The news that Alice in Wonderland has become the tenth highest grossing movie of all time, supplanting Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers, further strengthens the hold the 3-D phenomenon has taken over cinema. The fact that an offbeat fantasy, which did not receive the highest critical praise, could be so successful is another indication that audiences are flocking to cinemas for the spectacle, the buzz of 3-D alone, with subject matter a secondary concern. So what exactly is the nature of the new 3-D’s seductive allure, its x-factor, its secret ingredient? As psychedelic initiates have realised, 3-D produces something like an altered state, a non-ordinary level of sensory experience that is comparable to a drug trip.

The very act of putting on the glasses and seeing things differently is like passing through a gateway, or cleansing doors of perception. Then there’s the strangeness, the strikingly unusual quality of 3-D vision, where everything is heightened, surfaces and textures are more alive and resonant, and the commonplace becomes transfigured and imbued with specialness. The nature of how things are rendered in 3-D becomes part of the viewing pleasure, as important a factor as plot, action and characterisation; and the anticipation of the next 3-D thrill, plus the sense of immersement in another realm, take the audience beyond mere cinema into theme-park-ride and virtual-reality territory -- other parallels for chemically enhanced consciousness.

It appears that the researcher tested some 800 compounds on addicted patients...Three compounds were retained and all are now common drugs [including] dextromethorphan which is used in cough syrup.

Billings Police Sgt. Kevin Iffland says the first incident happened to Big Sky Patient Care located at 111 S. 24th St. early Sunday morning and the second happened early Monday morning at Montana Therapeutics, which is located at 2109 Grand Avenue.

Monday, the Billings fire department responded to a structure fire call around 4:30 a.m. at Montana Therapeutics. The fire was quickly put out and evidence at the scene shows it was intentionally set. Police determined that glass on the front door was broken by a rock and an accelerant was thrown inside the business to start the fire. Damages are estimated at around $2,000. Damages at the Big Sky Patient Care facility have not been released.

The fire scene has been turned over to the Billings Police Department for an investigation.

Sounds like residue from the "Cultural Wars" to me...

Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice is proposing a statewide ban on the synthesized cannabinoids which are added to the K2 herbal mixture, which is marketed under several different names, or "blends," such as Summit, Citron, Blonde, Pink, Spice and Pineapple Express. According to the DA, ingredients include: canavalia rosea, clematis vitalba, nelumbo nucifera, pedicularis grand folia, heimia salicifolia, leonurus sibiricus, ledum palustre, blue lotus, baybean and a number of other herbs. Because the chemical compounds that give K2 smokers a high are slightly different from THC, they are not covered by existing drug laws.

A group of Long Island lawmakers have already proposed criminalizing K2, but their bill would makes the offense only a business violation, imposing a $500 fine on any business caught selling the herb. Rice says that doesn't go far enough, and she wants to add the synthetic marijuana compounds to the list of Controlled Substances, which would also make it a penalty to use K2 or possess it.

So who was Lilly? His early biography offers little hint of what would be his enduring obsession with the bottlenose. Taking a degree in physics from Caltech in 1938, Lilly headed off to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, joining the war effort as a researcher in avionics. An early photo shows him as a rakish young scientist, smoking a corncob pipe while tinkering with a device designed to monitor the blood pressure of American flyboys -- a number of whom, in those days, were actually using surfacing cetaceans for strafing practice.

After the war, motivated in large part by contact with the pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield, Lilly turned his hand to neuroscience, applying the era's expanding array of solid-state electronic devices to the monitoring and mapping of the central nervous system. Eventually appointed to a research position at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Lilly spent the better part of a decade conducting invasive cortical vivisection on a variety of animals, particularly macaques. In the spy-versus-spy world of the high Cold War, this kind of work had undeniably creepy dimensions. Manchurian Candidate anxieties about "forced indoctrination" and pharmacological manipulation of political loyalties peaked in the 1950s, and security establishment spooks (as well as a few actual thugs) hung around the edges of the laboratories where scientists were hammering electrodes into primate brains. Lilly later claimed not to care for that sort of thing, but in his prime as a government employee he had high-level security clearance -- J. Edgar Hoover knew him by name -- and was actively involved in research into brainwashing (or "reprogramming" as it was then called among the cognoscenti), sleep deprivation, and "operant control" of animals with wires implanted in the "pain centers" of their gray matter. Lilly's papers from this period include a black-and-white photograph of two brain-wired monkeys at coitus, ostensibly being driven by remote electrical stimulation. It may have been some sort of inside joke around the lab, but maybe not.

The story covers Lilly's career, through dolphin research and beyond:

Lilly was no diver, however. His deep fascination with these feelings hails from a very different arena: his long-standing research into that menacing corner of the human sciences known as sensory deprivation. While still working for the government at NIMH, Lilly and several collaborators developed a new technique for testing the psychological stability of human beings under sustained isolation and reduced sensory input: the flotation tank. Warm water, circulating silently through a perfectly dark chamber, buoyed a naked experimental subject over whose whole head had been fitted a latex mask attached to life-support and monitoring devices. Money for this sort of research hailed, of course, from the military, which was mostly curious how pilots and submariners (and potentially astronauts) would fare during long spells of lonely tedium. When it turned out that many subjects rapidly came unhinged in this disorienting environment, unforeseen possibilities emerged: the technology could be used in personality assessment, and perhaps also in personality adjustment. Lilly himself -- fearless about self-experimentation, and already beginning to conceive of himself as a cosmonaut of consciousness -- spent many hours encased in his own tanks, exploring what happened when a mind in the water was left to its own devices. The results were trippy (this was, after all, the Lilly that would later inspire the sci-fi thriller Altered States), but he was convinced that the mentally sophisticated and strong -- those with what he would eventually call "wet courage" -- could thrive under these conditions. One had to transcend the terror, because a kind of enlightenment lay on the other side.

Utterly amazing installations by Heike Weber. She draws with permanent markers on acrylic floor and walls -- surfaces that have reached up to 600 m2.

I can't begin to imagine how time consuming these breathtaking installations must have been.

More photo goodness at the link below.

[Thanks Mason!]

A seminal interview with Dennis McKenna, Ph.D on the evolution of ayahuasca and the entheogenic movement and the imminent tipping point on planet earth the movement parallels. In which experiential journalist Rak Razam quizzes Dennis on his role as a scientist and a leading ayahuasca researcher, while Dennis waxes lyrical on bio-piracy, the proliferating business of shamanism in Peru and around the world, and the urgent need for integration of the plant teacher experience in people's everyday lives to truly make a difference. Is the sacrament of ayahuasca becoming commercialized? As pharmahuasca -- and the startling development of ayahuasca in a pill form -- spreads beyond the vine itself, is the wisdom of globaluasca transcending its Gaian roots to connect with a new generation without the plant dogma? Is the future a religious, compartmentalized Entheogenic Evangelism? Or will lodges transform into "psychedelic monasteries" training plant Jedis? Its been ten years now since Dennis' brother Terence passed on, and Dennis deconstructs some of his theories, from Timewave Zero to the Singularity and provides a critical analysis of the 2012 phenomenon and the unfolding Archaic Revival...

Get the podcast at the link below.

The number of American soldiers seeking treatment for opiate abuse has skyrocketed over the past five years, at a time when the U.S. military has been surging forces into the heart of the world's leading opium producer.

Pentagon statistics obtained by FoxNews.com show that the number of Army soldiers enrolled in Substance Abuse Program counseling for opiates has soared nearly 500 percent -- from 89 in 2004 to 529 last year. The number showed a steady increase almost every year in that time frame -- but it leaped 50 percent last year when the U.S. began surging troops into Afghanistan. Army troop levels in Afghanistan went from 14,000 as of the end of 2004 to 46,400 as of the end of 2009.

The Army did not break down the opiate-use data to show how many of the soldiers had been deployed to Afghanistan or what specific opiates they were using; opiate drugs include morphine, codeine and heroin.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. Army spokesman, said the military has been monitoring the uptick and is "concerned about it." He said the numbers reflect use not only of heroin, but of prescription drugs, that the abuse may not be "directly correlated to previous deployments," and that the increase could reflect an increase in reporting abuse -- not just drug use itself.

But the abundance and accessibility of heroin in Afghanistan surely account for part of the jump, said Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, an Army Reserve officer who served in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2004.

Shaffer said heroin abuse had "started to get out of hand" when he was in the country. He said a "black market" existed where troops on U.S. bases would trade goods to local Afghans in exchange for heroin.

"It sounds like it kind of went way beyond that," he said after learning about the statistics. "It's inevitable. ... It's available. It's right there."

Originally published by City Lights in 1963 'The Yage Letters' has since been republished 3 times. This fourth edition 'The Yage Letters: Redux' was published in 2006; it is edited by Oliver Harris who?s also included a thorough introduction of the text's history. The book is presented as an epistolary of largely letters between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; who both chronicle their travels to South America in search of the hallucinogen yage.

The introduction, written by the editor Oliver Harris, looks in some detail about the events on which the content is based -- essentially some Burroughs and Ginsberg biography as background but it adds great insight into the text -- and looks at how the events led to the first publication of the book by City Lights. Ginsberg had already persuaded several magazines to publish excerpts of the original document -- 'In Search of Yage' -- previously. Harris also writes in some depth on the editing process over the four editions. The book is a fine example of how multiple-authorship and editorial scholarship give a text its own life...