More on Supreme Court Warrantless Search Decision

09-1272.pdf application/pdf Object.

This link – sorry about its being a .pdf document – contains the official notes from the recent Supreme Court decision, which ruled against the unconstitutionality of what police did at an apartment complex in Kentucky.

To recap: a man had his apartment door kicked down by cops who were following up a staged crack buy. After the targeted dealer vanished into this man’s apartment building. the police had seen him enter the “breezeway” (is that something like a foyer or outdoor hall? I’ve never heard the term) and lost sight of him at the point when he entered this “breezeway”.  The cops noted that said crack dealer could have entered either a room to the left or a different one to the right. After smelling marijuana smoke coming from the left room they knocked, announced their presence, and heard “a bustling” that was interpreted to be destruction of evidence…so when the tenants failed to answer, they went about the business of kicking their door in, in the style familiar to anyone who’d ever seen an episode of “COPS” on TV.  Once inside the apartment, they discovered the tenant, his girlfriend and another guest had been passing a doob around, and so immediately arrested them. When they DID get the search warrant, they found more pot and some cocaine.  For this, he was sentenced to ELEVEN years in prison.

Only after THAT was over and done with did they enter the OTHER apartment on the right,  found the crack dealer this whole business had been about in the first place, and nabbed him.

Reading this entire document might be a bit of a challenge for the legally-unfamiliar – it certainly was for me, but I still plowed all the way through it- with all its talk of what constitutes “exigency” – the consequences that apparently provide the precedents that effectively allowed the permission for warrantless search.  (The link does not go to page one of it, but rather to the page with the quote I’ve cited below; it will be easy enough to use your PDF reader or plugin to navigate to its beginning.)

This passage below should resonate with meaning to anyone familiar with any of the “Constitutional Rights 101 for Stoners” pamphlets handed out by many medpot advocates, and/or Don’t Get Busted – the familiar book by Ed Rosenthal and attorney William Logan – which remind the most frequently arrested people in the whole country – marijuana smokers, growers and distributors – to “flex their rights” before their lack of exercise causes them to just keep disappearing, more and more, as every day, month and year passes: (Emphasis mine)

When law enforcement officers who are not armed with a warrant knock on a door, they do no more than any private citizen might do. And whether the person who knocks on the door and requests the opportunity to speak is a police officer or a private citizen, the occupant has no obligation to open the door or to speak. Cf. Florida v. Royer, 460 U. S. 491, 497–498 (1983). (“[H]e may decline to listen to the questions at all and may go on his way”).When the police knock on a door but the occupants choose not to respond or to speak, “the investigation will have reached a conspicuously low point,” and the occupants “will have the kind of warning that even the most elaborate security system cannot provide.” Chambers, 395 F. 3d, at 577 (Sutton, J., dissenting). And even if an occupant chooses to open the door and speak with the officers, the occupant need not allow the officers to enter the premises and may refuse to answer any questions at any time. Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame for the warrantless exigent-circumstances search that may ensue.

The presence of police can certainly be intimidating, so actually remembering not to talk to them while they are demanding conversation is obviously liable to be difficult – particularly if you’ve snarfed up a blunt or two, and thus suddenly find yourself having a gigantic panic attack as you begin to feel your worst fears amplified fivefold: there’s no denying that there is a  well-known increased susceptibility to stress-based confusion that pot – no matter how well it has helped you medically, or how generally positive its effects as a multi-purpose tonic have been for you  – can still potentially cause even in the mind of the experienced toker.

Don't Get Busted

Thus in light of what has happened in the nation’s highest court I recommend that all active marijuana users, distributors and/or growers – regular or not – do the following things, as soon as you possibly are able:

- Purchase and read the above book, Don’t Get Busted, by Rosenthal and Logan
- Make it your sincerely-attended-to, honestly-worked-towards goal to move ASAP to a state in which voters have approved the legal use and distribution of medical marijuana.

California is probably the best of these, with its city and state laws most open to it. Cities such as San Francisco and Santa Cruz have made marijuana arrests “lowest priority” for their police departments. If you live in a state like Kentucky, expect the opposite…and be ready for the possible consequences.

Of course, since I’ve been born and raised in  – and still live in – good old golden Cali – and fabulous Frisco is my current home, streets brimming with retail storefronts adorned with the insignias we know and love: the green cross, or the green caduceus and sometimes just the familar bracted leaf…perhaps, I’ve got a wee bit of bias.

Sometimes, I feel that this preponderance of pot stores, and the general change of attitude regarding marijuana in movies and on television, represent the sole thing about this awfully baleful 21st century that could be thought of as any improvement at all when it is compared with the prior one.

Corporatism and Prison Slavery, or “Oh, no wonder they STILL keep it illegal”

Why is it I never see anyone bring up one of the most important reasons there’s still a drug war and people are still sent to jail for years for smoking flowers? Drug freedom advocates talk about hemp, they talk about how Anslinger started the whole damn thing to get people riled up about Mexicans, they talk about excuses to eliminate our freedoms.  But why? Who benefits from all this?

Two Words: Prison Slavery.

Pot is smoked by more people than it ever has been in America, even in the 1960s, nowadays, but the drug culture still aims mostly at the 18-34 demographic.  It’s not harmless to smoke anything, so people began eating weed and someone invented vaporizers.  But we all know pot never killed anyone and that stoned people might be a little more lackadaisical than the rest of us – fine, they have their pleasures, other folks have theirs.

But young to middle-aged people who aren’t suffering from major health problems make the most useful SLAVES.  Do you think people in prison just sit around in their cells all day, run around in the yard lifting weights, and raping young boys who drop the soap come shower time?

They spend most of their days doing labour – and we’re not talking about banging out license plates, amigos.  It’s the sorts of work even illegal immigrants wouldn’t take if they were starving, sometimes.  At best, it’s a full time job of tedium, with horrid supervisors and the most terrible part is the prisoner doesn’t have a home to return to afterwards, and s/he receives NO TRUE PAYCHECK for their toils since they’re ‘working off their debt to society’ for being such offensive persons as to want to either self-medicate, or simply alter their consciousness with something less stupefying than beer and hard liquor.

(Just to legally bypass being ‘enslavers’ they pay the prisoner about two dollars a week, according to what I was last able to find on this, which was about ten years ago so it may have either been adjusted for inflation, or else, just kept the same, after all, these are prisoners, who’s going to care? But that money is just about enough for one call home and a roll of toilet paper.)

Worse still, prisons are slowly and very silently becoming privatized.  Not that it may even matter anymore, seeing how much protection the government gives us any more. Look up “Corrections Corporation of America” (CCA) – it’s practically a monopoly, which began in Texas and the surrounding states, and is now spreading like a cancer across the so-called nation.  Um, sorry, I guess it’s “homeland” now.

THIS is why I think no matter how many people vote to legalize pot, it stays illegal.  We all know elections can and do get dickered with.  Prop. 19 in California very nearly won last year, but still there had to be a CCA lobby, in addition to the liquor lobby and the usual religious nutcases.  How many corporations depend on prison labor?

Someone – perhaps myself – needs to gather data on this, and make it very public.  And these corporations need to be not merely boycotted, but their reputations ruined no matter what it takes short of violence. At the very least the word needs to spread about this practice, and the fact that there is STILL SLAVERY in the US, it’s merely done mostly by harmless drug users and in relative secrecy.

And yes.  MOST drug users are harmless to others, and even most dealers are harmless if you simply leave them alone and treat them like any other businesspeople. I live in the worst part of San Francisco, but none of them bother me, the only harassment I get comes from drunk people. Even though I rather despise certain drugs, particularly crack, if offered it, I merely say, “No thanks” and walk off.

The harm drug users cause to themselves varies, and is still their choice.  If we do not own our bodies, though, and the right to trash them or keep them as pure as snow – or anywhere in the middle of these extremes – then what rights do we have at all? We do not owe our bodies to ‘society’ and the moment we do, we’re living in something like communism, only worse.

Supreme Court OKs Warrantless House Search

Supreme Court OKs Warrantless House Search

If you’re on anything at this time that is going to make you feel too amplified in paranoia or depression as to possibly become violent or suicidal?

I feel it’s my responsibility to tell you to NOT READ THE LINK ABOVE THIS WARNING YET, but ABSOLUTELY to bookmark it, until you come down, and this time, be sure to do something like drag the link to your desktop so that you make sure that you read it when you’re not in any hugely altered state any longer.

The information in it may affect you, or your friends, at any time.

Okay…are you sitting down? Or just “down” from whatever you were on last time you saw this page?

Once upon a time we had a Bill of Rights, which included Amendment 4, the right to not be victims to warrantless searches and seizures.

Our Supreme Court just voted 8 to 1 to approve this: If a cop merely suspects, for any reason, that you MIGHT be a drug dealer, they can bust your door down with NO WARRANT if they hear “a rustling sound” from behind it.

I am not making this up.

It is time to finally come to grips with why ouir rights as drug users are so instantly invalidated.  It’s not the usual shit you always hear drug legalization advocates talk of.

I left the post which will appear above this one as a comment to this article, but I am also going to repost it here, and in the months to come am going to focus on this particular reason more – and would suggest other advocateurs do likewise.

The gist of it is that we are still a nation that runs on slavery…prison slavery.  How do you get enough prison slaves without making a very popular but essentially harmless activity illegal?

I will not sleep easily tonight.  Send the best of vibes to your friends – and those anonymous-at-various-levels persons you know who put their lives on the line to make their money but without whom you’d not have your drugs; if you have a friendly dealer who doesn’t rip you off or constantly have assholes hanging around be extra-thankful.  And be sure they know about this, so that they can strategize. In general most smart purveyors of black market goods are by necessity very quiet about what they do.  Not all of them are smart.  Begin small campaigns amongst your friends to smarten them up, if you notice they aren’t quiet enough. Whatever inconvenience either the dealer or customer must face in the wake of this decision, it MUST be put up with.

Though really, in this “their word against yours” system, I dunno how much good it will do – but it could not hurt.  And even if it were not this way, it’s far better for dealers to be as unproblematic to their neighbours as possible.  Even if all drugs were virtually decriminalized to parking-ticket level.

Venom Yum

I found Venom Yum whilst doing a really weird search-engine experiment related to one of my zillions of semi-anonymous experimental blogs.  It appears to be some sort of Euro-based design team with lots and lots of fairly cutesy but also fairly psychotrippical output.

This reminds me: I’m thinking of fusing the Counterculture Vulture blog and this one; trying to keep them both running is sort of a pain in the ass being that they are both on WordPress.  And doing so would also make this more like the old Anodyne, which was about both the drugs and the druggish arts that they’ve inspired.

More variety for the reader…less annoyance to the writer (your Spokesnut, yours truly.) A win/win situation.

I’m also seeking one or two individuals who might like to become writers for Anodyne, complete with access codes and sidebar avatars and linkage and all that.  All ya gotsta do is just submit bits and snippets of occasional drug-oriented content, thus bringing yet more variety here.

Ergo…if you’re a “Drugly American”  – or any nationality for that matter, but write well in English (whether stoned or not) just drop me a line–and I’ll snort it, just to see if it tastes right,  see if I like its effects. Then I’ll space out for a week or two and get back to you.

Maybe, if it’s stimulating enough, I’ll get back to you immediately.

You could easily figure out how to reach me, but I’m not going to sit here and fuck with your head, sending you puzzling non-directions; look, just email psychaotic@choronzon.org and that will get your dropped lines where you want them to go.

Stoner Achievement Awards!

View this document on Scribd

Amusing as Hell.  May help distract the distractable-enough from noticing that sidebar stuff didn’t get done.  Do you really need to hear why? Just assume the obvious, and whether you are or are not correct, you’ll settle for the ‘reason’ knowing full well it coulda just as easily been YOUR fuckup, if you were running this show…

Seriously, though…I’ll really try to get to it even though the next four or five days are burdened with what Tim Leary usedta call ‘first circuit concerns’, the damn CRAP every human needs to do if s/he wishes to maintain living space, adequate food, health, and all that happy horseshit without which whatever addicts you to a sludgeball of euphoric glee, be it legal, illegal, halfway-there and racing for the finish line…OR MAYBE YOU are, like me, JUST REALLY ADDICTED to the goddamn internet, so much that it’s done more damage than your past hard drug habits, but stopping it or cutting down to a healthy hour or so a day and no more would take you, or your caring friend, putting an ax through your almost-$800 dollar computer, which is NOT the kind of intervention that makes my friends remain my friends.

What happens to net addicts who also can happen to – unlike me at this juncture – actually afford weed? Does the weed make it worse, or does the weed make you succumb to the need to get horizontal and/or eat which kind of interrupts the net-addiction process…you STOP clicking when you are stoned, if my memory serves me (and yes, ONDCP jerkoffs, it DOES) before your brain melts out your ears in goopy wet gumdrop like balls of fizz.

But enough of that.  Download this Scribd – is that scrib-dee or scribbed, when you say it either out loud or read it in your head? This one’s a hoot.

Sidebars.  Blogrolls.  Soon.  If you give a damn remind me.  If you author a drug blog and don’t remind me, I will send minions to your home to steal your stash and bring it…somewhere else, until you send me your url and beg me to sidebar it, the way folks did in the old days when there were about 85 blogs and mine was one of them! Everyone rushed around trying to get on each other’s sidebars, using creative begging, bribing, and even obscene offers to obtain this vital link love.  Now, the fucking RSS shit does all the work and all I have to do is grab the list of feeds, run a few, then hit one of the social nutwhacking sites searchbots, put ‘drugs’ in the box, and after winnowing out the rehabs and happy church group community anti-drug program blogs, scoop the rest onto the sidebar in one grab and slap.

(Actually, that while doable, would kind of suck.  That’s the way I had it before, but this time I’m gonna do a categoried blogroll, since the p0t blogs and junkie diaries ought to live in their own lil’ comfy sections.  Doncha agree?) That however does take more work.  Might hafta wait till that First Circuit shit gets attended to, or else I’ll just do a crappy job since I’ll be too worried–not to mention entirely too straight…since until I figure out some way to earn my own pot money, I ain’t gonna smoke it.  It’s a karma thing.

420 Day

It’s also Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of Columbine, but fuck all that, we know what it really means.  Hope you had a good one today.

As a temporary measure, I put up one of the old, old, Anodyne logos from back-in-the-day.  It looks like crap because of resizing and all this happened because I can’t get Photoshop running to make a new one.

SIDEBAR for blog will be fixed in the next 24 to 36 hours and blogroll replaced.  Might as well categorise it this time, and do a better job than the last one, at least, since I have to go hunt down all the drug-blogs that now exist anyway.

I will swear to the holy nature of LSD and my own life, damn it, that Anodyne was THE FIRST BLOG on the subject of drugs.  There WAS a blog active at this time, circa 2000, not created on blogware, called Drug War Rant, which is still around and full of the never ending reasons why it’s completely ridiculous to keep spending so much money and police time keeping people from using them.  Anodyne, though, only was partly political, seeking to be the blog that was about all aspects of drugs, including the politics, but also the stories from my life, and also submissions by anonymous parties telling such tales.  Some were Good Stories, some were Bad Stories, and others were very neutral, which is rare when such a passionately loved and hated topic is discussed.

If you have a Blog on Drugs of any sort and want it included in New-and-Improved Outlaw Anodyne Blogroll, you just send a link right to me via the comments and I’ll see it gets attended to.

I Goofed

I was trying to change something on my OTHER damn blog and ended up hosing my lovely Outlaw Anodyne logo leaving us with this stupid default tree-and-lake picture that looks like the front cover of a rehab pamphlet or something.

As soon as I can, I will design a new one, because I’m too much of a space to figure out WTF I did with the old one. Damnit.

Where the Druggophile Blows It

Outlaw Anodyne is obviously a pro-drug blog, but I realise that since it’s been resurrected, I’ve not managed to balance some of my bloviations of profound and/or silly recommendations of ‘the life’ with the Other Side of the Sword.

Maybe it’s time to do that. I can sum up the following in a single sentence if you haven’t the time or urge to read on: However much bullshit the Government and Church people spew about ‘drugs’ nonspecifically, or about certain substances that have proven to so many people the lack of merit that this bullshit has, ‘they’ got the whole heroin thing right.  Everything bad you ever heard about heroin is true.  (Which makes the bullshit about other substances even more dangerous, obviously.)

So how does someone otherwise gifted with fairly good judgment – perhaps not the best, but surely not the worst – end up doing the Stupid Thing, and why? To get into heroin and henceforth become an addict, which is the fate of 99% of people who do get involved with it, is to do something that strikes me as being the expectation of every drug-fearing or ignorant blind follower of ‘the propaganda’.

I won’t lay all the blame for what happened in 1990 on the fact that obviously since the Acceptable Use Policy in ‘normal’ society for any “drug” – i.e any medicine that makes you feel good or interesting – is to avoid using it, since it is ALWAYS wrong to do so – and there’s a great deal of evidence that this policy, upon which laws leading to serious jailtime are based, is riddled with bullshit and half-truths, and sometimes so much so as to be outrightly confusing and mostly meaningless to people who “understand” (read: have used drugs themselves or know people who use them that don’t fit the evil profile).

I will point out that some of the seeds of it were there.

But the blame belongs to me, and me alone.  It was my decision, and I made the wrong one.

This “acceptable use policy” is mostly no “acceptable” period. Kids were brought up in my day – and are still brought up being taught this way – that “marijuana makes you schizophrenic” or even “addicts” a user to it. Now that a couple of generations have noticed the lies about pot, the laws and attitudes are slowly beginning to change.

But one idea persists – the “gateway drug” notion, which insists using pot or psychedelics will lead a harmless pot toker on a road inevitably leading to heroin. The fact that this happened to me is the greatest shame of my life.  But it surely didn’t happen to most pot smokers in the sixties and it’s not happening now.  I’m probably one in several thousands that it did happen to. Would it have happened had I not been lied to about weed, would it have happened if it had been legal and thus I hadn’t had to deal with dealers selling multiple substances, telling lies of their own? Just something to ponder.

The “gateway” thing exists whenever someone has a liking for a particular anti-social practice, I think – there’s a subconscious desire to take it to the top (or in this case, bottom) floor of the whole thing.  But does a child who likes playing football feel automatically drawn to participate in ‘extreme’ (dangerous, death-defying) sports? I think the gateway theory is just a way of arranging data to make all drug users look bad, but consider this: does it also in some way ‘write the script’ for their progression in advance, before they even GET into altering their consciousnesses?

I followed the script and made a shitty example of myself.  Don’t let this happen to you, because this little adventure cost me a whole, whole lot of living (it gave me hepatitis C, for starters) and it could have easily cost me far more.  I was one of the luckier ones. But the luckiest are the ones who keep to the pot and the psychedelics and leave the rest alone.  So help me, Gods.

Heroin can put you here very quickly.

Surely I knew better – especially after seeing what the small group of junkies that started forming in the co-op that cured my cibophobia (see prior post) went through when they went into withdrawals.  I never took heroin at the co-op.

I took it after the co-op was no longer where I could go on living, after graduation, after a smaller cooperative in San Francisco I went on to live in also disbanded, a few months after me and the spoiled trust-funder that owned it kicked me out since I had to pay my rent with public assistance one month after losing a job. Looking back, I was more confused than I realised I was at the time. A five year relationship more or less ended by mutual consent after a lot of dishonesty and power games on both our parts.  And I ended up being taken in by someone who, at the time, seemed to be giving me the miracle break I needed.

I will call her Susan. It wasn’t the name she went by.  I have looked all over the net for her since we last saw one another in 1991.  I looked for her at least seven years.  This year, on New Years’ Day, I discovered she died of an overdose only two months earlier.

She was a person who could be your best friend one minute and in a flash turn on you so fast you were left bewildered and asking senseless questions which she’d never let you finish because it was HER apartment.  It was HER domain.  And it was HER friendship with me that led me to become an escort, which we all know is a fancy sort of expensive prostitute, for the spring and summer of 1990.

It was she who gave me my second taste of heroin.  My first had been in 1989, smoking it on a piece of foil, swearing to myself to never tell a soul.  I did it because I’d been fired from a job I loved.  I did it because I had gone to get some pot but lacking a connection, I made the fatal error of running into a ‘street hook’, someone who is paid in dope by a heroin dealer to find fresh meat for his or her business.  But I never went back there.  Frankly, I had not found it very interesting high – my thing being drugs that opened horizons, not drugs that narrowed them.

But Susan could be really, really persuasive.  She’d been grooming me to be a girl who would take over calls she couldn’t get to, in exchange for a cut of what I made.  I ought to have been smart enough to see that.

But it’s hard to be smart when you’re on opiates and making your living independently by simply lying there letting men project their fantasies onto the blank screen of your face and body.  You could get to feeling idiotic superiority to the working stiffs who would take half a year to make what you made in a week.  In addition, she had a deal going with her connect and she’d send me out to pick up dope, for SEVENTY DOLLARS a quarter, which silly newbie-junkie me thought was the going price for ‘opium’.

I didn’t seem to have any way of being aware that this was not a job I could do for the rest of my life, that in only a few years I’d be too old to pull in clients, and by the time I was addicted enough to be ill without my dope – a TERRIFYING experience which in every way matches the dumbass health-class filmstrips–Susan had a new angle in her life, no longer needed me, and discarded me like old news.  After two completely useless attempts to clean up via inpatient rehabs, spending thousands of dollars of my dear family’s money, I decided to get on methadone.

I’m still on it.

Susan never got on methadone, for the usual reasons – not wanting to surrender to a lifetime of medication, and a government-stored record of addiction.

She did evil things to me, but my own foibles caused me to not resist them. I had just as many good times with her – she had a side of herself that was beautiful, and to her credit, she did manage to stay off opiates for 12 years, apparently, something I have not done.

But she is dead and I am still alive, and though my mom, who supported my decision is now gone leaving my remaining family only my younger brother who quite assiduously does not – I realised this year I made the right choice.  Some people have stronger roots than I – and whether my malnutritive childhood, some accident of genetics, or parents who had me late in life and lacked the energy to resist me when I wouldn’t accept their guidance (I refer to my younger childhood here rather than my adolescence, though the same was true of those times, it would have been too little too late) I just knew I would fall into the heroin sink hole again unless I plugged those blasted opiate receptors with the methadone that has saved more than just this one life.

In some future post I’ll go into all the chemical and other differences that make it an entirely different creature than heroin, not merely a legal fix but a DRUG THAT PREVENTS THE BODY FROM CRAVING THE OPIATE LASSITUDE.

For now, though, this is my message to the next generation of druggonauts.  Believe me, the bloody propaganda got it right on this substance, even if it has lied so much about other ones, and those lies don’t make this truth any less true.

Be a better credit to your subculture than I was, and be the person who says ‘no, thanks’ when they should, and thus a far better spokesperson for drug legalisation than I will ever be.  Please do this for me so I can die some day not having completely failed at certain missions.

And if you are shooting heroin – or smoking it – and have been doing so for more than a couple of years, run, don’t walk, to the nearest methadone clinic.
If you’ve only been using for a year or less, I’d recommend suboxone, from everything I’ve heard and seen, though have not got the personal experience to relate.

Blotter Barn

I am so there…what a great museum trip would be…figuratively or literally…

Blotter Barn.

I met the proprieter, incidentally, in a long gone age…

Marijuana and Cibophobic “Food Aversion Disease”

I know pot is ‘medicinal’ since it saved me from having to spend my adult life continuing to live with a rare condition nothing else even touched, and that was my childhood aversion to swallowing solid food, which persisted into adulthood.

Marijuana cured me of a weird, rare eating disorder, cibophobia, which I was apparently born with. It’s not at all like anorexia since it’s not weight-issue related at all, but the effects on the body are about as dangerous to one’s health. It just makes no sense: swallowing food just felt horrid, tasting it, feeling its textures–all were so horrendous, you can’t imagine it unless you had it. My case seems to have been fairly bad, compared to others I now have read about. In the 1960s, no one in the medical community knew of this disorder.  It is still a huge mystery, being neither hereditary nor microbially caused, and though it has psychological symptoms, the problem was really centered in my throat and tongue, not my brain – or at least it felt that way. As a result of years of cibophobia, malnutrition caused me to grow up quasi-autistic, and I never fully developed my knee joints. My face, in childhood, looked terrible–and in late middle age, the traces it left on my visage still show a little.

Cibophobics seem to choose a few foods, usually of no caloric value, and eat those.  I loathed swallowing, especially soft foods or vegetables, fruit or meat except for the skin of KFC. I only could eat popcorn, crackers, pancakes, french fries or the chicken skin – period! All I would drink was orange juice, and thankfully it probably saved me from rickets, or worse.

As babies cibophobics are merely assumed to be being finicky, but when your 9th birthday comes and you’re still like this, your parents start gettting terrified and exhausted by the failure to rid you of it. My brother never had it at all. But my parents had to force me to eat dinner each night, sitting there watching to insure I didn’t hide it or throw it away until I’d eaten the following:
- a tiny sliver of carrot
- a quarter-sized hamburger meat mini-pattie
- two leaves of lettuce.

I had to wash each tiny bite down with orange juice in order to stand it, hardly taking the time to chew, and crying like crazy.  Swallowing and tasting food just felt horrid – unless it was crunchy, salty junk food, which I chewed into dust and swallowed normally.  At about age 5 or so, Mom tried to force the food monster out of me by depriving me of all those things, but after 5 days of eating no food at all, the doctors finally told Mom to relent, and let me have my Ritz cracker box.  I dug into it like mad while a TV commercial for denture cream bleated “Finally, NOW, you CAN eat all the foods you LIKE!” — which made me laugh and laugh and laugh and I stood there watching Mom, and not understanding why she wouldn’t even smile.  It seemed so funny to me and it was the first incident in my life I remember experiencing humour.

I had to eat to keep me from passing out, and they loaded the OJ with vitamins. Every night on my plate were those exact same 3 things.  Trying a new thing was even more traumatic.  My dad tried to force a piece of cucumber down my throat and I think he may have chipped a tooth without meaning to: after that he gave up on me completely.

THIS was my entire food intake for fourteen of my most important years for my body and mind to become strong and well.   I shunned all people.  I did somehow manage to become really good with reading and writing, and my grades got me into Berkeley.  I told no one at all my sole motive to go to the university was to fulfill a desire I had since I was four and saw a news program about Woodstock: I went there to become a drug user, as if it was a career choice…and to me, it felt like it was.  I secretly yearned for hallucinating, and for the company of these adult people who actually looked happy and played like children instead of looking like sad, tired, used up adults…

When I entered college – with the express intent of finding the counterculture and using drugs, I found the student co-op and its communal house with four floors of hippie painted walls and dancing swirling lovely girls and boys…but when they noticed my eating habits they were terrified for me.

The night in September when a girl with a tie-dyed shirt on and another boyish-looking girl friend of hers sat by me in the dining hall they said hello to me right away instead of looking at me with askance, sideways glances of disgust, like I’d gotten all my life. One of them gave me a joint of pot which I smoked explaining I had been ‘waiting for it since 1969′.

“Apparently!’ they laughed, thinking it an exaggeration, but when I explained all my life I’d been waiting to ‘become a hippie when I grew up’ they thought this was amazing, because no one did that.  People ended up using drugs sort of by accidental exposure, and I was thanking them like they were my best friends for finally giving me this magical stuff people loved and hated so passionately.

The tie-dyed girl , viewing my plate and anorexic looking body, quipped “Either you are morbidly unobese and eating astronaut food pills or you really did need this all your life…”

I think the next hour was one of the sweetest I ever knew.  The pot I tried – mistakenly – in high school never worked but this did, and not only did I feel happiness for the first time in my life – in my reduced condition ‘happy’ had just meant ‘not horribly miserable’ despite my perfect family raising me and giving me anything I ever asked for…This was a “happy’ my body felt.

Fleeting memories exist of my first few weeks at the place…of one of the girls holding my head against her arm while the other helped me slowly swallow three bites of rice, lentils and zucchini that she cooked. I tasted the food and it was homey and nice and I loved it.  The orange juice in front of me sat there and I didn’t even reach for it.

After a week of this, my cibophobia was about 90 percent cured and a year removed almost all traces of it.  Marijuana pretty much saved my life – I’d have died of something far too soon, had I not begun to eat real food regularly…my concentration improved despite the pot use, and I did wonderful in my first year at Berkeley.

Top Ten Things To NEVER Do While Tripping – via Hip Forums

Enjoyed the heck outa the Hip Forums.  Definitely will spend a bunch more time THERE if I can squeeze some out of a day.  A fellow named PB Smith posted this entertaining, even if somewhat disturbing, list there a few years back…I reran it with a few small grammatical changes and added some responses.   (Italicised commentary from me follows each list item.)

1 Don’t even bother trying to explain to the nice police officer why you were driving into oncoming traffic. With your lights off. And no, holding a flashlight out the window does not count as headlights. (Why would headlights even matter once you’re in “driving to the opposite direction the street is flowing its traffic towards” territory? More importantly, what the fuck are you doing in a car behind its wheel while on a road in the first place if you have a head full of LSD? My hard, absolute rule is ‘do not drive on drugs’ – ESPECIALLY psychedelics, even if you have somehow managed to develop an adeptness for keeping the ‘hallucinarea’ away from the car and road in spatial reality, and out of the temporal zone representing the time it takes to drive where you’re going.  Besides the obvious fact that not everyone can do this as well as they might think, there is ALSO FAR too much NORMAL SHIT involving cars, cops and things going wrong with them that can screw up your trip at best and kill you and/or other persons at worst — with a whole spectrum of prison flavoured badness inbetween.  Use your head and plan your trip so that driving motor vehicles is not involved, or you will be a poor example to persons who distrust drugs and all persons who use them. Driving on hallucinogens is STUPID, no matter how good a driver OR  a tripper you are.  Got it? I chose to never even get a license or ever own a car, as a responsibility ethic.)

2 Don’t try to pick that zit on your face. It probably isn’t real. (And if it IS real, you’ll turn it into a major staph magnet.  Ugh.  It’ll look like a hallucination from hell when you are not on anything, and plus be dangerous to your health since most staph is antibiotic resistant now.)

3. Don’t go to the store to buy some of the new drink, Swill, that you just saw advertised on Saturday Night Live. (Never heard of it.  I would stick to drinks you are familiar with.  The last trip I ever got to take with a partner was over a decade ago; we were both reading the Dune books by Frank Herbert, and decided to make a fluid representing melange to drink after we dosed…made from cinnamon mixed with coffee and powdered chocolate.  This was because the Spice was supposed to taste cinnamonish.  This coffee might have been good at another time, but in a tiny espresso sized cup.  We drank a HUGE glass of it and got all barfy.  Thankfully we didn’t lose our blots before they had us lost in them. )   ///…maudlin nostalgia pseudo-flashback for about 15 seconds…///

4. Don’t try to light your farts–especially if you have a really hairy ass. (Oh come on, don’t do this, no matter how hairy the ass and/or how hairy the acid. It’s puerile.)

5. Don’t try to make a “lemon chocolate milkshake” by mixing lemon juice, milk, and chocolate ice cream in a blender. Lemon juice makes milk curdle. (Didn’t know that.  File under “nothing I’d think to try no matter what I was on” – but it’s interesting.)

6. Don’t forget to put the lid on the blender when you try to make a lemon chocolate milkshake. (Or if you are making popcorn, remember that without the lid, you have Mount Vesuvius in your kitchen, and while the eruption will be fun to see, the popcorn won’t be edibly clean, and you’ll have to sweep it up the next morning after.  There are better paths to acidic volcanic events… speaking of which comes the next item…)

7. Don’t keep laughing while having sex with someone who isn’t on acid. (I could write for years about sex on acid because I am better at it than anyone in the entire world – this is no joke – and it was my absolute favourite thing to do in life, ever. It still would be if I had acid, and someone to have sex with. Time does what Time does, tho’… I’m an old lady now, so I need not elabourate on what THAT means sexwise…and since acid’s only available if you’re in Europe or Russia now,  I dun’ think I’ll ever get to ‘Do My Thing’ again. But I did it enough in my youth for seven lives…and the memories did not get old nor can the DEA take them away…so I still get LOADS of joy on a daily basis from each and every sex trip I took…and there were lots! But it is a communication breakdown waiting to happen if you try to do it with someone who ain’t There if you are There yourself!!!unless you are REALLY close to your partner and s/he REALLY ‘gets’ the acid-sex experience, but just doesn’t happen to be doing it at the same time you are.  Otherwise, either both do it, or go solo – deep out/down/up/into the Xenodimensional Realms…but don’t masturbate.  Just lie flat and don’t move, then sway back and forth slowly for a while and then I guarantee, if you trust in the Powers That Be, both in You and in the Drug, you WILL make love to the Gods, angels, demons, fairies, aliens, fantastic perfect lords, princesses, or other Beautiful Uber-personas – or your own Self.  Sometimes all at once…)

8. Don’t try filling a glass water bottle with butane, and then blowing into it when it doesn’t look like it is lit. The blue flame can be almost invisible. Eyebrows grow back slowly. (This is the sort of activity made for glue sniffers.  You are better than that….right?  Skip it.)

9. Don’t think you can jump over your friend’s Ford Pinto, even if he is only going 20 mph. It’s LSD, not Superman Juice. (See #1.)

10. Don’t try to make homemade fireworks by pouring 1 1/2 pounds of black gunpowder into a coffee can and lighting it on the 4th of July. Sure, it makes an awesome tower of flame that is higher than a two storey house, but the police show up soon afterwards. (This seems like something that a meth-lab monkey cooking speed in a moving vehicle, in the back of a van, would do. Not an ‘enlightenable’ tripper who can see/feel/hear their own mind learning how to do a thing while it is being learned…for one of a zillion examples.  What tripper would need to make explosions in a coffee can? Answer: one who is not on LSD, obviously.)

via Top Ten Things To NEVER Do While Tripping – Hip Forums.

One Way To Get “Edgy” People Into Church

Snails On Speed

What a contradictory image that strikes me as being.

Apparently, experiments have suggested snails given methamphetamine have better memory.  But, your Spokesnut here wonders, what ends up happening to their pseudopods…given that any tweaker knows speed louses up the production of mucusy stuff, saliva and so on? A tweaking snail must ‘think’ fast, but move much more slowly than usual, if this is also the case with them, too.

An Entertaining ‘Pitch’ For LSD

Now, I know less than nothing about sports, but it would appear that former San Diego Padres pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on a weekend when he’d had quite a few more than no ‘hits’ himself – but rather than the steroids that baseball players usually opt for if they are interested in chemical additives, he was in the midst of a quite powerful and protracted LSD trip.

I can’t imagine being able to do this myself…but then again, I suck at sports. For a pro ball player, it’s probably a lot more doable. (Animated by New York artists No Mas.)

Phenergan’s Wake

Most of the heroin dealers in my ‘hood leave me alone since they’ve already seen me going into the methadone clinic, or have gotten the “no thanks, I’m on methadone” answer when offering chiva to me.

Yesterday someone came up to me while I was waiting for a bus and offered to sell me Phenergan.  It’s been a while since someone’s done that.  I laughed sardonically, shaking my head, and since the girl who was hawking them didn’t seem to be in a hurry, I told her why I didn’t want anything to do with Phenergan.

Phenergan – generic name Promethazine – is prescribed as an antihistamine.  The reason it sometimes gets peddled in areas known to be open-air pharmaceutical markets for the opiately-bent–like San Francisco’s Tenderloin– is that some people like to take them for potentiating the effects of heroin, morphine or methadone.

I only took it once in my life.  It was before I got on methadone, back in the days when I was still drowning in the spoon.

It was September of 1991 when I met someone who’d offered one to me since I looked a little dope-sick, and instructed me to take one the next time I had a fix.  I thought she had called them “Finnegans”.  In fact, until the internet came along and showed me the pill’s true name, I always thought “Finnegans” were a street name and that it had something to do with the obtuse, abstruse James Joyce novel  “Finnegan’s Wake”.

Of course, I had a fairly good reason to think this after the night I took one of those pernicious pink pills and what had turned out to be a large dose of heroin. Phenergan is more befuddling than Joyce, and not in a good way.

I’d been a call girl at the time and was headed out in a taxi  to the person I was going to be seeing.  I got into the back seat of a De Soto cab and THAT is the LAST thing I remember…at least in any stable sort of way.

I faintly recall some dreamlike impressions of being thrown down some stairs and then wandering around Mission Street in the area between First and Third, Fourth, maybe further downwards, and back.

I kept thinking I saw Byron, who’d been my “junk buddy” at the time. I kept wandering around calling for him.  A “junk buddy” is someone a junkie prostitute splits rent with, who helps her with the needle business and gives her a measure of safety just by being around she wouldn’t have otherwise…in return, he gets some of her dope.  However, he  is also definitely not a pimp of any sort. Byron and I had been friends who had sex occasionally, but he’d really wanted me to be in love with him, and I wasn’t. But he did look out for me.  And I thought I was supposed to be meeting him on Mission Street…

I was wandering around in the dark, calling his name.  I recall walking into a fast-food outlet and getting kicked out immediately.  I didn’t understand why.

I think I was on two distinctly separate Muni buses that night and ended up around Kearny Street at the foot of Market by dawn.  I was missing my purse and one boot. This, of course, must have been why the Mc Burger King or whatever had kicked me out. I wondered how it had taken me this long to notice that.

By the time I got back to the place Byron and I had been living I asked him “WHERE WERE YOU?!” but he was too busy asking me “WHERE WERE YOU ALL NIGHT?” to answer.  I had gotten it in my head I was supposed to meet him down on Mission Street but at no particular time for any particular purpose.  And I had never bothered to call him.

As for whatever else happened that night, there”s a damned good chance it’s a good thing I couldn’t remember it.  All things considered.

Phenergan and opiates  are a really, REALLY bad combination.  They put me on a full-blown fugue experience, the only time that has ever happened to me.

When I finished telling the girl the story, she said, “No wonder no one wants these” and tossed them down the storm drain.  It relieves me to see that apparently, the addict community is catching on to the truth about those damn things.  It’s one thing to be on drugs – whatever problems that whole mess is going to cause – but it becomes a whole new set of bad circumstances when you don’t know what you’re doing at all because of them.  That’s really hardly ever the case–most people on drugs have a sapient awareness that whatever mess they’re into, it’s drug-related when it is, and isn’t when it’s related to some other thing.  With Phenergan, that’s all out the window.

So if you’re a drug user, and you have any of them, that’s where you ought to toss them, too.

Text Adventure Parody: Infocom Caves On Acid

For the past month or so, I’ve set my Flock browser to start up with Cracked.com – yeah, it’s a website that’s somehow also connected to that Mad magazine knock-off you’ll remember if you spent your childhood in the 1970s, although I am not clear on who if any of the persons who did the magazine are also doing the website.

It makes a good start page. There is a stable – or would that be an ‘unstable? – of lunatics who churn out articles on a very regular basis, which are nearly all quite funny.  Plus…a lot of them manage to be keenly-witted rant epistles which manage to also contain lots of interesting trivia or things that are actually really important to read about, but which sometimes tend to get avoided by certain sorts of persons.  See, for the most part, out in the world beyond Cracked,  writers wrap that sort of thing all up in far too much phony gravitas – and besides, doesn’t stuff that’s “supposed to be good for you” or that cover topics that “you’re supposed to care about” already lose you before you even get there?

Not all Cracked articles are granola bars wrapped up in junkfood, and not all of them are Numbered Lists – although there’s a LOT of those.  Sometimes, someone will do something else altogether, and an example is Robert Brockway’s psychedelically-charmed text-adventure parodies to be found there.

It’s too bad there isn’t something out there like this that’s an actual game, as far as I know.  Text adventures, as you might guess, are those pre-graphical-era computer-nerd favourites, the sort of thing the nerds you knew in college if you were going there in the 1980s would play when they weren’t hunkering down with their DnD manuals and little figurines or studying piles of science and math for whole months at a time…in other words, the subset of folks having computers before computers were both easy enough to learn to use, and also did enough things that you’d want to bother learning how to use them. The nerds were using them because they knew how important their chosen career fields found the things.  But they weren’t above having fun on them, and before windows and mice, Infocom adventures were really all there was in the way of games that weren’t some form of chess or checkers.

But skipping to this century, some people still like these things, and new ones still get made.  So maybe, there’ll be something for this to have been a parody of before it existed.

Robert Brockway, who also gave us a list of nootropicky-type drugs and some reviews of their effects – has done two of these  articles.  The first one’s called a “Misadventure” – CYODFM – and the second’s an “Adventure” CYODFA.  What criteria made for the difference in quality has not been made obvious. Maybe whatever Brockway was on at the time had a great deal to do with it? Your guess is as good as mine, but better for you, since it’s yours.

Anyway: CYODFM is a  Sci-Fi Epic: “High in Space” – and CYODFA is sort of chance-based clusterfuck called “Fuck This Lost World” that would be somewhat describable as Tarantino/Harry Potter/Imaginarium orgy shoved into a time machine whose inventor used Windows Vista as the operating system so it flips out and subdivides and crashlands/crashlanded/will crashland (time means nothing to a time machine running Vista) leaving the party stranded in about four or five different versions of 1968. It will probably look like something else to you, but that’s the nature of Drug Fuelled Adventures, isn’t it?

As I read these things I found it sort of unfortunate that they didn’t actually work as text adventures, letting you click to your choices and follow the threads of the  trips being taken – you have to pretend, and keep scrolling up and down the screen, if you want to end up seeing the threads.  Or just read them top to bottom and forget continuity anyway–after all, especially if you’ve been smoking some pot having any variety with a name containing “Haze” in its pedigree, chances are time doesn’t mean shit to you by now, anyway, so whatever.

Y’know, this actually might satisfy the craving for a Drug Fuelled Adventure, at least for people who aren’t busy doing the real thing, being that they are too scared to, or have a piss test at work next week, or who’ve been living as American (or European, Canadian, et cetera)  hikikomori for so long they don’t have friends who’ll help them find good drugs, or maybe just happened to be people of the ‘Did That Already And Don’t Need To Do More” camp (these folks will be the ones most entertained, naturally.)

I recently began compiling a list – I’ve been reading Cracked too damn long…lists! – of  “People Who Provide Us With Gonzo Drug Culture That Are Neither Dead Nor Senile” – Steve Aylett being, so far, the only name on it, but that’s because I just started the damn thing. I think Mr. Brockway deserves a slot, for sure…though to show he, like most of them, also does other stuff, you can go look at his blog called I Fight Robots.

When Your Computer Starts Smoking, Start Smoking Your Computer.

This afternoon, I decided to start washing my clothes in the bathtub instead of going to a laundromat, to save money. In the process of looking for instructions on how to do this right, I ran into the great source of “how-to” info, Instructibles. Before I started doing laundry, however, I inevitably answered the internet’s siren song of procrastination-inducement and started clicking and reading other entries. I figured, after all, that I’d be giving myself a good education in practical know-how…

I read about several nifty things I could do to make stuff, including a cat feeder, before I ran into the site’s contest pages. They’ve just finished running a Dead Computer Contest – involving various projects you can do to (well…duh) re-use dead computers. It’s managed to get quite a few entries, describing all manner of things I’d never have thought computers could be turned into.

And while you probably also never would have thought of making a bong out of one…well, hey, if you can make an aquarium out of an old Mac, why not a bong? It would likely be a little unwieldy to use, in practice, because of its size…but it makes an entertaining novelty, for certain. Thanks and props to Instructibles member kirkfog for this: apparently, it was his first post there, ever. (If anyone happens to be reading this before the 13th of March 2010, take a couple of minutes to go and give him a vote!)

Sad Day For Interrobang Lovers

Leave it to the bloody ONDCP to go and make the interrobang uncool:

It’s their new logo for a new decade. I guess they figure it makes them look edgy and hip or something. It doesn’t. It makes them look exactly like they are trying really hard to be perceived that way.

I also just found out that Comcast, which happens to be my internet provider, is a Proud Corporate Sponsor for the “Timetotalk.org” site. Oh, swell.

This means I need to do two things: shunt them a customized copy of the letter in the last post…and then, start looking for another damn net-pipe provider. I really hate it when I am the one who ends up paying for this shit with more than just tax dollars. One must be ever-vigilant if such things are to be avoided.

ONDCP Nation

I wrote the following letter tonight to the folks at The Nation.

Dear Editors:

Today I was reading The Nation’s article on the underappreciated progressive victories that have happened in the past decade – and nodding my head as I came to its reminder of the Obama administration’s change of attitude regarding drug prohibition. 

Ironically enough: while I was reading it, the “Timetotalk.org” ad from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America popped up on the page’s random-targeted-ad rota. It was an unpleasant shock to see that running on the pages of such a progressive and rational site as The Nation. All  federal anti-drug ads are issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) which does not, contrary to its misleading name, formulate “national drug control policy” since it’s not connected to the legislative branch of the federal government; it’s an executive branch office, with its ‘czar’ handpicked by the President.  A more proper name for it might be “Office of Neurotic Drug Connected Propaganda”.

Why must you run ads pointing to propaganda from the office of the (anti-) “Drug Czar?” I wouldn’t be surprised if they paid you a lot of money to do it… but if it was actually motivated by a desire to run anti-drug public service ads, can’t you please choose something from a source that’s got a history of providing more truthful, balanced information that people can actually trust, instead of ads from an office whose job it is to discourage all drug use and legalization no matter what it takes? Even if it only hires researchers who will bring them negative data, and thus structure their experiments to be more likely to find facts that ‘prove’ pot is dangerous…which nearly every honest study completely contradicts? If you must run anti-drug PSAs, find some from a different source which does not have a track record of pumping out half-truths at best and outright lies as often as is deemed necessary.

The ONDCP is obviously under pressure from both pharm corps and liquor companies to help keep a non-patentable medicine that people could grow in their own back yards from becoming legal at a time when the nation is more and more open, with each passing year, to supporting this move.  Now that vaporizers have been invented, there’s not even the need to smoke it in a way that damages the lungs any more.  The ONDCP is a waste of money, at a time when it ought to be saved for far more important things than ineffectual silly TV and web spots that kids just laugh at anyway. But lying about drugs is their worst sin, no matter what your feelings on drug use, or about drug users, happen to be. If you lie to kids about pot, do you think they’re going to trust you if you tell them how bad heroin is?

Maybe the lower-level employees of this organization  think of themselves as merely good people who chose a career that would help to protect vulnerable youth from lifetimes of crime.  ONDCP materials sometimes take a “science-based” approach, but the ONDCP assigns its researchers to only bring them negative data. This is  a corruption of the basic research process, because a pre-ordained ideology is undermining the experimental process, right from the start. ONDCP-paid scientists will not even be likely to publish study data independently that could suggest cannabis has positive medical value–for then their employer would never want another word from them again.  They are ordered to not only cover up positive information, but also to do their best to not even notice it when they find it. In so doing, they have stifled valuable research about the proven medicinal value of cannabis, including that based on the significant finds by EU and Canada-based researchers showing that components of cannabis may actually work to help prevent the growth of cancerous tumors. A nation with a sane drug policy would want this researched up, down and sideways!

The ONDCP – and its enforcement wing, the DEA – are the offices which exist to make sure it remains in the dark when a recreational substance might in at least some ways be good for you – and lie enough so that many people who use marijuana and know they’ve been lied to will sadly ignore the facts about the drugs that can actually be quite bad for you.

 

Should Have Taken Acid With You

This dude probably should have taken anything but alcohol, apparently.

Me Seek Weed

Cute. But I’m a little stumped about how the person who p-shopped this saw a letter “G” in that cannabis leaf.

///shroogle///

The Amusement Park Mantra

I saw a question asked at Plinky, a blogger’s springboard service, which asked: “What’s the best theme park you’ve ever been to?”, which reminded me of this. I answered “LSD”.

When it then asked me to qualify my answer, I wrote the following:

If you’ve ever been to “Park Psychedelic” yourself, you won’t even need me to qualify this answer.  You already have your “E” ticket on this one.  (Or your “L” ticket, more like…)

Of course, there are  lots of people come to Park Psychedelic and go straight to the equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, or the original Willy Wonka Chocolate Riverbooat, and decide – naturally – they will never come back.

It’s not all scary like that, though, and the parts that are scary tend to be a lot less so if you manage to keep hold of the thought that it’s all just an amusement park ride. It’s an altered state. You will come back from it. It’s an irreal adventure produced by your mind at the behest of a drug.

I am not posting this to be excessively irreverent about an experience that ought not to be thought of as just another party drug adventure. It’s because this is information that might actually help someone quell a bad trip before it lands them in the hospital. The hospital is one place you don’t ever want to be in on acid.

The mantra:

“It’s only a bad dream. It’s only a movie. It’s just a bad amusement park ride. It’s only a drug.”

Scrooge McCzar’s Christmas Adventure

What a great link to find a few days before Christmas. This rendition of the Dickens classic is actually also a Cartoon History of Drug Prohibition: A Drug War Carol – which is also available as a book.

Definitely, have a peek at this, and pass it to anyone you think could use some education on the subject.

And happy Winter Holidays from Outlaw Anodyne. Burn a “tree” if ya got one, and get lit up.

Albert Hofmann To Steve Jobs

It would be hard to read this and still try to deny LSD has positive potential.

Whatever you think of Macintoshes, or Apple Computer as it exists nowadays, it’s a fact that the first Macs are pretty much what brought computers, graphical user interfaces and people into contact with one another. Windows and Linux then followed suit. So the computer you are likely reading this on was initially invented by someone who not only has tripped on acid, but calls that experience one of the few really important things to ever happen to him.

I have to wonder if Steve Jobs ever had any contact with Timothy Leary, who shifted his focus from LSD to computers at least in the public eye after he got out of prison in the 1970s.

Danish Drug Users Are “Unionized”

The Danish Drug User Union site makes me wonder for the fifty-umpteenth time if there is any hope of leaving the United States with its conservative conspiracies and con-jobs, and emigrating to Europe (or Canada) some day. It seems like the users there have allowed themselves to come out of the shadows and ask to be treated like human beings.

I think that it is when people begin to listen to the inner critic that runs a shame routine on them about being drug users – no matter what sorts of drugs they’re using – that they begin not to bother to take care of themselves. They’re assuming that no matter what else they do, if they’re drug users–or even ex-users–they are part of the lowest rung of society there can possibly be, and will never be trusted or admired by anyone.

I wonder how much of the mass psychology of the “drug problem” is actually connected in various ways to this never-ending inner “shame voice” that’s run into the collective psyche of users, which started all the way from the time we’re children and continues right up to this very day? People who feel good about themselves tend to do good things for themselves–and also for others. Convince drug user to be ashamed of themselves, with their redemption completely contingent upon them no longer using, and you start getting people who go through their days having a lot less reason to care about anything. I wonder how much of that non-caring gets automatically attributed to the drugs themselves?

The Danish DU Union has an Opiate Museum. This is an actual building with exhibits in it; it’s not just a website. Imagine seeing a historical collection of paraphernalia, pharmaceuticals and the packaging thereof…Wow. What an interesting place that would be to visit, for someone like me…

I’ve been through the heroin wringer. That was actually 20 years ago, now. I’ve avoided falling back into the spoon by staying on methadone since I quit. There’s a lot of badmouthing methadone, by people who aren’t familiar with it, or who just never saw it work for someone before, but it is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually kept anyone from backsliding without spending their entire lives 24/7/365 in NA meetings. (There is some indication buprenorphine [suboxone] may be doing this for some addicts, now, too–but generally it is not given to long-term methadone patients unless they get off the methadone first, because it has naltrexone in it to prevent people from shooting it up.)

Methadone doesn’t work for all addicts. Some can’t get used to the fact methadone doesn’t get you high like heroin; it only really quells the stupid jones, and keeps addicts from getting sick if they’re getting off dope, and keeps them from wanting heroin in the first place, if it’s doing what it’s supposed to.

That was enough for me. I’d had enough of the junkie life because it was like a full-time job, but provided even less reward, once the physical addiction set in. I never speak of addiction to things people just like a whole lot. Addiction, to me, is when your body and mind just break down completely when the dope stops flowing. It’s not when you just “feel depressed” without it. You can’t be addicted to marijuana, or psychedelics. Even methamphetamine, called addictive by most people, really mostly just makes the user just get really tired after ceasing its use. And whoever said “cigarettes are more addictive than heroin” never has been addicted to heroin, obviously.

I’m not that impressed with the opiate high as an experience–I suppose in those first six months or so, it was fun, and felt good, but it’s not what I’d call interesting. In retrospect, it would’ve been much better had I managed to avoid it–and that would be true even if it didn’t have that nasty withdrawal syndrome. I don’t like what heroin does to memory. I can remember a lot of the stuff that happened in 1991. I remember the places I’d gone and the things that happened to me, but the saved memories aren’t viscerally connected to sense impressions or to emotivity. This means they feel greyed-out, compared to the memories before and after heroin.

This is why I believe methadone is a good maintenance drug for addicts, and that it’s not just replacing heroin with a different drug that’s just like it. The post-heroin years, which I have spent on methadone maintenance, have not left this grey quality to my memories of them. When I hear music from 1996, I can feel it. When I smell something that reminds me of something from 2002, I can feel it. This does not apply to the years 1990 through 1992, the shrouded years of being on the chiva.

It would appear that the Danes understand the harm reduction concept pretty well. What really impresses me, though, is how people are gathering there under the rubric of their being users. They even sponsored an event last year called International Drug User’s Day. (October 30th.)

What Chuckie Cheese Snarfs

Always had a feeling pure cane sugar might be this child-stalking rat’s drug o’ choice. He’s such a dork, he can’t even cut his lines properly.

That’s one way to go about feeding a jones.

Something about this is definitely oxymoronic. How many crackheads can hold a job?

Found through Worst of the Web!.

DC to Free Medpot?

Apparently, the Democrats have copied an underhanded strategy from the conservatives: the practice of attaching unrelated riders to important budget bills.

I always found that practice somewhat galling…but maybe that’s just because I’ve always seen it used to sneak ugly legislation past the radar instead of things like this. Ending prohibition is an uphill battle, even with the change of climate we’re experiencing nowadays. Maybe this is what it’s going to take, sometimes.

Congress to censor itself against reform talk?

This alert showed up at LEAP’s site:

This is urgent. The Senate could vote as soon as this week on an amendment to ban the government's own advisers from even discussing drug legalization! Take action at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com/censorship

This sort of thing shows that the prohibitionists hear the rumblings Middle America is beginning to make suggesting it might finally be cluing in to the idea that fighting a war against people who want to use drugs has been, and will continue to be, a failure.

Up until now, they’d never have to try to pass a law like this. There’d have been no need to. Congress has always censored itself, when it comes to even considering legalization.

This year, the push to legalize pot has gone farther than it ever has before. Would that be enough to scare Congress into voting for something like an act of self-censorship? Really, this can’t be allowed to get far. This is what Twitter is for, folks. Use it.

Renovation

After about four years of non-existence, Anodyne is back.

In the interim time that Anodyne wasn’t around, someone else snapped up the name “Anodyne”, so now the Blog on Drugs you may have known if you ever happened to land on a website called Involution.org is now called Outlaw Anodyne.

Since it’s about drugs which tend to be illegal, the reason for the name should be obvious.

When this blog was around in its old incarnation, the whole blogging trip was a whole lot simpler. I started “blogging” in 1999, during the first year that the original Blogger site first broke out, and pretty much the whole “blogosphere” existed on the servers of Blogger.com, and a few other now-defunct outfits. Now, there’s not only about a zillion blogs and a million places to put them, but we now have XML and “social networking” connecting every website you frequent to every other website you frequent.

Outlaw Anodyne is probably not going to have all that newfangled stuff on it – at least not for a while. It’s all I can do just to get used to the complexities of WordPress. Especially since most of the time, these days, I’m a lot more sober than I really wish to be.

Posting shall begin in a few minutes or hours or maybe days.