So yeah, I'm finally back from my eons-long vacation to Burning Man. Apologies if it takes me a few days to ramp back up to my regular quota of posts around here; I'll try, but the reintegration/decompression process hasn't run its course. Naturally I was thrilled to get back and see the big hubbub about the fact that the Man burned early. Monday was the day we stopped to get our RV batteries replaced in our camper van, only to have the idiot technician start an electrical fire that basically ruined the van for the rest of the week. We had some superficial repairs done that day and dutifully charged out to the playa, and were just totally fried when we got there - and determined not to leave camp. And someone said, "Oh, I think you'll leave camp for this," and sure enough, when we saw the Man was on fire early, we dutifully charged out across the playa to go look at it.

Of course, it didn't get that much cooler the closer we got to it, but it was certainly hilarious, and you really don't get to see towers of water aimed at the Man every day, so there was that. Everyone I talked to that week thought it was extremely humorous; it was only later when we got back to civilization that I learned that countless shrieking pundits had determined this was an awful travesty of justice, or something.

Now I freely admit that Paul Addis's strident remarks that circulated after the event certainly had an obnoxious quality about them, but personally, I try not to judge a play by the director's notes in the program. The fact is, for many of us, seeing the Man burn early was a beautiful sign that the entire festival still had the capacity to surprise us, to engage us in unexpected ways. Of course, throughout the week, I was also quite taken aback by some of the outstanding large scale art installations on the playa (the dancing monkeys, the big rig); the last time I went, three years ago, I remember comparing notes with Erik Davis and we both sort of muttered about how there really wasn't anything that remarkable that year. Well, this year was different, and the early burning of the Man - coupled with the incredibly noble efforts of DPW and crew to get a new Man in place by Thursday evening - symbolized alla that in a lot of ways. While the desert was busy kicking some of our asses (my wife and I had to leave early due to mechanical and physiological duress), others were out there kicking everyone else's ass with some inspired ideas and some ridiculous risks.

That said, I fucking hate Burning Man, and hope to never go back, but still, it was kind of neat this year.

Here's an exciting twist in the world of figuring out what the hell antidepressants are doing to your brain chemistry:

It cannot be assumed that an antidepressant has lost its effectiveness if a patient relapses while continuing on the medication, because the medication may never have been effective in the first place, according to study findings reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In the study, the majority of relapses occurred in patients who had never been true responders, Dr. Mark Zimmerman, director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, told Reuters Health.

Some patients with major depressive disorder, similar to other medical disorders, respond to placebo, Zimmerman explained. In clinical practice, everyone is given an active drug, so it's not clear if a patient who responds has improve because of the drug.

Ha! This is outstanding for a couple reasons, in particular because it helps prove to a subset of people that their own minds were actually more in the loop about their mental health than they gave themselves credit for:

Using two different methods of estimating relapse, the researchers found that the majority of relapses occurred because the patients were never true responders to the drugs.

This suggests, Zimmerman told Reuters Health, "that a message can be conveyed to patients who have repeatedly improved on medication and then lost its benefit that perhaps they are more capable than they think in bringing their own resources to bear to improve their depression."

Go Team Science!

I heard about this right before I split for the playa and didn't get a chance to do much digging; and now that I'm back, I'm too lazy to do much more digging, so I'll leave it to your capable hands to suss out what's happened here. The situation seems to be: dude gets hauled in kicking and screaming by the cops, dude later dies in police custody, toxicologist later claims that dude died of an LSD overdose.

In the immortal words of that lovable scamp Arnold Jackson, "Whatchootalkinbout, Willis?""

Fortunately, of all the news reports that eventually went by about this, at least one registered a reasonable amount of skepticism about the tale. This article breaks it down a few ways. For starters:

One of the few recorded cases of LSD overdose occurred in 1972, when four men and four women snorted powdered LSD at a dinner party, thinking it was cocaine. Some 15 minutes later, they were admitted to a San Francisco hospital. Five were already in a coma when they arrived. Three of them were experiencing depressed respiration, leading doctors to perform endotracheal intubation -- in which a tube is slid through the mouth into the trachea to assist breathing.

Tests found between a low of 2.1 to a high of 26 nanograms per milliliter of blood in the eight patients, all of whom survived.

Now you can laugh all you want about the perils of snorting a thing you thought was this one thing and it turned out to be this other thing; it's happened to me, although to be clear, it was just a different brand of drain cleaner than I was expecting, and frankly, I don't mind the off brands that much but I don't like to let my corporate sponsors know that. At any rate, moving on:

Cotton's blood had concentrations of 10.6 ng/ml at the time of his death, perhaps three to four hours after he took the drug, using his release to determine the time of ingestion. Since there have been so few deaths, the lethal dose of LSD has only been projected at .2 milligrams per kilogram to 1 mg/kg, or between 14 to 70 milligrams for a 155-pound person.

Jager was not immediately available for comment to give Cotton's exact weight.

While the analysis of LSD levels is tricky, a comparison to experiments in which a 35-year-old man was administered 600 micrograms of LSD -- and was found to have 1 ng/ml concentrated in his blood four hours after ingestion-- suggests that Cotton would have had to have taken more than 6,000 micrograms, or 6 mg, of LSD to produce his result.

This may seem counterintuitive, but bear with me: it seems like Viagra might actually encourage "feelings of love" and "social bonding" in men who use it.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Oh, please, the only thing Viagra encourages is heart attacks and unsafe sex practices among speed freaks," but if that's what you're thinking, you're just a gol durn cynic. Listen to this:

Viagra, known generically as sildenafil, raised levels of the hormone oxytocin in rats, the team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said in a report published in the Journal of Physiology.

This hormone is involved in nursing and childbirth but also in orgasm and feelings of sexual pleasure.

And it seems Viagra and related drugs act on the part of the brain that controls release of oxytocin, said Wisconsin physiology professor Meyer Jackson.

"This is one piece in a puzzle in which many pieces are still not available," Jackson said in a statement. "But it raises the possibility that erectile dysfunction drugs could be doing more than just affecting erectile dysfunction."

Of course, we need more research to prove it, but it's an intriguing avenue, given that emotional dysfunction is probably as common as erectile dysfunction among men. But the best part about the article is this delightful quote from one of the researchers:

"I hope that this doesn't cause some wild orgy of inappropriate recreational use."

Well, shoot, I guess my Saturday plans are off.

Here you go, get high and watch this, I proooooomise it's not freaky and certainly not depressing!

Seriously, though. Haven't you noticed that some media (music, video, visual art, whatever) seems to have that essential something that makes it psychedelic, and some don't, and it's not necessarily correlated with the fractals-and-bright-colors factor anymore? I wonder about that. What is it that make some things needle right into your brain, and even more so when it's turned on, whereas other things just get no juice whatsoever from the juice?

The New York Times reports that a new drug from Eli Lily - known only by its code name LY2140023 - seems to substantially reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia, with very few side effects. What's more interesting is how researchers got their inspiration for the new drug:

For decades, psychiatrists have known that users of PCP, a street drug sometimes called angel dust, have symptoms nearly identical to those of people with schizophrenia. By the 1980s, scientists had discovered that PCP blocked brain receptors that are triggered by an amino acid called glutamate. This led some companies and scientists to study ways to stimulate glutamate receptors as a treatment for schizophrenia.

But the brain has many different kinds of glutamate receptors, and figuring out how to stimulate or block them in medically beneficial ways has proved complicated. Instead of focusing on the receptors blocked by PCP, Dr. Schoepp concentrated on modulating the action of glutamate receptors in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for personality and learning.

Yes, this is completely stupid and irrelevant but I got a kick out of it, and at least it's vaguely topical, since we have been discussing Burning Man here.

Here's some lovely footage of an Australian Defense Force coastal patrol aircraft sinking a North Korean freighter that was trying to smuggle drugs into the country. At least, that's what they're saying... (There doesn't seem to be any sound on the video, so don't try to adjust your set. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical...)

Part three of our amazing (almost) real-time Burning Man coverage, where our fearless correspondent gets a fistful of what the doctor ordered, and finds he has gone too far.

Wednesday, Sunset: I stumbled into a friend of a friend who found me drunk (still wobbling from the daiquiris) and gave me a place to pass out for a while. When I woke up I was on a pile of pillows in his modest dome. It was sunset. His travel crew were sitting around divvying drugs for the evening. There was discussion about who would be taking the ketamine, who would be taking the E, who wanted to save the acid for the burn, and who had Valium so they could get some sleep later that night, that kind of thing. My head was pounding from a hangover and I needed water and caffeine. I had lost my water bottle at the bar, I think I gave it to some girl and never saw it again. I begged some water off my friend and luckily he has brought probably more than he needs. I hydrate and begin to recall that I have not eaten in maybe ten hours now, I should probably find food. I am passed a big sticky Tupperware container that looks like melted chocolate fudge. "It was made with mushrooms, I'm not sure if it's any good anymore." I take the container and have a taste. It is good chocolate and it hits the spot. I have maybe more than I should, but no one else seems to want it, so there you go. I make plans to meet up with them later at one of the blinky places, but doubt we'll see each other again. Who knows, Burning Man is a strange place.

Thursday, Sunrise: What a long strange trip it's been. I can't tell you exactly what happened last night, but after I was abducted by aliens, escaped captivity, was almost stabbed (I think) by an Egyptian terrorist, and barely escaped being burned by a crazy fire-dancer chick, I head out for the hills in search of some crazy lights on the far horizon. I come to my senses walking the outskirts of the playa, near the trash fence very far away from anything. In the far distance the noise of the event sounds almost industrial. I stumble across what appears to be a couple making out on a blanket under the stars. "It will be twins," I say in a deep Jedi voice as I walk by, I hear one of them gasp. Off in the distance I see what look like two Sheriffs deputies or fire officials standing by an SUV, way back in the darkness, ghosts of law enforcement lurking in the night. I hear them chattering and I hold my hand up and say, "Hey!" as I approach. They shine a flashlight on me and I come closer.

Here I am, making myself at home at the front page of Dosenation before settling in for a good night's sleep, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a Google ad--right at the top of the Dosenation page!--titled "LSD acid hallucinogen abuse help". Well, I suppose that could be an inarticulate description of what we offer here, but no it's a link to Gulf Coast Recovery's offer of, well, I'm not sure what exactly, LSD addiction recovery? The linked page claims LSD is not addictive, but leads to use of more dangerous drugs. Oh no! Oh, wait, I remember that part, nevermind.

Their home page advertises "Interventions: Help for the Unwilling" and "transport services", which together sound a lot like the trailer for Self+Medicated previously linked here...