Police officers arrested a 20-year-old Gilbert man who allegedly tried to trade marijuana and an iPod for an iPad.

According to the Gilbert Police Department, Jacob Walker posted an advertisement on Craigslist.com indicating that he wanted to trade an Apple iPod Touch and marijuana for an Apple iPad. He included pictures of both in his ad.

Gilbert police Sgt. Mark Marino said detectives replied to Walker's posting and set up a meeting for Wednesday at Val Vista and Warner roads.

Marino said Walker arrived at the location with the items and presented the marijuana to an undercover detective.

Walker and another man, Joseph Velarde, 20, of Gilbert were arrested by police officers.

When you're starving and tired, how does your brain decide whether you should sleep or keep hunting for food? This basic survival decision may be hardwired into two genes, and scientists have figured out to control them.

The brain systems that control sleep and eating are connected in most mammals, including humans. Scientists have long known what many of us have realized from pulling all-nighters: Sleep deprivation makes you hungry. But when you're starving, it's hard to sleep.

It turns out fruit flies have a similar response to starvation, and a group of researchers decided to study the food-or-sleep mechanism in these insects to shed light on human behavior. Now the researchers say that they'd isolated two genes, Clock and cycle, that regulate circadian rhythms.

Ever wanted to sleep away those depressing, depressing pounds? Soon, you can!

Marijuana grown in Germany is increasingly edging out imports from countries that until now acted as suppliers, such as Morocco and Afghanistan. Where hippies of the past swore by "black Afghan," today's pot smokers are quite willing to roll German hashish and marijuana in their joints.

Hobby gardeners who grow a few plants in their basements or garden plots for their own use are not the main part of the problem. Authorities such as Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) see far more cause for concern in large-scale operations such as the one near Brandenburg, as well as in the business' "organized international structures." Many German marijuana growers have Dutch backers, while those who care for the crops and help with the harvest are often recruited from countries where wages are lower.

The boom in domestic cultivation also means a change in strategy for police. In the past, their main target was drug trafficking. But, increasingly, officials are on the hunt for local marijuana growers and their hidden plantations.

The number of large-scale growing operations discovered -- those with more than 1,000 plants -- increased last year from 18 to 26. Authorities also found 316 small and mid-sized sites with fewer than 1,000 plants. Investigators assume, though, that a considerable number of cases go unreported.

The current phenomenon began in the Netherlands, but the situation there quickly got dangerous for growers. Gang wars sprang up around harvests, distribution channels and markets, and in some cases people were even killed.

Photo slideshow at Spiegel. Thanks Jim!

THE Police in Masaka have arrested two nuns for allegedly participating in growing marijuana.

The two nuns, who had declined to reveal their identities to the Police, were picked from Bwanda Convent in Masaka district, where the Police found a banana plantation full of the illegal crop.

The New Vision later learnt that one of the nuns is Nanteza, while the other is Sister Rita.

The Masaka district Police commander, Titus Byaruhanga, also arrested two other men who were found attending to the plantation.

However, there was a scuffle when Sister Nanteza attacked the Police, accusing them of entering the convent without permission.

Via Gawker and Tomas.

A rookie cop is suing to be reinstated to the NYPD after he was fired in March for testing positive for cocaine. Alvaro Casado insists he's no coke fiend, he just made the mistake of drinking a cup of Mate de Coca tea the night before he was tested. The South American tea is made from coca leaves and has been known to show up on drug screenings; one study found an average of 4.14 mg of cocaine in a cup of Peruvian coca tea. (No caffeine, though!)

Casado claims his girlfriend's mother prepared the tea for him last October in order to help calm his nerves after a car accident. He's an airman in the Air National Guard, and the next day he tested positive for coke in a test administered by the Air Force. But the Air Force eventually bought his story about the tea, and officials concluded Casado "did not knowingly ingest an illegal substance." However, they forwarded the test results to the NYPD, which administered another test of his hair and urine samples in November 2009. He came up positive for coke again and was canned.

The police chief of a small Texas town near the Mexican border faces federal charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana and possession of marijuana, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday...

Guerra was arrested as part of a Justice Department probe called Project Deliverance, a 22-month investigation targeting Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the United States. More than 2,000 people were arrested, including 400 on Wednesday...

The Justice Department says the investigation has led to the seizure of $154 million, more than 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine, 2.5 tons of cocaine, more than 1,400 pounds of heroin and 69 tons of marijuana.

What do you do if you've undergone a profound, like-changing mystical revelation and you want to articulate it in a way that's workable, comprehensible and will make people take you seriously and not simply dismiss you as a headcase? Unless you already have an appropriate platform in place, it's not an easy one. Within evangelical churches, most everybody is a visionary and their visions have a uniformity of focus and topic. Outside of such accepted institutionalised frameworks, highly vocal 'visionaries', perhaps infected with manic zeal -- that certainty that the whole outside world must be automatically tuned into your special wavelength -- and publicly acting out accordingly, might well find themselves being dealt with under the Mental Health Act. Labelling religious zealots as 'lunatics' has proved doubly convenient for societies throughout the ages, since the visions can be written off as ravings and the subjects can, if needs be, contained through incarceration, medication or both. And if the visions happen to be drug induced, then this is an even greater reason for their rejection by the world at large.

In the autumn of 1979 I underwent a three-week epiphany, an elevation into a higher, cosmically connected visionary space as a result of two medium-dose psilocybin mushroom trips taken close together. I imposed a Zen Buddhist, neoshamanistic context on the experience, as they were my preoccupations at the time. So in those terms I had achieved satori, become enlightened, attained a foothold in Ultimate Reality, which was the same as ordinary reality since the Cosmos had become an undifferentiated whole. In a more conventionally religious context, I could be said to have 'found God'.

These drugs distort a person’s visual and auditory perceptions and produce feelings of detachment -- from the self and the environment. Although PCP and ketamine have mild-altering effects, these are not hallucinations. The proper term for PCP and ketamine, according to National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is "dissociative anesthetics."

Names for these drugs are: PCP, or phencyclidine ("angel," "angel dust," "uppergrass," "zombie"), and ketamine ("K," "Special K," "cat Valium") are dissociative drugs that were initially developed as general anesthetics for use during surgery.

What happens to cause the effects?

Dissociative drugs, PCP in particular, produce an almost instant trance-like feeling and users experience a rush of euphoria, a sense of pleasure and detachment from reality. PCP alters dopamine in the brain, resulting in the predictable euphoria and rush that users and abusers of dissociative drugs crave. The effects of PCP can last for hours, and some users report the feelings last for days.

Originally published in 1987 'Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream' by Jay Stevens is one of a number of heavyweight histories of LSD and American culture. The narrative non-fiction format makes the text very entertaining and, whilst not stinting on the details, it provides the reader with a simple and accessible presentation of what was a many-threaded and complex historical period.

Like all historical books that have LSD at their heart 'Storming Heaven' begins in Switzerland where in 1943, 5 years after the semi-synthetic was first developed, Albert Hofmann discovered its hallucinogenic properties. It was on the 19th of April that Hofmann became the first individual to intentionally consume LSD and the repercussions of this event are still being felt today. However, its most intense period of being a widespread social phenomena occurred in the U.S.A during the 1960s and it is this period the text concentrates on.

Some two tonnes of cocaine with a street value of roughly a billion dollars (835 million euros) has been seized in Gambia, a British official confirmed Wednesday.

Twelve people of various nationalities were also arrested after investigators discovered the drugs in an underground bunker in a warehouse outside the Gambian capital Banjul.

West Africa is a major stop off point for drugs, often from South America heading to Europe, although officials say it is impossible to say exactly where this consignment was heading at this stage.