" is a net gain for the cause of light, in the end. And if a nice phat Ecstasy pill helps take the edge off on the way down, well, more power to 'em.

Hey, here's a (not) surprising fact: painkiller use in the States has shot up dramatically:

The amount of five major painkillers sold at retail establishments rose 88 percent between 1997 and 2005, according to an Associated Press analysis of statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during the most recent year represented in the data. That total is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country.

So where do I line up to get my 300 milligrams, dammit?

Apparently there are three big reasons for the increase: the population's getting older, and older people need more painkillers; drug manufacturers are doing a lot more marketing; and the whole philosophy of better pain management through prescribing more painkillers has caught on. The obvious fourth reason of "painkillers are hella fun" is of course not being propagated, but that's because that very reason is part of a "pendulum swing" in the opposite direction of, shall we say, less conservative pain management techniques. In our own general practitioner's office, my wife (who suffers from chronic pain due to a car accident years ago) gets reasonable, regular prescriptions of various painkillers and sleep aids; when she saw a particular substitute doctor in that office, the doc wouldn't even open her chart and said she didn't believe in prescribing Soma because it has addictive properties. It's all a bit of a mess, and the people who need painkillers most are sadly getting caught in the crossfire.

But that's beside the point, because I want my 300 milligrams, dammit!

One problem with this year's trip to Burning Man was that I wound up hooked on caffeine again. Now that I'm back in civilization, I'm trying to give it up but it's just so damnably alluring, especially in one of those offices where the soda machines dispense free (and delicious) soda pops. Thankfully, someone (I truly cannot remember who) forwarded me a link to a delightful comic that is already helping soothe the pain.