80's superstar Phillip Michael Thomas turns it up to 11 to dramatize the dangers of angel dust in this amazing clip.

I think we can all learn something from this.

Photographer Mathieu Young captures some beautiful images of marijuana harvest in Mendocino. (h/t to Mat)

The always amazing Big Picture blog has a series of arresting images from the world of drug law enforcement and treatment.

The 2009 United Nations World Drug report, released earlier this year, notes that 2009 marks "the end of the first century of drug control (it all started in Shanghai in 1909)", and that the illicit drug market worldwide has now become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, and crackdowns in Afghanistan are being made against its massive opium crops, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts.

Something more than alcohol is to blame for the following clip one suspects. A man visits a convenience store but is unable to meet the challenge of completing a transaction.

Great series of posts on this book fetishist's blog featuring incredible psychedelic illustrations from a 1972 textbook Biology Today.

I would love to see a modern biology textbook as artful and daring as this. Biology as a subject is so weird and marvelous that it deserves nothing less.

This labor day weekend, while many Bay Area readers of this blog will find themselves at the annual DIY amusement park that is Burning Man, another quixotic event of lofty ideals and hedonistic indulgence will be taking place in San Francisco. Slow Food Nation is being billed by organizers as the largest celebration of food in history, bringing together artisans, activists, farmers and food fanatics from around the country and around the world to taste, celebrate, and debate the past present and future of food.

The principles of the Slow Food movement and the conceit of the event are summed up well in this modest proposal written by SFN chair Katrina Heron from last Sunday’s SF Chronicle:

No one knows less about food than us. We, the American people, having inherited an extraordinary and unprecedented wealth of native and immigrant culinary traditions and knowledge - a kind of Alexandrian library of edible wisdom - no longer know how to feed ourselves…

The fundamental questions the movement raises about what we choose to put in our bodies, and examining the ignorance about our food choices at both the personal and policy level seems analogous to the sorts of discussions we in the entheogen community have around drugs.

And there is actually a bit of drug content in the event. Coffee, chocolate, tea, beer, wine and spirits will all have pavilions at the massive Taste Hall at Fort Mason. I’m a co-curator for the coffee pavilion and we’ve brought together some of best coffees from around the world, a number of great producers, an insane amount of gear and a team of the best roasters and baristas in the country to attempt to deliver a mind-blowing coffee experience to many thousands of attendees. If you are dodging the desert this year, Slow Food Nation might be an enlivening alternative.

Sunday night HBO will air the final episode of The Wire, the gripping and grim tale of the decline of the American city spanning five seasons. It's easily some of the best television ever. The creators of the show have taken advantage of their current moment in the limelight with this piece in Time magazine advocating jury nullification in non-violent drug cases.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy - the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do - and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will - to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty - no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

On a lighter note, fans of the show should check out this clip of the beloved character state Senator Clay Davis:

"For some its grass/ For some its coke/ For some its powder/ For some its smoke / Everybody today is turnin' on..."