... when they dose your pizza in an attempt to kill you.

It may seem funny to dose the weirdo janitor, but think about it. This guy has access to drain cleaner and other solvents. Do you really wanna start this kind of war with him?

You know those spams in your e-mail trying to sell you discount drugs? Ever wonder if anyone is making cash from those? A recent Forbes article on pharmaceutical brandjacking illustrates just how easy it is to set up shop spamming people for discount (read: fake) drugs. How many pharma-spammers are there? Let's take a look at the numbers:

Analyzing more than 60 million spam messages linking to 7,090 sites, MarkMonitor tracked the six most commonly advertised drug brands, a list that the company declines to reveal [editor's note: try Viagra, Cialis, Ambien, Xanax, Oxycontin, and oh, let's say Valium...]. Given an estimated 0.5% sales rate and using the traffic measurement tool Alexa, the report roughly calculates that the most visited 3,000 sites alone drew more than $4 billion in annual sales.

Four billion in annual sales is huge. But is this a legitimate business model. No, it is most often fraud.

Though most of those 3,000 sites claimed certification as legitimate pharmacies, only four actually had credentials from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. The average cost of drugs on the uncredentialed sites was 75% less than on the legitimate sites, suggesting counterfeit, expired, stolen or diluted drugs.

To illustrate just how much the global market can get away with, the following paragraph (with links) is included:

Alibaba's offers include an Indian company selling Methadone and a Chinese supplier of a raw ingredient used in Ketamine. An advertisement from a Greek company on Tradekey offers a long list of substances like cocaine, ecstasy, codeine and heroin.

Nice tidy article about this booming new e-business model. Moral of the story: stay away from discount drugs online.

As part of our long-standing commitment to covering all the key developments in the war on drugs, we present the following important technological breakthrough:

During three years of blog entries, which are now accessible only through an archive search, Bator describes life as a cook at Village Inn [an IHOP-style chain].

In some entries, Bator writes about his co-workers' personal lives, including inter-kitchen relationships and drug use on the shift. There are detailed instructions for the fabrication of a marijuana pipe made from a Village Inn sausage, constructed after a worker left a real marijuana pipe at home.

"It's not quite as complicated as an internal combustion engine, but you should still be impressed. Sausage is a surprisingly difficult medium to create anything out of other than biscuits and gravy," Bator wrote.

A video on YouTube.com showed Village Inn employees demonstrating its use -- while in uniform and in the kitchen, no less -- and a diagram and two photographs were included in the lawsuit.

Bator said this week that the sausage pipe scenario made him laugh, and he felt like it was worth sharing with friends. He said to Village Inn's credit, the pipe-maker -- himself -- no longer works at the restaurant.

Sadly, I knew I had hit a new low in life when I found myself typing the words "sausage pipe" into YouTube's search box. Alas, this video has proven elusive, like my dignity.

A freelance writer recently shared his reminiscences of meeting Tim Leary and Richard Alpert at a psychologists conference in 1963. Even from this briefly painted picture, set well before the full mayhem of the counterculture emeged, the cavalier quality that catapulted them to prominence is already plain to see:

Over room-service breakfast, Leary defended the work he and Alpert did at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality. The two had been ''expelled'' from their teaching posts because, as Dr. Dana Farnsworth, the psychiatrist in charge of the university's health service, declared, ''Patients suffering the consequences of the hallucinogens demonstrates that these drugs have the power to damage the individual psyche, indeed to cripple it for life.''

Leary's response: ''At Harvard they have 15 to 20 psychiatrists who work part-time. There are a lot of students in psychotherapy. The psychiatric center is a hotbed of gossip. Apparently some of the patients at the clinic took drugs on their own and then gave lurid reports to their psychiatrists. I assume that's where Dr. Farnsworth gets his information.''

''Dana's statements are too general,'' Alpert told me. ''How can he know the drugs can cripple for life when the only persons he has worked with are students?''

When confronted with the notion that LSD might have ill effects, Leary manages to boil it all down to a pithy slogan - one which happens to ring somewhat true, of course, but still, it's pretty slick:

Leary and Alpert had seen LSD's malignant face. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Park Avenue penthouse, Alpert told me, ''Once on LSD, I went into a trance for four hours and saw a red cloud coming over me with everything of my past life. This was my most-frightening experience.'' Leary insists that the uppers of psychedelic tripping outweigh the downers. ''Just because you get airsick sometimes, that's no reason to stop flying.''

Every now and then, Google Ads lead to some interesting places. Most recently, I stumbled across the web site for Meth Coffee (some kind of over-caffeinated bean that is "dusted" with yerba mate). The splash page for the site contains a masterful rant that, were I still a coffee drinker, would no doubt entice my simple brain:

METH COFFEE, a volatitherapeutic beverage, IS FORMULATED after chemical confetti and wakes zombies, fucks with perfectionists, straightens drunks, rattles teetotalers, revs vandals in search of impetus, brightens house chores AND CUTS BOREDOM LIKE A GODDAMN RAZOR. METH COFFEE may promote feelings of mania, zania, euthanasia, fantasia, and all manner of paranoia. DO NOT DRINK ALONE. METH COFFEE SHOULD NOT BE CONSUMED BY minors, bilious baby handlers, hazelnut-flavor whores, swill consumers, anger management seminar attendees, road ragers, or cup-cradling hand warmers unable to handle upward shifts in speed and mobility.

As if to hammer home the point re how much their coffee brings about paranoia (just like meth!), the rant abruptly takes a different tone:

Agent, I've been testing its effects. On day one, hair stands like pins...day two, head becomes sounding board for mental transmissions...day three, seeing motion in standstill. The spies have been watching me roast our coffee substance over open flame. I cannot see them, but I know they're there.

I transmit! I transmit!

While I was out selling they confiscated the formula, but they didn't find the hidden bags. I'm guarding residual specimens and have means to duplicate. Do you hear me? I've been talking to you! I hide underground and await your further transmissions.

I realize I shouldn't let myself get suckered by gonzo marketing techniques, but sometimes I just can't help it. They even made this delightful little video for your bemusement:

I suppose I should be less enthusiastic about glorifying this kind of product in an age where kids are dying from espresso overdoses... but c'mon, it's Meth Coffee.

Researchers in Melbourne have uncovered some interesting facts about how opiate addiction affects the frontal cortex, "the key region of the brain involved in decision making":

Participants were asked to complete a test of self-control in which they had to overcome an automatic response in favour of a more controlled alternative response, requiring them to control their impulsive tendencies.

The researchers found two important differences between the opiate-using group and the group who had never used heroin.

The opiate-using group needed to activate more of their brain by placing greater physiological demand on it to avoid making an error on a test of self-control. Brain cells in the frontal region of the brains of the heroin users also were revealed to be less healthy than the non-opiate-using group.

“What people don't tend to understand about long term drug users is that this is not a matter of choice. They have a reduced level of biological resources and find it hard to stop,” Dr Yucel said.

That's an interesting nuance; it seems to me like most people understand that addiction by its nature robs people of some measure of choice, even if they don't understand the full physiological picture of how that happens. But this type of research helps clarify that picture, and potentially offers insight toward new treatment methodologies.

This story broke back in May, and indicates that caffeine’s seemingly benign little cousin, found in chocolate, coffee, and tea, as well as the guarana berry and yerba matte, may be keeping us out of the dentist’s chair. Woohoo!

In his new work, Sadeghpour [a University of Tulane researcher] evaluated how theobromine treatment affects the integrity of teeth. In one set of experiments, he took leftover human molars from 13 individuals and cut each into pieces. Then he treated some pieces with fluoride at varying doses and exposed other pieces to varying doses of theobromine.

He then put all molar slices into a machine fitted with a diamond bit. For 5 seconds, the bit pressed into each piece of tooth, creating an indentation. The depth of that depression offers a gauge of the tooth enamel's hardness. In these tests, theobromine outperformed fluoride.

Sadeghpour and his team hope to move ahead with human trials, using a prototypical version of the theobromine-fortified toothpaste. Keep your ears to the ground, folks.

Today brings a pair of very silly commercial videos from the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside. Since they're both in the thirty-second range, I'm dropping them into one post - "for your convenience!"

I'm not sure how long this has been up, but I just came across an excerpt from The Visionary State; A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, the 2006 work by Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner. If you're not famiilar with the book, this excerpt sets up the premise quite nicely, describing how Davis developed his appreciation for California's "enchanted and sometimes sacred landscape that overlays the conventional world we know":

California seekers could be said to have taken the bait that William James dangled in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, where the psychologist defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” For James, personal experience was the cornerstone of the religious life, rather than dogma or institution or even belief. Because of his interest in individual experience, James opened up the wunderkammer of consciousness, accepting mysticism and so-called “altered states” as valid points of departure. Experimenting with psychedelic compounds like peyote and nitrous oxide, James argued that such exalted states of consciousness had to be integrated into any philosophy worth its salt. Though James’ approach hardly exhausts our understanding of religion, it certainly helps illuminate California consciousness. Solitude, especially, is key: though California has hosted scores of sects and cults, seekers are often driven by the sneaking suspicion that, in crucial ways, they are largely on their own. In California, though, James’ “individual men” are as often as not women—the feminization and even “queering” of the sacred being one of California’s defining, and most controversial, characteristics.

If, after you've finished the excerpt, you're curious about the photography, meander over to the book's official site to peruse a sampling of images.

Hey, here's a great idea. You know all those unruly passengers on airplanes who theoretically pose a great security risk and could be terrorists and are just generally annoying? Well, as the ever reliable Gizmodo points out, an inventor has come up with a way to nip this whole problem right in the bud: remote-controlled tranquilizer necklaces!

The diagram above displays a design for a deterrent against unruly behaviour during air travel. Essentially, the passenger would be required to wear the collar, which would be controlled remotely. If the said passenger were to shout like a sissy or do anything slightly alarming, the air marshal/steward/stewardess would panic and press the big red button. This would deploy tranquilizers via a syringe, directly into the offender's neck.

Right the fuck on. If this catches on, I can think of dozens, nay, zillions of events where this kind of contraption would be worthwhile. In particular, it'd be hilarious to see the townies who come to Burning Man on Friday before the burn equipped with such devices. Oh sure, we'd have to step over mounds of them over that weekend, but it'd be worth the extra effort, and we could paint them all turquoise blue just for the hell of it...