This surreal lost Dragnet episode was made by Frank Conniff of Mystery Science Theater and former Mr Show and Chris Rock Show writer Mike Upchurch as a presentation pilot for Adult Swim. They’ve digitally inserted popular alt-comedians into the 1967 cop show Dragnet, and turned it into a story about bad cops trying to eradicate a powerful strain of medical marijuana. It’s technically stunning, exceeding Forrest Gump and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid in both ambition and outcome, while being produced in a living room for only $200.00. (NSFW due to language.)
Take acid and go to a monster truck rally??? This seems like a total fucking nightmare, actually. Dan Meyer did a pretty good job keeping his shit together… considering.
According to St. Petersburg police, 34-year-old Jarvis Sutton of St. Petersburg, Florida, called 911 approximately 80 times on Sunday for some Kool-Aid, weed and burgers to be delivered to him.
Sutton admitted to making the calls. When the cops arrested him, he actually started to gnaw on “the foam attached to the metal caging in the back of a police cruiser.”
Like a hunk of meat dropped from a shopping bag onto the steaming summer streets of Washington Heights, the FDA and its supposed mission is rapidly turning rancid. Rapidly entering the territory where continued inaction can arguably be equated with criminal and maggoty negligence. Lemme explain just what the hell I’m talking about…
If you had, say, tuberculosis, you wouldn’t seriously consider going online and buying a “GUARANTEED CURE FOR TB!!!” from the same guy trying to sell you Cialis or Viagra, would you? You’d go to a doctor or, if you are poor and reside in the United States, to your local emergency room once you began to hack up blood, and you’d probably just assume that whatever antibiotics they were giving you had gone through, like, testing and shit beforehand, right? That’s the legacy of the FDA: Theoretically, it protects us regular folks from unscrupulous or fly-by-night “pharmaceutical” companies just trying to make a quick buck, right? In general, that’s a reputation we all probably (for the most part) trust in. FDA approval means something, right?
But all that comes to a screeching halt when we’re talking about psychoactive chemicals. I mean, do you really trust the FDA to issue statements or studies on bath salts or designer drugs? Of course not. Check out the recent New York magazine article on designer drugs (”Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar”). There are countless LEGAL drugs—albeit not the ones for sale in a Rite Aid, Walgreens or CVS store—entering the illicit market every month, and yet the FDA doesn’t feel like this is something they need to watch or study or bother with, aside from categorizing said psychoactive chemicals as “Schedule 1” under the analogue drug laws and making them illegal In other words, if the public, who they are supposed to protect, actually ENJOYS a drug, the FDA will provide exactly ZERO useful guidance on (eg) dosage or fatality rates or which producers are making their drugs in a harm-minimized fashion.
Am I suggesting that the FDA behave as if the organization were Erowid? Indeed I am!
Back in the late 70s we heard rumors in New York of this new (and at the time, perfectly legal) drug being produced at Harvard. or somewhere up in Boston, that provided this initial super-euphoric rush, followed by many hours of just plain outrageous grooviness. I was a teenager at the time, so it didn’t occur to me that, perhaps, this new drug (now known as Ecstasy) might be dangerous or untested. It came from Harvard! I just wanted to try some, what the fuck did I know?
Only a couple of years later, however, an exotic creature named Cindy Ecstasy (you may know her as a backing vocalist on Soft Cell records—she does the rap in “Memorabilia”—but I knew her in a different capacity) was shuttling back and forth between Boston and Brooklyn on weekends and distributing pretty inexpensive hits (about $13 at the time, as I remember) around clubland. It was only an accident that we were ingesting what would turn out to be one of the safest party drugs ever to hit the streets, though, a few years later, it was categorized as “Schedule 1” and made as illegal as heroin or crack. Back then it was pretty pure MDMA, although we did not know that. Who knows what is in it today?
So what we see, therefore, is that “Schedule 1” means that the FDA has basically backed out of any responsibility, despite the fact that millions of drugs are consumed by young people each year. Those consumers of bath salts, synthetic marijuana, designer drugs and other new-and-upcoming substances—critically, drugs that have often come out of nowhere and that have no real street history/folklore yet—know that the FDA has completely backed out of any real involvement, and so take on the risks themselves.
And that would be bad enough. But now, with fully legal recreational pot being sold in two states, and “medical” marijuana either sold or soon to be sold in many more, can the FDA still continue to ignore its responsibility to millions of partakers of psychoactive chemicals? I mean, the FDA regulates donuts, for fuck’s sake. Does it make any sense whatsoever that they continue to ignore the rapidly expanding area of legal MJ medical research? Sure, it’s illegal at the Federal level. Lots of things are. But if hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are consuming a substance, doesn’t the FDA have a responsibility to provide clear and nonpolitical guidance about consequences, usage dos and don’ts, potential contaminants and other dangers?
Put in another way, right now the FDA still has an OK-ish reputation for “big pharm” drugs that battle cancer and other sicknesses. But they’ve completely missed the boat on psychoactive and other chemicals that they are politically bound BY STUPID LOGIC to pretend don’t exist. And everyone knows this. In regards legal or illegal “fun drugs”, the FDA has ZERO reputation, they bring ZERO value, they are doing (what is in effect) NOTHING about substances that have an overall impact that completely outweighs any one pharmaceutical drug, even some of the ones that are the most prescribed! This is why a whole host of US states are currently going it alone, trying to determine how to monitor, license and inspect marijuana cultivation facilities in order to keep their residents safe and to minimize any harms along the way in the supply chain.
Look, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs out there. It can cause damage or death if consumed without information and guidance, not to mention that you can strip varnish with it. There are consequences to consuming alcohol that we minimize by empowering the FDA and other governmental bodies that don’t do what’s really required, here, now, in 2013. So far, on pot or mushrooms or MDMA or LSD or anything else, the FDA provides pretty much zero in the way of useful guidance, and everybody knows it. In other words, GET OFF YOUR FAT ASSES FDA AND START PRODUCING APOLITICAL GUIDANCE ON PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS.
The legality or illegality of those drugs is totally irrelevant at this point. Do your job, FDA.
Below, Cindy Ecstasy joins Soft Cell on Top of the Pops in 1982. I tried to find out whatever became of her and this was about as far as I got...
Look who’s coming to dinner at John Boehner’s house… a foreigner! With waist-length dreads? SHOCK HORROR… he’s a pothead!
Lindsay Boehner, the 35-year-old daughter of the GOP Speaker of the House, is set to be married in May to Dominic Lakan, a 38-year-old Jamaican-born immigrant. Lakan was arrested in 2006 in Florida in possession of less than two grams of pot. Previously, Lakan was arrested for having an open beer in his vehicle.
Check out the, uh, considered reactions from the folks at Free America:
Deformed America, the new abnormal.
He looks like a total filthy uneducated bum who’s latching on to a rich white girl. Holy cow, I wouldn’t let that thing come within 50 yards of me! Let’s all chip in and buy her a case of Frontline as a wedding present…
Not only the fleas, but there’s a wife beater if ever there was one! I bet he’s mean, angry & violent when he’s on drugs or booze, as well as when he’s not high. Then he’s just surly mean! I also think he is hoping & praying to his voodoo witch doctor, that he will get some portion of inheritance from Boner!
Bet he’s an Obama voter!
She’s marrying a Rastafarian? She must REALLY hate her dad.
My Lord—If I saw something like that coming out from under the sink I’d step on it.
He looks Middle Eastern to me!
This daughter is seriously out to get her parents. The Jamaican clearly does not fit with the country club and/or congressional set. The halls of power are in need of cleaning? Or what?
he looks like death sucking a life saver…
You haven’t a ball nor a dick if you let that thing get NEAR your daughter. Dear GOD, America ... what kind of person (I CAN"T say man .. ) are we putting into positions of high power? It’s time to clean house.
One Freeper decided to look on the bright side:
Better a Rastarfarian than a muzzie. But seriously, what’s with the Dr. Seuss hat?
Surprisingly—or not so surprising—this story has thus far gotten very little play in the left-wing blogsphere, as if the information itself (HE’S JAMAICAN AND SMOKES POT!) is somehow “racist” instead of merely neutral.
I wish the couple the very best. I hope they’re laughing like hell about this. Fact is, this minor brouhaha has simply got nothing whatsoever to do with either Dominic Lakan or Lindsay Boehner and everything to do with her idiot father…
I cannot wait to see wedding photos. I wonder if the father of the bride will cry?
There are special moments in one’s life that take on mythic qualities. Most of mine have involved sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. One particularly mindfucking moment for me was the night I got shitfaced with Lester Bangs at The Village Gate while watching Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers and their opening act The Senders. Bangs and I agreed it was a mighty night and we celebrated it with reckless abandon, the kind of assault on my body that would probably kill me today. I learned to pace myself. Lester didn’t. He died a year or two later…
Phillipe Marcade, the frontman of The Senders, was a mad Frenchman who was drunk on Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And Thunders was firmly embraced but not strangled by the arms of Morpheus. That night at The Gate, the alchemy was like mystical napalm and we all went up in some kind of cosmic smoke. I will say here and now it was a great night of rock a’n’ roll and what I can remember of bullshitting with Bangs was pretty good too. In fact, it was splendid. Having a conversation with Lester Bangs was like trying to stand up in a row boat during a hurricane. The force coming off of Thunder’s guitar provided the ballast to keep me from capsizing.
So all of that is leading me up to prepare you for another fine moment in which The Heartbreakers roared heroically with Johnny’s knees only buckling occasionally under the blow of smack’s velvet blackjack. This footage of the band at Max’s Kansas City in 1979 captures some of the raw excitement of Johnny, Walter Lure (doing most of the heavy lifting), Jerry Nolan and Billy Rath grinding out their punk bliss with the kind of transcendent energy that only loud guitars and big ferocious beats can deliver. The audio is thin, but I can guarantee that being at this show was as breathtakingly intense as being crushed by a subway train. This is Johnny shortly before the dope turned him into a helpless headcase. Savor it.
You know, this is something I have wondered about… although, ahem, not for personal use. Thankfully PopSci has the answer to my burning question:
The maximum capacity of a normal rectum–meaning, before the patient is overcome by the urge to defecate–is about 350 to 500 mL, or about a pint in volume. That’s a lot; the first urge to defecate comes at about 100 mL, so if you’re storing five times that amount, you’re probably pretty uncomfortable. But repeated stretching of the rectum can increase that size markedly. “We do know that it’s not rare for people to have larger capacities,” says Dr. Whitehead. “We have certainly tested people for whom it’s 800 mL. With practice the capacity becomes larger.”
The rectum is a fantastically powerful, stretchable part of the body. The problem I kept running into in trying to figure out how much cocaine you could fit in your butthole is that, well, there isn’t really an upper limit. It’s all about conditioning and practice. That said, let’s take that 800 mL as an example upper limit. Given the density of cocaine hydrochloride, that converts to about 0.97 kilograms of cocaine, or very nearly the size of one of those big bricks you see confiscated on the news.
An interesting police report from Friday, April 19, in Steamboat Springs and Routt County, Colorado via Steamboat Today. I hate it when this happens…
10:05 p.m. Police received a call from a woman who said her juvenile granddaughter was at the ski area last week and ran into a person who was selling bags of what she thought were portobello mushrooms dipped in chocolate for $30. Police said the granddaughter further informed her grandmother that giraffes were chasing her down the hill after she ate the mushrooms.
