A UK Crimestoppers group is handing out scratch and sniff cards to familiarize the public with the smell of pot. This is in the hope that it will help people detect when neighbors are growing marijuana so they can report this serious, dangerous crime.
Gather around, children, and you shall learn of an ancient time, before the internet. A day of paper fanzines and weird information obtained only via books delivered by snailmail.
The main purveyor of such good stuff was the Loompanics catalog. Alas, they were driven out of business in 2006. The current website using their domain name is a shell and a scam by cybersquatters.
Over one hundred Loompanics books have been tagged as a Goodreads collection. You can get a small sense of what they were all about there.
United States Border Patrol agents found some 'suspicious' cans on the US side of the border with Mexico recently. Upon closer inspection the cans were filled with cannabis and had apparently been shot over the border with a cannon. Wonder how much trouble the guy who thought that one up is in now.
If anyone can explain to me what the hell this song is about, its logic and mythical allegory, and why it was included on Johnny Cash's Xmas album The Christmas Spirit, I'd be grateful. Any easy answers regarding too much drug and/or booze consumption by Cash will be rejected as too facile.
In the early 1950s, German photographer Leif Geiges created a series of abstract images in order to try to portray "exactly what the mescaline subject sees and hears during the course of his artificial psychosis" — as Newsweek put it, which ran his images in its Feb 23, 1953 issue. This was before mescaline was made illegal, back when psychiatrists still believed that the experience of taking mescaline approximated the mental state of a schizophrenic and therefore could be of great experimental value.
As for the mescaline imagery itself, Newsweek explained:
On taking mescaline, first there is nausea, but this is soon followed by a derangement of the brain centers of sight and sound, which causes a constant stream of scenes of incredible beauty, color, grandeur, and variety. The contents of the hallucinations always jibe with past experiences; they are wish-fulfilling fantasies (an air pilot sees mechanical dream cities; an ex-archeologist, mythological people and monsters). The form most frequently perceived is a tapestry, such as a wall-paper pattern that breaks into grotesque shapes. Other familiar forms are (1) lattice work of checkerboards, (2) spirals, (3) tunnels, funnels, alleys, and cones. The mescaline action begins 30 minutes after taking and lasts from ten to twelve hours.
"Wallpaper patterns come to life, change to demoniac caricatures, threaten immediate destruction"
Ostensibly a primer in spatial awareness for kids, this drug-addled escapade is really an elaborate allegory for sexual tension. The geeky male's inability to physically connect with, mate with, or ultimately please the attractive female. Watch, and see if you don't agree.
I came across this brief article in a back issue of Fantastic Adventures magazine (August, 1940).
The source isn't the most credible. (I don't think Fantastic Adventures peer-reviewed its articles.) But the story made me curious enough to do a google search to try to figure out where this drug 'anhalonidin' came from. A lot of the search results discuss it in connection with the cactus lophophora, from which comes the drug peyote. That kinda makes sense, I guess. Though I'm not sure if lophophora grows all the way down in Colombia.
Category: Drugs