He began to experiment with drugs, including LSD and amphetamines. "I would take a huge dose of amphetamine," he recently told the New Scientist, "400 tablets on the weekend – and basically have something like a nonstop orgasm for 48 hours."

OK then - sounds like a plan!

Judging from the smorgasbord of drugs confiscated over the weekend, Atlantic City Police could hang a sign on their evidence locker that reads:

Phish Pharmacopeia.

The Grateful Dead-inspired jam band played Friday, Saturday and Sunday (Halloween) in "America's Playground," and authorities, including immigration/customs agents and members of the county prosecutor's office, collected everything from magic mushrooms and acid to the anesthetic ketamine and prescription pills.

They even seized Rice Krispies Treats with cannabis.

Enough to create an illustrated field guide to meds and mind-altering substances.

Arrested were 63 men and women from 15 states, plus one Philadelphia 15-year-old who allegedly resisted arrest after distributing nitrous oxide. Most of the accused were given summonses for possession and released. A detective "assaulted with nitrous oxide" while making two arrests was treated and released from a hospital, and a captain's hand was injured as he tried to subdue a male suspect, according to the police news release.

Here's the list of drugs gathered by A.C. police:

- 70 nitrous oxide tanks.
- 551.2 grams (19.4 oz.) marijuana.
- 4 marijuana-laced brownies.
- 16 marijuana-laced Rice Krispies Treats.
- 66 marijuana-laced cookies.
- 134.9 grams (4.8 oz.) psilocybin mushrooms.
- 22 doses of ketamine.
- 34.3 grams (1.2 oz.) of Ecstasy (MDMA powder form, a.k.a Molly).
- 60 pills of Ecstasy.
- 30.7 grams (1.1 oz.) cocaine.
- 2.2 grams (0.1 oz) heroin.
- 395 hits of LSD.
- 21 LSD-laced cookies.
- 26 Oxycodone pills.

Umm... How do you assault someone with nitrous oxide?

Yet young people will do anything for this grungy skanky weed. They will lie and cheat. They will steal car stereos or trade their delicate, yearning bodies to bearded ex-cons. They will flirt with biker gangs or cruise skid row. And once they grab hold of a bag of this deadly drug, they become paranoid and greedy, often turning to violence to knock off their fellow addicts so they will have more for themselves. To do their smoking, teens and 20-somethings seek out the very places that a serial killer would likely prowl-- empty parking lots and abandoned buildings. Just imagine your kids falling asleep, knocked out on drugs, as unknown pedophiles watch from nearby bushes... Or else they lock themselves behind dead bolts in rundown railroad flats, heavy blankets covering the windows and the phone permanently off the hook to avoid calls from Mom.

Toking, sucking, chuffing.... These are all words to describe a pot lover gulping down that acrid yellow smoke deep into his lungs. The sensation that comes almost immediately is one of pain and trauma but the addict likes the punishment, he lives for the punishment! He will hallucinate shadowed monsters on the walls, the sound of rabid dogs scratching at his door. Maybe his hand will fall off or the television will speak to him like Satan in this putrid delusion. The mind is thus released from any moral boundaries and sex naturally ensues. Paganistic, hedonistic orgies of lust perversion where no hole is left unviolated. The thrill of sadomasochistic carnal insanity is the great addiction of the toker. Penetrating each other for days, slobbering like wolves gorging on a carcass, the stain of their fluids on every wall will grow tacky before the hippie party ends. They will return to this again and again until they no longer know what sex is, what decency is, what America is. Or else they release themselves through constant, violent masturbation. Yes, self-gratification is a chronic disease of the weed wanton. Trapped in a world where only the hand and the genitalia exist, neither hurricanes nor death can unlock the grasp of the marijuana masturbator before it's time.

Thank you, Christwire, for keeping it real. [Thanks, Bamyasi!]

Move over, Advil. A Harvard Medical School researcher says LSD, the hallucinogen at the heart of the 1960s drug counterculture, holds a better treatment for humanity's worst headaches.

Harvard researcher John Halpern has formed a company he hopes will bring to market a drug based on his research into the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide on cluster headaches, a rare but devastating condition that is as bad as it sounds.

Halpern, a noted expert in the long-term effects of drug use, said research suggests chemicals present in LSD are an astonishingly effective cure for cluster headaches. His company, Entheogen Corp., is seeking $10 million to bring the drug through to FDA approval, according to a regulatory filing this week.

Entheogen's drug does not cause triptastic visions, Halpern said. It is based on BOL-148, a non-hallucinogenic LSD derivative developed in the 1950s and 60s for research into the effects of LSD on the brain, when such was last in vogue. "Trying to do a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial with a drug that's as psychoactive as LSD is impossible," Halpern explained.

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I’ve just found a remarkable 1963 study [pdf] from the Archives of Opthalmology in which 24 blind participants took LSD to see if they could experience visual hallucinations.

It turns out, they can, although this seems largely to be the case in blind people who had several years of sight to begin with, but who later lost their vision.

Those blind from a very early age (younger than two years-old) did not report visual hallucinations, probably because they never had enough visual experience to shape a fully-functioning visual system when their brain was still developing.

"It is evident that a normal retina is not needed for the occurrence of LSD-induced visual experiences. These visual experiences do not seem to differ from the hallucinations reported by normal subjects after LSD.

Such phenomena occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior visual activity. The drug increased the frequency of visual events such as spots, lights, dots, and flickers. However, the complex visual experiences reported by 3 subjects after LSD did not occur after placebo or in ordinary experience.

It is interesting to note that duration of blindness was not related to the occurrence of visual hallucinations; nor was intelligence, acuity of visual memory, or use of visual imagery in speech."

I mentioned in an earlier post on auditory hallucinations in deaf people that I’d heard rumours of studies on LSD in blind people but never found any reports. This study is not the only one it seems. The paper reviews several other studies in the same area.

[Thanks Sam Hell!]

A 23-year-old British man died from what the coroner said was a dangerous dose of caffeine, according to British media reports.

Information from the coroner's inquest revealed that Michael Lee Bedford ingested two spoonfuls of pure caffeine powder that he washed down with an energy drink. Coroner Dr. Nigel Chapman said the dose Bedford consumed was equivalent to 70 cans of Red Bull.

"This should serve as a warning that caffeine is so freely available on the Internet but so lethal if the wrong dosage is taken," Chapman said at the inquest.

A warning label on the product said only one-sixteenth of a teaspoon should be taken, but Bedford far exceeded that amount.

"He wasn't doing anything wrong, it was just the danger of the dose he took," said Chapman.

[Thanks mthing!]

The human consumption of psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, is of even more recent historical origin than the human consumption of alcohol or tobacco, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent people use more drugs more frequently than less intelligent individuals...

Given their extremely recent origin and thus evolutionary novelty, the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume all types of psychoactive drugs than less intelligent individuals. Once again, as with alcohol consumption, the fact that the consumption of psychoactive drugs has largely negative health consequences and few (if any) benefits of any kind is immaterial to the Hypothesis. It does not predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in healthy and beneficial behavior, only that they are more likely to engage in evolutionarily novel behavior.

A new study in The Lancet rates the harmfulness of 20 psychoactive drugs according to 16 criteria and finds that alcohol comes out on top. Although that conclusion is generating headlines, it is not at all surprising, since alcohol is, by several important measures (including acute toxicity, impairment of driving ability, and the long-term health effects of heavy use), the most dangerous widely used intoxicant, and its abuse is also associated with violence, family breakdown, and social estrangement. A group of British drug experts gathered by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) rated alcohol higher than most or all of the other drugs for health damage, mortality, impairment of mental functioning, accidental injury, economic cost, loss of relationships, and negative impact on community. Over all, alcohol rated 72 points on a 100-point scale, compared to 55 for heroin, 54 for crack cocaine, and 33 for methamphetamine. Cannabis got a middling score of 20, while MDMA (Ecstasy), LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms were at the low end, with ratings of 9, 7, and 6, respectively.

[Thanks Mark!]

Results submitted to the FDA showed that Nuedexta reduced episodes of PBA by about half...

The active component of the product is dextromethorphan, which has been used for years in cough syrup... some patients who got it noticed they were having fewer emotional outbursts.

It has taken a dozen years to bring Nuedexta to market. One reason is that the product combines dextromethorphan with a drug called quinidine, which keeps the active ingredient in the bloodstream longer.

But quinidine can affect heart rhythms and has other side effects. So in 2006, the FDA asked Avanir, the small company developing Nuedexta, to study a formulation that used less quinidine.

And the rest is history. Anyone ready to sign up for a Neudexta study?