Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time? [continues 581 words]
Well, No. But the Latest Research Suggests the Health Risk From Occasional Use Is Mild, and It Might Ease Certain Ills I never smoked pot in junior high because I was convinced it would shrivel my incipient manhood. This was the 1980s, and those stark this-is-your-brain-on-drugs ads already had me vaguely worried about memory loss and psychosis. But when other boys said pot might affect our southern regions, I was truly terrified. I didn't smoke a joint for the first time until I was 21. [continues 2935 words]
Not If You Want To Get High, Anyway. But If Hemp Isn't A Drug, Why Is The DEA Treating It Like Heroin? LEXINGTON, KY - No one is saying Kentucky doesn't offer its share of distinctive intoxicants. Bourbon and tobacco have long been popular drugs here, and even in these abstemious times, a well-known member of the political class will occasionally pour his visitors a glass of moonshine from a Mason jar with plumped cherries bobbing on the bottom. [continues 1800 words]
Not if you want to get high, anyway. But if hemp isn't a drug, why is the DEA treating it like heroin? No one is saying Kentucky doesn't offer its share of distinctive intoxicants. Bourbon and tobacco have long been popular drugs here, and even in these abstemious times, a well-known member of the political class will occasionally pour his visitors a glass of moonshine from a Mason jar with plumped cherries bobbing on the bottom. But the farmers around Lexington are mostly old-fashioned men with a serious problem: the decline in demand for U.S. tobacco. [continues 1777 words]
John Ashcroft wants to mobilize the Justice Department to fight terror. Is he going too far? Most attorneys general embody only the first half of what their title promises, but not John Ashcroft. Last week he announced a sweeping "wartime reorganization and mobilization" of his law-enforcement troops, converting the Department of Justice into something more like a Department of Antiterrorism. Fewer FBI agents will fight local crimes and the drug war; they will walk the al-Qaeda beat instead. Hundreds of crime fighters at headquarters will be transferred to field offices on America's "front lines." And 10% of the budget-$2.5 billion-will be redirected to counterterrorism. [continues 622 words]
Will The Feds Use A 1980s Anti-Crack Law To Destroy The Rave Movement? Nearly three years after her daughter's death, Phyllis Kirkland still visits her grave every day. She drives over from the Monroeville, Ala., dentist's office where she works. She weeps. Jillian was only 17--"a beautiful 17," her mom chokes--when she died from a drug overdose after a sweaty night of dancing at the State Palace Theatre, a nightclub about a four-hour drive away, in New Orleans. [continues 2158 words]
Finding New Party Drugs Like K And Ecstasy Won't Be Easy In the past few months, it's become nearly impossible to buy Ketaset in New York City's underground drug market. Made by Fort Dodge, an Iowa-based pharmaceutical firm, Ketaset is a brand of ketamine, a compound that blocks certain neuroreceptors, causing hallucinations in high doses and, in lower doses, a fuzzy dissociation -- like the warmth of a couple of Jim Beams. Legally, it's used as an anesthetic. Illegally, one snorts ketamine because the fuzziness lasts half an hour and doesn't produce bourbon's four-Advil hangover. [continues 741 words]
In the past few months, it's become nearly impossible to buy Ketaset in New York City's underground drug market. Made by Fort Dodge, an Iowa-based pharmaceutical firm, Ketaset is a brand of ketamine, a compound that blocks certain neuroreceptors, causing hallucinations in high doses and, in lower doses, a fuzzy dissociation--like the warmth of a couple of Jim Beams. Legally, it's used as an anesthetic. Illegally, one snorts ketamine because the fuzziness lasts half an hour and doesn't produce bourbon's four-Advil hangover. [continues 742 words]
Cited: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS): http://www.maps.org/ Note:MAPS has prepared a fact sheet to clarify some inaccuracies in the TIME story and expand on important points only mentioned in it. See: http://www.maps.org/research/mdma/time.html Cited: DanceSafe: http://www.dancesafe.org Bookmark: For more on ecstasy click this link: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm The elixir best known for powering raves is an 80-year-old illegal drug. But it's showing up outside clubs too, and advocates claim it even has therapeutic benefits. Just how dangerous is it? [continues 3822 words]
Ecstasy, once a drug confined to the club scene, is flooding many high schools and universities. Here's why. Before setting out to board a Sabena flight from Brussels to Shanghai via Beijing last week, three Malaysian men stuffed 32 kg of the synthetic drug ecstasy into cardboard candy boxes and distributed it among their carry-on bags. Tens of thousands of the pills were stamped with the number 88--a lucky number for intended consumers in China, but not for the couriers. Belgian police arrested them at the airport. Their only stroke of luck was to have been caught in Belgium rather than the Far East, where drug trafficking can draw a death sentence. [continues 1147 words]
SUDDENLY PEOPLE ALL OVER THE country are talking about "ecstasy" as if it were something other than what an eight-year-old feels at Disney World. Occasionally the trickle from the fringe to the heartland turns into a slipstream, and that seems to have happened with the heart-pulsing, mildly psychedelic drug called ecstasy. To get a sense of just how far and fast "e" has moved into American communities in the past year or so, talk to Mark Bradford, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [continues 1370 words]
Should congress prohibit "right-to-die" measures? It took years for Oregonians to settle the prickly question of whether doctors should be able to help people kill themselves. But a majority of the state's voters made clear-twice-that they favor physician-assisted suicides, at least in the limited case of terminally ill people expected to live less than six months. The initiatives that approved assisted suicide had all the messy attributes of democracy, including emotional debate and dumb ads, but the state has carried out the law with care. Oregon hasn't become a Hemlock Society convention-only 15 people committed suicide with a doctor's help last year-and other states are mulling similar laws. [continues 188 words]
Street Cops Accused Of Frame-Ups In Widening Scandal By the end of last week, the scandal swirling around the Los Angeles Police Department was being called the city's worst since the 1930's. But the bad cops of that era, who took bribes of French champagne from madams and cash from bootleggers and gamblers, almost seem like nostalgic Humphrey Bogart types compared with the officers who ruined the life of a 19-year-old kid named Javier Francisco Ovando. [continues 509 words]
Mandatory Sentencing Was Once America's Law-and-Order Panacea. Here's Why It's Not Working Remember little Polly Klaas? She was the 12-year-old Petaluma, Calif., girl whisked from a slumber party in 1993 and found murdered two months later. Her father Marc, horrified to learn that her killer was on parole and had attacked children in the past, called for laws making parole less common. He joined with others backing a "three strikes and you're out" law for California--no parole, ever, for those convicted of three felonies. Klaas went on TV, got in the papers, met the President--all within weeks after his daughter's body was found. [continues 1476 words]
In trials going on nationwide, buprenorphine seems to block the cravings of heroin withdrawal When Ted C., a heroin junkie and former baseball umpire, heard about an experimental new treatment for his addiction, he was skeptical. Doctors told him that a simple pill called buprenorphine could eradicate his enormous craving for the narcotic, which he had been snorting daily for several years. It sounded too good to be true--junkies live in fear of the agony that arrives when a hit wears off--so Ted bought an extra bag of heroin the night before he took buprenorphine for the first time. Just in case. [continues 726 words]
