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Creative way to propose to a stoner
07.05.2011
02:59 pm
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I wonder if she said “yes”?

(via reddit )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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07.05.2011
02:59 pm
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Lou Reed: 1989 Rock Against Drugs p.s.a.
07.03.2011
10:25 pm
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Lou Reed and his specialized mullet dispense words of hard-earned street wisdom. You know, for the kids.

Drgz: I stp’d.
U shu’nt strt.

 

 
With thanks to Ian Schultz

Posted by Brad Laner
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07.03.2011
10:25 pm
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Video: Couple freak-out smoking Salvia
07.01.2011
02:21 pm
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Or is that what is really happening? Hard to tell. I’ve never smoked Salvia before, so I don’t know if they’re smoking the right amount or what’s in their bong or even if they’re faking it? Either way, Miley Cyrus handled it better. These guys, not so much.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Salvia Divinorum is not for party people: Take it serious, Cyrus
Exploring the Mind-Bending World of Legal Psychedelic Salvia Divinorum

(via BB Submitterator )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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07.01.2011
02:21 pm
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Biker Pipe: ‘Who Sez You Can’t Smoke at 60 m.p.h.?’
06.29.2011
12:36 pm
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“Whether you ride on the weekend or live in the saddle, you can ride high with these dudes…”


 
(via reddit and Nistagmus)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.29.2011
12:36 pm
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Was Shakespeare a stoner?
06.27.2011
07:34 pm
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To toke or not to toke, or rather did he toke, that is the question. That’s right, you heard me, did the Bard smoke weed?

Not to get all “Lord Buckley” on you finger-poppin’ daddys, but is it possible that Willie the Shake was a “viper”? That’s what a controversial paleontologist wants to find out.

After some two dozen pipes were found buried in Shakespeare’s garden, many containing residues of smoked cannabis, a South Africa scientist named Francis Thackeray, with help from Professor Nikolaas van der Merwe of Harvard University, obtained fragments of these pipes via the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. They handed them over to South African Police forensic scientists for lab analysis. Low levels of marijuana residue was found in the pipes.

Cannabis was known to have been cultivated at the time in England and so it is certainly plausible that Shakespeare partook of the herb superb, but it would take looking at bone samples to say for sure. (Two of the pipes also tested positive for traces of cocaine, but this is a more difficult to swallow than the idea of the Bard smoking the “noted weed,” as cocaine first gets synthesized around the time of the Civil War).

Thackery says that his team could get into Shakespeare’s final resting place—he was buried under a church in Stratford-upon-Avon—unobtrusively, because a full exhumation of the body is not required and the remains would not have to be disturbed at all. Good thing, too, because Shakespeare was notoriously wary of anyone screwing around with his skeleton. A curse is engraved on his tomb that reads:

“Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare/ To digg the dust encloased heare/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones/ And curst be he that moves my bones.”

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.27.2011
07:34 pm
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Poetic justice for Buju Banton: 10 year prison sentence for 2009 coke bust
06.25.2011
03:06 pm
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On Thursday, Jamaican singer Buju Banton was sentenced to ten years in federal prison for his role in setting up a five kilo coke deal in Florida in late 2009. Concealed weapons charges were dropped against the Grammy Award-winning singer and the sentence was the most lenient that the judge could have given him under the sentencing guidelines. His lawyer say they’ll appeal, but good luck with that…

Banton is one of those guys who thinks he’s more clever than he is. Even though I admit to liking some of his music—he’s an undeniably a big talent, one of the best musicians of his generation on the island—his rampant homophobia and smart-ass posturing to gays rights groups has always made me think he was a total asshole. And what is a Grammy winner doing making drug deals, anyway? He doesn’t have enough money already? He thinks he’s a tough guy, but I wonder how tough he’ll be in a federal penitentiary. I don’t suspect Banton is going to have a very easy time with all the “batty boys” he’s going to meet in prison. Some of them probably don’t appreciate his lyrics that advocate shooting gays in the head and burning them alive. That’s the way it goes. Karma’s a bitch, Buju-baby.

Below, Jamaicans react to Banton’s sentencing in Florida.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Buju Banton Comes Out of the Closet

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.25.2011
03:06 pm
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Federal measure to legalize marijuana introduced in Congress today
06.23.2011
02:49 pm
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A bipartisan measure to end federal criminalization of the personal use of marijuana was introduced today in Congress for the first time since 1937.

The ‘Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011’ was co-sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and Texas Republican Ron Paul—- along with Reps. Cohen (D-TN), Conyers (D-MI), Polis (D-CO), and Lee (D-CA)—and would stop the Feds from prosecuting adults who use or possess marijuana. The law would remove THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, as well as the planet itself, from the “schedule” of the US Controlled Substance Act of 1970.

“The Marihuana Tax Act” was passed in 1937. Language in the new bill is similar to the language of the bill that repealed prohibition in 1933 and would nullify the conflicts between state laws—like here in California, where for all intents and purposes, pot is pretty much legal—and Federal drug laws.

It’s about time. They’ve been talking about legalizing cannabis since the Jimmy Carter administration. Enough already.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.23.2011
02:49 pm
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Krokodil: The drug that (literally) eats junkies
06.22.2011
02:31 pm
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There’s a super bleak story in The Independent about a home-made heroin substitute that’s becoming popular in Russia. The problem is that “Krokodil” is so detrimental to the human body that it practically eats right through it. There are up to two million junkies in Russia, the most in the world and around 100,000 of them are addicted to Krokodil which can be easily produced for a fraction of the price of smack. 

Even hardcore methfreaks are better off than Krokodil addicts. Withdrawal from the drug can take an agonizing MONTH (Heroin detox lasts a week to ten days, a relative walk in the park).

The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or “crocodile”. It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be “cooked” from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.

It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.

“If you miss the vein, that’s an abscess straight away,” says Sasha. Essentially, they are injecting poison directly into their flesh. One of their friends, in a neighbouring apartment block, is further down the line.

“She won’t go to hospital, she just keeps injecting. Her flesh is falling off and she can hardly move anymore,” says Sasha. Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death.

This is like something straight out of Burroughs or Cronenberg, but as I was reading the article, I was thinking more about what a modern day Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky would make of a plague like this.

Read the entire horrific story: Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies (The Independent)

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Scarface: Attack of the Flesh-Eating Cocaine

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.22.2011
02:31 pm
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Timothy Leary’s papers acquired by New York Public Library
06.17.2011
10:37 am
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Timothy Leary with Boing Boing founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair at Golden Apple Comics. Photo: Richard Metzger
 
At some point in 1995, I was visiting Dr. Timothy Leary in his home in Benedict Canyon. I showed up at the appointed time and waited outside on the patio.

And I waited. And waited. And waited and waited and waited. After about an hour and 45 minutes—the guy was one of my greatest heroes, how long are you supposed to wait in a situation like that?—I made to leave when Tim finally arrived. It had been some time, maybe five years, since I had seen him last and he looked terrible. Until recently Leary could have passed for a man 20 years younger, but now he looked just awful. It was the week before he told the media that he had terminal cancer.

That day, a delivery of several boxes of items which had been confiscated during one of his many drug busts of the sixties, had arrived at the house. There were several people in the housre cataloging the contents (one of them was Bill Daily, the antiquarian book dealer here in Los Angeles and I think former SNL comedy writer Tom Davis might have been there, too).

One item had the group on stitches when it was discovered: A tin flour container (my grandmother owned the exact same one) full of flour. It was surmised by the group that whoever grabbed it must have suspected the flour jar was where the cocaine was hidden. I recall Leary quipping “I wonder where they thought we kept our flour?”

It’s taken over a decade since Leary’s death, but yesterday an article in the New York Times reports that Leary’s personal papers have been acquired by the New York Public Library:

When the Harvard psychologist and psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary first met the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1960, he welcomed Ginsberg’s participation in the drug experiments he was conducting at the university.
Multimedia

“The first time I took psilocybin — 10 pills — was in the fireside social setting in Cambridge,” Ginsberg wrote in a blow-by-blow description of his experience taking synthesized hallucinogenic mushrooms at Leary’s stately home. At one point Ginsberg, naked and nauseated, began to feel scared, but then “Professor Leary came into my room, looked in my eyes and said I was a great man.”

Ginsberg’s “session record,” composed for Leary’s research, was in one of the 335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs and more that the New York Public Library is planning to announce that it has purchased from the Leary estate. The material documents the evolution of the tweedy middle-aged academic into a drug guru, international outlaw, gubernatorial candidate, computer software designer and progenitor of the Me Decade’s self-absorbed interest in self-help.

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60, ’70s and ’80s.

Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”

Leary, who died in 1996, coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” and was labeled by Richard M. Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America.” He was present in Zelig-like fashion at some of the era’s epochal events. Thousands of letters and papers from Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and even Cary Grant — an enthusiastic LSD user — are in the boxes.

 

 
Thank you Douglas Rushkoff!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.17.2011
10:37 am
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Jewelry for pill poppers and other addictions
06.16.2011
12:45 pm
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.925 Sterling Silver, 26” Silver Figaro Chain, $250.00

 
Los Angeles-based designers Cast of Vices create whimsical pieces of jewelry based on “pop culture and our obsession with self-medication and addiction.” There’s also a pricey ($1,350) 14k Vicodin necklace you can view here.

.925 Sterling Silver, 26” Silver Figaro Chain, $180.00

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.16.2011
12:45 pm
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