According to a recent report, scientists have developed a gadget that will detect the presence of "date rape" drugs like GHB in your drink:

The drugs are often colourless, odourless and difficult to taste when mixed with drink. Modern detection techniques including conventional methods such as test strips are far from perfect and are prone to false positives, as well.

But the device developed by scientists at the London South Bank University claims to overcome all these problems.

The device has a probe, which when dipped into a drink, passes a current through it and records the characteristics of the resulting signal. It then compares this signature with a library of known drug signatures stored in its memory to find a possible match, reports New Scientist.

It would be nice if the device could be tuned to detect the presence of too much bitters in my Manhattans, or too much vermouth in my martinis, but I guess that's taking things a little too far.

At the Summer of Love Exhibit, currently at the Whitney, there are a number of photos of the Joshua Light Show - the liquid-light pioneers that regularly ran visuals for acts like Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore. Two pictures in particular, showing the group with all their gear at work, really scratched my geeky how-it-works itch. Yesterday, I interrogated my dad about his liquid light show, stole a few tricks from him, and then started looking up the Joshua Light Show to see what they're up to today. Lo and behold, they still exist, have learned some nifty new tricks, and opened the damn Summer of Love Exhibit. Which I was invited to and missed. Clearly these people must be my friends.

The ACLU describes a recent case of a same-sex couple on supervised release after their convictions for possession of meth. Typically, individuals on this type of probation are not allowed to interact with other felons, but exceptions are usually made for close family members. This couple, however, was initially prohibited from seeing each other, and spent over a year without contact while their case made its way through appeals. The ACLU managed to get the decision overturned:

After acknowledging the long-term commitment that the couple has made to each other and noting the great strides both have made in their recovery, Judge Katz ruled today that the couple can no longer be barred from having contact with each other. Relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, Judge Katz ruled that same-sex couples have the same right to form intimate relationships as opposite sex couples and that it is unconstitutional to treat same-sex couples differently.

"This is truly a great day for our clients who have been barred from having any contact with each other for more than a year," said Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "By honoring their commitment to each other and fighting to be together, Dan and Steven have helped to bring about ground-breaking law requiring equal treatment for same-sex couples."

That's a nice silver lining to uncover at the end of an addiction and a jail sentence.

I don't know why celebrities feel it necessary to describe the details of their illicit drug use to the public, but apparently, it's sometimes just the thing to do. Keith Richards recently admitted that he's no longer able to do cocaine, due to some medication he's on after a head injury last year:

Richards says, "Drugs I'm on now - the s**t I've gotta take because of the brain job, Dilantin. Means you can't take cocaine anymore. Which is fine with me.

"I mean, I haven't seen coke for, like, a year and a half. Big deal. Y'know I used to like my little bump here and there after meals. But now I can't do that anymore, so I don't do it no more.

"I still smoke like a f**king chimney. Get me some good weed."

Admittedly, the notion of a "bump here and there after meals" sounds surprisingly civilized, not too far off from taking an espresso after a meal really. And I guess simply admitting to the press that you smoke like a "f**ing chimney" isn't particularly grounds for the authorities to come bashing down your door. Maybe the 63-year-old rock star just needs some way to demonstrate he's still a bad boy, given that his music is the definition of establishment now and his concerts are like watching animatronic pizza parlor shows.

Scientific American reports on a study by INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Montpellier, France, published recently in the journal Neurology. They studied 7000 older people over four years, and found that higher coffee consumption was associated with less decline in memory over time for women over 65. Interestingly, there was no difference in rate of dementia, and there was no difference for men.

When I read the full study, there was one strange omission: there was no information about whether the baseline level of memory performance was any different between the coffee drinkers and the non-coffee drinkers. Maybe the coffee drinkers already killed most of their brain cells, and there wasn't much room left for decline, and that's why they showed less decline. Yes, that sounds silly on the face of it, but it seems like such an obviously relevant piece of information that I can't imagine why they left it out.

So there's an interesting bit of substance-news, and also yet another object lesson in careful interpretation of scientific publications...

Fembots from Hyperspace, Part 2: The Message. Click here for full-sized image

Here we see the tesseract in its lower dimensional form. Notice how it casts shadows of symmetrical geometric objects on planar surfaces. Hidden within the octohoron is the Flower of Life. Watch the cyclical convolutions as the hypercube consumes itself and grows from within. Those of you who study sacred geometry know that the only way to observe a hypercube in its natural state is to teleport yourself to a higher-dimension. Oh yes, an exponentially accelerated spatial cortex helps too.

Slappy Pinchbottom keeps putting out new radio programmes, and I keep forgetting to mention them here. A recent episode was called "Drug Magic," and here's the description:

this week, scattered throughout the show, we feature several excerpts of a neocyberpsychedelimagickal rant by one of my favorite comic book writers, Grant Morrison, taken from conference thrown by the fine folks at Disinfo way back in 2000 — i mean in history, Patty, before they changed the water.

Part 1 also features a track called Tasmanian Pain Coaster, by pioneering indie hip hop artist El-P, formerly of Company Flow (thanks to Comfort Radio for that track.) we wrap up part 1 with a talk given by Mark Pesce at the Mindstates conference....

Part 2 begins with mr. morrison’s brief guide to creating magic sigils. we then move swiftly to an exploration by example of a number of regional American accents, followed by more morrison, and we wrap up this segment with episode 5 of our weekly adventure series, Moon Over Morocco.

Part 3 this week features the ever-sprightly medroxy progesterone acetate, followed by a bit by yet ANOTHER psychedelic guru, Terence McKenna, this time talking about Jihad and the future of humanity. we finish up with a heartwarming chat between father and son, which begins with the son pummelling the father into sexual receptivity. (note: that may just be my interpretation.)

As if that's not enough, another recent episode, entitled "All Slappy All The Time," focuses a laser eye on the mythos of the singularity (among other things):

part 1 this week features a slappyrant about the impending Singularity, and whether Google can save us from nuclear holocaust. we then present a dialogue between two ghosts in the machine, ghosts named Alice and Jabberwacky. in part 2 we chat a bit about Ray Kurzweil, and then delve into a braided collage of short pieces designed as a vehicle to facilitate swift passage to the hypnagogic realms. part 3 consists of a description of a number of highlights from the game of Blank White Cards, which is interrupted by a special news briefing and farewell address from the President, who resigned during the course of this episode of Slappy Pinchbottom’s Odd Preoccupation. (i’m not saying the two phenomena are related, though they ARE.) part 4 rounds up the show with the usual painfully droll interstitial banter between the Odd Preoccupation and the Elk Mating Ritual.

A recent study, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, reported on an interesting potential treatment approach for bipolar disorder, utilizing modafinil as an add-on to other substances:

The study randomly assigned 85 patients with bipolar disorder and clinically significant depression despite ongoing treatment with mood stabilizers. Forty-four percent of the patients who were designated to receive modafinil add-on responded within the 6 weeks of the study, and only 23% of those receiving placebo add-on responded, a significant difference.

Previous studies have not found modafinil effective in unipolar depression. It is tempting to think that this may reflect a higher prevalence of psychomotor retardation in bipolar depression, which is therefore more responsive to modafinil. However, measures of fatigue and sleepiness did not differ after modafinil and placebo treatment in the study by Frye and associates.

The dense article makes clear that this is only one study that needs to be confirmed among larger populations, but it's still interesting; the list of potential benefits for modafinil continues to increase. Of course, the article's author also points out that modafinil is - currently, at least - an expensive treatment, which is a shame. Personally I want this stuff over the counter in gigantic bottles. However, I'm left surprised that "measures of fatigue and sleepiness did not differ" between modafinil and placebo, especially given that, even though this was a double blind study, all the doctors and patients knew that the medicine being studied had stimulant effects. Very curious...

Slate has an interesting piece on "the economics of addiction," studying how demand and price interact in a world of hard core dependence:

Rational addicts should behave in certain ways. They should, for instance, respond not just to current price increases but to expected future price hikes. If heroin is likely to get more expensive, rational addicts should consider trying to quit before that happens. Addicts may even be more sensitive to lasting price shifts than nonaddicts. And since addiction is self-reinforcing, when the rational addict wants to quit, cold turkey is the efficient way to do it.

Economists have found some evidence to support these ideas: Pamela Mobilia finds that betting at racetracks falls in anticipation of increases in bookies' takings; Nilss Olekalns and Peter Bardsley find that coffee addicts show similar foresight; Philip Cook and George Tauchen found that when some U.S. counties raised taxes on alcohol, liver cirrhosis fell more sharply than overall consumption, suggesting that it was the alcoholics who cut back most.

I'm no economist (in fact, I'm no just about anything that might be relevant to writing for this blog), but it all sounds very intriguing. Of course, from my own experience, if I want anything badly enough, I tend to screw my life up trying to find money for it - and I'm just talking about computer gear and CDs, so clearly I don't have the right context to appreciate the fine detail in this article. But it's still worth a look - heaven knows a fresh perspective on understanding what motivates long term hard core addiction would certainly be welcome.