[Thanks Howie!]

A collection of clips about prescription pharmaceuticals, marijuana, and the hypocrisy of the War on Drugs. Video by Ryan Kaye of sacredcow.com. Featuring comedy from (in order of appearance) Chris Rock, Ed Helms, Bill Maher, Dave Reinitz, Marko Elgart, George Carlin, Doug Stanhope, Katt Williams, Jon Stewart, and more.

An American high school student who fell to his death in June at the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver was high on LSD, according to a B.C. Coroner's report.

The report determined LSD was a contributing factor in the death of Daniel Cho, 17.

Cho, from San Mateo, Calif., died on June 6 after climbing over a 1.2-metre-high railing at a viewing platform and falling 30 metres to his death.

Cho's death, ruled an accident, was due to multiple injuries sustained in the fall. The coroner found there was no evidence Cho intended to harm himself.

The report also found Cho had previously been caught by a school chaperone climbing over a railing into an out-of-bounds area.

The music student from Aragon High School was in Vancouver as part of an exchange trip with students from Killarney Secondary.

According to the report, Cho and two other students took LSD on a bus ride from Seattle to Vancouver.

Chaperones had noticed the three students behaving strangely and had informed a teacher, who intended to talk to the students at their hotel after the trip to the bridge.

Police arrested three college freshmen after campus cops discovered they had converted a Georgetown University dorm room into a clandestine drug lab.

Cops and school officials said the students were using the room to create dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a powerful hallucinogenic that is said to cause visions of alien encounters and trigger horrific, near-death sensations.

Early reports misidentified the room, located on the top floor of Georgetown's Harbin Hall, as a methamphetamine lab.

Georgetown freshmen John Romano and Charles Smith and University of Richmond freshman John Perrone were arrested and charged with manufacturing a controlled substance, according to NBC Washington.

Cops busted the dorm room drug den after a Harbin resident called campus police at around 5 a.m. to report a strange odor coming from room 926 on the top floor of the residence.

More than 400 bleary-eyed students were forced to evacuate the building at around 6 a.m. on Saturday while police and safety officials swept the building with drug-sniffing dogs.

Once in the room, cops found a stash of sketchy-looking chemicals and materials, including a glass jar with an unidentified red substance, mason jars containing a clear liquid, a turkey baster and black suitcase reeking of a strong, chemical smell, NBC reported.

At a press conference in New York on Tuesday 26 October, at the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly, one of the UN’s key human rights experts will call for a fundamental rethink of international drug policy.

Anand Grover, from India, is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health, whose mandate is derived from the UN Human Rights Council. Mr Grover’s annual thematic report, to be presented on October 25/26, sets out the range of human rights abuses that have resulted from international drug control efforts, and calls on Governments to:

* Ensure that all harm-reduction measures (as itemized by UNAIDS) and drug-dependence treatment services, particularly opioid substitution therapy, are available to people who use drugs, in particular those among incarcerated populations.

* Decriminalize or de-penalize possession and use of drugs.

* Repeal or substantially reform laws and policies inhibiting the delivery of essential health services to drug users, and review law enforcement initiatives around drug control to ensure compliance with human rights obligations.

* Amend laws, regulations and policies to increase access to controlled essential medicines

* To the UN drug control agencies, Mr Grover recommends the creation of an alternative drug regulatory framework based on a model such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

The report is the clearest statement to date from within the UN system about the harms that drug policies have caused and the need for a fundamental shift in drug policy.

This news was brought to our attention by reader Sami, who also wanted to point this out this fact from Grover's UN Human Rights Report: Lack of access to LSD precursor (ergometrine) is causing tens of thousands of women to bleed to death during childbirth every year.

Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental
health (UN Doc No A/65/255):

44. Emergency obstetric procedures and management of epilepsy also require use of scheduled medications, and remain inadequately resourced. Post-partum haemorrhage results in over 100,000 maternal deaths annually. Oxytocin and ergometrine, two controlled drugs used in obstetric procedures, are difficult to access yet reduce the risk of severe post-partum bleeding by more than half.73 Similarly, around 75 per cent of people with epilepsy in developing countries and up to 90 per cent of patients with epilepsy in Africa do not receive treatment with essential medicines, including phenobarbital, partly because it is a controlled substance.

“And Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” were the words etched in stone behind the speakers at the recent “Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics” conference at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. And I will add that Christ Consciousness is especially with one at the end of the world, when psychedelics dissolve the ordinarily stable confines of reality, and reveal one of underlying transcendent glory and truth. I will now review the most important insights into the nature of the psychedelic experience that were expounded by some very inspiring and peculiar researchers...

One of the more anticipated researchers was Rick Strassman, who oversaw the administration of 400 doses of Dimethyltryptamine to 60 volunteers in a study at the University of New Mexico that finished in 1991. His recent research however, was on the prophecies in the Hebrew Bible and their relation to the psychedelic state. He hypothesized that prophecy is the perception of “invisible worlds,” which is experienced under a “prophetic state of consciousness,” which no doubt involves the endogenous release of DMT or its chemical relatives. DMT is, at least visually, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, and tends to make “invisible worlds” visible and immediate. It is also synthesized naturally in the lungs and red blood cells. Strassman spoke of, quote, “History as fulfilled prophecy, end of days, and the messiah.” He also mentioned a passage in the Hebrew Bible which was particularly psychedelic, involving entities, which were frequently encountered by subjects in his DMT studies.

With my first new interview in over a year, we've got Mitch Schultz, producer and director of the new film, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," a documentary about dimethyltryptamine and the research conducted by Rick Strassman. You can get more info on the film by visiting www.thespiritmolecule.com

Underneath the mattress isn't going to cut it. Neither will tucking it behind the stack of "Twilight" books. Not even pushing it deep into the toe of a smelly gym shoe.

The dog will find it. And he'll know it's not oregano.

A new service in Maryland is promising parents peace of mind by allowing them to essentially rent a drug-sniffing dog, a highly trained canine that will come to their house and within seconds, detect even the tiniest whiff of narcotics. The program allows ordinary moms and dads access to a search tool typically reserved for law enforcement -- and typically aimed at suspected criminals.

Dogs Finding Drugs will, indeed, uncover teens' stashes. Whether those kids talk to their parents again remains to be seen.

Anne Wills, who runs the just-launched, Catonsville-based nonprofit, says parents are clamoring for the service and she expects business to "explode."

[Thanks l.p.]

Originally published in 1962 'My Self and I', by American Thelma Moss, was released pseudonymously under the name Constance A. Newland. One of a number of books that came out of the psychotherapeutic application of LSD in the 1950s and also, in part, as a reaction to Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell', the text reads like an idealised Freudian analysis. A case history that displays all the key signifiers of a Freudian model like the Oedipus complex, castration and penis envy, to name but a few but that recognises the value of LSD as reaching beyond the psychotherapeutic framework.

In his foreword Dr. Harold Greenwald casts the author (hereafter referred to as Newland) as being the stereotyped American woman as perpetuated by the media "misogynists" of the 1950s and early 60s. She is, in his terms and her own, "balanced" socially but she is also the "model of the frozen, ruthlessly efficient American career woman" (New 7). He see's her as typical of the "baffling problem of frigidity in the liberally educated modern woman" (New 9). The problem of 'frigidity' is described as being a neurosis that, for a psychoanalyst, represents certain blocks in the Unconscious. Having undergone numerous years of unsuccessful psychoanalysis, this book chronicles her sessions of drug therapy, under which she receives successful analysis while under the influence of LSD-25.

ILLUMINATED by a single candle, the shaman's weathered face appeared kindly, like that of a sympathetic doctor, with painted red marks also suggesting a calm, fierce authority -- both qualities that I would rely on during the dark and uncertain hours ahead. He sat on a wooden stool carved into a tortoise, and wore turquoise beads around his neck and a crown of crimson feathers. A table beside him displayed the modest tools of the ceremony: a fan of leaves, jungle tobacco, a gourd bowl and a clear plastic soda bottle containing an opaque, brown liquid.

"You will start to feel a reaction in about half an hour," the shaman, Tsumpa, said, as my guide translated. "When the effects come, you must concentrate on what the medicine is trying to communicate."

The open air of the hut, animated with night sounds, grew still with expectation. Tsumpa grimaced as he drank the brew. After pouring a bowl for me, he cupped the gourd in his hands and for several minutes whistled a sweet melody into it -- the high key of a tin whistle or courting bird, seducing the plant spirits to aid me.