GQ writer Wells Tower took a job at a marijuana coffee shop, inhaled the best stuff on earth, and saw the totally righteous future of legalized ganja. What it's like to work in a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

This morning, employees of Amsterdam's de Dampkring ("the Smoke Ring") coffee-shop franchise have convened at the unbohemian hour of 9 a.m. for a daylong refresher course on the finer points of effective and responsible weed salesmanship. Not long from now, I'm scheduled to spend a week behind the hash bar at one of de Dampkring's two local branches, but what I know about the art of marijuana retail--not to mention Holland's perverse and hazy drug statutes--wouldn't fill a golf-ball dimple. So at the request of the shops' rightly nervous manager, I've crossed the pond early to undergo a spot of preprofessional cramming.

The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom--from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.

[Thanks Sam!]

Hey, it's Friday!

From IO9.com:

LSD and ketamine, two powerful hallucinogens, are also potential cures for depression, OCD, and anxiety. Two studies published this week, in Science and Nature, confirm that hallucinogenic drugs stimulate healthy brain activity, even promoting the growth of neurons.

[Thanks Jesse!]

Erowid recently published a deliciously gonzo experience report by a self-proclaimed "trip-cycler", someone who regularly loads up on strips of acid and hits the streets of San Francisco to deliver packages:

To describe the experience of putting my life in the hands of the San Fransisco Traffic God's while the sky melds together in an amalgous orgasm of blue and magenta and while cars leave such profoundly solid tracers behind them that I can't tell whether they're limousines or not is, essentially, impossible. The experience is just fucking ludicrous. I've been bombing hills at 35 miles an hour before only to have taxi cars open their doors in front of me with only ten feet to brake. I've been within inches of been piledrived by several ton cars in direct oncoming traffic. On one occasion, the quick release on my primary brakes snapped while I hauled ass down one of the steepest streets in the city (which is really saying something, if you've ever been to San Fransisco before), forcing me to simultaneously wedge my foot between my front wheel and my front forks to slow myself down while navigating my bike through two massive four way intersections. I was a half second away from getting anally raped between a bright silver Hummer and a half lime-green/half hot-pink sedan. I suspect that this was not the actual colour of the vehicle.

To do what I do, I have to be paying attention 100% of the time. My peripheral vision and reflexes are my best friends. Acid is not a drug that lends itself to fast reflexes, however; it feels like I have ADHD on higher doses of psychedelics. 'Oh boy, look at that beautiful tree! Gee, don't you just love nature? Holy fuck, the sky! Goddamn, that cloud just turned into two ninjas fighting each other! I love you sky, you're so blue and beautiful.' On my early days of trip-cycling, I would occasionally find myself zoning out for short periods of time, too interested in the patterns on the asphalt below me or the height of the skyscrapers above me to remember that I was in a life or death situation. These sorts of distractions usually ended like this: 'Jesus, look at the floral designs on the pavement, doesn't that just look HOOOOOONK SQUEEEEEEAL FUCK FUCK SHIT FUCK A CAR!!'

Of course, this is not to glamorize such an approach to the profession. In fact, the trip-cycler, Muksi, notes:

Now, it's clear to most people that doing a job like mine while being righteously skull-fucked on a ten strip of acid is a goddamn terrible idea. Yes, you are absolutely right. Without a doubt, I would NEVER recommend to anybody doing what I do on a daily basis. It hasn't ever stopped me, but it's still a goddamn terrible idea. Like the good doctor said, 'I wouldn't recommend... drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.'

'The Acid Diaries -- A Psychonaut's Guide to the History and Use of LSD' by Christopher Gray was originally published in the UK by Vision under the title 'The Acid: On sustained experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD' in 2009. The author sadly passed away last year but fortunately this extraordinarily insightful book is being republished by Park Street Press, in November 2010.

Christopher Gray (1942-2009) first came to prominence in the 1960s for his involvement with, and text translations of, the Situationist International. During his formative lifetime he saw himself, politically, as being part of the New Left -- a movement, in many ways, entwined with the counterculture. Having travelled extensively, he eventually settled back down in the UK with his wife and child. The book picks up with Gray post-divorce and pushing retirement age, in a time of personal crisis. He finds himself drawn into the psychonautic world of LSD, something he'd not considered since its 1960s heyday, but through which he saw a possible salvation for himself.

Escher on DMT? More fractal video goodness.

The Stranger just published an interesting, in-depth look at how the relatively recent practice of cutting cocaine with levamisole might have evovled:

[A] 1998 study at Vanderbilt University showed that levamisole eased withdrawal symptoms in mice addicted to morphine. That study caught the attention of Dr. Mike Clark, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center, who also studies cocaine addiction in lab mice. "According to the study, levamisole acts on all three monoamine neurotransmitters," he says. "That's exactly what you'd expect from something that potentiates cocaine." In other words, levamisole may heighten cocaine's effects -- or might be a stimulant all by itself. In the next few weeks, Dr. Clark will begin an experiment of his own to find out (among other things) whether levamisole, without any cocaine, can produce cocainelike effects in lab mice.

If he can demonstrate that levamisole makes cocaine more potent, we'll be a step closer to understanding what it's doing in the supply chain. Other people have other theories, including:

• Something about the chemical structure of levamisole retains the iridescent fish-scale sheen of pure cocaine, giving cocaine cut with levamisole the same appearance as pure cocaine.


• Levamisole is a bulking agent for crack. The process of making crack involves "washing" cocaine and filtering out impurities and cutting agents. Levamisole slips through this process, meaning you can produce more volume of crack with less pure cocaine.


• Levamisole passes the "bleach test," a simple street test used to detect impurities in cocaine. When dropped in Clorox, pure cocaine dissolves clearly. Procaine (a common cutting agent) turns reddish brown, lidocaine turns yellowish, and other impurities float to the bottom. In a lab test conducted by Dr. Clark, levamisole stayed clean and clear.

Of course, levamisole is responsible for a host of nasty potential side effects, as the article details. But in Seattle, at least, we may soon have a testing kit:

One thing that can be done: develop an inexpensive field-test kit to try to detect levamisole. Dr. Clark has invented such a kit and -- in association with The Stranger, a few folks in the local harm-reduction community, and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA), which runs the U-District needle exchange -- hopes to begin distributing kits in a few weeks.... The kits will contain instructions for use, a fact sheet about levamisole and agranulocytosis, and a survey on a prestamped postcard about where and when the cocaine was purchased, whether it's powder or rock cocaine, whether it tested positive for levamisole, and a few other research questions. Hopefully, that data will help us -- me, Dr. Clark, PHRA, and a local harm-reduction organization called DanceSafe -- develop a better understanding of how levamisole-tainted cocaine is distributed through the city and whether some neighborhoods face greater health risks than others. (Is the cocaine you can buy on the street in Georgetown, for example, more or less tainted than the cocaine at some millionaire's house party in Bellevue?)

German scientists use genetically-engineered bacteria to produce THC. Google translation of an article in Spiegel Online.

Kayser's team has now developed a method of producing the genetically engineered bacteria in the THC. "We have virtually copied the biosynthesis of the plant into a micro-organism," Kayser said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE. The THC-production with another organism was possible for the first time worldwide.

THC is extracted from hemp grown in Germany, for growing and imports are legal. "Because the fibers contain less than 0.2 percent THC, the production process is correspondingly expensive," says Kayser. From the cannabis plant, which can contain up to 25 percent THC, the active ingredient may for legal reasons in Germany can not be won.

[Thanks Barnaby!]

Pictures of drugs. Fun to look at. Drug porn.

[Thanks Jim!]

From MK12:

HELLO! MK12 here. We've just finished up our newest in-house short film, TELEPHONEME.

It's a psychedelic-experimental kinetic vision of the educational film aesthetic, presupposing that language works as a double-agent and carries a hidden meaning with it, for reasons yet-unknown.

NEVER KILL A SNAKE WITH YOUR BARE HANDS.

Free house font created by MK12 for download as well as a pdf with further inquiries into the concept, conspiracy and film...

Enjoy!

MK12

*More experimental animation and pure kinetic goodness can found at our Vimeo page.