MAPS has made available PDFs of The Psychedelic Review, a journal on all things psychedelic back in the 1960′s and 70′s. It’s really a gold mine of information with some great material by the giants in the field at the time. Definitely a must read if you have any interest in the subjects whatsoever.
Found another gem in Google Reader this afternoon, this time from the Telegraph. It’s about how boys are increasingly becoming feminized and not just because of culture and society but because of actual chemicals found in their bodies as well as mothers’ umbilical cords.
Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the “lost boys”: babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead.
Young boys, like those in the Danish study, could end up producing less sperm and developing feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes.
And it is in the womb that babies are most vulnerable; a study of umbilical cords from British mothers found that every one contained hazardous chemicals. Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that boys born to women exposed to phthalates had smaller penises and other feminisation of the genitals.
Here is also a documentary from the CBC on the subject:
Thoughts?
James Joyce
Use the quote below as your meditation, or something, for the week.
Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde.
What’s Joyce talking about here? Does it relate to anything you’ve been thinking about lately?
Think and have fun.
I came across another fascinating article today. This time from the website called DoubleX and is about two parents who give their autistic kid marijuana in a variety of ways in order to calm his demeanor and his rampant tantrums. Most interesting quotes below:
Question: why are we giving our nine-year-old a marijuana cookie?
Answer: because he can’t figure out how to use a bong.
My son J has autism. He’s also had two serious surgeries for a spinal cord tumor and has an inflammatory bowel condition, all of which may be causing him pain, if he could tell us. He can say words, but many of them—”duck in the water, duck in the water”—don’t convey what he means. For a time, anti-inflammatory medication seemed to control his pain. But in the last year, it stopped working. He began to bite and to smack the glasses off my face. If you were in that much pain, you’d probably want to hit someone, too.
A prescription drug called Marinol, which contains a synthetic cannabinoid, seemed mainstream enough to bring up with J’s doctor. I cannot say that with a few little pills, everything turned around. But after about a week of playing around with the dosage, J began garnering a few glowing school reports: “J was a pleasure have in speech class,” instead of “J had 300 aggressions today.”
The coordinator of our patient group introduced us to a licensed grower. A recent horticulture school graduate, he’d figured out how to cultivate marijuana using a custom organic soil mix. His e-mail signature even quoted Rudolph Steiner. The grower arrived at our house with a knapsack containing jars of herbs. We opened the jars to sniff the different strains of “bud”—Blueberry, which did smell fleetingly of wild blueberries, and Sour Diesel, which had a rich, winey scent. The grower also had cured some leaves for tea, and he brought a glycerine tincture, a marijuana distillate in olive oil (yes, organic), cookies (ditto), and a strange machine that looked, fittingly, like a lava lamp. Basically an almost-bong, this vaporizer heated the cannabis without producing carcinogenic smoke.
But since we started him on his “special tea,” J’s little face, which is sometimes a mask of pain, has softened. He smiles more. For the last year, his individual education plan at his special-needs school was full of blanks, recording “no progress” because he spent his whole day an irritated, frustrated mess. Now, April’s report shows real progress, including “two community outings with the absence of aggressions.”
Even the limited studies that have been done suggest marijuana’s potential as an adjunctive therapy for cancer. Marijuana, you need some rebranding. Maybe a cool new name.
Meanwhile, in treating J with pot, we are following the law—and the Hippocratic oath: primum, non nocere. First, do no harm. The drugs that our insurance would pay for—and that the people around us would support without question—pose real risks to children. For now, we’re sticking with the weed.
What are you thoughts on this? I think it’s really amazing and shows we are actually making progress in the sanity of this country. With the Government’s announcement that they would no longer prosecute medical marijuana users at the federal level, you can almost feel the weights shifting to our side. Keep it going!
I originally came across the article here at Disinfo.com.
Soldiers are seen through a burning pile of over a ton of marijuana, various illegal pills and cocaine being incinerated at a military base in the border city of Ciudad Juarez September 9, 2009. (REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas)
Here’s an up close and brutal essay about the War on Drugs from Boston.com.
From the opening paragraph:
The 2009 United Nations World Drug report, released earlier this year, notes that 2009 marks “the end of the first century of drug control (it all started in Shanghai in 1909)”, and that the illicit drug market worldwide has now become a $320 billion-per-year industry. As drug-related violence in Mexico appears to continue unabated, and crackdowns in Afghanistan are being made against its massive opium crops, new efforts are also being made worldwide in methods of enforcement and treatment of recovering addicts. Collected here are a handful of recent images from the rough world of illegal drugs across the globe. (37 photos total)
Some of the images are kind of graphic. Just a warning to you soft-stomached folks. Still a good idea to take a look though. Some outstanding photohraphy.
