From the IMDB listing for Orange Sunshine (2008):

Orange Sunshine is a feature-length documentary that traces the stories and smugglings of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, from it's beginning as a small surf gang out of Newport Beach, California in the mid-sixties to their rise as the largest distributors of LSD and hash in the world by 1969, to their ultimate demise and take-down by governments here and abroad in the early-seventies...

The blue house. The red house. The white house. There were seven color-coded houses in all in the sleepy coastal town of Laguna Beach, California, in the area known as Dodge City. Hash was the yellow house. Uppers were red. Acid, orange. And as shabby as these little beach shacks might have seemed, they were home base for one of the largest drug distribution rings in the world...

I'm leaving for Burning Man this weekend, which means I won't be posting for the next week and a half. I'll try to be back by next Wednesday, assuming I don't set myself on fire or get blown up somehow.

In the meantime, I leave you with this delightful video clip entitled "Bathing in Marijuana." Here's the backstory from the guy who posted the video:

In South Africa I accidentally purchased 22 pounds of the Chronic for 100 US Dollars. I thought it was going to be 2 ounces. I was leaving 6 days later so I smoked joints the size of beer cans then I bathed in it before I had to leave it all behind.

The novelty of the actual video wears off quickly. However, the real reason I'm posting it is that I'd never heard the absolutely fantastic audio track that accompanies this video - a piece called "Marijuana In Your Brain" by the Lords of Acid. Let the admonitions in that track be your guide in the long week and a half while the posting around here slows to a crawl. When I get back, rejuvenated from my adventures in the desert, we'll be firing on all cylinders around here again.

Via MilkandCookies..

Ah, DMT - it's like having your own theme park, right inside your head! From the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside.

Thanks to the keen investigative work of DoseNation reader dusty, I am pleased to be able to offer these sausage pipe videos, posted to YouTube a mere 12 hours ago - perhaps in light of recent publicity, perhaps not. Regardless, enjoy them now before cruel fate wrests them from our hands once again. Marvel at these youngsters' ingenuity! Thrill at the notion of a breath full of sausage-infused pot smoke! And most of all, wonder how they avoid burning their sausage pipes to a blackened crisp after using it over and over!

An interesting forensic approach is under investigation by scientists working for the ONDCP. Under the moniker of the Marijuana Signature Project, these scientists hope to learn more about where and how marijuana is cultivated across the nation:

With financing from the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Dr. [Jason B.] West, 34, is creating a model that can identify the geographic origin of cannabis plants based on certain chemical calling cards. The agency hopes to use the research to help decide where to concentrate its resources.

The research, the Marijuana Signature Project, relies on stable isotopes, which are forms of an element like nitrogen or oxygen, that have distinct atomic masses. Long employed in ecological research, stable isotopes are increasingly used for forensic purposes, including investigations into blood doping, arson and trafficking in contraband like drugs and endangered species.

"Stable isotopes are a signature on plant materials and things that are derived from plants," said Dr. West, a research assistant professor in the university's biology department. "Using them, you can get information about where something grew and its growth environment."

Surprisingly, despite what seems to a layperson like me to be a staggering number of marijuana busts each day, the government still apparently feels it has relatively little information on marijuana production:

Although suppliers in Mexico and Canada, especially British Columbia, are gaining market share, most of the marijuana that is bought, sold and smoked by Americans is grown domestically. Six states -- California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington -- dominate domestic marijuana production. Beyond that, relatively little is known about where the drug comes from and how it makes its way around the country compared with what is known about harder drugs like cocaine or heroin.

The drug control policy office is betting on stable isotopes to identify unique markers in marijuana, distinguishing it not just by geography but also by its cultivation method -- for example, indoor versus outdoor.

"It's an epidemiological and forensic public health investigation," said David Murray, chief scientist at the agency and director of its Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center.

This, of course, is the part where I'm obligated to mention how easy it would be to understand all this if marijuana were legal and in fact regulated by the government, but instead, I think I'll just nod quietly and go about my business.

In case you thought it was just rock stars and movie stars who were susceptible to wrecking their lives and careers with drug abuse, turns out they're not alone: the competitive, stressful world of opera singing has its share of problems as well.

"We are faced with the choice of performing and being attacked because we sing one false note, or being attacked because we are taking care of ourselves," [tenor Endrik Wottrich] told the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

To deal with the pressures, "soloists are taking beta blockers to control their angst, some tenors take cortisone to push their voice high and alcohol is everywhere," he said. "The real pressure is no longer good old stage fright but comes from a new dimension that has penetrated opera - it now lives from glamour, and normal human mistakes are a disruption in such an environment."

The mezzo Vesselina Kasarova spoke of colleagues who "are doing much too much ... and are not as robust as they think.

"They then turn to drugs to be able to cope with this kind of lifestyle," she told the German weekly Die Zeit.

Cortisone, as it turns out, can actually wreck your voice in the long run if overused, a danger some of these singers currently face; when you get paid per show, cancellation can be a costly business. I think it's a bit misleading, in fact, to compare the lives of opera singers to the lives of rock stars or movie stars, who can often reach their position of fame without actually possessing much talent or doing much work; a more apt comparison is to the world of professional athletics, where people at the top of their game physically and mentally nevertheless feel compelled to push the boundaries of their performance in some fashion. (Cortisone, by the way, is a steroid, in case the analogy isn't perfectly clear.)

But one thing modern opera singers and rock stars do have in common is the allure of fame, the allure of the trappings of a glamorous lifestyle. To the extent that glamor is pulling these singers into a sordid life of cocaine binging and alcohol abuse, they're definitely shooting themselves in the foot. Of course, when I was getting my degree in theatre, I used to hang with opera singers in training and I'm telling you, even before they were famous, they were smoking and drinking like the best of them. Some people need no excuse!

Just when you think celebrity excess has finally hit rock bottom, just when you think it can't possibly sink any lower, along comes Pete Doherty to chart new terrain:

Pete Doherty's pet cat has been found to have traces of cocaine in its blood stream after being taken in for observation by vets, say reports.

The Babyshambles star owns a cat named Dinger, a slang word for syringe, which recently gave birth to a litter of five kittens.

One of the litter became ill and the singer was forced to take the kitten into the vet for tests, where the drug revelation was discovered.

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE KITTENS???

Paranormal investigators face empathogenic bliss, in this installment from the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside.

To be fair, there are articles all over the place on this topic right now; a Google news search will lead you to many domestic articles saying the same thing, but I was charmed by the phrasing here at the Taipei Times:

People in the US are living in a world of pain and they are popping pills at an alarming rate to cope with it.

Don't you feel sorry for those poor people in the US, living in their world of pain?

The news, such as it is, is that a recent analysis of figures by news organization AP revealed that painkiller use in the US nearly doubled between 1997 and 2005. According to the article, 90,720 kilograms of opiates were purchased in the US in 2005, which they say is 300 mg per person per year. Which is not a lot of dope if it were really distributed uniformly, but still that's a lot of dope! Makes those big DEA busts look like total child's play in comparison.

The article also concludes that 2 to 3 million doses of painkillers are stolen from pharmacies every year. I'm not sure I believe that; that's a hell of a lot of drugstore cowboy action!!!

We keep hearing stories about how stimulant beverages are knocking people down. The latest one is rich with unintended hilarity. To be clear, I don't find it humorous when someone suffers a heart attack after drinking too many Red Bulls. I do, however, find it a little humorous when that someone turns around and blames Red Bull for not having a warning label on the can that says "You may experience a heart attack if you drink 11,000 of these in a row." OK, so it was only eight, not 11,000. And of course, there is a warning label, it's just not, uh, specific enough.

Now facing six weeks off work, he said warning labels on the products should be revamped to alert people that excessive consumption could lead to death. Labels currently warn against consuming more than two cans, or 1.5 bottles a day, without describing the consequences.

"They say [on energy drink labels] don't have more than this much," Mr Penbross said.

"But they don't say if you have too much, what will happen."

Gotcha. Also, we need to enhance stop signs, because although they tell us to stop, they don't tell us in excruciating detail all the things that will happen if we don't stop.

Of course, the dude here actually did have a small clue about what might happen:

[Dr. Malcolm Barlow, a cardiologist] said Mr Penbross had no other risk factors apart from smoking and had told him he previously experienced chest pain at times when his intake of the drinks was high.

Gee, you mean this fella didn't draw a connection between drinking a lot of Red Bull and, oh, say, irregular chest pains? At any rate, my proposed language for a new warning label is "Warning: drink too much Red Bull and your tiny, weak, ill-informed heart may burst like a balloon, driving you to your knees as you sink into a brief existential terror before your eyes close for the last time and your life is extinguished by our delicious stimulant beverage." I don't know, it might not be clear enough, but it's a start.