Here we have a lovely young Helen Hunt sampling angel dust for the first time - Play her off keyboard cat!

New evidence from a government-backed study suggests that attention deficit drugs like Ritalin and Adderall can increase the risk of sudden death, yet federal health regulators continue to urge parents to keep their children on the medications.

The study, which appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that the stimulant drugs used to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder may be linked to sudden death in children and adolescents.

Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall already carry warnings about the risks of heart attack in children with heart conditions, but scientists are now seeing if the same risks apply to children without pre-existing heart issues.

According to the study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, healthy children using the medications had an increased risk of sudden death when compared to children not taking the drugs.

Besides Oaksterdam U, which appears to be thriving, Lees tarted the Bulldog Cafe (named after a famous collection of Amsterdam coffeehouses), and owns a pot growing and equipment store where there are a range of high tech machines for making hash, and powerful microscopes for a super enhanced view of the beauty of the pot plant -- in this case "white widow" which the crystals in the pot plant give off a jewel like glow. Near by is a cannabis novelty store with hundreds of cool and corny pot tschockes, T-shirts and the like, soon to be a cannabis museum (like the one in Amsterdam, of course), Lee also has a glass blowing studio and an advertising agency-- all the better to promote his varied operations (e.g. Lee advertises for Oaksterdam U. at concerts at the Shoreline Amphitheatre.) And finally, la piece de resistance, a pot growing warehouse, with many dozens of beautiful and pungent green plants thriving under the warm glow of grow lights. Lee proudly points out his specialties including "white rhino" and "casey jones" -- which are sold at the Blue Sky Cafe, his medical pot dispensary, a block away.

That is all.

From Rak Razam comes 'Aya: a Shamanic Odyssey', a new book on ayahuasca tourism and shaman culture in South America. This is the video trailer.

Six members of London’s metropolitan police force are the focus of a criminal investigation after a corruption probe revealed allegations by a serving officer that detectives waterboarded suspects allegedly caught with a “large amount” of marijuana...

“[British] papers gave varying accounts of the exact technique used by police, with the Times saying that officers poured water on a cloth and placed it over a suspect’s face to simulate the experience of drowning,” reported the Associated Press. “The Daily Mail said police officers repeatedly dunked the suspects’ heads in buckets of water. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.”

I have stories, but this will do Piggies, this will do...

The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson is writing a book saying that “psychedelic drugs and psychedelic culture have had a deeper, less obvious influence on the art of the past 60 years than has generally been acknowledged.” Johnson doesn’t mean that the intermingling of art and drugs is new; they’ve probably been canoodling as long as both have been around. And his idea isn’t about artists who actually use drugs. Sober-looking work is made by stoners and addled-looking art is made by teetotalers. Van Eyck’s hyperreal paintings are among the most hallucinogenic works ever made. In some ways, all art is a hallucination. Johnson’s idea has to do with the widespread availability and use of psychedelic drugs and the increasingly common understanding of their effects.

This notion has been around for a while. Five years ago, I wrote about a wily show called “Drunk vs. Stoned,” which postulated that “stoned art” is introspective, hypersensitive, detail-oriented, and prone to surprise, spirals, and repetition, while drunk art is outward-looking, impulsive, romantic, and unafraid of messiness and sloppy emotions. Under these criteria, Expressionism is drunk; Pop is stoned. Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Nan Goldin are drunk; Warhol, Johns, and Cindy Sherman are stoned. Johnson’s lens provides an interesting alternative to teleological-stylistic versions of art history. It is experiential rather than detached. Look at John Chamberlain’s crushed-car-part sculptures this way, and you don’t see commentary on consumerism and waste, or formal arrangements of color and line; you see exoskeletal creatures of folded space. Pipilotti Rist’s burning color becomes the morphing of alternative universes, and Matthew Barney’s crawling through Vaseline makes the malleability of space palpable.

The piece goes on to review an installation of works by Charles Ray, which sound amazing if only for their engineering prowess alone; but I suspect the effect of the installations is well worth investigating judging by these descriptions.

Initially Ink Line looks like a strand of yarn strung the height of the gallery, a pulsating Fred Sandback sculpture, a free-floating Barnett Newman zip, or a disembodied Sol LeWitt. Get close and you’ll realize the line is liquid, glimmering, the consistency of syrup, moving fairly fast, fluctuating slightly, and thinner at the bottom than at the top. The ink forms a weird climatological aura around itself, slightly changing the humidity of the room. I was blown away when I was allowed to see the elaborate apparatus that makes this simple effect possible. There was a large, noisy electric motor in the showroom beneath this gallery, all sorts of wiring, and plastic tubes that go under the floor, behind the wall, and above the ceiling. A gallery assistant arrives two hours early each day to drain the ink, “de-gas” it (!?), heat it with lamps to between 90 and 95 degrees, and put it back into the system. Anyone who looks at Ink Line can figure out how it works—yet the piece is as much a phenomenological event and a mystery as it is a work of formalist sculpture.