Prisoner drug addicts are being given a heroin substitute - through vending machines installed in jails, it was revealed today.

A 4 million scheme will see machines automatically dispensing methadone installed in half the 140 prisons in England and Wales.

The machines, which allow prisoners to access the drug directly by scanning their fingerprint or iris, are already operating in 57 prisons.

Love your ales, pilsners, weissbeers and stouts, but worried about all that fermented grain waste?

Thanks to German researcher Wolfgang Bengel, brew lovers can help create cleaner energy every time they down a pint.

Bengel, the technical director at German biomass company BMP Biomasse Projekt, has developed steam boilers that safely burn the spent grain left over from brewing beer. In the process, Bengel and his partners created a system for effective anaerobic (oxygen-free) treatment of waste water from breweries as well.

The combined systems offer breweries a comprehensive way to reduce their environmental footprints, as well as cut operating costs: recycling their brewing waste into a biofuel source; slashing the amount of grain waste trucked out of their facilities; and ultimately using less energy overall.

"Beer making is energy intensive - you boil stuff, use hot water and steam and then use electric energy for cooling - so if you recover more than 50 percent of your own energy costs from the spent grain that's a big saving," says Bengel in a statement.

Thanks Gavin!

My easy question is this: If Jackson was so into downers and painkillers and anesthetics, why didn't he just stick to ketamine?

Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he'd be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.

See the letter here.

Thanks Tim and Jason!

A pro-marijuana group launched a television advertisement Wednesday in California advocating legalization and taxation of the drug to help solve the state's budget woes.

The 30-second spot, airing Wednesday and paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project, features a retired 58-year-old state worker who said state leaders "are ignoring millions of Californians who want to pay taxes."

"We're marijuana consumers," says Nadene Herndon of Fair Oaks, who says she began using marijuana after suffering multiple strokes three years ago. "Instead of being treated like criminals for using a substance safer than alcohol, we want to pay our fair share."

State lawmakers are bitterly debating how to close a $26.3 billion budget deficit that likely means cuts to state services.

Injections of THC, the active principle of cannabis, eliminate dependence on opiates (morphine, heroin) in rats deprived of their mothers at birth. This has been shown by a study carried out by Valérie Daugé and her team at the Laboratory for Physiopathology of Diseases of the Central Nervous System (UPMC / CNRS / INSERM) in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The findings could lead to therapeutic alternatives to existing substitution treatments.

In order to study psychiatric disorders, neurobiologists use animal models, especially maternal deprivation models. Depriving rats of their mothers for several hours a day after their birth leads to a lack of care and to early stress. The lack of care, which takes place during a period of intense neuronal development, is liable to cause lasting brain dysfunction. Valérie Daugé's team at the Laboratory for Physiopathology of Diseases of the Central Nervous System (UPMC / CNRS / Inserm) analyzed the effects of maternal deprivation combined with injections of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main active principle in cannabis, on behavior with regard to opiates...

To these rats, placed under stress from birth, the researchers intermittently administered increasingly high doses of THC (5 or 10 mg/kg) during the period corresponding to their adolescence (between 35 and 48 days after birth). By measuring their consumption of morphine in adulthood, they observed that, unlike results previously obtained, the rats no longer developed typical morphine-dependent behavior. Moreover, biochemical and molecular biological data corroborate these findings. In the striatum, a region of the brain involved in drug dependence, the production of endogenous enkephalins was restored under THC, whereas it diminished in rats stressed from birth which had not received THC.

So adolescent marijuana smoking is a prophylactic against opiate addiction in adulthood? Score!

Thanks to maeneyak for finding this.