Hier habt ihr den Trailer zu einem neuem Film zu den Merry Pranksters rund um den Autor und Urhippie Ken Kesey (Einer flog über das Kuckucksnest). Die Pranksters waren zuerst im Sommer 1964 auf einem Roadtrip durch die USA, um den Konsum psychedelischer Drogen und den Hippie-Lifestyle zu promoten, als die meisten Leute noch nichts davon gehört hatten. Ich werd' mir den Film bestimmt anschauen :-) Mehr Infos zum Film gibts auf der Website.
"Let's say I were the type of person who would go to a party where an assortment of recreational drugs were being used. Would it matter, so far as the environment goes, which one I took?
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. [...]"
Eine kleine Infografik von Lapham's Quarterly, welche Werke unter dem Einfluss welcher Drogen geschrieben wurden. Leider alles andere als vollständig, aber voilà:
So lustig es klingt, so ernst ist war es wahrscheinlich gemeint: Ein Forscherteam der San Diego State University hat eine psychologische Studie über den Konsum von Salvia Divinorum gemacht. Besonders cool: Anhand von YouTube Videos. Anscheinend gibt es tausende von Leuten, die ihre Salvia-Flashs auf Youtube stellen.
Was dabei rausgekommen ist: keine Ahnung. Hier die Resultate, die man wohl nur auf Salvia verstehen kann:
"The mean duration of the videos was 5.8 (SD = 1.91, range = 2.34–9.55) min with users taking an average of 1.71 (SD = .94, range = 1–5) hits while holding the smoke in their lungs for an average of 25.4 (SD = 15.03) s. A range of 0–6 (mode = 2) other people were in the room, with nine (26%) videos including another salvia smoker. In seven (21%) videos, the user was moved, touched or otherwise interfered with in some way by others. In almost half (n = 16), those with the user showed concern for the user, and in 30 (88%) videos the others laughed at the user. Finally, there was a “trip director” or a person that provided instructions to the user in 24 (71%) of the videos.
Dose and administration effects were observed. Number of “hits” was correlated with speech problems, specifically gibberish (r = .353, p < .05), and diction (r = .593, p < .05). Users that exhibited severe diction problems had, on average taken more hits (m= 2.4 vs 1.4, p < .05) than those that did not; those exhibiting severe fluency problems (m= 2.4 vs 1.35, p < .05) took more hits, and held the smoke longer (m= 32 s vs 21.3 s, p < .05) than those that did not. Finally 44% (n = 8) of the water pipe users had severe fluency impairments versus only 13% of the standard pipe users (p < .05). There were insufficient instances of salvia strength verbal descriptions to find relationships with that variable."
Die ganze Studie gibts hier als .pdf. Via MindHacks.
Als die Beatles 1967 offiziell den Drogen abschworen, um sich zukünftig der Transzendentalen Meditation zu widmen, hat John Lennon mehrere Flaschen LSD in einer Schatztruhe auf seinem südenglischen Anwesen in Surrey vergraben. Als die Beatles von Ihrem Trip von Indien zurück kamen hatte John selbst danach gebuddelt, aber selber nichts mehr gefunden. Nun haben anscheinend ein paar psychedelische Piraten den Schatz gefunden, arr! Vom Daily Telegraph:
"HARDCORE fans of The Beatles legend John Lennon uncovered where in the grounds of his Surrey, southern England, home he hid his stash of LSD more than 40 years ago.
Builders digging up the lawn of his old house, Kenwood, came across the remains of a leather holdall containing several large broken glass bottles, The Sun reports.
Legend has it that Lennon buried a large quantity of the drug in his garden in 1967 when The Beatles declared they had given up drugs in favour of transcendental meditation.
But when the band returned from India, John decided he had been a bit hasty and tried to dig it up - but never found it.
Now fans are convinced these bottles contained the missing treasure - though they will never know for sure as the one bottle found intact had a cracked cork, so it was empty."
And now for something completely different: Im Playboy (no shit) gibts einen mehrseitigen Artikel zum Thema "The New Psychedelic Renaissance", indem der heutige Stand der Forschung mit Psychedelicas aufgezeigt wird. Den Artikel gibts hier als PDF, bei dem auch jeglicher explicit content entfernt wurde :-)/:-(
Am 16. April 1943, also heute vor genau 67 Jahren, war Albert Hofmann wahrscheinlich gerade mit seinem Fahrrad auf den Strassen von Basel unterwegs. Happy Birthday, LSD!
Diese Woche findet im Kalifornischen San Jose eine internationale Konferenz zum Thema Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century statt. Organisiert wird das ganze von MAPS, der Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, und soll gemäss der NYTimes die grösste Konferenz dieser Art seit 40 Jahren in den USA sein. Mit dabei sind auch Alex Grey, die Gründer von Erowid.org und Ralph Metzner.
Die New York Times hat zu dem Thema einen Interessanten Artikel unter dem Titel "Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again", der sich insbesondere um die Behandlung von Krebskranken mit Psylocibin dreht:
"[...] After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe.
“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”
Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects. [...]"
Bei CIO.com gibts den interessanten Beitrag Tech Visionaries and LSD, bei dem dargelegt wird, wie gross der Einfluss der Psychedelics Kultur auf die Entstehung von Silicon Valley und damit von Personal Computern war.
"Silicon Valley's rise as the hub of the technology industry in the 1960s coincided with LSD's explosion on the cultural scene. Within a few miles of Stanford Research Center (SRI), where Douglas Englebart was envisioning the personal computer as a mechanism to "augment human intelligence," three organizations were then legally administering LSD to guinea pigs. The Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute were studying LSD to better understand schizophrenia. Meanwhile, the International Foundation for Advanced Study, founded by a former engineer, sought to give credibility to LSD's mind-expanding properties. These organizations offered leaders of the counterculture (Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg) and some of the personal computer industry's founding fathers their first communions with acid. No doubt, their mind-blowing experiences influenced the communal ethos of the early personal computing industry and later the open source software movement. [...]"
So lustig es klingt, so ernst ist war es wahrscheinlich gemeint: Ein Forscherteam der San Diego State University hat eine psychologische Studie über den Konsum von Salvia Divinorum gemacht. Besonders cool: Anhand von YouTube Videos. Anscheinend gibt es 
