Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas...

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

Thanks Ben!

We just learned some incredibly exciting news from the FDA we have been granted permission to proceed with our MDMA/PTSD therapist training protocol! This means we will be able to legally administer MDMA to the therapist we will be training to conduct our Phase 2 and Phase 3 MDMA/PTSD studies. Read on below to learn how we agreed to write the protocol as a Phase 1 study to assess the psychological effects of MDMA on healthy subjects.

Okay, so if I gather this correctly, therapists who want to use MDMA in therapy will have to be trained on MDMA? Pretty nice setup. Go MAPS!

How can you get high without breaking the law? A survey of friends and colleagues. "Smoke nutmeg," said an actor. "Find a dodgy Starbucks barista who'll sell you the nitrous oxide cans they use to whip cream," said a banker. "Ask around for something called Methedrome, or Mephedrone, or Mephedrome," advised an account manager. "Lick a newt," texted a doctor, "and don't ask me things like this again." One PR directed me towards news stories about Spice, an over-the-counter smoking mixture that was reported to have effects similar to cannabis; a web developer directed me to a recent issue of Mixmag, announcing the new popularity of "analogue drugs" such as Mephedrone (aha!) in British clubs. Something known as "that purple drank" was a favourite of American rappers in the 1990s, an A&R man told me: "I think it was a mixture of cough syrup and Sprite and it made everything move very slowly." A teacher remembered that a fistful of ProPlus worked when he was younger. A civil servant had tried snorting Dreft detergent, to no effect.

I was sifting through this jumble of urban myth and murky fact when a report was forwarded to me by a medical student. Published last month by drugs information charity DrugScope, the report stated that "legal highs" had, for the first time, made a significant impression in its annual survey of drug use. Legal highs? That sounded right. I wanted to try some. "Go to a head shop," said the student. "You'd be surprised."

Thanks Jonathan!

Despite the overall decrease in cocaine use, only 38 percent of the subjects taking the high levels of vaccine achieved sufficient levels of antibodies to prevent the absorption of cocaine into the brain. And of this minority, the functional levels of antibodies were present starting only after two months from the first vaccine and were in decline 16 to 24 weeks into the trial.

Thomas Kosten, a professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and a lead study author, is confident that with better vaccine ingredients (theirs used a traditional cholera toxin strengthened with an aluminum hydroxide adjuvant), the vaccine's effectiveness could be improved to as high as 80 percent. In animal trials, he noted, with newer vaccines donated from pharmaceutical companies the researchers found more than four times the amount of antibodies in the rats.

Although the vaccine lessened or negated participants' ability to feel high from the drug, many of the trial participants still consumed cocaine—and at levels far higher than normal. Such so-called "testing," as Kosten noted in the press briefing, was expected and is seen in animal experiments, as well. And even after having warned trial volunteers about the potential dangers of challenging the dosage limits when they couldn't reach an expected high, some showed as much as 10 times the habitual amount of cocaine in their urine until, he said, they likely just ran out of money.

Okay, seriously, WTF? This study shows 38 percent efficacy over an unpredictable one-to-two month window, and even then cocaine use actually increases among many users and becomes more dangerous and financially problematic. And they use cholera toxin? So here's the kicker:

The search for a cocaine vaccine has also revealed that some individuals "seem to be immune to immunization," Kosten said. Like acclimation to a former allergen, he explained, it is possible for "your body [to] think that it's a part of you," and to not allow antibodies to bind to the cocaine molecule.

I would call these results a problem, but others see cause for celebration:

The new findings, which Volkow called "transformative" in the briefing, may ultimately be translatable to other addictive substances, and may pave the way to creating anti-addiction vaccines for other drugs. "We're very enthusiastic about this," Kosten said about this prospect.

Thanks to all the readers who sent links to this story our way.

Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

llicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand, according to authorities and marijuana dealers on both sides of the border...

Now, to stay competitive, Mexican traffickers are changing their business model to improve their product and streamline delivery. Well-organized Mexican cartels have also moved to increasingly cultivate marijuana on public lands in the United States, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center and local authorities. This strategy gives the Mexicans direct access to U.S. markets, avoids the risk of seizure at the border and reduces transportation costs.

Unlike cocaine, which the traffickers must buy and transport from South America, driving up costs, marijuana has been especially lucrative for the cartels because they control the business all the way from clandestine fields in the Mexican mountains to the wholesale dealers in U.S. cities such as Washington...

Mexico produced 35 million pounds of marijuana last year, according to government estimates. On a hidden hilltop field in Mexico's Sinaloa state, reachable by donkey, a pound of pot might earn a farmer $25. The wholesale price for the same pound in Phoenix is $550, and so the Mexican cartels could be selling $20 billion worth of marijuana in the U.S. market each year...

Led by California, 13 U.S. states now permit some use of marijuana; Maryland is considering such a law. In many cities, marijuana is one of the lowest priorities for police.

To some authorities, the new laws are essentially licenses to grow money. With a $100 investment in enriched soil and nutrients, almost anyone can cultivate a plant that will produce two pounds of marijuana that can sell for $9,000 in hundreds of medical marijuana clubs or on the street, according to growers.

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The tiny mushroom is one of 7 new species of glow-in-the-dark fungi found around the world, bringing the total known to 71, according to a study that appeared October 5 in the journal Mycologia...

In an international team effort to catalog the world's luminescent mushrooms, San Francisco State University's Desjardin and colleagues have made an appeal to their fellow researchers: If you find a new fungi species, look at it in the dark too.

Even the mycelium glows. Check the photos and see. Thanks me!

We have not been given, nor will we be given, an adequate explanation for why House's chronic pain is suddenly manageable without painkillers. Keep in mind House had a legitimate, verifiable medical condition (infarction leading to muscle death) in his leg, so it's not like fibromyalgia or bad headaches some other painful condition that is hard if not impossible to medically verify.

The DEA has been writing letters to Fox complaining about House's "flagrant use and abuse of narcotics without consequence" for years now, and finally the network, writers, and producers all caved in to the government's demands... in the worst possible way. They decided to make the vicodin House had been taking for over a decade into a sudden hallucinogen, causing him to see dead people. They showed him going through the painful detox, and now he's just fine and dandy, no reference to his pain at all. And there won't be any further reference to his pain, other than "it's all manageable."

Idiots will consider this to be "character growth" but you can do your own Freedom of Information Act request and get the letters the DEA sent to Fox demanding that "House" no longer show a character using drugs and performing well (exceptionally well, in fact) at his job, without horrible consequences. You know, "for the children."

House's chronic pain and need for vicodin (in reality he should be on something much stronger and without the toxic acetaminophen that vicodin contains) were a central part of the show and the character of Dr. Gregory House. If they are going to destroy the character like this - at the request of the government, no less - then I won't be watching the show for much longer.

They gave the DEA final script approval over all episodes of House. Talk about big brother. Then again, "big brother" is the very essence of drug prohibition.

This thread also appears in tvsquad.com comments from the House season premier recap a few weeks back. Viewers seemed disappointed that House's hallucinations were blamed on Vicodin. Not sure if this is a DEA conspiracy, pressure from lawyers in the Standards and Practices dept., bad writing, or what, but the impression is that Vicodin was thrown under the bus for political reasons and House will now tell patients with chronic pain to suck it up and deal.

Thanks to Sleepy for digging this one up!

The above story of Salvia divinorum demonstrates how anecdotal evidence is bizarrely abused to create and foster the war on drugs. In modern America’s narcophobic climate one death out of millions of users can cause all adult users to be deemed criminals worthy of prosecution and incarceration.