Today I (largely) finished The Dance Music Manual, a big textbook on how electronic dance music is produced, from math and physics through machinery and software to psychoacoustics, aesthetics, and culture:

Although both these genres are still produced and played in clubs to this day, the increased popularity of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA or “E”) amongst clubbers inevitably resulted in new forms of trance being developed. Since this pharmaceutical stimulates serotonin levels in the brain, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to place clubbers into states of trance with tribal rhythms, and instead the melodies became more and more exotic, slowly taking precedence over every other element in the mix.

The book is hilariously written in parts — the author makes no distinction between the words “subsequently” and “consequently”, for example — and so it requires some interpretation to really understand. The included CD, while not required, is interesting listening if you want to hear tracks being built and instruments being synthesized.

It’s rare that I run into a book which is perfectly suited to my competence in a subject. Most are too simple, some are too complex. This book provided me with exactly what I needed, including the first-ever cogent argument I’ve heard against weed: since weed makes music better, don’t smoke it while learning to compose — it’ll impair your critical faculties.

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.

[Update from comments: my math is for shit. The costume still stands though.]

Drunk driving limit: 0.08 BAC.
Considered fatal: 3.5 BAC.
Winehouse: 4.16 BAC.

When she died, her blood was stronger than most (all?) American beers. This gives me an idea for a Halloween costume: the vampire that found Amy Winehouse. Basically you dress as a vampire and then get shitfaced.

Vegas went well.

When McLuhan writes that humans use technology to create the environment, that electrical technology in particular provides a medium whose content is a previous medium, and that the medium is itself the message, you’d think he grew up in Vegas instead of Western Canada.

Vegas exists because of technology, mostly electric light and air conditioning. As a city it contains multiple duplicates of other cities (some fictional): New York, Venice, Paris, Cairo, Rome, Camelot. It celebrates spectacle, is itself a spectacle, and there is only one message: money.

Vegas is so hyperreal and other-worldly that not only is technology environment, environment becomes technology: they pump oxygen into the gambling area to keep everyone happy, awake, and satiated (though it seems the oxygen bar fad has now passed). You don’t get tired or hungry in Vegas, not without outsized effort.

My occasional forays into the ultra-capitalist environment almost always end up philosophical. Last time a buddy and I walked down The Strip waving off the ubiquitous offers of “LIVE GIRLS DIRECT TO YOUR ROOM” and discussed L’Étranger and the relative benefits of a flight to Las Vegas versus a pair of skinny jeans (a purely academic point in my case).

This time another friend and I wondered at the sameness of utilitarian capitalism and Canada’s workaday socialism. Whereas socialists like public transportation so people can get to places where they’re economically useful, cheaply; the ultra-capitalist casinos offer complimentary transportation to get people to places where they’re more economically useful, cheaply. Indoctrination runs deep on both sides: no judgements.

I learned some new facets of my game of choice: table selection really IS that important, worth approx. 500x the big blind over a session, or about $100/hr in real terms; my comfortable game requires the maximum buy-in; and sometimes people give off weak tells when they miss the board and decide to hang on — bullying them based on their stink of fear, alone, isn’t enough (sometimes the big dog actually has to kill).

One thing Vegas should do, really my only critique, is legalize drugs. I’m too terrified of the prison-industrial complex to actually break the law down there, but I always find myself wanting something more than caffeine, cigars, and alcohol. I’m sure I could find it, but I’d rather not have to.

Insite won its court case!

In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that not allowing the clinic to operate under an exemption from drug laws would be a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Suck it, enemies of science, freedom, and humanity!

“Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven. There has been no discernable negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation,” the ruling said, written by chief justice Beverly McLachlin.

Another interesting example of drug economics is the cutting of cocaine with a drug called levamisole (first follow-up, second follow-up). Levamisole is a superior cutting agent because it passes most of the tests for cocaine purity and survives the conversion into crack*. It even appears to potentiate cocaine, so cocaine cut with levamisole is close in potency to pure cocaine. Unfortunately, levamisole is an immune modulator that occasionally causes user’s immune systems to shut off.

The cocaine industry used to be vertically integrated, so the same organizations handled the product from leaf to street distribution. Under vertical integration, it is most efficient to smuggle cocaine before cutting increases its volume and then cut right before distribution to customers who are not qualified to assess purity.

Law enforcement broke up the vertically integrated organizations into separate players at each stage of the supply chain. So the organizations that convert coca leaves into powdered cocaine increase their profit by cutting before sale to smugglers. Levamisole is the only cutting agent the smugglers can’t detect.

This is a good example of how mere decriminalization of cocaine, like Portugal has done, does not minimize harm to users (and does nothing to help supplier countries). Government should regulate the entire international trade, all the way back to the plantations (I’m guessing they already do this for medical-grade cocaine?). Then you could buy certified organic, fair trade, shade grown cocaine.

* Yes, crack is better for you than powdered cocaine cut with something toxic – welcome to the perverse world of prohibition.

I’m just finishing up The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman, a book about his results and experiences administering DMT in a clinical setting during the mid-1990s.

First let me say this: the book is crazy. I question Dr. Strassman’s methodologies from experimental design all the way through to footnoting the book. If you do read it, make sure to follow the footnotes — there’s an effect whereby something footnoted looks more legit, but the notes in this thing trade on that power without backing it. Footnotes like, “I couldn’t find anything to support this.”

Strassman’s theories begin with the scientific and verifiable and end well within the realm of the spiritual and untestable. Part of this is by design, and part of it is because of the nature of the material studied. Strassman believes that a proper study of psychedelics is very nuanced. The first section, for example, begins with a lengthly discussion of the language used to frame psychedelic drug research and how that has the potential to affect the outcomes of that research.

From there Strassman discusses the chemical structures of various psychedelics (it turns out that DMT has a simple, perhaps minimal, psychedelic structure) and the biological processes through which DMT acts on the body and brain.

This leads into Rick’s quest to obtain regulatory approval to produce pure DMT, to get permission to test it on human subjects, and to design the experimental protocols in use through the rest of the book. The dose response study, for example, involved a double-blind series of doses determined relative to body weight, not absolute drug mass.

Then things get weird. Patients start reporting fairly consistent drug experiences, which allows Strassman to guide them with some success. Until, that is, they start meeting entities (machine elves, clowns, and saguaro-beings — the last of which I once encountered). At this point Rick begins discussing them with patients as though the beings are manifestations of internal mental processes. This is never met well by the patients (though my saguaro-demon was a manifestation of my own fear), leading to a loss of rapport with Strassman.

Leary’s set and setting theory governs Strassman’s experimental design — the circumstances of ingestion being as key to the total experience as the actual drug — so a loss of rapport between the experimenter and the subject is a large problem. From then on Strassman decides to take entity contact reports at face value. It is here the book moves from the Pop Sci section of the bookstore to New Age.

So The Spirit Molecule, as indicated by the name, ends up with a lot of pseudoreligion and spiritualistic speculation (some of which I quite like). Strassman’s experiment design was also filtered through his buddhist practice (babysitting a tripper being an exercise in calm mindfulness) and he chronicles his essential excommunication from the community once his research gets close enough to their concerns. For example, can psychedelics offer a shortcut, albeit temporary, to an enlightenment experience — and will we strive not harder for the peak, having once glimpsed the vista?

The final part of the book is on future directions for experimental and clinical uses of psychedelics. These ruminations are very interesting. They indicate that the psychological, psychiatric, spiritual, religious, personal, and social aspects of psychedelics, while worth studying individually, are inextricably tangled. Psychedelics have fewer negative and more positive effects than opponents traditionally assume and also fewer positives and more negatives than proponents typically believe.

After Rick Doblin, Gabor Maté spoke about using ayahuasca to treat addictions. Maté is the closest thing to a celebrity doctor working in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

Maté was very careful to distinguish between “ayahuasca” as a ceremony that includes the use of naturally-occurring DMT and the drug itself. He doesn’t really care about experimental design or even the legality of importing psychotria plants into Canada. Much like a safe injection site, he thinks the treatment should be done because there have been positive results.

Someone asked the really interesting question of whether these ceremonies count as cultural appropriation, particularly in light of the popularity of Ayahuasca Tourism. The ceremonies are performed by residents of BC who have apprenticed under Peruvian shamans but Maté mentioned at least one that included BC First Nations ritual elements. Given that many addicts in BC are First Nations and the significant of First Nations in our province’s spiritual culture, I think it would make sense if these evolve into a hybrid ritual.

Maté only briefly compared ayahuasca with ibogaine, another hallucinogenic used in the treatment of addiction in Vancouver. From what I gather, ibogaine cures physical addiction but has less impact on the psychological cause of drug use in the first place. Although patients who participate in ayahuasca still have relapses without a follow-up support structure. Maté mentioned that he would like to try combining ibogaine and ayahausca.

Interestingly, Maté has participated in these ceremonies a number of times, which made me question his distinction between medical treatment, spiritual work and recreational drug use.

I went to a talk by Rick Doblin, the head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who has bachelor’s in psychology and a PhD in public policy. MAPS’s main project is the use of MDMA combined with talk therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in a small number of sessions.

Doblin had some interesting things to say about strategy. He pictures a progression in treatment groups from the most politically valuable to the least:

• Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, police and firefighters
• Sexual assault victims
• Terminal cancer patients
• Couples therapy (the original therapeutic use of MDMA)
• Individuals doing self-therapy for emotional issues or spiritual enlightenment (this will effectively require full legalization)

Doblin thinks MDMA is cognitively simpler than hallucinogens and therefore easier to use in therapy. The idea is to get it accepted by the therapeutic community and then introduce other psychedelics. And then once drugs have a history of safe therapeutic use we can start talking about legalization.

The DrugMonkey blog had a lot of criticism of the lack of rigor in MAPS’ initial exploratory testing. Now that they’re seeking US Food & Drug Administration approval, their experimental design has been beefed up:

• MAPS has developed a specific talk therapy protocol to be used with the MDMA. Therapy sessions are recorded and then scored by observers for adherence to the protocol.
• They’re comparing between patients who randomly receive one of three different doses: 25 mg, 75 mg and 120 mg. And then giving low-dose patients the opportunity to repeat the intervention with a higher dose.

The great comment (slightly edited) below was made on BoingBoing in response to this security fog warning:

This is actually just one component of a larger security scheme.

The fog contains a debilitating chemical, 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

At the same time that the fog is dispensed, the building lights flash on and off to attract the attention of nearby security patrols. Grids of lasers sweep through the area, to pinpoint where in the fog the perpetrators are.

Meanwhile, incredibly loud, pulsating music plays from hidden speakers to disorient the intruders and prevent them from communicating. A recorded voice instructs the intruders to put their hands in the air (to show law enforcement that they are unarmed) and then repeats the command: “get down, get down, get down”.