The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

Thanks Josh!

h+ is available online and on stands now.

There is some confusion, even among experts, about how to define “addiction” and what can be included in that category. A certain breed of purist would say it’s only addiction if drugs are involved. But, the dopamine boosts you get from a slot machine’s intermittent pay-off schedule could also be considered a drug effect: many popular substances work by artificially setting off or potentiating the happy juice you already make in your brain. So the border is blurry at best.

Some also limit the use of the term “addiction” to situations where physical dependence is involved; when the body’s chemistry has changed in response to the use of a drug so that refusing the call to indulge results in strongly noticeable withdrawal symptoms. But withdrawal because of physical dependence is really just a small part of what drives the human animal. My own personal definition of addiction stretches to include virtually any situation in which an individual can’t stop doing something when they really want to stop.

What do I mean when I say that a person can’t stop? This is part of where the slippery free will issue comes in. I never watched any of the Saw horror movies, because I take a lot of drugs and that sort of thing always rebounds on me in the worst way. But let’s just imagine that I somehow got hold of like a hundred junkies and rigged a bomb on each one of them so that if he or she ever touched heroin again it would go off, okay? I know I know, that’s terrible and it wouldn’t work and obviously I’d never do that in real life, but play along with this as an illustration. If you prefer, let’s say the bombs are fake but the junkies don’t know that. Whatever. My thesis is that a few of the poor devils would eventually hit a spoke on their cycle where they caved in and shot up anyway. That’s the percentage who really can’t help it. There are those who really can’t stop. But I bet that quite a few of them would find a way to resist, even though they are clinically addicted.

On Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 10:00 AM in Room B2 at the Statehouse in Boston, the Joint Committee on Revenue in the Massachusetts legislature will hold a public hearing on the bill known as H2929, An Act to Regulate and Tax the Cannabis Industry.

If passed, the new law would repeal existing marijuana prohibition laws at the state level and replace them with a system of regulation and taxation, similar to how wine is sold. The law, in fact, is largely modeled after the alcohol control laws.

The text of the bill is here, and a summary is here.

Thanks Sandoz!

In the funky Adams Morgan neighborhood of the nation's capital, just past the yellow "Drug Free Zone" sign, the B&K News Stand sells hookahs, rolling papers and "Purple Sticky Salvia."

The psychedelic Purple Sticky label warns that the contents of the cylindrical package — dried leaves of the hallucinogenic herb Salvia divinorum and a chemical extract of the drug — are to be used as incense only. But at $30 for a pillbox the size of a small jar of lip balm, that's some awfully expensive fragrant foliage.

It's legal to sell, possess and ingest salvia in the District of Columbia. But the same stuff, long used for medicinal and mystical purposes by Mazatec Indians in Mexico, will get you arrested in Virginia, where a ban on salvia passed last year.

Last month, the Ocean City Council passed emergency legislation to ban salvia products, which were being sold at almost 20 shops on the resort town's boardwalk. An identical ban followed suit in Worcester County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and state Del. Jim Mathias, the former mayor of Ocean City, plans to push for a statewide ban when the General Assembly meets in Annapolis this winter.

Salvia has been gaining popularity over the past decade as a smokable drug whose psychotropic extract provides a short-lived but potent hallucinogenic trip. The 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 1.8 million people in the United States had tried salvia, "and it's probably even more now," said Matthew Johnson, a psychopharmacologist at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, where he studies salvia and its active ingredient, salvinorin A. "It's really hit a critical mass in the last couple of years."...

Although its hallucinogenic qualities were known by ethnobotanists and in psychedelic drug circles for many years, salvia had a low profile in this country until the late 1990s, when word spread that concentrating the active compound, salvinorin A, and smoking it was like a legal ticket to a magic carpet ride.

"That's when things started changing, around 1998, 1999, and you started seeing mail-order companies offering it," said Daniel Siebert, creator of the Salvia divinorum Research and Information Center, a salvia Web site. Siebert has experimented with the drug himself, "though I haven't done it in a couple of years," he said.

He describes his experience as a journey to another place. "If you take a high dose, you get immersed in this dreamlike trance state," he said. "You're seeing this narrative scene unfold, like you do when you're asleep, and you're not aware of your body or the room you're in. You think you're someplace else."

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If you want to read what the little person is saying, you have to click through to the actual comic.

A MAN’S plan to experiment with the use of cannabis to produce items such as plastics, clothing and toothpaste was hindered by a 10-week stint in jail.

Dan Joch McLeod’s scientific ambitions were thwarted by police soon after he crossed the Queensland border into the Territory in February this year, towing a caravan full of cannabis seedlings and cuttings.

He had hoped to take the plants to a property north east of Tennant Creek to grow them there.

McLeod had come from Camooweal where he had already been picked up for possessing the same drugs and was subsequently fined $450 in the Camooweal Magistrates Court.

Thanks to Shiggy for the story. But pot toothpaste? You have to be kidding me.

Thanks to Aron for finding this!!