Administrators at Byron Nelson High School in Trophy Club suspended a 16-year-old boy on Tuesday because his eyes were bloodshot and they thought he might have been smoking marijuana.

The teen said he was not high. Instead his eyes were red because he had been grieving the loss of his murdered father.

Kyler Robertson’s father was stabbed to death on Sunday. His mother honored his wishes and let him go to school on Tuesday to be with his friends.

“I am sure he had a lot on his mind going to school. I had asked him not to go to school,” said Cristy Fritz.

Before returning to class Kyler had to go to the office to get a tardy slip. That’s when school employees accused him of being high because he had red and watery eyes.

Fritz said she got a call from administrators who told her Kyler would be suspended for three days.

[Thanks Barnaby!]

A group of police officers, judges, and prosecutors who support Proposition 19, the California ballot measure to control and tax cannabis (marijuana), will hold simultaneous press conferences Monday, September 13 in front of Oakland City Hall and in West Hollywood Park near Los Angeles at 10 AM PDT to release a letter of endorsement signed by dozens of law enforcers across the state.

"At each step of my law enforcement career - from beat officer up to chief of police in two major American cities - I saw the futility of our marijuana prohibition laws," said Joseph McNamara, former police chief in San Jose and Kansas City, MO, now a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "But our marijuana laws are much worse than ineffective: they waste valuable police resources and also create a lucrative black market that funds cartels and criminal gangs with billions of tax-free dollars."

Former LAPD sergeant and Los Angeles County deputy district attorney William John Cox, added, "This November, Californians finally have a chance to flip the equation and put drug cartels out of business, while restoring public respect for the criminal laws and their enforcement by passing Proposition 19 to control and regulate marijuana."

From sea shells and spiral galaxies to the structure of human lungs, the patterns of chaos are all around us.

Fractals are patterns formed from chaotic equations and contain self-similar patterns of complexity increasing with magnification. If you divide a fractal pattern into parts you get a nearly identical reduced-size copy of the whole.

The mathematical beauty of fractals is that infinite complexity is formed with relatively simple equations. By iterating or repeating fractal-generating equations many times, random outputs create beautiful patterns that are unique, yet recognizable.

We have pulled together some of the most stunning natural examples we could find of fractals on our planet.

[Thanks Joshua!]

From Comedy Central via Huffington Post.

Last night on "Tosh.0," Daniel Tosh met up with Paul "Yosimite Bear" Vasquez, better known as the "Double Rainbow" guy. Tosh got Yosimite Bear to talk about his life in the wilderness (he lives on just $5,000 a year!) and he even swore that he wasn't on drugs when he made the infamous video. To see the world through Yosimite Bear's eyes, Tosh downed some "magic mushrooms" and the pair followed an awe-inspiring quadruple rainbow through the forest. When you see where the rainbow ends, you too will be asking "what does this mean?"

Originally published in 1999 'Blue Tide: The Search for Soma' by Mike Jay is the story of the author's search for the potentially psychedelic plant soma. In attempting to unravel its mysteries, Jay is tackling, what is felt by many, as one of the most important, unanswered historical questions in psychedelic studies. A blend of travel and adventure, research and experiment, the book displays the classic motifs of a psychedelic text and utilises a broad range of approaches to great effect.

Soma is first mentioned in the Rig Veda, a vast collection of hymns that began life as oral poetry and were then written down in Sanskrit; the earliest extant texts are thought to date to the fifth century AD. The Vedic peoples, travelled from some unknown place in the West and settled in North India and Jay describes the Rig Veda as "the great surviving text of the lost civilisation before civilisation" (Jay 2). Soma is a God, representing a great many things in opposition to Agni, water and sun respectively for example, but whilst Agni is incarnated on Earth as fire, Soma becomes a plant: the "Plant of the Gods".

In 1988, DC Comics released a Batman issue of the Detective Comics series where the primary villain is a young man who is given ecstasy and then goes on a killing rampage. The secondary villain is the ecstasy dealer / pusher who gives the young man the drug. This comic represents some of the absurdist "Just Say No" propaganda common in the late 1980's and is an amusing piece of War on Drugs memorobilia. This comic also represents an interesting piece of history because it came somewhat after the first crest of media frenzy about MDMA. By 1988, the "designer drug" hysteria had been mostly drowned out by the "Crack Epidemic" scare. When Ecstasy fear mongering was reinvented in 1998-1999, the previous wave of anti-ecstasy media was all but forgotten.

The story in Batman 594, written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, is very thin and the artistry of the book, drawn by Norm Breyfogle and colored by Adrienne Roy, is of middle quality. Included here are several pages from the comic to give a flavor for the depth with which the issue is addressed and the standard drug-scare cliche plot. The story itself isn't specific to ecstasy and any "Evil Drug" could easily be inserted in place of the term "Ecstasy" and the story would make just as much sense (if not more). The storyline is all the more absurd since Ecstasy is known to be one of the psychedelic-class drugs least likely to precipitate severe traumatic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or lasting psychosis.

[Thanks Jim!]

Video of Vice Magazine's Hamilton Morris interviewing Sasha Shulgin in his home.

After spending days, weeks, months poring over the work of psychonaut-in-chief, Alexander Shulgin, Hamilton Morris mustered up the chutzpah to give him a call and request an interview. The result is this: an epic love-fest on the man who birthed Ecstasy in a test-tube. Hamilton visits the Shulgin residence (in San Francisco, naturally) and tempers his fanboy freakout with a rare and intensive look at the home and laboratory that caused the balls of millions to trip.

[Thanks Jim!]

The psychedelic drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms," can improve mood and reduce anxiety and depression in terminal cancer patients, Los Angeles researchers reported Monday.

A single modest dose of the hallucinogen, whose reputation was severely tarnished by widespread nonmedical use in the psychedelic '60s and ethical lapses by researchers such as Timothy Leary, can improve patients' functioning for as long as six months, allowing them to spend their last days with more peace, researchers said.

The research was a pilot study involving only 12 patients, but it is viewed as a first step in restoring the drug to respectability.

[Thanks Sam and Gene!]