Re: Back to the Future, LastWord, April 6 - 12 "All that 1960s stuff" was really about the peaceful psychedelic revolution in consciousness and lots of great things came out of it, such as awareness that war-mongering and materialism are destructive, wasteful and futile. Renewed reverence for life manifested in the health food and holistic medicine movements and the environmental movement was also influenced by the peaceful psychedelic revolution in consciousness. However, mainstream society failed to give credit were credit is due - to psychedelics. [continues 226 words]
They have such whimsical names as heavenly blue, crimson rambler and pearly gates, and delicate blooms that crawl quickly up trellises. But when morning glory seeds aren't planted -- when they are instead ingested -- whimsical thoughts can crawl through altered minds with kaleidoscope-like visions. And teenagers know this. Once popular in the hippie era of the 1960s, morning glory seeds as a hallucinogen seem to have sprouted once again. Local gardening shops have noticed their seed stocks depleted by adolescent hands, and poison control centers in the District and its suburbs have received calls from hospitals with patients experiencing adverse reactions, or bad trips, from the seeds. [continues 1274 words]
That psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and MDMA (ecstasy), can be effective treatments for various psychiatric illnesses is an old idea. Once considered wonder drugs for their effects on anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and other mental illnesses, they have been effectively banished from medical practice after legal rulings banned their sale and use. Although such bans were largely put in place to quash concerns about rampant recreational drug use fuelling the counter cultures of the 1960s and 1980s (LSD and MDMA, respectively), criminalisation of these agents has also led to an excessively cautious approach to further research into their therapeutic benefits. [continues 226 words]
"Use more psychedelic drugs," is not advice you would expect from your GP, but that is the call from an influential US medical journal to researchers. An editorial in the Lancet says that the "demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil" has stifled vital medical research that would lead to a better understanding of the brain and better treatments for conditions such as depression. The journal's editor Richard Horton said he was not advocating recreational drug use, but championed the benefits of researchers studying the effects of drugs such as LSD and Ecstasy by using them themselves in the lab. [continues 414 words]
A little-known hallucinogenic leaf that is legal in most of the USA is the target of new calls for a ban after the suicide of a teenager who smoked it. Salvia, a relative of flowering sages enjoyed by many gardeners, is the most powerful natural hallucinogen known - almost as strong as LSD, experts say. Known as "diviner's sage," salvia has been used for centuries by the Mazatec Indians in Mexico. In the United States it is sold in leaf and liquid form by Web sites and head shops and is available to anyone at any age. advertisement [continues 695 words]
I'm in college and went to a party where everyone was acting strange. I found out they were all eating some type of chocolate "cookie" they called "silly putty." I left the party because my friend said the cookies were laced. Have you heard of these cookies? - - D.W., Portland, Ore. Yes, but these are not cookies. They're chocolate-covered mushrooms that make your brain feel like putty because they're psychedelic drugs. You were smart to leave the party when you did. [continues 469 words]
Some Call It a Danger That Should Be Banned, While Others See Potential for Therapeutic Use A little-known hallucinogenic leaf that is legal in most of the USA is the target of new calls for a ban after the suicide of a teenager who smoked it. Salvia, a relative of flowering sages enjoyed by many gardeners, is the most powerful natural hallucinogen known -- almost as strong as LSD, experts say. Known as "diviner's sage," salvia has been used for centuries by the Mazatec Indians in Mexico. In the USA it is sold in leaf and liquid form by websites and head shops and is available to anyone at any age. [continues 692 words]
DENVER -- An appeals court on Tuesday upheld the life sentence of a man who allegedly used an illicit laboratory at Wamego, Kan., to become the nation's largest supplier of the hallucinogen LSD. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 against William Leonard Pickard in his bid to overturn his convictions and two life prison terms. Pickard, 60, was convicted in 2003 in federal court in Topeka for his role in operating the lab from a converted missile silo. Authorities said the LSD-making lab was the largest ever seized in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. [continues 454 words]
Herb, Available Legally Through Many Web Vendors, Would Be Placed In Same Category As Heroin, LSD A hallucinogenic herb that may have contributed to the suicide of a Salesianum School senior in January would become an illegal drug under a proposed state law. Salvia divinorum, which is widely and legally available through hundreds of Internet sites, would become a Schedule I controlled substance under Senate Bill 259, putting it in the same category as heroin and LSD. The Senate Health and Social Services Committee sent the bill to the full Senate after a hearing Wednesday. [continues 530 words]
Ray slips his shades back over his eyes and leans against the window as the van crosses the border into Mexico. It's noon on Monday, Oct. 31, and he hasn't slept in three days. He thinks about the bag of chronic he threw out the window on the way to meet the guy from the clinic. He thinks about the pipe load of meth stashed in the seat of his motorcycle back home. Ray is skeptical--will he really be so changed by Friday that he'll be able to go home and throw it away? [continues 4925 words]
A SCOTS soldier fed LSD in spymasters' mind control tests is in line for UKP 10,000 compensation. But no one knows where to find Logan Marr, who would now be in his 70s. Three ex-servicemen who took part in what they believed were tests on the common cold in the 1950s were awarded out-of-court payouts last week. But they were given the hallucogenic, which MI6 hoped could be used as a truth drug. Now the hunt is on to find Logan and get him a payout for his ordeal. [continues 107 words]
The Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has paid thousands of pounds in compensation to servicemen after feeding them LSD in mind control experiments in the 1950s, it emerged this week. One of the men involved in the clandestine tests received the drug twice a week, and recalls lengthy hallucinations in which walls melted, cracks appeared in people's faces and eyes ran down cheeks. The hallucinations happen because the drug mimics a chemical messenger in the brain called serotonin. While serotonin is usually described as a "feelgood" chemical - it is the neurotransmitter released by the drug ecstasy - it also plays a number of other roles. [continues 194 words]
WASHINGTON -- Federal narcotics laws don't trump the religious-expression rights of a Brazilian-based sect that uses a hallucinogenic tea in a sacrament, the Supreme Court ruled. The decision was one of a host of actions the court took upon returning from a monthlong recess after the 58-42 Senate confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito. The justices also heard arguments on the scope of the Clean Water Act; declined the Bush administration's request to dismiss a challenge to special military courts it set up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try suspected foreign terrorists; and affirmed the power of contractual-arbitration clauses. [continues 507 words]
Gino Rebussini, a recently retired Rhode Island Department of Health investigator, spoke on Friday concerning several different types of illegal drugs as part of the weekly forensics lecture series. Rebussini's talk focused on types and effects of specific drugs, and also the criminal activities surrounding them. Specifically, he focused on production and dealing. Although Rebussini is staunchly against illegal drug use, throughout the talk he was honest about why people were involved in them. For example, Rebussini spoke frankly on the motivations behind these activities: "People are getting involved because the money is very big," he said, after listing the average selling price of marijuana in Rhode Island. [continues 332 words]
Tell Me About I READ with interest about the case of the man who vanished in the middle of the ocean while aboard a cruise. He was drinking absinthe. What is absinthe and what can it do to your body? Absinthe is a strong alcoholic liqueur made from a herbal abstract, including wormwood (called Artemisia absinthium). It is emerald green in colour because it contains chlorophyll, and is extremely bitter. In order to drink it, you have to dilute it with cold water, which is poured over a spoonful of sugar into a glass containing one shot of absinthe. The drink then changes colour to an opaque, milky white. [continues 788 words]
When looking at the illegal drug culture of Athens, one can look deeper at the population to find a subculture of people who look for drugs to possibly do more than make them "high" for a few hours. Some Ohio University students and community members use drugs that they say expand their consciousness and perception of reality, though they acknowledge the potential for a "bad trip," not to mention the serious legal repercussions of getting caught with these drugs. The aforementioned illegal drugs include such psychedelics as LSD (acid), MDMA (Ecstasy) and psilocybin mushrooms. While all three of these drugs can have dramatically different effects on the body, users typically use them for similar purposes or desired outcomes. [continues 1613 words]
BASEL, Switzerland -- When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25. "It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD. [continues 1554 words]
Albert Hofmann remembers very clearly the moment when, on a spring afternoon, riding his bicycle, the whole world -- and his life -- changed. "Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror," says the chemist, who celebrated his 100th birthday this week. "I had the feeling that I could not move from the spot. I was cycling, cycling, but the time seemed to stand still." It was 1943, and Hofmann was experiencing the world's first LSD trip. [continues 1465 words]
The press notes for History Television's documentary The Psychedelic Pioneers, about medically motivated drug experiments in the 1950s, point out that in a remote corner of the Prairies, "three gifted Canadian doctors were attempting to unlock the secrets of the human psyche in an unconventional way -- with the use of the drug LSD." It's debatable whether that would qualify as a legal defence in this day and age, but the documentary profile of how the Saskatchewan doctors first used LSD as a way to understand schizophrenia and later as an aid in psychotherapy and treatment for alcoholism has special significance today, given the renewed debate over legalized drug use. [continues 91 words]
LSD is an unlikely subject for a 100th birthday party. Yet the Swiss chemist who discovered the mind-altering drug and was its first human guinea pig is celebrating his centenary today, in good health and with plans to attend an international seminar on the hallucinogenic. "I had wonderful visions," Albert Hofmann said in Geneva, recalling his first accidental consumption of the drug. "I sat down at home on the divan and started to dream," he said. "What I was thinking appeared in colours and in pictures. It lasted for a couple of hours and then it disappeared." For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention. "I produced the substance as a medicine," he said. "It's not my fault if people abused it." [end]
