Baby skittles.

I was recently interviewed by Daniel Kottke for his Palo Alto cable TV show, The Next Step, which will broadcast ONLINE one more time on Wednesday night February 24th at 11pm PST. Though his plan was to grill me on my new book, THE EIGHT-CIRCUIT BRAIN, we also ended up discussing other unexpected topics thanks to my habit of not knowing what I was going to say when I showed up. So, if you've got an hour to kill late night Wednesday the broadcast should be accessible to most hi-speed computer connections.

Here's the webcast page::
http://midpenmedia.org/watch/stream/

NOTE: This site features live broadcast; no archival presence.

THE SHOW IS ON CHANNEL 27
Wed, Feb 24th 11:00pm Pacific time

I don't remember my rave days being quite like that, and not for want of a schoolbus....

Being the adventures of a disembodied brain in the wilderness.

[Thanks, Phyllis!]

Any questions?

[Via Stay Lucid]

Weed is widely available on Koh Phangan from just every bar decorated with Bob Marley posters and playing reggae music. Sometimes the owner will sport healthy rastas. A lot of times, especially late into the night, the owner will smoke weed and will treat you to it. The guidebooks warn against weed sellers snitching on you to the police for additional profit, however I haven't heard about such cases. Surely, those bar owners pay a cut to the police for some protection...

Mushrooms. This is the main illicit plant attraction of the island. Out of respect, I will not use the D word for them. Mushroom shakes are openly advertised in those mellow mountain bars in Haad Rin. The price of the "happy shake" is 500 baht, and it's a good dose. I wouldn't recommend to take it during a party, as the trip can get quite personal and introspective. Of course it won't hurt to smoke some weed at the onset of trip, as the weed relaxed you and enhances the journey...

MDMA, LSD and ya baa (meth) are widely available at parties of the Half moon, Black moon and Jungle experience variety. I've seen a stall that openly sold MDMA (800 baht) and space cookies (200 baht) at the Jungle experience. Otherwise, just ask around. An LSD tab costs 300 baht.

Excellent article. As an aside, the Thai baht is currently trading against US dollars at 33 to 1.

Universities must investigate measures, including random dope testing, to tackle the increasing use of cognitive enhancment drugs by students for exams, a leading behavioural neuro-scientist warns.

Student use of drugs, such as Ritalin and modafinil, available over the internet and used to increase the brain's alertness, had "enormous implications for universities", said Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at Cambridge University's psychiatry department.

Normally prescribed for neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, such drugs boost acetylcholine in the brain, improving alertness and attention. Their use has prompted concerns that they could give students an unfair advantage. "This is something that universities really have to discuss. They should have some strategy, some kind of active policy," Sahakian said.

"The coercion aspect is a strong one. Some students say they feel it is cheating, and it puts pressure on them to feel they have to use these drugs when they don't really want to."

Sahakian, whose work is at the forefront of research on the effects of such drugs on healthy people, said urgent debate was now needed on the ethics of how society dealt with "smart drugs".

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was -- the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom -- the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Originally published in 2008 ‘Inner Paths to Outer Space’ is a collaborative project between Rick Strassman M.D., Slawek Wojtowicz M.D., Luis Eduardo Luna Ph.D. and Ede Frecska M.D.. Through a series of scientific explanations, first-hand psychedelic accounts and the development of hypotheses therein, the four authors offer a broad argument for a connection between certain sci-fi topics and psychedelic consciousness.

In a recent interview with PsypressUK, Rick said: “I think the science fiction community has taken the ball with the psychedelic material and done great things with it. This was the kernel of thought that blossomed into the Inner Paths book.” The collaborative effort, taking in a variety of disciplines, means the book has a broad foundation of knowledge from which to draw on; which ultimately leads to an exceedingly well structured text...

A load of illegal drug dealers thinly veiled as a vigilante group are going round burning headshops down and in one case shooting someone who sold legal highs from his shop. These are acts of terrorism.

First off, the fact that these people are illegal drug dealers is speculation, but since half a million euros was found in the burnt out husk of just one of these headshops, it's not hard to find a motive. They claim they're against drugs in general, but no one who feels that drugs are so morally wrong would go out and shoot someone -- a far more immoral crime. They're either completely moral, completely immoral or completely nuts. The situation is chillingly similar to that Christian loon who shot that abortion doctor in the US.