Too lifted to read the news? Every week, we recap the most interesting news in the world of intoxicants, illegal or not. To inform, to liberate. …
1. The Thai boys soccer team went from hole to k-hole. As the 12 boys were hauled out of the cave by divers, they were sedated with ketamine, one of the British divers told the New Zealand Herald. The identity of the substance used to sedate them had been a mystery, previously described as either an anti-anxiety med or a muscle relaxant. Ketamine has both properties. Ketamine is also a promising anti-depressant and can feel heavenly at Bassnectar shows.
2. Is the opioid epidemic slowing down? A new report found the rate of opioid addictions for members of Blue Cross Blue Shield stabilized, and possibly dropped slightly in 2017. Is that the beginning of a trend?
3. A giant marijuana company went public and made bank. Ontario-based Tilray, which harvested seven tons of cannabis last year, saw its stock price rise 30 percent in one day. The company is valued at over $2.5 billion, and its product is being sold in 10 countries. The center of the cannabis world is in Canada now.
4. Burning Man tries to get less shitty, as the acid-and-pyromania festival in a Nevada desert asked its twisted hippies to take dumps in plastic baggies rather than just dook in the middle of the Playa. BM has lots of Port-o-Potties for BMs, but who has time or coordination to walk all the way to a bathroom when you're coming up with the cosmos — or going down on a nasty hippy dude named Cosmo?
5. Psychedelic supporters continued to get juiced over a paper saying that LSD and DMT regrow brain cells, hopeful that a whole new class of brain-helping drugs can be developed from drugs once thought to fry your brain.
6. An old paper showing how drugs affect spiders' web-spinning skills re-circulated on the Internet. All the illicit drugs made the spider webs less organized, including marijuana, caffeine and large doses of LSD. But, notably, small doses of LSD made the webs more regular and organized. In other words: spiders were on to the LSD microdosing trend decades before the rest of us.
7. A chick slinging fentanyl-coke got snatched by the long arm of the law at Camp Bisco in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The woman, Angela Masotti, was two years ago charged with selling meth at Electric Forest festival in Michigan. Festy folk don't like fent in their non-opioid drug. Frightens them.
8. Folks steal their dogs' opioids, and veterinarians were asked to step in and stop owners from purloining their pooches stash.
9. Oklahoma's Republican leaders cockblocked its own voters, saying that it won't allow the green medicine in smokable form.
10. The DEA released its annual list of slang drug terms. The list's many mistakes and omissions reminds you that DEA agents don't do drugs. But it did call meth "biker's coffee," Adderall "study Skittles" and "kiddie cocaine," LSD "mind detergent" and PCP "Ashy Larry," all of which are wonderful words.
11. Many people at EDM shows who think they've taken molly have actually taken bath salts, a new study showed. Researchers tested the EDM kids' saliva, and they were as likely to find cathinones as MDMA. Cathinones are quasi-legal drugs structurally similar to MDMA. Sometimes sold as "bath salts" or "pet food" to trick law enforcement, bath salts got a bad rap for causing cannibalism. (Allegedly.)
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