"Do you think you're big enough to take the neck from your old man?"

Meanwhile, in the "tell me something I don't know" department:

Drug users are well informed about the harms associated with the drugs they use, and perceive alcohol and tobacco to be amongst the most dangerous substances, according to a survey by UCL (University College London) and Imperial College London researchers. The findings, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, suggest that the current system of classifying psychoactive drugs in the UK may need to be revisited....

Drug users were asked to rate twenty psychoactive substances on a 'rational' scale previously developed by Professor David Nutt, Imperial College London, who collaborated on this study. Heroin, crack and cocaine topped the list in terms of harm, but alcohol was rated fifth, solvents seventh and tobacco ninth. Ecstasy came 13th in the harm rating, LSD 16th and cannabis 18th. Thus, the survey found no relationship between the drug's legal status, based on the current classification system, and users' ratings of harm....

Dr Celia Morgan, UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, says: "Given that the Misuse of Drugs Act aims to signal to young people the harmfulness of drugs, this suggests a flaw with the current classification of drugs. We found that drug users rated legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco as more harmful than Class A substances like LSD and ecstasy. We found a high correlation between harm ratings by users and those made previously by scientific experts across all substances, suggesting users are well informed about the harms of drugs."

Those pesky well-informed drug users, blowing the curve for everybody else...

This sort of sums it all up, doesn't it? Rowan Simpson has a post up about a researcher studying anti-ulcer drugs, who accidentally spills some on his hand. He's got a decision tree staring him in the face:

There are a couple of possible responses:

1. “Bugger… I should wash my hands quickly!”
2. “Hmmm… I wonder what it tastes like?”

To be an inventor you have to be the sort of person who is tempted to lick!

The reward for licking in this case - not DEADLY POISON but the discovery of Aspartame. Not bad at all, really! [Via Nat Torkington]

Siggy and Darren write to share a story on Australian Aborigine kids smoking pot.

ABORIGINAL children as young as eight are smoking marijuana, with the drug replacing petrol sniffing in some remote Northern Territory communities, according to indigenous MP Alison Anderson.

Ms Anderson told the Northern Territory Parliament yesterday that smugglers are using unusual methods to avoid police detection, including sewing marijuana inside kangaroo carcasses or hiding it in women's underwear because male police are not allowed to body search them at road blocks.

Ms Anderson, a former NT indigenous affairs minister from the central Australian community of Papunya, called for a wide-ranging inquiry into substance abuse.

She said money that is not quarantined for food and other essential items under the federal indigenous intervention was going to marijuana dealers.

When famous existentialists trip on mescaline, hallucinatory lobsters are the result, as revealed in John Gerassi's newly released interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre:

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters — which he sometimes referred to as crabs — Gerassi’s account offers startling new details of the philosopher’s descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.

“Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he says in Gerassi’s new book, Talking With Sartre. “They followed me in the streets, into class ... I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’ I would say, ‘Okay guys, we’re going into class now . . . ’ and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.”

That doesn't seem super comforting to me, but Sartre apparently missed his little friends:

No longer taking mescaline, Sartre, who died in 1980, found himself pining for the distracting visions from his youth. “The crabs were mine. I had got used to them,” he said. “I would have liked my crabs to come back.”

Yet by then the crustaceans that he had once found so inspirational were nowhere to be seen. “We call them crabs because of my play [The Condemned of Altona, in which a race of crabs sits in judgment on humanity],” he said, “but they were really lobsters. And you know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them ... I remember how they used to sit there on my leg.”

In a cautiously optimistic new article, The Economist takes a look at the state of the world's various legalization efforts, and asks a bold question:

California, with its network of pot-friendly physicians, offers the most visible evidence of a tentative worldwide shift towards a more liberal policy on drugs. Although most countries remain bound by a trio of United Nations conventions that prohibit the sale and possession of narcotics, laws are increasingly being bent or ignored. That is true even in the United States, where the Obama administration has announced that registered cannabis dispensaries will no longer be raided by federal authorities.

From heroin “shooting galleries” in Vancouver to Mexico’s decriminalisation of personal possession of drugs, the Americas are suddenly looking more permissive. Meanwhile in Europe, where drugs policy is generally less stringent, seven countries have decriminalised drug possession, and the rest are increasingly ignoring their supposedly harsh regimes. Is the “war on drugs” becoming a fiction?

Slate's Jack Shafer takes a look at a recent Today show story about how the youth of today are apparently getting ripped on inhalants - now, more than ever before! Shafer's a reliable critic of this kind of media sensationalism, and he's more disgusted than usual by this one.

In the annals of stupid drug reporting, a special commendation must be reserved for NBC's Today show, which on Nov. 19 aired (video) one of the stupidest drug stories in broadcast news....

I could go on and on about the awfulness of the Today segment. I could write an angry paragraph about the hackery of playing "sad" music on the soundtrack as its reporter narrates the story of a 14-year-old who killed himself by inhaling Dust-Off. I could rail about the absence of any numbers to prove its assertion that huffing is a deadly trend. (It would be useful to know if more or fewer kids are killing or damaging themselves with inhalants than in previous years.) I could gripe about Today's failure to distinguish among the different kinds of inhalants (volatile solvents, aerosols, gases, nitrites, etc.) and the absence of any discussion of the nonlethal health dangers posed by the compounds. And I could close with a complaint about its hidden camera "gotcha," in which two child actors were video recorded buying inhalants in New York City stores.

The only question is: What's in the pipe Bart?

From "The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15", Bongo Comics, 2009, which also contains a Simpsons spoof of "Call of Cthulu". Excellent.

From TMZ:

DEA Special Agent Erin McKenzie-Mulvey tells us the heroin baggies with "Twilight" characters were seized recently in West Hempstead, Long Island. The "Twilight"-themed baggies have been gaining popularity over the last couple of months.

Reader Bob wrote to update us on the growing story of doda, a narcotic opium paste or powder made by grinding dried poppy pods, favored by Canada's South Asian community.

Are you aware of the growing police crackdown in Canada on dried poppies and ground poppy pods? This crackdown seems to be a new phenomenon that began this year, with arrests in the Vancouver area (last week), Edmonton (August), and the Toronto area (March), in 2009.

Particularly in the large S.Asian (Indian) communities in Canadian cities, the sale of ground, powdered poppy pods known as "doda" or "dode" has become widespread and is commonly sold on grocery store shelves - up until lately. I believe the crackdown is due to a reaction to the rise in, and openness of use. Plus the fact Canada now has the Conservative Party in power nationally, with a get-tough-on-drugs agenda, following the failed American war-on-drugs model. Here on some article links:

• Doda drug bust: Opium poppy plants seized in Surrey
  
• 22 face drug charges after Mississauga, Brampton raids
  
• Opium bust 'significant,' police say

A couple of other news articles give some relevant background to the story:

This article from Toronto in July '08 shows there was some lobbying and campaigning within the S. Asian community against "dode" sales and use, but at that time police were not yet ready to arrest anyone for poppies, partly due to some lab tests showing morphine/codeine content in concentrations thought too low to prosecute. Evidently that hurdle didn't last long, as arrests soon began in 2009 in several cities across Canada.

Also, editor of a Toronto area Punjabi newspaper who'd been editorializing repeatedly against presence of dode/doda in the community, actually got kidnapped and beaten without explanation. At least one theory was people in the dode/doda biz didn't like him fearmongering and threatening their biz!

As far as I know the floral trade in Canada is still selling dried poppies on stems for decorative purposes, unmolested by the police, for now. But that could easily change almost overnight. Canada's narcotics laws do state possession of opium poppies is illegal. All that needs happen is for authorities to decide to start enforcing the letter of the law. Next step, shutting down the floral trade in poppies... Followed by raiding the yards of little old ladies who've, for years, been growing poppies as mainstays of their gardens?!