All I can say is, what a waste.

Thanks GK.

StopTheDrugWar.org weighs in on the Hempfest debate:

Somewhere around 300,000 people converged on the Seattle waterfront Saturday and Sunday to attend the 19th annual Seattle Hempfest, the world's largest marijuana "protestival," as organizers like to call it. While organizers and drug reform advocates were out in force to encourage attendees to get involved in changing the marijuana laws, for most of the crowd, Hempfest was one big pot party. And that has some movement critics unhappy...

While Hempfest came off without any serious problems, it has sparked a couple of related controversies. This week, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation head Eric Sterling wrote a blog post, Hempfest is Huge, But is It Good Politics?, in which he answered his own question with a resounding "no." Hempfest and similar rallies are "a political fraud," he wrote. Even worse, they are "advertisements for irresponsible drug use."

Similarly, former Hempfest organizer Dominic Holden stirred the pot the week before Hempfest with an article in the Seattle Stranger, A Few Words About Hempfest, in which he complained it was a "patchouli-scented ghetto" and overly countercultural. Like Sterling, Holden saw the hippiesque trappings of Hempfest as counterproductive. "Countercultural celebrations and drug legalization advocacy are mutually undermining ambitions," he wrote.

Hempfest organizers were not amused, and on Sunday, Holden was removed from the back of the Main Stage by unhappy erstwhile comrades. They explained why in an interview with Steve Bloom's Celebstoner, and Holden continued the spat with his own interview.

Perhaps the organizers of Hempfest and similar events will listen to Sterling and Holden, but probably not. Hempfest is a celebration of the pot-smoking counterculture, and it's not likely to go away or change its ways because a guy in a suit and a disaffected former friend are unhappy with how it operates. Straight-laced drug reformers will most likely just have to put up with Hempfest and its pot-happy ilk. They can treat it like the crazy aunt in the attic, but they can't get rid of it.

Why can't we all just smoke a joint and get along? Read the interviews at Celebstoner.com if you want more of this story.

Mexico decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin on Friday – a move that prosecutors say makes sense even in the midst of the government's grueling battle against drug traffickers.

Prosecutors said the new law sets clear limits that keep Mexico's corruption-prone police from shaking down casual users and offers addicts free treatment to keep growing domestic drug use in check.

"This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty," said Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the attorney general's office.

The new law sets out maximum "personal use" amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities no longer face criminal prosecution.

Espino del Castillo says, in practice, small users almost never did face charges anyway. Under the previous law, the possession of any amount of drugs was punishable by stiff jail sentences, but there was leeway for addicts caught with smaller amounts.

"We couldn't charge somebody who was in possession of a dose of a drug, there was no way... because the person would claim they were an addict," he said...

The maximum amount of marijuana for "personal use" under the new law is 5 grams — the equivalent of about four joints. The limit is a half gram for cocaine, the equivalent of about 4 "lines." For other drugs, the limits are 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams for methamphetamine and 0.015 milligrams for LSD.

Thanks Bomberman and GK for sending us the news!

Can you capture a DMT trip on film? Jason Tucker wrote to tell us about a movie screened at Cannes this Spring that claims to do just that. 'Enter the Void'.

Almost defying definition in contemporary cinematic terms, Gaspar Noe’s third feature film Enter The Void is a wild, hallucinatory mindfuck for adults which sees the director explore new shooting techniques and ambitious special effects to capture a young man’s journey after death. More experience than narrative, it runs to a massive 163 minutes, meandering and careening in and out of story and into visual realms and moods that are nothing short of hypnotic. It is a film that will instantly achieve cult status among young adults. If audiences care to, they can lose themselves in Noe’s images and trip on his imagination. If they don’t, they will be bored to tears.

The neon lit landscapes look like a DMT trip to me. I only hope this film can live up to it's hype. From another review from Twitch:

Gaspar Noe won the Palme D’Or of my heart with this 160+ minute mind-bender. Enter the Void is more of an experimental, avant-garde journey through a DayGlo heart of darkness than it is a traditional narrative. After the punishing violence of both Seul Contre Tous and Irreversible, Noe switches gears completely and attempts to intimately capture the internal, hallucinatory experience of a young man’s death.

After years of living apart in foster homes, American brother and sister Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz De La Huerta) are reunited in Tokyo, where he’s a low level drug dealer and she a budding stripper. The film starts out literally inside Oscar’s head, registering each blink of his eyes as a momentary black screen, and showing us first hand the DMT trip he’s on, which Ne depicts as a series of unfolding, expanding brilliantly-coloured spirals, fractals and delicate tendrils (a bit reminiscent of a constantly mutating science class diagram of the parts of a cell).

Another review from Hollywood Reporter calls it "unwatchable":

It goes without saying that the film is violent, but its obsessive emphasis on sex and drugs -- to the point that most viewers are going to feel utterly bludgeoned by both -- makes it virtually unwatchable, especially at its unofficial "director's cut" length of 160 minutes. Commercial prospects seem remote, but its LSD and other drug-induced visual fireworks might ensure a long life as a cult film on DVD.

Excerpt from an Interview with Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution, from h+ magazine.

Like any new set of tools, the set of emerging neurotechnology tools can be used for both good and bad purposes. Today there are college students, Wall Street financiers, software programmers, and even poker players who are using cognitive-enabling drugs to improve their competitive performance.

There is a whole host of ethical, legal, and societal issues with taking drugs generally developed to treat an illness and then using them to help normal humans. There are issues of safety. There are issues of fairness. There are issues of health. And there are issues of coercion. And the reality is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, there are over 100 compounds in clinical development right now focused on treating some form of memory loss. And we expect a small handful of these over the next decade to improve memory in normal humans. So you can imagine the inherent coercive force that will emerge as those treatments become developed. Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco and she's competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, India. Neither one knows whether the other is using one of these cognitive-enabling drugs.

And it's not just drugs; there are neurodevices in development that will be able to improve memory and speed learning. What we're going to see is what I call "neuro competition." This is the next form of competition that individuals and businesses and nations will adapt to gain competitive advantage –- except this will be a neuro advantage. Just as companies today compete for a competitive advantage in information technology –- whether it's the latest social software, the latest IT backbone, the latest servers, or the latest customer relationship management systems –- they will use neurotechnologies to improve their competitive positioning.

The new neurotechnologies will come in multiple forms. They will come not just as drugs to improve one's competitive performance, or emotional performance, or physical stamina, but they will also come in emotion-sensing technologies... and one of the really hard questions moving forward is: where does this all go? This was a major reason for writing the book -- to begin to spark a broad public dialog around the societal implications of where this technology might go, and how might we begin to have a conversation around what regulatory options that we might want to start discussing.

From an article in Reason subtitled, "How phony statistics about cocaine prices hide the truth about the war on drugs".

Clearly, the price trends of marijuana and cocaine are highly correlated, but the correlation is a negative one. In the 1980s, marijuana price increases drove demand toward other drugs. The war on drugs, hard, soft, or otherwise, helped persuade pot smokers to put down the bong and pick up the crack pipe, the mirror, or the needle. Pot use plummeted under Reagan. In 1979 about half of America’s 12th graders told University of Michigan researchers they had smoked pot that year, the same proportion as five years before. This fraction fell throughout the ’80s, dwindling to one-fifth of the country’s high school seniors in 1992. But the use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different, cheaper high.

An insightful article from the author of "This is your country on drugs," which looks very much worth picking up - video interview with the author elsewhere on the site.

Reader Jim sent us this link to an article on Route 36, the "world's first cocaine bar" in La Paz, Bolivia. Sure, it may be a cocaine bar, but the world's first? Perhaps we've forgotten Studio 54, and then there was Cokies in Brooklyn that just shut down a few years ago, which was a well known cocaine bar because it was called Cokies. It was an illegal cocaine bar, but still... Ah well, here's the story.

"Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram." The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. "We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM," says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world's first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

So drugs make people do some strange things, but keeping your stash in a diaper? That's always the first place the cops look!

From Saratoga Springs, NY, and old fashioned case of passive resistance... with LSD.

In case you missed the hubbub, Dominic Holden - agent provocateur - reports that the organizers of Seattle Hempfest kicked him out of the festival last weekend, ostensibly for having the audacity to be contrary:

I was talking to a friend when a member of the Hempfest board, John Davis, whom I’ve known for about 15 years, approached me and said, “You can’t be back here. You have to go.”

I showed him my VIP pass. Surely, an article I wrote suggesting the event should take down tie-dyes from the stages to debunk stereotypes about Hempfest couldn’t make them completely lose their shit, could it? And after working on Hempfest for over a decade, and pushing for many of the things the event organizers love so much (remember how pot enforcement is the city’s lowest law-enforcement priority now, guys? And that Hempfest steering committee members thought it was a “bad idea,” but it passed and now you appreciate it? You're welcome), they weren’t really kicking me out, were they? Davis snatched the pass out of my hand, and as the security guy escorted me out, he said that it’s because I'm a “member of the media.”

Uh, I’ve been a member of the media in past years, and I’ve always been allowed backstage. And before I was a reporter—back when I was the spokesman for Hempfest—several times we’d have reporters walk freely backstage. So what gives? Hempfest director Vivian McPeak reportedly told a staffer, who went to ask what the fuck was going on, that I had “proverbially stabbed [him] in the back.” But, Vivian, I thought you were omnipotent. About 10 minutes earlier, he was on the main stage mic referring to himself as “the great Vivian McPeak.”

Sorry for the egregiously long quote from Dominic's post, but really, you should head over to SLOG and check out the entire post. It is super duper awesome to see how open-minded this corner of the "movement" has become.