Professional Skateboarder Sees God After Shrooms
June 8th, 2009 by Rick
In an interview last Wednesday, professional skateboarder Jereme Rogers apologized for his the actions from early Monday morning of that week, when he took some mushrooms, stripped off his boxers and wound up preaching naked on the rooftop of his house in Redondo Beach. Luckily police were able to snatch him to safety before he wound up seriously hurting himself.
Rogers, the 24-year old athlete said:
It obviously was not an everyday experience. [...] It was a very out-of-body experience. I’ve never had an experience like that. [...] It was obviously something I shouldn’t have done. It was just something that happened. [...] I literally was walking on the edge. [...] They said my balance was amazing.
Redondo Beach police Lt. Jim Acquarelli and other officers were attempting to bring him down without incident. Lt. Acquarelli noticed that Rogers had a tattoo that read “In God We Trust.” Talking about his own religious experiences, the Lt. gained Roger’s attention and the officers were able to grab him.
Lt. Acquarelli said:
He would have fragmented, interrupted conversations with people that weren’t there. [...] He never lost his balance. [...] The potential was there for it. If he had taken a few negligible steps to the right, that would have impeded his balance and would have led to his demise.
Rogers was not arrested and was under 72-hour observation at County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center — charges may be pending. During the interview, Rogers rolled a marijuana joint but didn’t smoke it in front of the reporter saying that he was a medical marijuana patient and registered card holder.
Joe Rogan Obliterates Weed Opponents
June 2nd, 2009 by RussUsually relegated to giggling while a Fear Factor contestant attempts to down a glass of bird turd and tonic, Joe Rogan happens to be an eloquent advocate of marijuana. While many weed historians seek to blame the villainous Harry J Anslinger for stoking the fires of early 20th century drug crusades, Rogan targets more pragmatic opponents of marijuana in his LA local radio rant.
According to Rogan, potential large-scale industrialization of hemp threatened to unseat the logging and tree paper industries as a cheaper, more environmentally viable source of textiles and paper. This caused newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst to begin a propaganda campaign against this ’strange Mexican weed,’ to protect his financial interests. Once Hearst had created the necessary fear and political will to eradicate the plant, Anslinger was appointed to the task.
The history lesson is only a warm up for Rogan, however. He goes on to implicate alcohol companies, the US government, and modern forces of civilization as all being party to a species-wide conspiracy to prevent humans from truly knowing themselves by experimenting with psychedelics.
The eleven minute rant is worth infinitely more than you can absorb from countless hours of his UFC commentary. As with many professionals, you need to catch this guy on his off-hours to hear something genuinely insightful.
The Strange Case of Doctor Ecstasy
May 22nd, 2009 by ErinAlthough I’d never heard of Dr. Alexander Shulgin until now, I really wish I had. We can thank Shulgin for creating over 200 psychedelic compounds, a pair of memoir/cookbooks called PHiKAL and TiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved, and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved), and for reintroducing us all to ecstasy in 1976; a drug that had been considered useless when it was patented in 1914.
So how many times has Shulgin been arrested? Surprisingly, never. The compounds were not illegal when he created them — the DEA hadn’t heard of them yet. From the 50s through the 80s, he actually had the DEA’s full support and a DEA-issued Schedule I research license until PHiKAL was published in 1993. They weren’t too stoked on that; his lab was raided and his license revoked.
An experience with mescaline in 1960 attributed to his unconventional field of research.
He described that everything he saw and thought:
Had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid… I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.
Dr. Shulgin still views himself as a scientist; just maybe a little more exploratory and unafraid to test on himself. He prides himself on the identification and classification of a slew of psychedelic compounds previously unbeknownst to mankind.
New Search Engine Studies Psychedelics
April 30th, 2009 by Russ
Nearly 40 years have passed since luminaries like Timothy Leary and Alan Watts have used LSD and psilocybin in a rigorous exploration of human “inner space.” Now, a new academic research tool called PsyComp will continue their work and boldly go where no search engine has gone before.
PsyComp seeks to be the first online resource to aid students searching for ‘educational pathways into psychedelic research.’ It is currently compiling a searchable database of undergraduate-level, psychedelics-related courses in such fields as pharmacology, cognitive science, and botany.
While institutional support for such scholastic projects remains sparse, a few intrepid PhDs have laid the groundwork for future forays through the doors of perception. In his essay, So, You Want to be a Psychedelic Researcher? [Warning: .pdf] Dr. Andrew Sewell offers the following cautions to potential future students.
First, examine your motives for entering psychedelic research. Is it because psychedelics are novel and cool? While Dr. Timothy Leary, perhaps the most famous of the psychedelic researchers, found it a route to enduring fame and hot sex with large numbers of young women, he did this primarily though his showmanship rather than his scientific research. If such a lifestyle is appealing to you, there are shorter routes to this goal than decades of scholarly study.
Despite the warnings, Sewell acknowledges that many great minds have come by history-making discoveries via altered brain states.
Scientists such as Ralph Abraham, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Andrew Weil, and Nobel Prize winners such as Francis Crick, Richard Feynman, and Kary Mullis have found psychedelics valuable tools in formulating their great discoveries… [Also], the discovery of LSD was what sparked interest in the serotonin system and prompted the explosive growth of modern psychopharmacology that continues today.
And now, it seems, these potential pathways to knowledge and enlightenment will be made available to the internet public, at large. It’s a Brave New World Wide Web out there.
Drug Dealing May Be World’s Second Oldest Profession
October 20th, 2008 by Perry
Avoiding as many Stone Age puns as I can, archaeologists found equipment used to prepare hallucinogenic drugs for sniffing, and dated them back to prehistoric South American tribes.
The discovery was located in the Carribean Islands and are thought to be made in South America circa 400-200 B.C., and then carried 400 miles to the islands where they were primarily used for ritualistic purposes.
They found ceramic bowls, as well as tubes for inhaling drug fumes or powders, which appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried 400 miles to the islands.
Scientists believe that the drug being used was cohoba, a hallucinogen made from the beans of a mimosa species. Drugs such as cannabis were not found in the Caribbean then.
Opiates can be obtained from species such as poppies, while fungi, which was widespread, may also have been used.Archeologists have suggested that humans were extracting mind-expanding drugs from mescal beans and peyote cacti as far back as 5,000 years ago, but have not found direct evidence that this is true.
Which drugs were used is still under speculation, but scientists have reasoned guesses based on the agriculture available to the farmers.
Psychadelics and Spirituality at DoseNation
October 14th, 2008 by PerryInteresting video with noted, if not eccentric, quantum physicist Nick Herbert talking about the psychadelic experience, mind states, and the label “drugs.”
I always find it intriguing when legitimately intelligent people recount their experience with mind altering substances. Like Nick said, if they trusted him with plutonium, why not LSD?
