Originally published in 2010 'The Pot Book -- A complete guide to cannabis, its role in medicine, politics, science, and culture' is a collection of articles, essays and interviews edited by Julie Holland. A psychiatrist specialising in psychopharmacology, Holland has previously edited 'Ecstasy: The Complete Guide' and written the bestseller 'Weekends at Bellevue'. 'The Pot Book' is refreshingly comprehensive and takes into account many varied perspectives on this anciently used plant.

The Pot Book is divided into five parts that gives the reader a rough outline of approaches: An overview of cannabis; Risks of use and harm reduction; The clinical use of cannabis; Cannabis culture; and Steps in the right direction. In amongst these sections are notable contributors including the likes of Andrew Weil, Lester Grinspoon, Allen St. Pierre, Rick Doblin and Julie Holland, among many other lesser known but equally interesting people. This rich diversity sets the ground for a well-rounded and multidisciplined approach and although this method of arranging a text doesn't necessarily lend itself to a smooth front-to-back narrative this is not essential and would, in many respects, detract from the modern complexity of the issue, which these shorter essays amply tackle.

Alexander Shulgin, the one-of-a-kind chemist who crossed a diamond with a pearl, is in the hospital after a stroke. Friends are suggesting that donations can be made via the second link on this erowid.org page.

Family friend Greg M. writes that:

[Tuesday (11/16)] "on the way to the hospital for a scheduled test, Sasha had a stroke. He has been struggling for six months with an ulcer on his left foot that won’t heal, hoping to avoid amputation. Sasha & Ann have been in serious financial trouble for some years, and the coming medical bills will be a burden they can’t bear alone... For non-tax-deductible contributions: Paypal $ to [annandsashashulgin@comcast.net] or snailmail: Sasha Shulgin, c/o Transform Press, PO Box 13675, Berkeley CA 94712. For tax-deductible online donations to support the completion of Shulgin publishing projects that are underway: http://www.erowid.org/donations/project_shulgin.php "

From South Park. In case you didn't see it on TV already...

[Thanks Mark!]

It starts with an anecdote about a pool party in Beverly Hills. Some "handsome young men skin-tight trunks" and some "healthy, hyper-bosom, bikini clad animals of the fairer sex" get high on acid-soaked sugar cubes. When the LSD kicks in, there is "a rapid and indiscriminate pairing off of men and women." ....

Later in the story, author Joseph Andrews (who I could find nothing about), makes LSD sound like a cross between Viagra and Spanish Fly. He writes:

"Physically, a person’s sexuality becomes almost limitless -- and enjoyable in the extreme -- which is one of the reasons why a male LSD user’s potency may last for hours and why a female may often be capable and desirous of having a seemingly endless series of relationships, while under the influence of the drugs."

Sigh... further evidence that acid was better in the good old days.

Every society is a high society. Every day, people drink coffee on European terraces and kava in Pacific villages, sniff cocaine in American suburbs and petrol in Aborigine slums, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets and coca leaf on Andean mountainsides, swallow ecstasy tablets in the clubs of Amsterdam and opium pills in the deserts of Rajasthan, and smoke ya'aba in Thai nightclubs, hashish in Himalayan temples and tobacco in every nation on earth.

Acclaimed cultural historian Mike Jay paints vivid portraits of the roles that drugs play - as medicines, religious sacraments, status symbols and coveted trade goods. He traces the understanding of intoxicants from the botanicals of the classical world through the mind-bending self-experiments of early scientists to the present 'war on drugs', and reveals how the international trade in substances such as tobacco, tea and opium shaped the modern world.

A bill to legalize marijuana passed the House in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), a US territory, November 4. But the governor says he would only sign a medical marijuana bill, and the Senate appears poised to kill it.

Still, its passage marks the first time a pot legalization bill has passed in a legislative chamber in any US territory.

Let's hear it for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands - you're Number One!!

[Thanks, sd&m!]

A measure that would legalize medical marijuana in Arizona pulled ahead for the first time Friday, with both supporters and opponents saying they believed the proposal that went before voters on Election Day would pass.

Proposition 203 was ahead by 4,421 votes out of more than 1.63 million votes counted. The measure started out losing by about 7,200 votes on Nov. 2 and the gap gradually narrowed in the following 10 days.

Only about 10,000 early and provisional ballots remain to be counted in the state, and all are in Maricopa County.

If the measure passes, Arizona would be the 15th state with a medical marijuana law.

"We were optimistic that this is what the result was going to be today, and we're thrilled that it came to reality," said Andrew Myers, campaign manager for the Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project. "Moving forward it's our responsibility to help implement a program that Arizona can be proud of."

Opponents of the initiative, including all Arizona's sheriff's and county prosecutors, the governor, attorney general, and many other politicians, came out against the proposed law.

H+: What recent developments in neurological research have influenced your theory, and why?

JK: The research informing my theory has come from a variety of directions. I would say the first sense I had that I was onto a good working model started after reading Joseph Ledoux's Synaptic Self and Emotional Brain. I spent some time studying Ledoux and connective neuroanatomy, so I had a fairly strong idea of how sensation propagates through the brain to inform perception. That gave me a physical system to work with. Then I read J. Allan Hobson's work on acetylcholine, psychosis, and dreaming in The Dream Drugstore, and that gave me a pretty good understanding of memory and visual memory gating between the hippocampus and the frontal cortex. After that I went through Paul Bressloff and Jack Cowan's work on spatial visual networks, which demonstrates how destabilization in neural oscillations between the retina and visual cortex leads to various types of overlaid geometric hallucinations. There were plenty of others, but these three areas of research helped me solidify my working theory that all psychedelic phenomena are related to loss of feedback control in recurrent perceptual systems.

The theory I was formulating suggested that psychedelics promote feedback excitation in perceptual circuits to create sustained over-saturated states of sensual intensity. I did not know that Franz Vollenweider had already published a similar theory, but his model of under-constrained perception in sensory feedback loops is very similar to the model I had already settled on. This continuous feedback model was then refined into the Frame Stacking model on the suggestion of an anonymous Canadian researcher who had read my work. The Frame Stacking model helped describe the potential depth of nonlinear feedback hallucination in a very formal way: it was my first move towards a more quantum description of expanded states of consciousness. The Control Interrupt model of psychedelic action was the second piece of the quantum description, defining hallucinogenic action in terms of wave packets interrupting multisensory perception. This was my own conception based primarily on first-hand research, but was also informed by research coming out of Dave Nichols' lab, the survey of psychedelic receptor targets by Thomas Ray, an article on psychosis and Bayesian information processing in the brain by Phil Corlett, and other underground research. Most of the work I cite was published within the last three to five years, and most of it focuses only on one piece of the overall puzzle. With PIT I've tried to take all this current research and tie it together in a formal meta-analysis that makes some sense. The Control Interrupt and Frame Stacking models are what came out of this process.

Cheers,
Gwyllm

Trailer for an animated psychedelic project from Mark Perceval-Maxwell of PunchBot Studios. He is also responsible for Galleria Divinorum, a series of paintings influenced by psychedelics. Great job Mark!

The short story follows the main character, Daniel, as he embarks on a journey of self discovery in hopes of curing a life long condition of hyper realistic nightmares. At the suggestion of a friend he partakes in a shamanistic retreat where he is given a psychotropic brew, Yaki, in order to expel his inner demons.

What follows is a manic psychedelic romp as one of his purges gives birth to a small yet intense entity named Azmod, whose soul mission is not only to drag Daniel through an immediate awakening, but act out the role of a god on earth and expel the entire planet of its own shadow self.