This Week in Psychedelics - 11.16.18

Cannabis

• Will 2019 be the Year of Federal Marijuana Law Reform? (The Marijuana Times)

• Thai lawmakers back legalizing medical marijuana (Associated Press)

• Study Finds CBD Alleviates Psychotic Disorder Symptoms (Psychedelic Times)

• Pot approved for research, medical use (Bangkok Post)

• Medical cannabis: Death sentence prompts Malaysia to re-think harsh laws (BBC)

• Why Women Support Legal Marijuana Less Than Men, According To A New Study (Marijuana Moment)

• The Complicated Relationship Between IP Law & Cannabis (IPWatchdog)

• Marijuana Use Doesn’t Affect Outcome Of Kidney Transplants, Study Finds (Marijuana Moment)

• Will Michigan law push Indiana toward cannabis? (South Bend Tribune)

• Mitch McConnell Guarantees Industrial Hemp Legalization (Marijuana Moment)

• Why people love CBD — the cannabis product that won't get you high (CNBC)

• If Chris Christie Becomes Attorney General, Pot Advocacy Could be Set Ablaze (Reason)

• VA Will Explore Medical Marijuana, But Only If Federal Law Changes, Secretary Says (Marijuana Moment)

• A cannabis Coke and a smile? Colorado companies hoping to tap infused beverage craze (The Denver Post)

• Here’s Where The Next House Speaker Stands On Marijuana (Marijuana Moment)

• Canada: officials urge action to keep edible marijuana away from children (The Guardian)

• Legal Marijuana Would Generate Hundreds Of Millions For Illinois, New Analysis Finds (Marijuana Moment)

• Congress: New House Rules Chairman Pledges To Allow Floor Votes On Marijuana-Related Amendments (NORML)

• The Feds Want Researchers To Study ‘Minor’ Cannabinoids And Terpenes In Marijuana (Marijuana Moment)

• If This Bill Passes, Possessing Pot in Texas Will Be Treated Less Harshly Than Distributing Straws in San Francisco (Reason)

• Bipartisan Lawmakers Introduce Three Medical Marijuana Bills For Veterans (Marijuana Moment)

• Local Officials From Across US Call For Federal Marijuana Rescheduling (Marijuana Moment)

• Police drugs lead 'impressed' by cannabis clubs (BBC)

• The DEA Just Got Scolded Over Its Marijuana Eradication Program (Marijuana Moment)

• Cannabis and the brain: Recent studies shed new light (Medical News Today)

• The Feds Are Hiring Professional Marijuana Joint Rollers…Kind Of (Marijuana Moment)

• For a Buck and Sometimes a Buzz, Brewers Are Putting Cannabis Into Cans (The New York Times)

• Feds Seek New Growers To Produce Thousands Of Kilograms Of Marijuana (Marijuana Moment)

• Texas NORML: Midterm Elections and the 86th Texas Legislature (NORML)

• Indiana NORML: Midterm Elections Shakeup State Legislature (NORML)

• Here’s How Much Legal Marijuana Supporters And Opponents Spent Per Vote In Last Week’s Election (Marijuana Moment)

• Could Pot Help Solve The Opioid Crisis? (BuzzFeed News)

• Michelle Obama Talks Smoking Marijuana In New Memoir (Marijuana Moment)

• The UK's Biggest Legal Weed Producer Has Ignited Fresh Criticism (VICE)

• Cali judge protects right to grow cannabis (The Leaf Online)

• Holiday Gift Guide 2018: The Ultimate Luxury List For Cannabis Connoisseurs (Forbes)

• American cannabis expert warns UK government ‘relax laws or be left behind’ (Metro)

• ‘Walking Dead’ Actor Raises Money For Kids Who Use Medical Marijuana (Marijuana Moment)

• Alfie Dingley: Mum's fresh medicinal cannabis campaign (BBC)

• Texas Lawmaker Files Marijuana Decriminalization Bill (Marijuana Moment)

• Is the stigma of cannabis preventing more seniors from using it? (WTVF)

• Mormon Church Faces Potential Lawsuit Over Medical Marijuana Opposition (Marijuana Moment)

• NORML Chapters Participate in Las Vegas’ First Business-to-Consumer Cannabis Conference (NORML)

• TV Stations Pulled Anti-Legalization Ads Ahead Of Midterm Marijuana Votes, Advocates Say (Marijuana Moment)

• Here's What Marijuana Stock Aurora Cannabis Is Saying About Its Future (The Motley Fool)

• Colorado Governor Touts Marijuana Legalization’s Benefits (Marijuana Moment)

LSD

• Throwback Thursday: Understanding “South Pacific” With a Little Help from LSD (Dope Magazine)

• Man ‘gouged’ PCSO’s face while on LSD at Bexhill party (Bexhill-on-Sea Observer)

• Navy Sailors Dealing LSD in Nuclear Reactor Department of Aircraft Carrier (Citizen Truth)

• Drug with therapeutic effect: How LSD affects the brain (Infosurhoy)

Psilocybin/Magic Mushrooms

• Psilocybin Could Be Legal for Therapy by 2021 (Rolling Stone)

• FDA Gives Stamp of Approval for Clinical Psilocybin Trials (Psychedelic Times)

• Driver on psychedelic mushrooms crashed vehicle on Beltine, walked into traffic, police say (Channel 3000)

MDMA/Ecstasy

• How long will it be until we see the legalisation of MDMA? (The Student)

• Teenage boy with epilepsy died after secretly taking MDMA on night out (Metro)

• Girl, 18, died 'after taking "double-strength" ecstasy at Mutiny music festival' (Mirror)

• Woman, 29, died after taking heroin, ecstasy and cocaine in strip club (Metro)

Ayahuasca/DMT/5-MeO-DMT

• Can Toad Venom Unlock The Mystery Of Neurogenesis? New Insights on 5-MeO-DMT (Psychedelic Times)

• How I drank my way from the Amazon to the Himalayas (Condé Nast Traveller)

Peyote/San Pedro/Mescaline

• In The Only State Where Selling Peyote Is Legal, The Cactus Is Threatened And Still Controversial (Texas Public Radio)

Iboga/Ibogaine

• Holy War – A Tale of Bwiti Iboga Initiation, Part 2 (Psychedelic Times)

Synthetic Cannabinoids/Psychoactive Research Chemicals

• ‘Testing prisoners for cannabis led to the Spice epidemic,’ says former government adviser (talkRADIO)

Dissociatives

• Hospital Injected Intoxicated Woman with Ketamine, Enrolled Her in Clinical Trial Without Consent, Lawsuit Says (Newsweek)

• ‘It’s the PCP’: Man wearing only a towel arrested at shopping center (FOX2Now.com)

• Ketamine For Depression (Healthy Magazine)

• Man accused of causing deadly crash was high on PCP, officials say (KOCO)

• Judge rules woman accused of setting fatal Springfield fire was too high on PCP to confess (MassLive.com)

Opiates/Opioids

• As if heroin weren’t dangerous enough, it may come with lead poisoning (Ars Technica)

• 'Dozens' of underground heroin-injection sites operating now in King County (KIRO)

• Some pharmacies fail to offer easy access to naloxone, or to stock it, despite anti-opioid initiatives (STAT)

• The Hell of Getting Methadone When You’re Away from Home (Tonic)

• Philly may require all pharmacies to stock overdose-reversal drug naloxone (WHYY)

• Growing concern for 'pink death' drug and pure fentanyl (KMSP)

• Why Some Pharmacies Still Fail To Carry Naloxone (The Fix)

• Life After Heroin Is Beautiful and Boring (VICE)

• Find Out the Rate of Opioid-Related Overdoses in Your Town (NBC Chicago)

• Toronto man sounds alarm about 'drastic need' for naloxone training to battle opioid overdoses (CBC)

• Viewpoint: Big Pharma didn't drive up the cost of naloxone, 'opportunity has' (Becker's Hospital Review)

Kratom

• Kratom herbal supplement may cause withdrawal symptoms in newborns (MyNDNow.com)

• HHS recommended that the DEA make kratom a Schedule I drug, like LSD or heroin (STAT)

• The U.S. May Ban Kratom. But Are its Effects Deadly or Lifesaving? (Discover Magazine)

• A ruling is imminent on the legality of a controversial drug that's used to treat addiction — but some have called it a 'dangerous opioid' (Business Insider)

• Kratom for Fitness, Pre-Workout & Bodybuilding (Kratom Guides)

• Kratom Plants & Kratom Seeds for Sale Online (Kratom Guides)

Kava

• Vanuatu continues push for quality standard for kava (Radio New Zealand)

• The New Criterion: say 'bula' to the world's first listed kava producer (Livewire Markets)

Miscellaneous Psychedelics/Psychoactives/Drug Policy

• The DEA and ICE are hiding surveillance cameras in streetlights (Quartz)

• Egypt MP Proposes Law to Decriminalise All Drug Use (Talking Drugs)

• Teenagers boil sanitary pads to get high (The Jakarta Post)

• My Relationships With Drugs Vary Wildly: We Must Recognize Spectrums (Filter)

• Drug-Law Violations Account for Over a Quarter of Women Incarcerated in the US (Filter)

• Greece Health Ministry Plans Drug Consumption Rooms (Talking Drugs)

• Secret CIA Document Shows Plan to Test Drugs on Prisoners (ACLU)

• Psychedelic Ethics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Psymposia)

• Is Psychedelic Science Reaching A Breaking Point? (The Third Wave)

• Microdosers Are More Creative With Happier Emotions, Study Finds (VICE)

• The Psychedelic Renaissance Will Be Decided By Access (Chacruna)

• Get Up, Stand Up, Speak Up (Psymposia)

• What It's Like to Run the Biggest Drug Encyclopedia in the World (VICE)

• A New Documentary Shows How Vets Are Using Weed and Ayahuasca to Treat PTSD (Tonic)

• Ayahuasca for PTSD: Interview with "From Shock to Awe" Producer Janine Sagert (Reality Sandwich)

• This comedian tried to explain what drugs feel like and it went strangely (Rooster Magazine)

• Competitive Psychedelic Users Are Chasing 'Ego Death' and Losing Their Sense of Self (VICE)

• The Global Drug Survey wants to have an honest conversation about your drug habits (Time Out)

• Can Psychedelics “Cure” Gay People? (Chacruna)

• The Life and High Times of Psychedelic Bard, Terence McKenna (Kahpi)

• Oiling the Hinges of the Doors of Perception – Microdosing with Psychedelics (Beckley Foundation)

• Service workers say supervised injection facilities could cut restroom overdoses (Business Insider)

• The Island: Recovering Self, Culture and Place through Plant Medicine (Chacruna)

• Personal drug use should be decriminalized, addictions expert says (CBC)

• Chris Selley: On safe injection sites, why can't conservatives just let people not die? (National Post)

• Confirmation Bias And Misreporting Plague Psychedelic Research (The Ticker)

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

Image by Dahtamnay, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

FDA Monitors Social Media for Drug Abuse Trends

Pat Anson, writing for Pain News Network:

The FDA began monitoring social media – what it calls “proactive pharmacovigilance” – about a decade ago, primarily as an early warning system for adverse events involving medication.

I wasn't aware of this online monitoring by the FDA until now, but it makes sense that they're doing it. Maybe the organization has observed the fact that coverage about drugs (including psychedelics) has become more favorable in the media during the last 10 years.

It's also telling that the FDA seems to be going specifically after kratom vendors.

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Weekend Thoughts - 5.26.18

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

1. Assuming that things continue in the same direction that they're heading, some technology companies are poised to become pretty closely enmeshed with the country's policing industry. This week we learned that Amazon is selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement. The technology, dubbed "Rekognition", obviously raises some privacy concerns, not the least of which is due to the fact that the company also sells smart devices to consumers that are capable of recording audio and video. What's to stop Amazon or the police from using data obtained from a consumer smart device to improve the facial recognition tech? Not to mention that also this week a woman claimed that her Amazon device recorded a private conversation and sent it out to a random contact without her consent! I personally never recommended anyone purchase an Amazon smart device and now I definitely won't. The fact is, Amazon has shown that it is more than willing to collaborate with law enforcement in order to bring about increased surveillance. The lesson we can take from this news is that it is becoming increasingly important to carefully assess the amount (and type) of data that you are willing to provide to each technology company.

2. It turns out that the electric scooter rental business has become a cutthroat business for many teens and young professionals. The task of "bird hunting", which involves locating and charging the Bird brand of scooters, can be performed by kids after they are done with school for the day. The bird hunters comb through cities each night, looking for and gathering as many electric scooters as they can carry, shoving them in their cars and charging them at home overnight before placing them back on the streets in the morning. Since each scooter can only be captured once, some kids are getting a bit territorial in especially crowded areas, even resorting to violence on occasion. Not only is this is a fascinating story to read about because it shows consumers a bit of how the sausage is made in this industry—it's totally worth your time to watch the video of the bird hunter with a huge score, which is embedded in the article linked above.

3. Out of the blue, Pornhub made a VPN. The virtual private network will supposedly keep your browsing activity protected from snoopers and censors. This is a pretty interesting move. I definitely didn't anticipate that the world's biggest adult video website would create a VPN, and I'm not sure how successful or secure it will be, but I certainly applaud their effort.

It's time to say goodbye to Weekend Thoughts—today's post is going to be the last one in the series. That's because I have decided to replace the weekly "link roundup" blog post model with a trickle of individual link posts that will be published whenever something worth commenting about is happening in the news. So you can expect to see short posts linking to other blogs and publications in the very near future. Until then, keep thinking wilder.

Image by Ro & Allister, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Weekend Thoughts - 3.24.18

Image by pasja1000, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

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

1. Undoubtedly the biggest news this week was a scandal involving Facebook. It turns out that the political consulting firm named Cambridge Analytica harvested private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles—mostly without consent. That data was used by Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 and has ties to Steve Bannon and GOP megadonor Robert Mercer (who recently donated $1 million to MAPS), which has raised ethical and potentially legal questions about the firm's business practices. The hashtag #deletefacebook became popular on Twitter shortly after this story broke, and users have been leaving Facebook left and right. If you are interested in securing your Facebook account, it would be worth your while to check out Wired's piece The Complete Guide to Facebook Privacy, which has practical steps you can take to ensure that your account is as private as possible. However, you could also consider deleting your account entirely if you prefer. Just remember that even if you delete your Facebook account, the company may still be able to collect your data through its other apps—WhatsApp and Instagram. And plenty of other companies and websites are capable of collecting your information, anyway. Remember that if you're not paying for a product with money, you're almost always paying for it with something else. In this case it happens to be potentially sensitive private data.

2. Similar to the plot of an episode from Black Mirror's third season, China is expected to start banning citizens with a low "social credit" score from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year. This change will go into effect in May, and the social credit system will rate people based on criminal history, financial misdeeds, and what they purchase, say, and do. Citizens who receive a low score will face a variety of penalties; this travel restriction being one of the first to be announced. Hopefully this practice won't spread to other countries around the world, but we'll just have to wait and see.

3. One of Uber's self-driving cars struck and killed a woman in Arizona this week, which was the first time a pedestrian has died in connection with an autonomous vehicle. It still isn't quite clear how this happened, but some reports are saying that the woman walked across the road directly in front of the car—outside of the designated crosswalk and from the shadows—and that neither the vehicle's sensors nor the backup human driver were able to detect that she was there because it was nighttime. In other words, it sounds like this may have been the pedestrian's fault, not flaky software. However, even if Uber is to blame, the motivation for our society to transition to using autonomous vehicles is that they will be demonstrably better than human drivers—not 100% perfect. In my opinion, if self-driving cars are able to reduce car crash deaths by a significant amount then they should be considered a success.

4. Police in my hometown (Raleigh, North Carolina) recently obtained search warrants in order to ask Google to hand over data the company has about devices that were close to crime scenes at the time that the crime occurred. This is a new type of request, because the police are not looking for data related to specific users. Rather, they are asking to have the information about every mobile device within close proximity to the crime scene during the time that the crime occurred. And before. And after, as well—just for good measure. The data would be anonymized before the police get their hands on it, but it's creepy to think that our devices are continuously leaving breadcrumbs that could be used by police (or people with nefarious intent) to learn more about where we have been and where we might be going to next.

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

Weekend Thoughts - 1.13.18

Image by Engin_Akyurt, 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 U.S. Customs and Border Protection searched 60 percent more electronic devices in 2017 than it did during the previous year. That has led to concern from privacy advocates who worry that the rise in searches may indicate something nefarious about the administration's stance on immigration and surveillance. However, the good news to come out of this is that customs agents will now need to have "reasonable suspicion" before they can perform a thorough search on devices. The real question now though is, "What constitutes reasonable suspicion?" It's quite possible that even with this change, the number of searches will not decrease in the near future.

2. President Trump has signed an executive order that could make it easier for Internet Service Providers to install high-speed broadband networks in rural areas. This move may help bring reliable and powerful Internet access to these areas, where 39 percent of people do not have access to broadband speeds. However, Trump's latest order will not offer any federal funding to promote broadband in those areas; instead it will expedite federal permitting requirements, which theoretically would make it easier for broadband companies to install and operate wireless towers. And of course he had to follow up this move by saying, "Those towers are going to go up, and you're going to have great, great broadband."

3. The concept of humans having sex with robots is still fairly new (and foreign) to most people, but the technology continues to get more sophisticated and advanced as time marches on. It's worth thinking about the pros and cons of sex robots and how it may affect individuals as well as the species as a whole. All in all, this is a fascinating area of technology that has several layers of complexity, and you may find it worth learning about while it is still relatively unknown to the general public.

4. Brick-and-mortar stores have been having a tough time competing against online retailers recently, and some have begun to turn to automation technology solutions to replace human workers. Think of the self checkout register, for example. Now a six-foot tall robot that is capable of moving about a store, performing inventory tasks for its employer, is beginning to make its way to stores. This machine is able to take photographs of store shelves and determine when items need to be restocked—a job that is still done by a human. For the time being, anyway. So when you see a towering robot in your local brick-and-mortar store, it's probably wise to leave it alone and let it do its job.

5. And for one last piece of news, also related to automation technology—GM plans to release a car without a steering wheel or pedals in 2019. In fact, the car will not have any manual controls or buttons for the passengers (remember, there is no human driver in this vehicle!) to push at all. This release will be dependent on whether or not the U.S. Department of Transportation approves some regulation, but it is exciting to think that there might be a fully autonomous consumer-grade vehicle on the road just next year.

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