Be careful or you might even get banned from riding the bus!

In Britain, anyone looking for a high without the criminal side effects can go online or walk into a head shop and buy a perfectly legal alternative to a whole host of illegal drugs, from marijuana to ecstasy to cocaine. But not for long. On Tuesday, the U.K. government announced that it is set to ban these so-called legal highs by the end of the year. The ban on designer drugs such as stimulant BZP, narcotic alternative GBL and cannabis imitator Spice is being described as a precautionary measure, with the aim of getting the substances off the shelves before they've gained much notoriety — and before thorough studies have been done on how much harm they actually do to users.

With this new legislation, Britain joins the growing number of European countries that have tackled legal highs over the past several years. For now, dozens of U.K.-based websites and shops are still free to market and sell alternatives to illegal drugs, and to ship them to any country that doesn't yet ban them. It's these legal drug dealers that the British ban seeks to target. "The priority will be to chase suppliers, rather than users," says Martin Barnes, head of Drugscope, a nonprofit that studies drug use in the U.K., and a member of the advisory board that recommended the new bans.

As the FDA paves the way for clinical LSD trials, scientists are exploring its medical benefits. Is acid the new Xanax? Plus, from Angelina to The Beatles, a gallery of celebrity trippers.

Bob Wold doesn't seem like your typical acid tripper. A happily married 56-year-old contractor with four kids who lives the suburbs of Chicago, he had never considered taking psychedelic drugs until about 10 years ago. At the time, he was suffering from cluster headaches—known as “suicide” headaches because they’re so painful—for 12 hours a day, and he was spending more than $20,000 a year on medication. Then he read a post on a support-group Web site from someone who said they’d found a miracle cure for their own cluster headaches: LSD.

Wold decided to try it. "Compared to brain surgery,” he says, “taking a couple hits of LSD looked a lot more attractive.” But ever since a bust of the country’s biggest LSD lab nine years ago, the drug has become much harder to find. So Wold got his hands on the closest equivalent he could think of: psilocybin “magic” mushrooms (though he has since switched to LSD, which he says works better). The psychedelics arrived in a brown box at his doorstep from a long-distance dealer. He took one dose: about 1.5 grams. "In 15 minutes I could feel the difference,” he says. “My head was clearer than it had probably been in the past 20 years. Other medications felt like they were just covering it up.” But on acid, “All the pressure was gone."

Thanks Hana!

By 4 in the afternoon, most men walking the streets of Sana'a are high, or about to get high — not on any sort of manufactured narcotics, but on khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. Khat is popular in many countries of the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, but in Yemen it's a full-blown national addiction. As much as 90% of men and 1 in 4 women in Yemen are estimated to chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as the khat slowly breaks down into the saliva and enters the bloodstream. The newcomer to Yemen's ancient capital can't miss the spectacle of almost an entire adult population presenting cheeks bulging with cud, leaving behind green confetti of discarded leaves and branches...

But khat's detractors say the leaf is destroying Yemen. At around $5 for a bag (the amount typically consumed by a single regular user in a day) it's an expensive habit in a country where about 45% of the population lives below the poverty line. (Most families spend more money on khat than on food, according to government figures.) A khat-addled public is more inclined to complacency about the failings of the government, khat ceremonies reinforce the exclusion of women from power and, as is obvious to anyone finding a government office nearly empty on a weekday morning, khat is keeping the country awake well past its bedtime.

Thanks jim!

Tradical Hemcrete is a bio-composite, thermal walling material made from hemp, lime and water. What makes it carbon negative? There is more CO2 locked-up in the process of growing and harvesting of the hemp than is released in the production of the lime binder. Of course the equation is more complicated than that, but Hemcrete is still an amazing new technology that could change the building industry.

Who says you can't build schools with hemp? Thanks Roaldgold!

Presumably by 2012 placebo will be a 100% effective high...

GOVERNMENT plans to ban so called 'herbal highs' will make the drugs as rare as a largely forgotten narcotic known as heroin, experts claimed last night...

Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: "History teaches us time and time again that banning drugs is a completely marvellous idea.

"After heroin was banned in 1924, use of the drug immediately ceased and there have been only three documented cases of heroin abuse in the last 85 years, all of them foreigners.

"Similarly a drug called cocaine used to be very popular until it was made illegal. Not surprisingly, all the people who manufactured it immediately stopped and either joined the Red Cross or became primary school teachers."

He added: "Just think, if heroin and cocaine had not been banned then millions of people could have become addicted and it may even have led to the creation of a multi-trillion dollar industry run by insanely violent criminals called 'Pablo'."

Argentina's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday it is unconstitutional to punish an adult for private use of marijuana as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

The unanimous ruling makes Argentina the second Latin American country in the past four days to allow personal use of a formerly illegal drug...

Earlier this year, a Brazilian appeals court ruled that possession of drugs for personal use is not illegal.

Thanks Bomberman!

This is the new formula for methamphetamine: a two-liter soda bottle, a few handfuls of cold pills and some noxious chemicals. Shake the bottle and the volatile reaction produces one of the world's most addictive drugs...

Drug users are making their own meth in small batches using a faster, cheaper and much simpler method with ingredients that can be carried in a knapsack and mixed on the run. The "shake-and-bake" approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication...

The pills are crushed, combined with some common household chemicals and then shaken in the soda bottle. No flame is required...

"If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball," said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol's Division of Drug and Crime Control. "You're not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway. If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction."

One little mistake, such as unscrewing the bottle cap too fast, can result in a huge blast, and police in Alabama, Oklahoma and other states have linked dozens of flash fires this year — some of them fatal — to meth manufacturing.

"Every meth recipe is dangerous, but in this one, if you don't shake it just right, you can build up too much pressure, and the container can pop," Woodward said...

The do-it-yourself method creates just enough meth for a few hits, allowing users to make their own doses instead of buying mass-produced drugs from a dealer.

Thanks Toije!

‘It just isn’t right that we’re swanning around in expensive cars draped with bling whilst Afghan poppy farmers struggle to feed the family goat,’ said ‘Big Daddy’ Johnson, a narcotics entrepreneur from Streatham. ‘Smack-heads on my patch can rest easy in the knowledge that at least 4% of their dole money will go directly to the farmer who lives under daily threat of violent reprisal from the local drug lord.’