Like many people that haphazardly wandered into the cannabis lifestyle, I picked up a few bad habits along the way. And while some of them--an ability to relax into a near comatose state often confused as laziness and simply enjoy things and an unhealthy fixation on eating potato chips--have been easy to re-contextualize and mitigate, the nastiest of them, smoking, has been an unavoidable and predominantly negative consequence of the fateful decision.
Blame it on the refocusing effect of that post-toke smoke, the easy bar-adjacent socializing, the stimulation of dopaminergic reward pathways in my brain or blame it on a simple lack of willpower, through the year or so I have been smoking I have been waxing and waning through alternate states of enjoyment, despair and hatred, all the while unwilling or unable to give it up and all the while the pain in my lungs getting worse.
This particular story starts in the continued discussion of a particular website, Slate, on a particular drug, nicotine. Perusing their archives one day, a few heretofore unknown facts became clear: 1. the Americans are fucking around with cigarette laws again; 2. There is a buzz about "harm reduction" methods, a long-time standby of the med-weed camp; and 3. Obama is fighting an publicly admitted nicotine addiction.
As odd and partially encouraging to the drug war as some of these facts were, they weren't even the highlight of the session. What struck most odd was the article context-linked at the bottom of one of the stories--one about junk food and taxes. If an article about junk food in a populist magazine doesn't sound particularly new and intriguing, well, it wasn't; what was, though, was the discussion surrounding the proposed new treatment and classification of junk food--specifically, soda pop--by the FDA.
In 1994 raves were in the middle of a media frenzy. The underground was found out and exposed. I can’t think of a better example of the Reagenist Just Say No Era than the episode of Saved By the Bell – The College Years in which the gang decides to hold a rave on campus.
Of course Screech is pressu…
Last Updated on Wednesday, 16 September 2009 23:27
Less than ten pages into PiHKAL--a book that could rightfully be considered the chief canonical text of the modern psychedelic movement--author Alexander Shulgin, popularizer of MDMA and primum mobile of almost every club drug to have gained clout since its subsequent scheduling in the mid-eighties,…
I returned the comment with a fairly-confused look and an eventual "Thank You," as Shambhala would be the last place where I'd expect to receive a compliment for a shirt with art from progressive Metal group Tool on it. After all, this is a festival dedicated to cultivating peace, love and understanding through generally-uplifting electronic music; even Tool's socially-conscious and very trippy guitar-driven sounds would seem out of place if played through any sound system there. Granted, given the heavy psychedelic content of both Tool's music and that particular festival, the probability of finding at least one Tool fan would be likely rather high, especially in such a diverse crowd.
But it got weirder than merely being complimented on my rather-Metal shirt at a rather-Trance-y festival; both myself and those I camped with noticed the trend all weekend long: there were Tool t-shirts everywhere. What on God's Green Earth were all these metal heads doing at Shambhala?
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