Hey, be sure to make "special K" a part of your family's breakfast! From the drug comedy DVD Tales From The Tripside.

Transform, "the UK's leading centre of expertise on drug policy and law reform," just issued a colossal guide to intelligent drug policy reform arguments:

After the War on Drugs: Tools for the debate is a 76 page guide to making the case for drug policy reform. It is designed to:

* Reframe the debate, moving it beyond stale ideological arguments into substantive, rational engagement
* Provide the language and analysis to challenge the prohibitionist status quo, and to make the case for evidenced based alternatives

I freely admit I haven't read all 76 pages of this guide, so if any of you get a chance to dig in deep in the next couple days, please offer your thoughts in the comments. I'll round up a noteworthy summary for next week if I can.

If you're like me, you often find yourself pondering what the lethal dose of LSD is. (Of course, if you're like me, you also wake up shrieking ungodly praise to Cthulhu and foaming - frothily, I might add - at the mouth.) As it turns out, we're not the only ones to ask that question; indeed, a recent update to Ask Erowid brought to my attention the two known cases where people wound up shuffling off this mortal coil as the result of a massive LSD overdose. Check this out:

The first, which is mentioned in Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford, is discussed in a 1977 Journal of the Kentucky Medical Association article. In this case, "the quantity of LSD in the blood indicated that 320 mg (320,000 micrograms) had been injected intravenously" under the mistaken idea it was speed. The amount (320mg) was an estimate by the authors of the article and not based on direct knowledge of how much was taken.

So that's essentially the equivalent of injecting approximately all of the LSD in the western hemisphere. Gotcha - don't do that. There's another reported death although the details are too sketchy to draw any conclusions.

The handy part is learning about a few interesting brushes with insanity:

There are a handful of other reports of serious problems (but not death) caused by very large doses. One person who took 40 mg survived. Another report outlines the case of a group of eight individuals who snorted large quantities of powdered LSD on the mistaken assumption that it was cocaine... all survived.

So yeah, that gives you something to shoot for, folks. Peter Stafford reported in the Psychedelics Encylopedia an estimate of 14 mg as the LD-50 (the dose at which half the wackos who tried that dose would keel over dead), but if one person took 40 mg and survived, that means 50% of you wackos could take 40 mg and survive. It just stands to reason. So please, screw all this "one whole sheet, yippee!" malarkey and get down to some real honest to God acid quaffing, would you please?

NaFun pointed us to this delightful little faux Chick track about the perils of not planning properly for Burning Man. (You have heard of Burning Man, right?) The whole thing is pitch perfect, in that "it's funny because it's true" sort of way.

How will the next President of the United States handle the Drug War? According to publicly stated positions from presidential front-runners, the response to this question appears to be "What drug war?"

On every major presidential candidate’s campaign Web site, you’ll find their policy positions on diverse issues ranging from the war in Iraq to mortgage fraud. You will not find, however, a single reference to the Drug War by front-runners, including U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney.

...

While their continued silence doesn’t hurt their electoral chances, voters deserve a candidate who can acknowledge our failed drug war for what it is—a multi-decade failure that costs us billions of dollars each year.

In political terms, commenting on the Drug War could be considered opening-up a can of worms: A can of fluorescent, wiggling, brain-eating worms (God I love those worms). And how is a candidate supposed to take an enlightened view on drug policy when most of the country is still mired in the anti-drug propaganda from the hot-n-heavy Drug War heyday of the '80s. That said, demonizing recreational drug users seems as old-school as frosted perms and leather suits with zippers up the legs and sleeves. But I digress. Will someone please get a modern drug platform before the 2008 election? The smart candidates will try to deflect Drug War queries by moving it into the category of a public health issue (maybe even roll it into a larger discussion on health care); the sad ones will stay tough on crime while pretending they never inhaled.

My favorite is the Batman...

Here's some interesting news for those of you with less-than-stellar drug histories who still have a dream of working in counter-intel: The FBI still wants you drug-using geeks. From a recent story at the Washington Post:

The buttoned-down FBI is loosening up: Under a little-noticed new hiring policy introduced this year, job applicants with a history of drug use will no longer be disqualified from employment throughout the bureau.

Old guidelines barred FBI employment to anyone who had used marijuana more than 15 times in their lives or who had tried other illegal narcotics more than five times.

But those strict numbers no longer apply. Applicants for jobs such as analysts, programmers or special agents must still swear that they have not used any illegal substances recently -- three years for marijuana and 10 years for other drugs -- but they are no longer ruled out of consideration because of more frequent drug use in the past.

It's interesting that the FBI would admit that they are "out of step" with the reality of our times and concede like this, but the problem is they are having trouble finding people to work for them, and their drug policies are still even tighter than those of the CIA (can you believe that?). However, the FBI's new "whole person" approach to screening applicants promises to make some distinction between "recreational drug users" and "criminals", as odd as that might sound.

Here's a good old fashioned way to get public servants to actually serve the public: bribery! Well, bribery in the form of taxes collected on regulated sales of marijuana. At least that's the plan put forward by one California group:

The Let Us Pay Taxes group has offered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger one billion dollars to be put toward the budget crisis. The thing is; this money will be coming from a coalition of California marijuana growers and dealers. Whats the Terminator to do? Terminate the [budget] crisis with taxes that taxpayers would actually be willing to pay!

This seems like a reasonable solution to me. Keep the smokers happy, generate revenue for the state, keep the money out of criminal hands... Why not?

This video made me so happy. It also gave me chills and a contact high. Please to enjoy this short'n'sweet video depiction of a young man on acid inadvertently getting trapped in front of a mirror.

You know, it just seems like asking for trouble when your first hit single is about how they tried to make you go to rehab but you won't go go go - and then you need to get your stomach pumped for "a suspected drugs overdose."

Amy Winehouse, the turbulent diva of British pop, has been discharged from hospital after collapsing from a suspected drugs overdose.

The wayward Winehouse, 23, was given an adrenaline shot and had her stomach pumped at London's University College Hospital on Tuesday.

This comes after a string of recent canceled shows, ostensibly due to that fabled celebrity disease, "exhaustion." I don't understand why these famous people are so exhausted all the time; among the insane cornucopia of free-flowing drugs that must surround them at all times, are they completely unable to find any damn sleeping pills?