Too lifted to read the news? Every week, we recap the most interesting news in the world of drugs. To inform, to liberate.
1. The War on Drugs better raid the local bar, as the deadliest psychoactive substance continues to be — for the 10,000th year on record — booze. That's right, your friendliest neighborhood killer ain't heroin, ain't crack, ain't that merry jane, it's that Bud, that Coors, that Hennessey. A huge new global report says that alcohol kills 2.8 million people a year globally, and no amount of sloppy sauce is safe. DEA announces plans to spray Agent Orange on Napa Valley wine country. Kidding.
2. Hangovers are bad for learning, no duh, as the Institute for Obvious Research — we believe that's the name of the outfit — released a study finding that hungover students sucked at a computerized gambling task. The problem is that the part of the brain that gets excited about rewards dimmed, records of their brain electrical activity showed. With the students having drunk an average of six beers the night before, researchers were honestly lucky the kids showed up for the study at all.
3. Compared to alcohol, weed is pretty harmless, but it's not totally harmless, as national surveys say that perhaps one in 10 people who use pot will have problems regulating their own use. We went to a Stoner's Anonymous meeting a while back and heard some stories (and also got flack for writing about an ANONYMOUS group).
4. Pot smokers riding dirty, as one in seven Canadian cannabis users admits to driving high. They could crash and hit something, although, if they do, they'll only be driving four miles an hour. Many Canadians have the same thought, as one in 10 said weed makes you "a more careful driver." Rooster Magazine always takes Lyft or pays Amish wagon drivers to get us around.
5. Small-town cops on the road to Black Rock City set up drug checkpoints to bust Burners, man.
6. One of those finger-licking 12 herbs and spices might be methamphetamine, as a KFC building on the Arizona-Mexico border was found to be the entrance to a drug smuggling tunnel across the border. Before you check your Famous Bowl for fentanyl, know that this KFC had been closed for a while. The owner of the shell of a building was found with three kilos of fentanyl in this car, enough for three million solid doses. How you gonna stop three kilos when there are tunnels through the fast food restaurants? Smuggling drugs is easier than going through the drive-thru. Maybe legalize drugs already?
7. Coloradans pushing those psychedelics, as advocates in the state that legalized marijuana (you're welcome everybody) continued to raise awareness of their attempts to get psilocybin on the Denver ballot in May 2019, and also to let folks with life-threatening illnesses know about their "right to try" mushrooms, MDMA and LSD. Psychedelic Club of Denver and the Nowak Society held an informational session in the chic Invisible City space. Doctors, nurses and therapists filled the chairs. It was all very profesh.
8. Psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms that makes you think the cactus is talking to you, is now approved for clinical trials in the United States. Magic mushrooms can help depression. It could be legal in a few years to undergo psilocybin therapy, in which you sit in a room and trip with a therapist and several talking cactuses (we assume).
9. Scientists explore using psychedelics with hypnosis for therapeutic purposes. They're calling it "hypnodelics." Dose. Look into my eyes. Release your fears. Now quack like a duck.
10. Duterte, the Filipino murderer-president, was accused of murder at the International Criminal Court in the Hague for killing alleged drug users. Duterte don't care; he withdrew his country from the court this spring.
11. And, finally, as Rooster Magazine's weekly reminder that drugs can be all fun and games until someone gets addicted and loses everything, here's a video of a teen going through heroin withdrawals:
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