We’ve looked at this in the past, and here is the summary of another new drugs-harm study as reported by the BBC:

One question (of several): Where’s caffeine, the most widely-abused drug in our society?

Next time you’re out drinking, think: why not just smoke a joint or pop an E instead? You’ll be doing yourself, and all of us, a favour.

… sounds awesome. We’ll prolly have to turf the Cons though…

It turns out that money CAN buy you happiness, and that happiness is cheaper if socialized. Scary thinking that I’d be getting happiness meds from the gov, but I’m dosed enough to no longer be THAT paranoid

As it is I get my happiness from a combination of private vendors and insurers and it’s effing ‘spensive.

I moved to London, Ontario just over a week and a half ago and took that opportunity to make three changes in my day-to-day way-of-being:

• First, I became a vegetarian.
• Second, I took up yoga.
• Third, in consultation with a doctor, I doubled my daily dose of Cipralex.

I list these changes together because they’re interrelated, or seem so — diet affects exercise affects mood affects diet and exercise. I am also planning to start a regimen of talk therapy, but I haven’t quite hooked that up yet.

I did all of this in part because I want to live a bit healthier and explore happier states of mind — and I do mean “explore”. One of the takeaways from my Day of Judgement (a class three psychedelic experience) was that similar states of mind were achievable “non-chemically” (not the right word, but I could digress infinitely). The trees with which I became friendly also indicated that I should do more yoga.

The doubling was also, in part, due to the expected higher-than-average levels of stress in my future, part of which is self-fulfilling. Stressing about art school makes creativity more difficult — so call it a few milligrams of lookahead.

Antidepressants give you perspective on your malaise, crank up the contrast. They let me notice the difference between what I’ll call cognitive sadness and emotional sadness. “Cognitive” being that brought on by bad thinking styles (this person is doing this because they hate me) and “emotional” being a pervasive feeling of hopelessness, or dread, or anxiety, or utter meaninglessness. The difference is that you can reasonably think your way out of cognitive sadness, but emotional sadness is part of the milieu within which you think — the water within which the fish of your self swims — part of “the way things are”.

And the drugs seem to have lifted that. “Seem” because maybe it was diet or exercise or film school or moving and because sometimes the haze descends again. Yesterday I started ranting about bureaucrats and ended up in a Randian “everyone smart or talented should go on strike” mode. As soon as I realized that Atlas was shrugging I forced myself to calm down.

But something I have noticed is that I am assuming a great deal less hostility and sarcasm in my day-to-day interactions. People seem to have suddenly gotten friendlier, and when they aren’t it doesn’t bug me as much. It is possible that this is because of a change of scenery and hanging out with people who are a good deal younger than me, or because Ontarians are just sweethearts. But this might have been happening before I left BC — I seem to remember a lot of great service before I left. Plus, it feels as though I would “normally” feel worse in my current environment.

I’m glad I don’t. It makes everything a lot easier, and energy spent worrying, daydream-plotting, and stressing is energy better spent elsewhere.

[Edit: Jill says I should give more credit to the healing touch of my therapist-girlfriend. She is right.]

Via BB, here’s a not-an-interview with “the greatest psychedelic chemist in the world”:

It’s largely unintelligible, but a fun backgrounder.

The school I’m going to was built on the former grounds of The London Asylum for the Insane. The buildings are still standing, and it might be a good place to film.

First, from Heritage London’s whitepaper, as a reason to preserve: “Impressive scale and architecture of Victorian period public buildings and landscape.”

Next, here are some notes from an MA thesis on the asylum:

“[Dr. Burke prescribed] opium, not alcohol, although it was found to be addictive, [lowered] appetite, and caused nausea. He prescribed cannabis for sleep.”

“Masturbation was seen as the cause of insanity. The theory was that during sex blood rushed to the head causing damage to nerves in the brain. Masturbation [at a young age] was worse.”

From an urban exploration site (warning: has music), this tidbit:

“A more contraversial [sic] treatment method that [Dr. Burke] used was his gynecological surgeries, performed on over 200 women between 1895 and 1901. The theory at the time was that a women’s [sic] mental health was intimately linked to her reproductive system.”

Last, here’s a photoset from an urban explorer who was resourceful enough to get inside. There are some great, eerie shots there.

There’s definitely a scenario hiding there. Weird surgeries and patient gardens — they even built a chapel — all under the haze of opiates, cannabis, and insanity in Victorian Upper Canada.

Jamrock points to an article on environmentally-safer drugs.

Of course, weed and anything grown locally wins. Perhaps with shrooms there’s some runoff from the hydrogen peroxide in the growth medium, but I think that actually occurs naturally — and might be consumed during production?

Anyway. Legality is a terrible barometer of ethicality. There’s no mention of the environmental devastation of, eg, coffee. Talking about illegal highs gets more pageviews I guess.

Props to the author for briefly taking the “War on Drugs” itself to task for environmental damage — carpet-bombing Columbian cocaine fields with RoundUp has:

a) Made coke less available.
b) Caused Monsanto to lobby for rational drug policies.
c) Helped poor farmers feed their families.
d) Reduced drug gang violence and wealth.
e) None of the above.

The author ends with a cheap-shot though: “most of today’s drug culture is simply another wasteful frontier of American consumerism”. The reason most drugs have to be imported is because of prohibition — they are simply impractical to produce locally because of the land-use metrics the article mentions.

For example, people grow in national forests because they can’t grow on farms.

In California’s Central Valley, law enforcement estimates between 4 million and 7 million pounds of [meth] lab waste were poured into canals and on properties between 2000 and 2004. The people who have to clean it up wear Haz-Mat suits.

Irresponsible production is the result of poor government regulation. Like BP.

The Penny Arcade guys have a video up about their experiences with Lexapro*. I take Cipralex. Both are trade names of Escitalopram.

You can be depressed and the way it will effect your family and the people you know is that you’re funny.

Anxiety is my biggest productivity problem, leaving aside its other quality of life effects (which perhaps I shouldn’t). But the drug helps in that it makes productivity possible.

But I’d be remiss here if I didn’t say something Jill, a domain expert, has convinced me of: The drug helps, but talk therapy and eventual way-of-being changes are the “cure”, as much as one can, or does, exist.

Escitalopram gets you out of the rough, but you still need a shot clinic to keep you on the fairway.

* And illegal drugs.

[Update: due to the volume of spam on this post I've shut down comments.]

Also via Savage, Republican Judge Jim Gray calls the repeal of American prohibition the most patriotic thing he is able to do:

People that are supporting the status quo are on the wrong side of history.

Season three of Celebrity Rehab just started. VH1 fixed their site so you can stream it from Canada now:

Blizzard responded to a police request they didn’t have to, and a drug dealer hiding from American law in Canada was tracked down through his WoW character and IP address.

Remember: You’re never actually anonymous online. The companies you do business with will sell you out at the slightest provocation, regardless of your expectation of privacy.

I mean: Go law enforcement! Another nasty young marijuana dealer behind barz!