Not laudanum, not heroin, not oxycodone. This time Big Pharma is calling its refined opium hydrocodone — brand name “Zohydro” — and it’s ten times stronger than Vicodin. The theory is that it’s so strong people won’t have to take as much. Yeah, because that’s how humans think: “hey kids, this piece of candy is so great you can just eat one!”

“It’s like the wild west,” said Peter Jackson, co-founder of Advocates for the Reform of Prescription Opioids. “The whole supply-side system is set up to perpetuate this massive unloading of opioid narcotics on the American public.”

In the mean time a nonlethal plant is what’s illegal. Ridiculous.

Thursday was the day I was last sober, previous to today, Monday. The rest of the time I was sucking on a Launchbox from Jupiter.

I picked up the Launchbox at the suggestion of my doctor. Here’s how our initial social health meet-and-greet went down:

doctor: Do you smoke?
me: Just weed.
doctor: Switch to a vaporizer — it’s better for you than alcohol.

I’m on a long-term development contract for which billable hours are settled monthly, so I just recently got my first cheque. Jupiter is near where I work so I strolled in over lunch and got the skinny. I had tried to stop at another, even closer, store first but it was late opening: Jupiter was far more professional and I ended up topping off most of my ancillary supplies there (herbal nargila, coals, new grinder).

The box is very simple: a heating element controlled by a battery-button which you push on to juice. The battery’s anode and cathode are on the same side to facilitate this, and so they come with some rubber caps to stop pocket shorts and other random fires (and also a charger and a spare).

And, essentially, that’s it: weed goes into the box, heat goes into the weed, weed goes into the air, air sucks through a tube into your brain.

No smoke, no fire: and that’s also the catch. I’m used to smoking until I feel like I can’t smoke anymore, which it turns out is an effect of smoke. With vapor you can just go and go and go, which is why, I think, some people say vaporizers get you higher — there’s no practical barrier to continued consumption, and since weed is perfectly safe you can have as much as you like.

I’m a convert to vaporizers now, especially one this convenient: the time-until-smoking is equivalent to that of a pipe, as is the pocket-friendly size, and there’s no wait time or strange bag-sucking as with table units like the Volcano. At the end of the weekend I broke a personal rule — “no weed on school nights” — and had a couple of joints and one-hitters: the smoke, while fun and visually pleasing, left me with a sore throat and stinkbreath.

Four high-profile former mayors of Vancouver — Mike Harcourt, Sam Sullivan, Larry Campbell and Philip Owen — released a letter Wednesday pushing to decriminalize and regulate marijuana use in B.C.

Apparently. The argument is an oldie but a goodie:

A regulated market would enable governments to improve community health and safety while at the same time raising millions in tax revenue.

Insane right-wing Dutch nutjobs are trying to reclassify high-THC cannabis strains as drugs equivalent to cocaine and ecstasy.

Shameful.

Smoke as much as you can of the most potent cannabis you can find, then take as much low-grade cocaine as you can. Tell me which is worse.

Ha! Okay, you see the trap. Tell you what, replace cocaine with alcohol in that thought experiment: drink as much perfectly-legal alcohol as you can THEN tell me which is worse.

Oh wait, you can’t: both the illegal cocaine and the legal alcohol will kill you stone fucking dead, whereas no one anywhere has ever died from cannabis use. It’s not physically possible, because the LD50 of cannabis is impossible to consume — we’d need bigger bodies to pack it all in, and then the LD50 would be correspondingly higher.

The war on cannabis has something else behind it. I can’t decide what: ignorance, hatred, some combination, or something else. There’s no rationality to be found in it, and making plants illegal is straight-up retarded.

Via BB, it turns out that cannabis hyper-primes your brain [Narco Polo, see refs], making it easier to see distant connections.

Jill would be the first to jump in here: neuroscience doesn’t make subjective experience more real, it just makes it easier to write papers about because scientists prefer certain kinds of evidence.

What if “high thinking” didn’t make sense when you were sober because you had become too stupid to understand it? How’s that for a narrative shift? Plus, I can certainly imagine that a hyper-primed state would be more paranoiac — you’d be stretching towards connections that might not be there.

It would also explain why, anecdotally, several poker players I know find multi-level thinking (I know that you know that I know that you…) ridiculously simple on cannabis. My largest tournament wins have come when I was high, f’real.

Via BB, Rick Steves on pot:

July 1st is Cannabis Day. Stock up early.

Gatineau police smelled skunk, so conducted an armed raid of a family home:

“I opened the door and they all had their guns drawn,” MacQuat said.

Sure, it turned out that the skunk smell was just a skunk. But it gave the forces of prohibition an excuse to play with their guns and inspect a private dwelling in the Nation’s capital.

And not a single fuck was given (by the Hell’s Angels).

(via Ceebs)

Holes in Spanish drug laws identified by anti-prohibitionist free thinkers mean that cannabis clubs, similar to but more private than Dutch coffee shops, are now opening there.

The club also campaigns on laws. “Prohibition does not work. Cannabis has been consumed for centuries and will continue to be … for centuries. Prohibition creates an illegal market and all that brings with it. It’s better to educate people than spend money on prohibition that fails.”

Via a friend at a party it turns out that Holland’s new conservative government is considering banning tourists from coffee shops. Booooo!

Go now, and hurry: legal weed is a wonderful thing to see/participate in.

Oh, and, obviously: by banning the tourist trade the government is seeking to put all the remaining coffee shops out of business — there’s been a moratorium on new licenses in recent years.