Long-Lost Promoter Of Vancouver's First Hippie Club Returns With Stories, And Some Amazing Posters The saying goes that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there. Jerry Kruz knows this all too well. At 66, his memory of the parties, concerts and happenings he took part in during the hippie era are a bit hazy. But a marvellous thing happens when he looks back at his collection of old psychedelic concert posters. The memories of the shows come floating back, like a contact high. [continues 1704 words]
New Research on Psychedelics Is Unveiling Their Potential for Healing As university students, we know how prevalent substance use is. It's practically impossible to go through your degree (or your day) without being exposed to the use of coffee, energy drinks, alcohol, cigarettes, pot, Ritalin or other drugs for a variety of reasons ranging from partying to relaxing to studying. In our daily lives, the social acceptability of particular drugs is based heavily on stigma and the law, rather than on a sober evaluation of their effects and harms. [continues 738 words]
Op-ed writer Nate Greenslit is exactly correct in arguing that it would benefit the proponents of the use of psychedelics to focus the discussion toward the treatment of medical ailments ("Are psychedelics the next medical marijuana?" Aug. 6). However, unlike medical marijuana, which is primarily being used to treat pain and glaucoma, the benefits to the field of psychotherapy and healing from psychedelics is enormous. Psychedelics actually have the potential cure depression, anxiety, phobias, PTSD and other mental illness. Psychedelics, specifically natural plant ethnobotanicals like ayahuasca, have also been demonstrated to be effective in treating alcohol and drug addiction. Medical studies being conducted at Johns Hopkins and New York University suggest that both psilocybin and MDMA therapy help in the treatment of imminent death related anxiety. [continues 66 words]
Mental health. Local psychologist lauds banned drug's efficacy A Vancouver psychologist wants Health Canada to make LSD legally available to psychologists and psychiatrists for their patients. "The use of LSD as a therapeutic adjunct speeds up psychotherapy," Andrew Feldmar said. He claims that the drug allows patients to remember early childhood experiences and reprogram their brain. Feldmar, who is also studying the impact of MDMA, a form of ecstasy, on patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, said LSD has the potential to help patients with the most severe cases of depression to become completely cured of the mood disorder after taking LSD. [continues 323 words]
He heard about the drug trial from a friend in Switzerland and decided it was worth volunteering, even if it meant long, painful train journeys from his native Austria and the real possibility of a mental meltdown. He didn't have much time, after all, and traditional medicine had done nothing to relieve his degenerative spine condition. "I'd never taken the drug before, so I was feeling - well, I think the proper word for it, in English, is dread," said Peter, 50, an Austrian social worker, in a telephone interview; he asked that his last name be omitted to protect his identity. "There was this fear that it could all go wrong, that it could turn into a bad trip." [continues 803 words]
What: T.J. Dawe's Medicine When: Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. (also tonight at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, 150 Commercial St.) Where: Metro Studio, 1411 Quadra St. Tickets: $20 advance ($25 door) www.eventbrite.ca For Vancouver actor/writer T.J. Dawe, it's been one long, strange trip indeed. The University of Victoria theatre grad brings his latest one-man show, Medicine, to the Metro Studio this weekend. The autobiographical piece details his experiences with a psychedelic concoction known as ayahuasca. [continues 615 words]
NORTHUMBERLAND COUNTY - It's on the street, it's dangerous and it's legal. It's called salvia divinorum, and comes in different strengths. There is "standardized" salvia and there is "extreme" salvia that says "horse killer" on the package. But there are many other forms. "It is called 'horse killer' because of its extra ordinary power and deep trip," it says on the back of the package. Though packages say the product is for incense only, on the street people are smoking it like marijuana. [continues 665 words]
It's on the street, it's dangerous and it's legal. It's called salvia divinorum, and comes in different strengths. There is "standardized" salvia and there is "extreme" salvia that says "horse killer" on the package. But there are many other forms. "It is called 'horse killer' because of its extraordinary power and deep trip," it says on the back of the package. Though packages say the product is for incense only, on the street people are smoking it like marijuana. [continues 647 words]
Lady Neidpath, Who Once Drilled a Hole in Her Own Head, Is Dead Serious About Drugs. Nick Curtis Hears Why Our Fear of Illegal Highs Means We Could Be Missing Out on Cures for Depression I DO NOT doubt for one moment the absolute sincerity of the drugs campaigner Amanda Feilding, aka Lady Neidpath, Countess of Wemyss and March. Nor the good sense in her argument that narcotics should be scientifically studied, decriminalised, and licensed and regulated by the state for medical or recreational use as appropriate - a "sensible" alternative to the vast waste of lives and money in the unwinnable War on Drugs. But I can see how easy it is for her opponents to demonise the 70-year-old as a batty aristo. [continues 1565 words]
With a Big Bust in January and a Major Conference This Fall, We've Been Psychedelicized IT TOOK A POLICE battering ram to bust down the door of the West Philadelphia apartment. Once inside, police discovered a colorful cache of psychedelic drugs - enough LSD to open thousands of "doors of perception" for six to eight hours at a time. The Jan. 31 raid appeared to be a true flashback to a bygone era, with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration calling the 9,500 hits of LSD on tie-dyed images of Homer Simpson and Jerry Garcia an "anomaly" in Philadelphia. And since two of the five suspects arrested were Drexel students, the raid became known as the "Drexel LSD bust" in the media, with reporters interviewing students and getting statements from university officials. [continues 1170 words]
Hallucinogen May Help Alcoholics Give Up the Drink New research analyzing data from studies conducted between 1966 and 1970 suggests LSD may help alcoholics quit and remain sober. In a study that appeared in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology took a fresh look at data from six different studies conducted in the United States and Canada, according to Health.com. The researchers concluded a single dose of the hallucinogen helped heavy alcoholics quit and reduced their risk of relapse. In addition, 59 percent of patients showed a clear improvement after receiving a full dose of LSD, compared to 38 percent of patients who did not take the drug. Study authors Teri Krebs and Pal-Orjan Johansen speculated the results were linked to LSD's effect on serotonin receptors in the brain. "LSD may stimulate the formation of new connections and patterns, and generally seems to open an individual to an awareness of new perspectives and opportunities for action," wrote Krebs and Johansen. [end]
Is dropping acid a reasonable way to deal with a drinking problem? Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's department of neuroscience think there's some merit to the idea. They've gone through data from experiments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, and say there is evidence that subjects given LSD were more likely to make progress in dealing with a harmful alcohol habit. Their paper, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, took a broad look at six different experimental trials, including one in Canada in 1966, involving 536 subjects being treated for alcohol problems. [continues 288 words]
To legalize or not to legalize? The question of marijuana's safety, its impacts on society and its potential as a government revenue source has probably never been so hotly debated in the mainstream of public opinion. We've been waging war on the drug trade for decades, and what has it gotten us? Prisons full of drug users and street-corner dealers, an ever-increasing enforcement bill that cuts deeply into other services, and a murderous drug cartel to the south that threatens to turn Mexico into a full-blown narco state. Today, even "respectable" people feel the burden of those hard truths. [continues 1664 words]
A MIDDLE-AGED Shaman from Buckfastleigh faces a possible jail term after being convicted of producing and supplying a class A drug at a healing ceremony. Peter Aziz conjured up two brews of sacred drink from jungle plants for religious rituals at a disused hotel, Bristol Crown Court heard. Aziz said he didn't realise that one ingredient - the leaf of the Chakruna plant - contained controlled the drug N-dimethyltriptamene or DMT. The 51 year old denied two counts of producing a class A drug and two counts of supplying a class A drug. [continues 295 words]
To the Editor: Re "Electric Kool-Aid Marketing Trip" (Op-Ed, March 19): Michael Walker has written an encomium to Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the "LSD millionaire" who figured out how to manufacture the drug in industrial doses in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Without question, Mr. Stanley was a key figure in the Sixties counterculture and played a large role in the music, art and "Summer of Love" ethos associated with LSD. But virtually every obituary of Mr. Stanley has romanticized his legacy. Consider how many bad trips, suicides and ruined lives that legacy was also responsible for. Cory Franklin Wilmette, Ill., March 19, 2011 [end]
Owsley (Bear) Stanley, a 1960s counter-culture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia Sunday, his family said. He was 76. The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area. "He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honour," former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs You Can't Always Get What You Want. [continues 449 words]
Owsley Stanley, the grandson of a former Kentucky governor, made and supplied the LSD that fueled acid rock and California's hallucinogenic culture in the 1960s. Mr. Stanley died Sunday at age 76 after an automobile accident in Queensland, Australia, where he had emigrated in the 1980s. An early patron and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead, Mr. Stanley was memorialized in the band's song "Alice D. Millionaire," named after a newspaper headline about his arrest for dealing LSD. Mr. Stanley was credited with distributing thousands-some say millions-of doses of high-purity LSD, often for free at concerts and "acid tests" run by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. [continues 564 words]
OTTAWA (CUP) - The federal government has announced their plans to ban salvia, a hallucinogenic herb that has recently enjoyed a surge in popularity among young people in North America. In a Feb. 21 release, the government indicated it intends to add salvia to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), thereby making it illegal to possess, sell, import, export and grow the plant. Christian Paradis, Minister of Natural Resources, described salvia in the release as having the "potential for abuse, especially among young people". Otherwise known as Salvia divinorum and salvinorin A, and colloquially as "magic mint" or "diviner's sage", salvia is a plant in the mint family and is normally smoked to experience "mild hallucinogenic sensations," as described by a fourth-year University of Ottawa student. [continues 433 words]
Your Feb. 22 article Feds eye ban on obscure herb indicates a dangerous disconnect with reality and perception. Bart Stras, owner of the head shop The Joint, clearly has been smoking too much of his own product when he says "salvia has never had any issues as a herbal incense product." Of course it hasn't, because he knows that people who buy salvia want a hallucinogenic high and aren't looking to have their boudoir smell minty fresh. If it weren't so pathetic, it would be almost comical that salvia is sold as a so-called natural health product. I believe that poisonous mushrooms are also a 100 per cent natural product. Paul Doyle Winnipeg [end]
We would like to respond to the Feb. 23 editorial No need to ban salvia on the Government of Canada's recent proposal to control salvia divinorum and salvinorin A. We want to eliminate the misconception that salvia is a safer alternative to street drugs. It is not. Salvia divinorum, and its active ingredient salvinorin A, can produce powerful hallucinations similar to those associated with the use of the well-known hallucinogen LSD, which is a controlled substance. Other effects include confusion, disorientation and anxiety. [continues 115 words]