This Week in Psychedelics - 6.11.21

Cannabis

• Nevada: Governor Signs Bill into Law Regulating Cannabis Consumption Lounges (NORML)

• Senate Votes to Legalize Recreational Marijuana in Conn. (NBC Connecticut)

• Washington state offers ‘joints for jabs’ to boost vaccination rates (The Guardian)

• Louisiana lawmakers pass bill to decriminalize marijuana (The Hill)

• Biden Administration Wants to Uphold Ban on Adult-Use Cannabis Sales in DC (MERRY JANE)

• Testing People For Marijuana Impairment Based On THC Levels Is ‘Not Reliable,’ Federally Funded Study Finds (Marijuana Moment)

• Study: Enactment of Adult-Use Marijuana Laws Doesn’t Encourage Drugged Driving Behavior (NORML)

• Medical Cannabis Users Are More Likely to Cut Back on Cigarettes, Study Finds (MERRY JANE)

• NFL Funds Marijuana Research As Federal Prohibition ‘Adversely’ Impacts Studies Into Opioid Alternative For Players (Marijuana Moment)

• Virginia: Marijuana Arrests Fall Dramatically Following Enactment of 2020 Decriminalization Law (NORML)

• Bill Would Finally Let Researchers Obtain Marijuana From Dispensaries (Filter)

• LA Is Literally the Worst Place to Buy Legal Weed, Thanks to Exorbitant Sales Taxes (MERRY JANE)

LSD

• Susi’s Tram Ride: Recognizing the First Woman to Take LSD (Chacruna)

• Deepak Chopra did LSD for the first time in a lab and felt his consciousness shift while staring at a photo of Mother Teresa (Insider)

• Blotter paper part of LSD mixture, must be weighed too (The Times of India)

• LSD and the Anarchic Brain (Psychedelic Science Review)

• LSD for Bipolar Disorder: Is LSD the Answer? (The Third Wave)

Magic Mushrooms

• Silo Pharma Announces Collaboration with University California San Francisco to study Psilocybin as an Anti-Inflammatory agent in Parkinson’s and Bipolar Patients (Psilocybin Alpha)

• Psilocybin Oral Strips: Benefits and Drawbacks (Truffle Report)

• Mydecine Discovers Over 40 Groundbreaking Potential Pharmacologically Active Novel Compounds in Mushrooms (Psilocybin Alpha)

MDMA

• Pill-iD App Lets Users Scan MDMA Pills To See What They Contain (LADbible)

• MDMA soaring in popularity in New Zealand, making its way into high schools (Newshub)

• MDMA, Water, Seizures, and Death: Interview with Gabriel Kearns, M.D. and Founder of Elevation Chemicals (Psychedelic Times)

Ayahuasca

• Is Ayahuasca Legal? (DoubleBlind)

5-MeO-DMT

• A hallucinogenic toad in peril (High Country News)

Iboga

• Iboga Conservation (Chacruna)

Nitrous Oxide

• Can Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) Help People With Treatment-Resistant Depression? (Forbes)

Ketamine

• Colorado bill to restrict ketamine use outside of hospitals close to passing (Colorado Newsline)

• Deaths Resulting from Ketamine Injection Rare, Study Indicates (JEMS)

Miscellaneous

• Connecticut Governor Signs Psychedelics Study Measure As He Awaits Marijuana Legalization Bill (Marijuana Moment)

• The FBI Secretly Ran an Encrypted Messaging Service To Conduct the Same Old Drug War Stings (Reason)

• Aphrodite Health Is Here To Shift The Narrative: The First Psychedelics Company ‘For Women, By Women’ (Forbes)

• Poll Shows Huge Public Opposition to “War on Drugs,” After 50 Years (Filter)

• Seattle City Council Signs Letter Proposing Psychedelic Use in Opioid Addiction Treatment (Truffle Report)

• Field Trip Health Ltd. Applies to List Its Common Shares on the NASDAQ Stock Market (Psilocybin Alpha)

• Over One Third of US Voters Know Psychedelics Have Valid Medical Use, Poll Says (MERRY JANE)

• Psychedelics For Frontline Clinicians With Covid-Related Burnout? A Study Is Looking Into It (Forbes)

• Accountability & Transformative Justice in the Psychedelic Space: A Roadmap for Change (Psychedelics Today)

• Study Links Hallucinogen Use to Emotional Dysregulation, Risk Taking Among Youth (Psychedelic News Wire)

• Life Sciences Announces Launch of Initial Public Offering (Psilocybin Alpha)

• Are Psychedelics the Next Big Cure? (Good Housekeeping)

• Is Absinthe an Hallucinogen? Debunking the Green Fairy (Truffle Report)

• Tolerance, Tachyphylaxis, and Psychedelic Drug Action (Psychedelic Science Review)

• Basics for Tripping in Nature (Maps of the Mind)

• Psychedelic Cartoons: Through the Decades (Reality Sandwich)

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Disclaimer: "This Week in Psychedelics" does not censor or analyze the news links presented here. The purpose of this column is solely to catalog how psychedelics are presented by the mass media, which includes everything from the latest scientific research to misinformation.

Weekend Thoughts - 4.2.16

Image by Narayan G. Maharjan, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Fellow Mario fans and technology nerds rejoice! This amazing Mario glitch allows the game to be turned into Flappy Bird. The technical jargon may be a bit much for you, as it was for me, but it's a pretty cool to watch nonetheless.

2. I was slightly disturbed by the actions of a black student at San Francisco State University who earlier this week assaulted a white teen because he has dreadlocks. The black student insisted that dreadlocks are a hair style that are only culturally-allowed to be worn by black folks, and that the white student was stealing her culture by choosing to wear them. First of all, following up an accusation of cultural appropriation with violence is poor form. But perhaps most importantly of all, dreadlocks are not exclusively part of black culture. It turns out that dreadlocks have roots in places like Greece, Egypt, India, and more. So not only was the black student out of line with her violent actions, but she was also perpetuating a false myth. The article and video are certainly worth a look.

3. In a previous edition of Weekend Thoughts from earlier this year, I linked to an article describing a court case that the FBI brought upon Apple in an effort to obtain information located on a suspect's iPhone. It turns out that the FBI has officially dropped its case against Apple after finding a way into the phone. There is a ton of excellent analysis in the tech community and media about this case and the FBI's true motivations, so I won't get into that here. I will simply say that although this particular battle is over, the war will certainly see another day.

4. You may find yourself wondering why the feds usually try to unlock phones. It turns out that it's to fight the War on Drugs, not the War on Terrorism. The article explains how the FBI has repeatedly lied about its intentions for breaking into locked or encrypted devices and provides evidence showing that a majority of times the FBI has requested help for obtaining information has been related to drug cases, not dangerous or violent crimes like terrorism, financial crime, child pornography, or counterfeiting. The War on Drugs has clearly our government the precedent to invade our privacy and the apparent belief that lying to its citizens is acceptable.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.12.15

Image by Hartwig HKD, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. The FBI is going to expand its system for tracking police-caused deaths by 2017—however it will still rely on local police departments to voluntarily provide this data, rather than make it mandatory. This has been something I have covered for several months on Think Wilder, and I'm happy to see that it is an issue that is getting more attention, even though it seems that local police departments will still decline the opportunity to provide this data to the FBI. This just means that pressure and incentives matter—law enforcement heads in favor of this new system will most likely lobby others to participate as well, and community interest will come into play too. If a local community truly cares about police conduct in its neighborhoods, it will encourage its local police department to pony up this data. I suppose that time will tell how successful this program expansion will be, but I do hope that in a few years' time we find ourselves in a position where we can reliably research how many police-caused deaths there have been nationwide.

2. The founder of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been identified solely by the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" for the past several years, but Gizmodo and Wired identified Australian man Craig Wright as the brain behind the operation. Australian police raided Wright's home this week to seize computer equipment in an effort to assess these claims. There is still plenty of speculation that this could be a hoax, but as someone who has followed news about Bitcoin for several years, it is fairly exciting to have some new material to read about it.

3. Have you ever been waiting on edge for days or weeks at a time for mail to arrive? Well, the United States Postal Service plans to roll out Informed Delivery, a service designed to email you pictures of your mail so that you know what to expect when you get home. At least for the time being, this will only include letter-sized mail, not packages. We'll have to see how well this works out as the USPS doesn't have a great track record when it comes to technological advances.

4. According to a study utilizing 280 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, lots of people are susceptible to believing pseudo-profound bullshit. The study simply required participants to rate randomly-generated statements on a scale of profundity from 1 to 5. The statements were constructed from the website Wisdom of Chopra, which is a site that scrubs the tweets of alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, and uses them to construct the random sentences. The study claims that participants who rated random statements containing new-agey buzzwords as "profound" (therefore "being more receptive to bullshit") may lack critical thinking skills, exhibit lower cognitive abilities, are less reflective, more prone to conspiracy theories, more likely to subscribe to religion and belief in the paranormal, and more likely to be fans of alternative medicine. I'm not sure what to make of this study. It seems very anti-Chopra, which (in my experience) most scientific materialists are, there is a small sample size, and it is highly subjective. Take the results for what you will. My main goal in sharing this is to remind the community to be wary of buzzwords and question everything—even articles covering "scientific studies". (And yes, that means you should be wary of Think Wilder as well!)

5. In the wake of so many mass shootings that have happened this year, police in South Carolina unearthed one man's treasure trove including thousands of firearms and ammunition. This may have been the largest firearm seizure in history, and it's definitely worth taking a look at the pictures and videos in the linked article.

6. And finally, some humor for you this week: #GOPdildos is an effort to replace the guns in Republican's gun-toting photos with dildos. Enjoy.

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.