Political Group Can't Buy Super Bowl Airtime for an Anti-Bush Ad Following what it calls a long-standing policy of refusing Super Bowl airtime to all ads that take a stand on issues of public importance, CBS has refused airtime during next Sunday's game to two advocacy groups, MoveOn org and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA and MoveOn, however, have openly wondered whether CBS's policy has been selectively applied. MoveOn's ad, the winner of its "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, depicts children working menial jobs behind the caption: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" PETA's equates meat eating with impotence. Neither ad, contend CBS's critics, is more controversial than the campaign launched during Super Bowl 2002 by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) equating illegal-drug buys with terrorism. [continues 367 words]
Leading Ecstasy Researcher Retracts Critical Study Not everyone was surprised this past weekend when Dr. George A. Ricaurte of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a retraction in the journal Science of an earlier paper asserting that MDMA, a.k.a. Ecstasy, negatively affected dopamine function in two species of nonhuman primates. Writing with four other authors, including his wife, Una D. McCann, Ricaurte admitted that "the drug used to treat all but one animal . . . came from a bottle that contained d-methamphetamine [a known dopamine toxin] instead of the intended drug, racemic MDMA." Ricaurte et al. blamed the lab for mislabeling the two drugs, but other experts in the field have raised questions about studies involving Ricaurte before. [continues 741 words]
If You Want To Detox In Style, It Might Help To Get Arrested First Helen -- so not her real name that, a few days after we talk, she asks me not even to use the first consonant of her real name -- figured from the start that she was smarter than the average junkie. She did well in college, excelled in sports, held a top sales position at what she calls a "highly recognizable company" in Los Angeles. But after the failure of one more "dumb-ass relationship," Helen decided to experiment with heroin. She did it like she does everything else: She read up on the drug's effects, researched thoroughly the most cost-effective and safest methods of getting high. Following the detailed instructions on a Web site at the "Letric Law Library," Helen, at 35, learned how to prepare a solution, fill a syringe and inject the drug into her vein. "That was July 6, 2000," she remembers. "I never thought I'd be an addict this long." [continues 1440 words]
Artifacts of a public nuisance in Lightspace Gallery's '23 Drawings' Shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles 12 years ago, Timothy Leary called me up and invited me to a party. Fresh from Minnesota and greener than I knew, I was thrilled -- "the most dangerous man in America" was just on the phone with me! Then someone I worked with, a mentor and friend I relied upon for professional guidance, warned me not to be flattered. "He's a media whore," he said. "Don't waste your time." [continues 1328 words]
Last week, under cover of wartime and paranoia about the safety of America's children, the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2003, known in an earlier form as the RAVE Act, became law as a non sequitur tacked on to the PROTECT Act ("Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today"). It was a sneaky deal: After having failed to make it out of the U.S. Senate last fall, when it stood alone, the bill -- which applies the existing crack-house law to temporary venues and allows for civil penalties against club owners and promoters -- cleared Congress with no hearings and little debate. "It was very sudden," says William McColl, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, "but not entirely unexpected. It's the kind of thing that happens in Washington these days." [continues 317 words]
JUST ABOUT EVERYONE HATES THE WAR ON Drugs. Public officials and pundits at every point along the political spectrum, from the governors of New Mexico and Minnesota to the former mayor of Baltimore, have railed against its wastefulness; Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver blames it for exacerbating inner-city crime. William F. Buckley calls it a "plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year in public money"; Christopher Hitchens has labeled it "grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering." According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year, three-quarters of the country believes the drug war is failing. Enter the words "end the war on drugs" into Google, and you'll get some 2,400 links, leading to the Web sites of religious groups, corporate-media sources and drug-legalization advocacy groups. [continues 1242 words]
AT 6:30 SHARP ON A THURSDAY NIGHT IN MID-October, a crowd gathered quickly at the entrance to 6769 Lexington Ave., a half-block east of Highland in Hollywood. Aside from the shuffling of feet and the usual sniffles brought on by the plummeting temperatures of an early fall evening, there was little commotion until a couple of minutes past the half-hour, when a skinny guy in a watchman's cap and overalls began to bang insistently on the door. "Hey, man, you guys gotta open up!" he shouted. A minute or two later, a young woman with a ring of keys came downstairs, and the "clients," as they're called by the volunteers of Clean Needles Now, filed into a line that stretched up the stairs and spilled into the tiny space where volunteers manned a few folding tables. [continues 1219 words]
New platitudes from the people who stopped the vote counting in Florida. When Lindsay Earls set out in 1999 challenge her high school's policy of drug testing students who participate in extracurricular activities, she did so with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, her parents and the tacit approval of many of her teachers. But as in every high school, a few people try to ruin it for everybody: On the ACLU's Web site, which features a portrait of Earls' fresh-scrubbed family, the now 19-year-old Dartmouth freshman reports that as her suit garnered publicity, some of her fellow students began taunting her younger sibling, Lacey, saying, "Your sister is a pothead." [continues 973 words]
Everybody's talking about it. The White House spent $3.2 million on one minute of Super Bowl to run two ads that link illegal drug use to terrorism. The ads, which splice brief confessionals with big white words, are dark, spare, exquisitely controlled, created for the White House by high-style British director Tony Kaye (American History X). But their message is so bizarre you might suspect the groovy-and-goateed Kaye of playing a trick on his clients -- inventing a propaganda campaign that works against itself. [continues 412 words]
Everybody's talking about it. The White House spent $3.2 million on one minute of Super Bowl to run two ads that link illegal drug use to terrorism. The ads, which splice brief confessionals with big white words, are dark, spare, exquisitely controlled, created for the White House by high-style British director Tony Kaye (American History X). But their message is so bizarre you might suspect the groovy-and-goateed Kaye of playing a trick on his clients -- inventing a propaganda campaign that works against itself. [continues 411 words]
Things I Learned On High It is 4 o'clock on a bracing Burning Man afternoon, and I am riding my bike across the uneven pavement of the Playa, singing heartily enough to fill the entire Black Rock Desert basin. The horizon is billowing flamboyantly with clouds, portentous gray on their undersides and swept with light from the top — the kind of sky that makes perfectly sober people silly and turns the drug-addled downright religious. I think I'm biking faster than I ever have, slaloming between clusters of bodies and shards of art. I take one hand off the handlebars, then the other. [continues 877 words]
Sadie Plant On Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde And The Drug Jones In All Of Us Beginning in Europe before the Middle Ages, the semi-nomadic tribes of Siberia and Lapland discovered that their native reindeeer had a voracious appetite for a certain kind of mushroom, Amanita muscaria. The mushroom, otherwise known as "fly agaric," is one of the most potent naturally occurring psychoactive substances known to man, but in its fresh, unprocessed form, contains chemical compounds that are difficult for humans to digest. [continues 1386 words]
