For the upscale brown bagger, wine-o who has everything, or hipster desperate to burnish his street cred without sacrificing the convenience of a cool sip of Sauvignon Blanc.
Wine’O may look like a run-of-the-mill paper bag, but it¬s really super-strong non-woven fabric that¬s quilted and insulated to keep the chill in your chardonnay. Naturally, it’s reusable - so anytime you need to tote a bottle, it’s in the bag.”
Fred and Friends will be selling these soon in case you want to pick one up for that special grapehead in your life.
14 years before he stopped drinking, David Bowie tried his hand at being a mixologist in this photo from 1966.
Did you know there’s a Diamond Dog cocktail? Well, there is. Combine equal parts of sweet Campari, vermouth, Roses lime juice and fresh squeezed orange juice. Serve on the rocks. It was created at the George V Hotel in Paris, France.
Here’s the recipe for the Ziggy Stardust:
4 parts vodka. 1 part violette liqueur. Dash of orange bitter. 1/2 part Goldschläger. Ground cinnamon. Stir first two ingredients with bitters over ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Light a small glass of Goldshläger and pour over the drink. Dust the flame with cinnamon and serve.
Directed by Tomek Baginski for marketing agency Leo Burnett London and produced by Stink, The Machine is a thing of beauty, damned spooky and strongly makes its point about cocaine users being part of an evil assembly line sustained by drug customers.
You are what you snort, which is one of the main reasons, along with it making me miserable, that I stopped doing blow. Over the years, I saw the violence and death surrounding cocaine’s production and distribution and I knew I was connected to it by being a consumer. I gave up eating mass-produced meat for similar reasons. I didn’t want to be part of that karma. I’m waiting for legal, organic, free range cocaine.
The Machine is also promoting director Rachel Seifert’s documentary Cocaine Unwrapped.
From 1959 to 1961, John Newland directed and narrated the TV show One Step Beyond, which explored the “world of the unknown.”
In this rather amazing episode, Newland travels to Mexico to eat magic mushrooms. This show aired less than a year after Timothy Leary had traveled to Cuernavaca and had his first experiences with psilocybin, making Newland, along with Leary, one of the handful of high profile pioneers of psychedelia and one of the first public figures to praise psilocybin’s mind expanding properties.
That this open-minded episode of One Step Beyond ever entered the homes of unsuspecting Americans is certainly some kind of landmark in the history of psychedelia.
Journalist and book author John Kenneth Muir interviewed John Newland in 1999 (shortly before Newland took a step into the beyond) and discussed the infamous mushroom eating episode of One Step Beyond .
MUIR: Okay, you know I’ve got to question you about the episode called “The Sacred Mushroom.” This remains one of the most notorious episodes in network TV history, because you are seen on camera literally sampling mushrooms with hallucinogenic properties in a California laboratory. In your own words from the beginning of the show, “the story featured no actors, no script.” Basically, it was a travelogue to Mexico to experiment with these mushrooms. What was going on with that story?
NEWLAND: That was our most popular episode. It was a spooky trip. We landed in a tiny airstrip in Mexico near a mission. From there, it was a donkey trip of four days to reach the village [Oaxaca]. It was a dangerous journey, but we got phenomenal footage.
MUIR: That portion of the episode involved Dr. Barbara Brown (a neuro-pharmacologist), David Grey (A Hawaiin spiritual leader), Dr. Jeffrey Smith (a philosophy professor from Stanford) and Dr. Andrija Puharch sampling a mushroom called “X,” given to them by a local with doctor called a brujo. The peyote was supposed to enhance psychic abilities, and it was pretty damn unusual to see people getting high on TV in 1961, wasn’t it?
NEWLAND: Alcoa told us that the show was so bizarre, that we don’t dare put it on the air.
MUIR: So how did you salvage the episode?
NEWLAND: Well, Puharich asked me to take the mushroom, and I was game, so we took a camera crew and drove to Palo Alto and Puharich’s laboratory. Once there, I had three cameras rolling the whole time, and I told the cameramen to just keep shooting until we ran out of film. We decided to shoot and shoot and shoot and see what happened.
MUIR: Did you feel anything strange when you sampled the mushroom?
NEWLAND: I felt light-headed…and a sense of well being…the stuff was distilled. It was very powerful, but not poisonous, so I didn’t have any trepidations.
MUIR: Were there after-effects?”
NEWLAND: I had flashbacks and hallucinatory moments for about a month.
MUIR: But nothing psychic or paranormal happened?
NEWLAND: No. Not a grain.
MUIR: I guess I should ask you then, have you ever had a psychic or paranormal experience?
NEWLAND: I’ve not had a single experience. I’d like to have one, and if I were offered one, I’d certainly jump at it instantly.
MUIR: Going back to “The Sacred Mushroom,” your involvement with Puharich in the lab saved the show for broadcast.
NEWLAND: Alcoa saw it and considered my testimony “proof enough,” to air the show. As I said, it became our most popular episode.”
Here is the “The Sacred Mushroom” episode in its entirety. Sadly, Newland’s enthusiasm for ‘shrooms are not shared by the FDA.
This photo from the March 25, 1966 issue of LIFE Magazine has the following caption:
“A San Francisco mathematician takes a trip on LSD with his cat, who is on the drug too. He does this every other week.”
Rather presumptuous on the mathematician’s part to assume the cat isn’t already naturally high. Another case of human chauvinism at work. On the other hand, the cat doesn’t look like it’s freaking out. Still seems like a foolish and possibly cruel thing to do to an animal. How does one know how many micro-grams of acid to dose the cat? I guess it would take a mathematician to figure it out.
This reminds me of when hippies thought it was cool to blow pot smoke in the faces of babies. Aren’t babies stoned as it is? It sure looks that way.
What a long strange it’s been for Space Ghost - from Blip the monkey to the high priest of psychedelia, Timothy Leary.
Space Ghost: Now Timothy, tell me, what’s your secret identity?
Timothy Leary: I’m an outlaw, I’m a, a counter-culture person, and that’s where I like to be, out there on the, on the front lines, uh, with my friends.
Space Ghost: What sort of super-powers do you possess?
Timothy Leary: Oh, we flood your eyeballs, over, overload your, uh, your earballs, I give you patterns and swirls of color, and, uh, makin’ you feel better and better, yeah, the power of using light to, uh, to enhance consciousness and alter consciousness is the tricks I’m using now, and, so far, they’re legal, Space Ghost.
Space Ghost: Now, Tim, people depend on me to defend their planets and save millions of innocent lives from impending doom. What do you feel people expect from you?
Timothy Leary: Uh, Richard Nixon called me—I’m proud of this, Space Ghost—he called me the most dangerous man alive, and of course, I tried to be as dangerous to him as I could be. Outsiders, uh, like me a lot because I’ve given the man fits, so I’ve got a lot of friends out there.”
This appeared on TV as the third episode of Space Ghost Coast To Coast, but it was actually the first show of the series to be produced.
Oh yeah, Judy Tenuta (ugh) and Ashley Judd also appear.
Andre Perkowski says, “Loveable Levar Burton takes a look at Burroughs’ ode to addicting fluids, control, and giant aquatic black centipedes in this episode of “Reading Rainbow” suitable for children of all ages.”
Jason David, a 35-year-old single father from Modesto, showed up at Harborside in June 2011, desperately looking for a new treatment for his son. Jayden, now five and a half, has Dravet Syndrome, a severe, rare epilepsy sub-diagnosis that affects infants and children. When he was four months old, he started having seizures. Anything could set them off, including laughing and playing. “When he’d see a bounce house,” David recalled, “he’d get so happy he’d have a seizure.”
Only about eight hundred children in the world are thought to have Dravet. By the age of four and a half, Jayden was having three hundred to five hundred myoclonic seizures per day. He also was taking 22 different medications, including powerful anti-psychotics and anti-seizure drugs that are dangerous even for adults. “When you look at the side effects you think — pardon my language, but — you think they’re fucking safe? No fucking way. Half of them read: ‘committing suicide, dreams, yelling, screaming, going crazy, pain, suffering, seeing things, delusions, hallucinations.’
“My son would be crying and laughing at the same time,” David continued. “I have video of him screaming and tripping out of his mind. We had to get his liver tested every six months. The medicine was killing him. He’d had a grand mal seizure that lasted an hour and a half. He’d been in an ambulance 45 times in the last year. Seeing your son in an ambulance — it just kills you. I lost my ex-wife, my car, my business, my family, my life.”
David told his story to Andrew DeAngelo, the younger brother of Stephen DeAngelo, founder of Harborside. Andrew DeAngelo is a manager at Harborside who leads a monthly support group for seniors and families using medical marijuana. Jayden’s doctors at UC San Francisco had referred David to Harborside. “They told me, ‘Yeah you should try medical marijuana,’” David said. He was one of many parents quietly being referred to Harborside by UCSF for treatment of serious illnesses and symptoms that don’t respond to modern medicine.
Mainly, it was for appetite stimulation for kids with cancer, and pain management in paraplegic children, Andrew DeAngelo recalled. There’d be no smoking or vaporizing for the kids, of course. DeAngelo recommended edible cannabis or tinctures — extractions of the plant in glycerin or alcohol. Kids need just a drop. Many of the tinctures are barely psychoactive. DeAngelo started seeing parents who had kids with epilepsy, or autism, or a combination of both. “When I met Jason, he was the parent that was suffering the most out of all the parents I had met so far,” DeAngelo said.
Harborside gave David a tincture that was supposedly high in cannabidiol. Abbreviated as CBD, cannabidiol is produced by pot plants and has a multitude of medicinal properties. It’s anti-inflammatory, for example. And the federal government has patented it as a neuroprotectant for strokes. But it hasn’t been developed by pharmaceutical companies. You can’t buy a CBD pill at Walgreens.
Marijuana that contains CBD seems to modulate the body’s ability to maintain homeostasis — that is, an internal balance. It’s been used since biblical times to treat nervous disorders like epilepsy. It’s thought to help restore balance in the nervous system as well as the immune and digestive systems. According to lab research, CBD dampens the activity of the human nervous system at the site of what are called the “CB1” and “CB2” nerve cell receptors. These receptors are spread throughout the body’s nervous system.
Marijuana with high levels of cannabidiol also worked for David’s son. CBD is thought to act like a precision-guided warm blanket, calming Jayden’s overactive nervous system at key receptor sites. “Jayden had a seizure every day of his life, until the first day I gave him CBD,” David said. “It was the first four days in his life that he had went seizure-free. I was crying. I was happy crying instead of sad crying, which was new.”
The tincture worked for four months, but the second batch from the same tincture-maker didn’t work. “For two months my son started getting bad,” David said. Jayden’s doctors thought it might be a case of “honeymoon stage”: Some mainstream drugs are known to quell seizures for a month or two, and then seem to lose effectiveness.
But David had another idea. What if Harborside tested the tincture to make sure it was the same one as before? “I had done my research,” he said. “I knew they tested.”
In fact, it was one of the few places in the world where such a thing was possible.
They’ve done tests on lab rats using marijuana to mitigate and control induced seizures going at least as far back as 1977. It’s absurd that something like this—success where nothing else was working for this little boy—is being interfered with by the Feds in 2012, especially when examples like Jayden’s story show what possibilities cannabis has for medical science! This kid got his life back. He really doesn’t have to take 22 pharmaceuticals per day!
What would do if you were in Jason David’s shoes? I know what I’d do. Luckily Mr. David lives here in California. What about families in similar situations elsewhere? Should their children be forced to suffer because of brain-dead, antiquated drug laws from the 1930s when an organic substance that humankind has thousands of years of experience with could make their lives better? For what compelling reason? The Drug Enforcement Administration and the Obama administration need to check their heads on the matter. Michelle Leonhart, that fucking half-wit who runs the DEA needs to be pushed aside pronto. The American public at the very, very least deserves a competent DEA administrator Someone capable of a complex thought… or even a simple one. That’s not Leonhart’s strong suit, thinking, is it?
It’s TIME. As remarkable stories like Jayden David’s get around and as more and more people read about these kinds of benefits occurring with intelligent and intuitive medical cannabis treatment, it seems to me that the tipping point on marijuana law reform will be reached quite soon.
Below, Jayden David and his dad, Jason on Weed Wars.
