From Teafaerie's recent Jedi Temple speech:

I just got back from Peru, where I gave a talk at the 6th Annual Amazonian Shamanism conference. The theme was "Grace and Madness", and my presentation went a little something like what follows. Imagine that I'm reading this to you in a lush tropical paradise. You can hear the cicadas chirping in a weird sort of rhythm as a squirrel monkey skitters past your feet. And in the background, fireflies...

When I was invited to speak here in the Amazon, I kind of freaked out. I looked up the other presenters--all these legendary leaders in the field who've dedicated their lives to ayahuasca, shamanism, brain science, enthnobotany, chemistry, or art--and I thought, what can I bring to this? I'm just the Teafaerie. I write a sassy Internet column for a psychedelic information site frequented by do-it-yourself experimentalists.

Ayahuasca is a sacred mystery, and I am deeply ignorant about it. I've taken it less than a dozen times. I've read a few books, a bunch of articles, and a lot of trip reports. I've poked around on the forums. But I still have way more questions about ayahuasca than answers. I know that it's changed my life, maybe saved my life; it's healed me, it's helped me unknot some sick behavior patterns; it's opened up my body and my mind, my heart and my soul. I know that it's the real thing. It's a living magic medicine.

And my people are very sick, you know? The whole planet is very sick. So I thought: here's a chance for someone from my unique demographic to talk to some of the shamans of the Amazon and the Movers and the Shakers, to the people who work with this stuff, and to try to figure out how we can best relate to this mystery and to one another.

From the Guardian/Observer, UK.

Have this generation's crop of hippy-dippy indie artists found a new drug to match their music? Devendra Banhart, the Bees and Klaxons have in recent weeks namechecked ayahuasca, a so-called "plant medicine" taken in the Peruvian rainforest over intense 10-day periods. Klaxons' Jamie Reynolds even went so far as to cite the experience as a key factor in helping his band finally follow up their debut album. But before you rush out to guzzle down this herbal brew, it's perhaps best to know what you're letting yourself in for.

Paul Butler of the Bees told the NME of his experiences last month, but was a little disappointed to find they wrote it up as a crazed drug story. "Ayahuasca is most definitely not a drug, it's plant medicine," he says. "Taking it without an experienced shaman is dangerous."

Butler was introduced to the experience after producing What Will We Be by Devandra Banhart, himself an ayahuasca convert. He embarked on a "10-day dieta" in Peru, in which ayahuasca brews were concocted from, among other things, chacruna leaves, following the traditional methods of the Shipibo tribe.

"You drink a tiny shot with a bitter, sour taste," recalls Butler. "It's foul. In fact, it's making me retch just thinking about it! Then you sit for 30 minutes in the moloka, the octagonal ceremonial hut, waiting for the shaman."

What happens next isn't everyone's idea of a good night out. You are forced to face up to and resolve a series of issues and then vomit to cleanse yourself and overcome these problems.

"It can be quite an ordeal, facing your fears," explains Butler. "It can get very heavy, facing up to things in your life, but after these things are purged, the experience is like no other."

[Thanks Layne!]

The cooking blog Cooking Issues has a great post on some early testing they've done on a new techinique for rapid booze infusion that I know some folks out there are going to be interested in.

The miraculous trick: Using the high pressure of a cream whipper. (That's an obscure term for a nitrous cracker. Apparently some perverted freaks out there use the things to make whipped cream!).

They report getting good results generally with 60 seconds of infusion time. This depends of course on what you're infusing, but also apparently batch size and number of chargers used to pressurize. So there are a few variables to play with if you're a tinkering sort of ethanologist.

Tip to people who generally use their creamers to cream their brains instead of their coffee or desserts: You're probably going to want to clean it out real good first with soap and water. Maybe sticking a few paper towels in and rubbing them around the inside with the end of a wooden spoon or something first if it's really nasty in there. But you knew that right. And you already clean your precious machine regularly. Because you're a Dosenation reader and you're informed. Not one of those people fouling your lungs with a cracker full of atomized industrial lubricant.

BoingBoing recently provided a link to this excellent video of Neill Franklin of LEAP talking about the horrors of the drug war.

Time has an interesting article on how Ketamine can be used to help people with depression and bipolar disorders.

During the 1990s, the brief popularity of all-night (and in some cases multiday) raves led to a national panic over club drugs. The federal government staged elaborate crackdowns on ecstasy (known colloquially as E and in the lab as MDMA, short for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) and an anesthetic called ketamine (or K)...

Now it turns out that both ecstasy and ketamine may have healing qualities. On Aug. 2, the esteemed Archives of General Psychiatry published the results of a randomized, controlled trial hailing ketamine as a promising treatment for depression among patients with bipolar disorder.

Also, recent testimony from one of our commenters, Stephanie, also makes the case for ketamine as a therapeutic agent:

my son, who has suffered with extreme symptoms of bipolar disorder for 7 years has tried ketamine as a nasal spray and it has been nothing short of a miracle. It has been three months now and all anxiety and mood swings are GONE. he says he feels at peace for the first time in his life. He has gone from sitting in his room all day with anxiety to driving again, and enjoying life as a normal human being. Kudos to Dr. Zarate for his research. My son is being treated by a psychiatrist in NYC who has the courage to inform us of this medication alternative. He has 14 patients all of whom have had the EXACT same positive reaction from nasal spray whose effects last for up to a week. However it works it is correcting the problem and not masking it like the 10 other meds he took and is coming off on. It was discovered accidentally by one of his patients who underwent dental work and was administered Ketamine as an anesthetic and for a week became symptom free. there is no hallucinogenic effect as the dose is low... It has been 18 months for the first patient to try it with the same results and no side effects... Do not be skeptical... This is a major breakthrough that has changed my son's life... He has said that all those meds and 7 years of therapy were rendered totally useless by one application of nasal ketamine.

Originally published in 2009 'Gone Hallucinogen Freeway' is a stylistically experimental novel written by Craig J. Moore. Set in California, around 1967 and the summer of love, the book is narrated by Joey, and tells of his life aged seventeen, trying to find his place in the counterculture. As part of the growing genre of self-published psychedelic works, which tend to focus on personal, socio-historical narratives 'Gone Hallucinogen Freeway' portrays what, arguably, could be called the defining era of popularized psychedelia.

The book is split into three chapters; the first, Down the Rabbit Hole, recounts Joey's introduction into the world of weed, LSD and the alternative lifestyle of the counterculture. The second, The Summer of Neverending Love, she said, covers the hedonism of that now legendary season and the third, Way Down in the Revolution of Wild Flowers, is a resolution, of sorts, on Joey's personal, teenage hopes. Central to these hopes, and to the book, are a series of female relationships, wherein the age-old search for the destruction of virginity is tempered through the characterisations of the females in question.