A criminal investigation began on Sunday after 19 people were crushed to death at the Love Parade, one of Europe's biggest music festivals.

The event has been permanently cancelled after the accident in the entrance tunnel during the weekend.

Sixteen people were killed at the scene, three more died in hospital and almost 350 people suffered fractures and other injuries at the festival held in the western German city of Duisburg on Saturday.

Among the dead were Bosnian, Dutch, Australian, Chinese, Spanish and Italian nationals, police said. Sixteen out of the 19 victims, between 20 and 40 years old, have been identified.

As Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, paid her respects to the dead and injured, an exhaustive investigation into the accident began amid accusations that organizers ignored safety warnings.

Police initially said that overcrowding at the only entrance tunnel resulted in a stampede and then a crush. Disaster struck at 5:30pm on Saturday at the exit to the underpass as police were trying to prevent people from entering the site.

"The police announced by loudspeaker that participants should return in the direction of the train station," said one eyewitness.

However, authorities later said the festival grounds were not yet filled at the time of the accident.

But while estimates of the size of the crowd have varied -- organizers say there were up to 1.4 million -- it is clear that as too many people tried to pass through the 450-foot tunnel, panic broke out.

Festival-goers described the mass of people "pushing with unstoppable force," and hundreds were trapped inside the hot, airless tunnel, which had no escape routes.

"At some point the column (of people) got stuck, probably because everything was closed up front, and we saw that the first people were already lying on the ground," said Udo Sandhoefer, a partygoer.

Emergency services said many died from asphyxiation or crushed spinal cords.

Since the days of Reefer Madness, scientists have sought to understand the complex connection between marijuana and psychosis. Cannabis can cause short-term psychotic experiences, such as hallucinations and paranoia, even in healthy people, but researchers have also long noted a link between marijuana use and the chronic psychotic disorder, schizophrenia.

Repeatedly, studies have found that people with schizophrenia are about twice as likely to smoke pot as those who are unaffected. Conversely, data suggest that those who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as nonsmokers. One widely publicized 2007 review of the research even concluded that trying marijuana just once was associated with a 40% increase in risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

But here's the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and '50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.

[Thanks Acme Rocket!]

The bit afterward on quantifying the economic impact of early deaths due to cigarettes is also interesting, though the reporter is a bit inane.

[Thanks Barnaby!]

A group of police officers, judges and prosecutors who support legalizing and regulating drugs is crying foul after a federal agency reneged on a contract that gave the law enforcers a booth to share their anti-prohibition views at a government-sponsored treatment conference in Chicago next week.

After accepting registration payment from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration initially told the police group that it was canceling its booth at the National Conference on Women, Addiction and Recovery because of overbooking and space concerns. However, Sharon Amatetti of SAMHSA's Center for Substance Abuse Treatment later informed LEAP that, in a decision rising all the way to SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde's office, the group was actually being disinvited for its viewpoint.

"It's alarming that the federal government is trying to silence the voices of front-line police officers who just want to network and collaborate with treatment professionals to achieve our shared goal of preventing substance abuse through effective public policy," said Neill Franklin, a former narcotics cop with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department who is now executive director of LEAP. "Perhaps the administration was most concerned that LEAP's law enforcers planned to shine a spotlight on the fact that under President Obama, the White House's drug control budget maintains the same two-to-one funding ratio in favor of harsh enforcement tactics over effective public health approaches."

On a phone call with LEAP, Pamela Rodriguez of conference co-host TASC, Inc. of Illinois said that the police group wasn't welcome at the event because "our policy perspective and our policy objectives are different from you guys." She added, "It is the emphasis on prohibition vs. legalization that, for me at least, is the glaring dissonance with regard to our agenda."

Fans of the legendary hit show Mystery Science Theater 3000 and
internet sensation RiffTrax are in for the best Thursday in the history of the world on August 19 when NCM Fathom, the goons of Something Awful, and RiffTrax team up again to present RiffTrax Live: Reefer Madness at 8:00 p.m. Eastern / 7:00 p.m. Central / 6:00 p.m. Mountain / 8:00 p.m. Pacific (tape delayed). The creative team behind MST3K - Michael J. Nelson, Kevin "Tom Servo" Murphy and Bill "Crow T. Robot" Corbett - will reunited on the big screen for an evening of live riffing on the 1936 cult classic feature that warned against the horrors of excessive marijuana consumption.

Originally titled "Tell Your Children" and financed by a church group, Reefer Madness was intended as a morality tale about the dangers of cannabis use. The story follows a group of high school students who are coerced by pushers into trying marijuana; the catalyst for an ill-fated party that soon descends into madness. Soon after Reefer Madness’ initial filming in 1936, notorious exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper turned up the intensity with the addition of salacious insert shots. The final piece offers scenes of accidental murder, suicide and vehicular manslaughter.

I've never heard of "internet sensation" RiffTrax before so I can't vouch for this experience even slightly; and of course, Reefer Madness is awful enough that it seems sort of overly obvious to parody it. BUT, I did love me some MST3K back in the day, so who knows - might be worth checking out.

Experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews Steve Beyer, author of the recent compendium Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Beyer tells of his beginnings as a wilderness survival enthusiast that led him into the world of Amazonian shamanism -- and sorcery, the dark side of the shamanic world. Beyer explores the ideas of healing and harming and the relationship between the two: the magic phlegm for protection, the mariri, virotes and magic darts, attack sorcery and the dangers the West faces by absorbing a "shamanism lite" for its spiritual practice. Beyer posits that the plants and the spirits in them can be used for dark as well as the light. And while ayahuasca can reveal an infinite landscape within, are we putting too much emphasis on the interface instead of ourselves? As Westerners quest solely for visions and transformation with plants like ayahuasca -- what Beyer calls the the "pink neon buffalo" syndrome, are we focusing too narrowly on a tragic cosmovison?

MDMA, the drug commonly known as ecstasy, can help treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when used in conjunction with psychotherapy, according to a study published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

The finding, if replicated, will be historic: the first time that MDMA has been shown to offer therapeutic benefits to patients when used in clinical practice.

MDMA was used as a therapy drug from the late 1970s despite there being little scientific evidence for its effectiveness. In what was called the second summer of love in the late 1980s, it escaped to the dance floor and was banned before any clinical human trials could be performed.

To better understand potential benefits of the drug, Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist and clinical researcher practising privately in South Carolina, and colleagues gave either MDMA or a placebo to 20 patients with PTSD, mostly female victims of sexual abuse, who had not responded to conventional drugs.

Subjects were given two eight-hour psychotherapy sessions three to five weeks apart, during which they were administered MDMA or a placebo. Over the course of the experiment volunteers also took part in weekly psychotherapy sessions.

The volunteers were tested for symptoms of PSTD before and after each treatment, as well as two months later. Out of 12 participants who received MDMA, 10 saw significant improvements in their condition - no longer having symptoms that met the medical definition of PTSD - compared with two of the eight participants who received the placebo.

Mithoefer says the results are very encouraging, but notes that this was a preliminary study and the results need to be reproduced:

[Thanks Gaugenmaier!]

NOTE: Link was changed from CNN to YouTube video.

[Thanks Mason!]

After weathering the fear of federal prosecution and competition from drug cartels, California's medical marijuana growers see a new threat to their tenuous existence: the "Wal-Marting" of weed.

The Oakland City Council on Tuesday will look at licensing four production plants where pot would be grown, packaged and processed into items ranging from baked goods to body oil. Winning applicants would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

The move, and fledgling efforts in other California cities to sanction cannabis cultivation for the first time, has some marijuana advocates worried that regulations intended to bring order to the outlaw industry and new revenues to cash-strapped local governments could drive small "mom and pop" growers out of business. They complain that industrial-scale gardens would harm the environment, reduce quality and leave consumers with fewer strains from which to choose.

"Nobody wants to see the McDonald's-ization of cannabis," Dan Scully, one of the 400 "patient-growers" who supply Oakland's largest retail medical marijuana dispensary, Harborside Health Center, grumbled after a City Council committee gave the blueprint preliminary approval last week. "I would compare it to how a small business feels about shutting down its business and going to work at Wal-Mart. Who would be attracted to that?"

[Thanks Jim!]

My mother just returned to Iran. When she called this morning I thought she was just calling to inform me of her safe arrival. Instead, her voice was shaking. Fatemeh Khanoom, the woman who cleans my mother's house and whom I had written about for women's day, was there bearing the news that her husband had gone insane. "Why?" I asked my mother, she replied, "You know how he was an opium addict?" I answer yes. "Well," my mom continued, "he took a pill the dealer gave him called Ravangardan (psyche spinner) and he went insane. He broke everything in the house and went on the rooftop yelling at the top of his voice." She added, "Fekr konam hamoon LSDieh. I think it is that LSD."...

I called a friend of mine who is well versed in these matters and had just come back from Tehran a couple of weeks ago. I asked him if he has heard of a drug named Ravangardan. He told me that he has not but that it could be what people in South Tehran call Ecstasy or LSD. I asked him if it is true that there has been a recent flooding of the market with drugs, and he told me yes. A couple of years ago, my friend informed me that Crystal Meth (or Shisheh as Iranians call it) went 100,000 toomans for one gram. Today it costs only 10,000 toomans.

"Ever since the post-election unrest, they dropped the price so that the youth would get high and not take to the streets in protest." I asked him who is 'they', and he replied, "everyone knows that it is the Sepah (IRGC) that sells drugs in Iran." My friend went on to tell me that cocaine was very difficult to find five years ago in Tehran, but it is now readily available for 100,000 toomans a gram. "And it is good coke, they say they get it from Indonesia," he said. "Indonesia? I did not think they produced cocaine there," I said. He told me, "I don't know, that is what everyone says. Maybe they get it from South America; they have good friends there!" South Tehran, with a much poorer population, is on Shisheh while North Tehranis prefer cocaine.

[Thanks Richard!]