Tom Angell at LEAP sends us this breaking story:

Active duty police officer David Bratzer was planning to accept an invitation to speak about drug policy and harm reduction at an official city government-sponsored event...until his police department's leadership stepped in and ordered him not to show up.

Bratzer, a vocal "drug war" critic active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has served the Victoria Police Department in British Columbia, Canada for four years, and he has spoken up publicly about drug policy on many occasions, including in front of a Canadian Senate committee. He is always clear in saying that his views do not represent the department's, and he only practices his activism while he is off-duty.

Even though Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms strongly protects citizens' rights to free speech and political advocacy (just as the First Amendment gives all Americans the right to criticize government policies they disagree with), Bratzer's supervisors at the police department ordered him not to speak out at the city forum.

There is a petition at the following link to voice your opinion in this matter.

Move over, hopscotch boards. U.K. artist Julian Beever and German artist Edgar Mueller are two dudes who independently make some pretty amazing 3D chalk sidewalk murals. It's almost as if the guy from Mary Poppins and Wile E. Coyote started giving art lessons. These optical illusions use perspective so that when seen from the right angle, the drawings seem as real as a photograph.

Full slide show available.

Originally published in 2004 'Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanacatl' is a relatively comprehensive sourcebook on the psilocybin mushroom. The book is edited by Ralph Metzner, who's history with the psychedelic movement dates back to the Harvard Psilocybin Project. It contains contributions from a wide range of individuals and contains elements of science, theory, history and experiential accounts of the psilocybin experience.

The name Teonanacatl comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztec people; usually translated as "God's flesh", R. Gordon Wasson, the banker who brought the ritual use of psilocybin to the notice of the West, believed it more correctly translated as "wonderous mushroom." This sets the thrust of the book, which largely takes the view of an entheogenic discourse about the psychedelic...

Here's a job title that didn't exist around here a couple of years ago: budtender.

That would be the person helping a medical marijuana patient select the proper strain to treat his or her ailment. It's a job that requires a mix of mundane skills such using a cash register and making change, a little science nerdism to talk about the brain's cannabinoid receptors and the like, a familiarity with terms such as "couch lock" (since stoner descriptives can creep into a serious medical discussion), a passing knowledge of agronomy to explain hybrid strains, empathy, good communications skills, and generally -- assuming the budtender has a medical marijuana card -- some firsthand knowledge.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the latter continuing education aspect, it's a job much in demand.

"Hundreds of people come in here and want a job," says Jan Cole, owner of GreenLeaf Farm, a dispensary in downtown Boulder, she says, and then amends it to about a hundred. Cole budtends herself and has hired five or six budtenders, often former patients, whose knowledge on the subject impressed her.

Police in Southern Utah are documenting what they say is a disturbing phenomenon. Over the past year, they've had reports of a half-dozen crashes caused by people getting high on inhalants and getting behind the wheel. In some cases, people were huffing while driving.

"They're using Dustoff, common-type chemicals like that while they're driving, getting high," St. George Police Officer James Schafer told Fox 13 News. "Therefore they black out and lose control of their vehicles and cause accidents, that type of thing."

St. George police said it is something they have only seen within the past year or two. Recently, a truck went off a bridge, crashing into a river bed. Inside, police found cans of electronics cleaners. Officers said they have seen cases where they've caught people sitting in a parked car, abusing inhalants.

The chemicals are legal, but health officials said the allure is partially in their availability.

"If you look around your own home, there are a lot of substances there that young people are using as inhalants," said Paula Price, a substance abuse prevention specialist with Weber Human Services in Ogden. "We think to talk to our kids about alcohol use, we think to talk to them about marijuana, maybe other substances, but a lot of times we don't think to talk to them about inhalants."

Price said the high is similar to being drunk. It's quick acting and police said it also fades quickly, making it hard to track instances of "driving while huffing."

"We'll find the remnants... and a lot of times unless they're injured from the accident, we'll respond to it and they'll be coming out of it by that time," Schafer said.

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago's Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains that he'd cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments. Project BioShield, the Department of Health and Human Services' biodefense program, has found that agarikon is highly resistant to many flu viruses including, when combined with other mushrooms, bird flu. And a week before the trip, the National Center for Natural Products Research, a federally funded lab at the University of Mississippi, concluded that it showed resistance to orthopox viruses including smallpox—without any apparent toxicity. The potential implications are obvious: Most Americans under 35 have not been vaccinated for smallpox, and experts fear the current supply of the vaccine may be insufficient in case of a bioterror attack. A bird flu pandemic within the decade is even likelier. Currently, agarikon is being tested to see if it can also fight off the H1N1 swine flu virus.

"When you mention mushrooms people either think magic mushrooms or portobellos. Their eyes glaze over," Stamets laments. That a homely, humble fungus could fight off virulent diseases like smallpox and TB might seem odd, until one realizes that even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as "our ancestors" is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)

Originally published in 1860 'The Seven Sisters of Sleep' is a Western classic of drug literature. In over a hundred years, with no reprints until the end of the 20th century, the transformation in the importance of Mordecai Cooke's book is exceptional. Titled in its first edition with a 'popular history of the seven prevailing narcotics of the world' it now carries the tagline 'the celebrated drug classic'. And with good cause.

The book begins with a most poetic of openings. A short story, a fable possibly, which gives its premise over as the title of the book. Accordingly, Sleep had seven sisters who were jealous of her gift, which she waved over the creatures of earth "from pole to pole, and from ocean to ocean, she swayed her sceptre." They tried to steal the sway but they bred discord. So Sleep said: "My minister of dreams shall aid you by his skill, and visions more gorgeous, and illusions more splendid, than ever visited a mortal beneath my sway." And the seven sisters became entwined in their own splendour with the cultures of earth...

Reader John sends us this breaking news:

mephedrone and some synthetic cannabinoids (dunno which ones) have been put on emergency schedule or whatever in north dakota as of yesterday. i haven't read which ones, just that there's 7 of them that have been banned. there's a hearing on it on april 23rd or 24th in minot. please post an article about it so more people are aware of this bullshit. it's all because some little headshop in mandan was selling fake buds laced with cannabinoids for crazy amounts of money and they were selling mephedrone. first i ever heard of mephedrone being sold in the US at a headshop, i thought that was just in europe. here's some bullshit articles i found about it. the first one is pretty funny 'cause it's so stupid. i hate this state so much.

Now that is some proper reporting. Word.

Beyer's work is admirable in that he moves past surface elements of shamanic craft and takes an objective look at everything he reports. In a few instances Beyer seems overly taken with the magic he is exploring, such as seeing a spider escape from his mouth in a fit of jealousy, and wondering if it was the cause of his instructor's wife's illness. These few instances are far outweighed by the comprehensive and level-headed analysis of ayahuasca spirit ontology and the phenomenology of hallucination. While I thought I had exhausted all sources on this subject Beyer had me rethinking some fundamental assumptions about the magical nature of the ayahuasca space, and the dangers posed by jumping into the game of healing and sorcery without proper magical protection. Written with years of field study and well sourced and referenced, I would highly recommend this book to anyone studying ayahuasca, shamanism, or sorcery.