GOOD Magazine on the impact illegal drugs have on the environment. I’ll give you three guesses which one is best for the planet.

A Slate reader recently asked the Green Latern which illegal drug was the least harmful to the environment. If you not only care about your carbon footprint but also enjoy the occasional recreational high, you might find the Lantern’s response enlightening.

Let’s be frank: Most highs for you are kind of a downer for the planet. The conditions under which illegal drugs are produced make it impossible for the government to enforce any sort of clean manufacturing regulations, and the long-standing “War on Drugs” inflicts its own environmental damage. (Think of the RoundUp herbicide sprayed on 120,000 hectares of rural Colombia each year.) There are some ways to measure the eco-credentials of various narcotics, though. To understand how various drugs affect the environment, we need to take a close look at where each one comes from and compare the ways they’re harvested or synthesized.

Ecstasy, which is derived from the sassafras oil of endangered rainforest trees, and crystal meth, which comes from either Asian grasses or the pharmaceutical chemicals ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, are among the most environmentally damaging. Meth’s production is particularly toxic: “In California’s Central Valley, law enforcement estimates between 4 million and 7 million pounds of lab waste were poured into canals and on properties between 2000 and 2004.”

(GOOD: Which Drugs Are Best for the Environment?)

The Vice Guide to Film uploaded this video guide to Mexican narco cinema. The genre focuses on “cocaine, guns, girls and trucks.” Vice went to Mexico to explore the budding new genre. Fun stuff, inspired by Mexico’s current drug cartel mayhem.

(Pictured above: Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of drug trafficking!)

(Vice: Mexican Narco Cinema)

Discovery reports on the drug cocktail that our brave men and women in outer space indulge in on a regular basis to stay focused and sane. Personally, I have only one feeling about this, and it’s the same one I have about sex in space. [Waits for Branson-flights to drop in price…]

Outer space, at least as we encounter it in science fiction, is basically a drug free-for-all. If character’s aren?

Oh for god’s sake. New Scientist reports:

Stem cells show promise for treating a range of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s, strokes and Alzheimer’s, but it is tricky getting them into the brain. Perhaps inhaling stem cells might be the answer - if mice are anything to go by.

Other options all have their drawbacks. Drilling through the skull and injecting the stem cells is painful and carries some risks. You can also inject them into the bloodstream but only a fraction reach their target due to the blood-brain barrier.

The nose, however, might be a viable alternative. In the upper reaches of the nasal cavity lies the cribriform plate, a bony roof that separates the nose from the brain. It is perforated with pin-size holes, which are plugged with nerve fibres and other connective tissue. Since proteins, bacteria and viruses can enter the brain this way, Lusine Danielyan at the University Hospital of T?ɬ

 
A double dose of alarming news today from the drug front.  First, I read the AP‘s account of a new, DIY approach to amphetamine production that “does away with the clutter of typical meth labs, turning the backseat of a car or a bathroom stall into a makeshift drug factory.”  The ingredients are few—cold pills, a soda bottle, some common household chemicals.  The method is simple—pills are crushed, then shaken in the bottle with the liquids.  After everything fizzes out, what’s left is a crystalline powder that users smoke, snort or inject.  And there it is: meth-making without the lighting of a single match.

A major plus since cooking it up Breaking Bad-style can sometimes trigger fires, explosions, and the release of byproduct ingredients similar to toxic waste.  But while this “shake-and-bake” method has caused a spiking in meth-related arrests throughout Oklahoma and Missouri, it’s by no means foolproof:

If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball,” said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.  “You’re not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway.  If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction.  One little mistake, such as unscrewing the bottle cap too fast, can result in a huge blast.”

Thanks, I’ll remember that during my next Palmdale picnic!

Because Big Pharma‘s involved, I find today’s second dose of news more alarming than the first.  While I was thumbing through the latest issue of Parents (I just read it for the articles!), I paused on an ad for the Bristol-Myers Squibb drug, “Abilify,” which seems designed to combat depression, even schizophrenia.

But Abilify’s not some run-of-the-mill anti-depressant like Prozac or Paxil.  No, because “approximately 2 out of 3 (!) people being treated for depression still have unresolved symptoms,” Abilify’s been designed to take ON TOP of those drugs, a supplement to the supplement you’re already taking.  An anti-depressant chaser, if you will!  Oh, Bristol-Myers, you’ve sure got your finger on the pulse of self-medicating America!  But where does it all end—chasers for the chaser?

Of course, the usual disclaimers warning you of the possible meltdown of your bodily functions haunt the Abilify print ad (as well as the following video).  Above all else, these ads warn, “Talk to your doctor.”  Hmm…I’m pretty sure millions of Americans are now finding it utterly depressing to be without heathcare.  Hey, Bristol-Myers: to whom should they be speaking to?!

 
As seen in The Huffington Post: New Do-It-Yourself Meth Formula Flys Under The Radar Of Anti-Drug Laws

Via TWBE: Saddest Calvin And Hobbes Ever!

If you hate druggies, you’ll love NARC. It’s about the best 8-bit Nintendo game ever, and when it came out in 1988, I bet Nancy Reagan was so happy she had a twinkling tear in her left eye and ate a cream puff as a little self-reward for the day. In this awesome game, you can team up with a friend to portray two narcotics officers who “take it to the streets” and kill the shit out of every drug user and drug dealer they can get their hands on. It’s gritty, real-life, practically the 8-bit “The Wire.” Its villains are ultra-realistic portrayals of the heartbreak of urban living, as if they could be taken straight from the blood-splashed newspaper headlines of today. Among the “people” you eliminate for their wretched, spineless crimes against society are fiends such as:

?

 
“Welcome to Route 36, will that be ‘normal’ cocaine or ‘strong’ cocaine with your complimentary bottled water?”  Keeping up with today’s drug theme, what’s being described by The Guardian as the world’s first cocaine bar (first “official,” anyway) is now open for business in Boliva.  With its corrupt officials and “anything goes” atmosphere, Bolivia, it seems, offers such outlaw operations an ideal business climate.  Ideal, though, isn’t perfect:

Since they are an after-hours club and serve cocaine the neighbours tend to complain pretty fast.  So they move all the time.  Maybe if they are lucky they last three months in the same place, but often it is just two weeks.  Route 36 is a movable feast.”

Apologies to Frank Loesser, but I guess this makes Route 36 the oldest established permanent floating coke bar in South America.  But unlike Damon Runyon‘s crew of crap players, what do these guests rely on for amusement?  Why, Jenga, of course.

And much like those towers of falling blocks, attempts to curb Bolivia’s exploding cocaine economy is crumbling fast: President Evo Morales, himself a cocoa grower, is not only fighting for the rights of his fellow growers, he recently booted the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) out of Bolivia.

In The Guardian: The World’s First Cocaine Bar

 
Engrossing article this week by Marc Lacey in The New York Times: Mexico’s Drug Traffickers Continue Trade in Prison.  In it, Lacey describes the nonchalance with which prison guards in Mexico grant “revolving door status” to that nation’s most notorious drug traffickers.  The guard-trafficker relationship has, in fact, grown so cozy of late that prison cells have become de facto bases of operation for the traffickers’ criminal empires.  What were once “Centers for Social Rehabilitation” are now better known as “Universities of Crime.” 

Fortunately, there’s American money on its way to fix things!  As part of its counter-narcotics assistance program, the U.S government is sending Mexico a grand total of…$4.0 million.  Cue this.  In the accompanying surveillance video, watch and see what all that money’s gonna try to fix.