Words of praise for marijuana's spiritual properties by John Sinclair

Higher Ground

Sacramental herb

Words of praise for marijuana's spiritual properties

By John Sinclair

Published: May 25, 2011

I'm crossing the English Channel on the Stena Line steamship as I write this, moving on from London to Amsterdam for the next 10 days, and then on to Italy. It was a rough April in the Motor City with one cold, gray day after another and the Tigers foundering until I left, but London was bright and sunny almost every day, and the weather should just get better from here.

England is a rough place to cop good medicine, and marijuana is considered illegal in every application — not at all what you'd call smoker-friendly. I ventured outside the city one day to visit my religious leader, the Rev. Ferre (as we'll call him) of the THC Ministry, and he made sure my medicinal needs were well taken care of.
In fact, I just sneaked my last smoke from that stash in my little cabin on the ship so I could write this column, and soon after I arrive at the Hook of Holland in the morning I'll be back at my regular stand at the 420 Café in Amsterdam, where you can always buy your weed over the counter whether you're sick or well and the price is always the same.

The THC Ministry is based in Holland and operates under the slogan, "We use cannabis religiously — and so can you!" I'm proud to be a member of the ministry, and it takes me back before the advent of socialized medicinal marijuana, when we thought perhaps the solution was to highlight the spiritual and indeed religious aspects of the sacrament as a way to escape the heavy hand of the narcotics police.

The brilliant hallucinogen called peyote had been established as a religious sacrament used for spiritual purposes by several Southwestern Native American nations, and many beatniks, hippies and fellow seekers had gained experiential knowledge of its potency as a spiritual force.

Many of us felt the same way about marijuana: that its spiritual properties and potentialities qualified weed as a religious sacrament for ritual use and equally beneficial in navigating the vicissitudes of daily life as well, much as prayer itself seems to work for the Christians and other faithful. Our daily marijuana use went well beyond the concept of recreational drugs — it was integral to our work and play in equal measure, and helped us keep our minds to the mental grindstone at all times.

Eventually, we sought to register an entirely different definition of marijuana from the orthodoxy enshrined and promoted by the forces of law and order. Not only were marijuana and associated psychedelic or euphoriant substances neither narcotics nor "dangerous drugs," they were in fact benevolent and had manifestly evident healing powers and could serve to help bring their adherents into alignment and closer harmony with the natural forces of the universe.
 
I can't remember exactly when, but at some point in 1969-1972 we formed the First Zenta Church of Ann Arbor, a nonprofit ecclesiastical corporation chartered by the state of Michigan that held marijuana, hashish, peyote, psilocybin and other psychoactive natural substances as sacraments central to the church and the religious and spiritual lives of the congregation.

Now these tenets we held true, plain and simple, but the underlying social idea was that members of the Church of Zenta could thenceforth rely on the constitutional doctrine of freedom of religion as their protection against conviction for possession and use of narcotics — or later, "controlled substances" — under the state's marijuana laws. Zenta members used marijuana religiously, as the THC Ministry puts it today, and were entitled to protection as religious practitioners following the basic tenets of their creed.

There were other benefits of ecclesiastical corporation: Organized religious bodies didn't pay sales or income taxes; their real estate transactions were exempt from taxation as well; and their forms of worship, however diverse or divergent from the Christian norm, were given wide latitude by the temporal government. Churches were churches, another order of being from the rest of the social order, and our church was determined to join their number and enjoy equal protection under the law of the land.

Like our other efforts to combat the narcotics laws and the incipient War on Drugs based in their idiotic assumptions — for example, as I've said many times before, marijuana was never a narcotic — the establishment of the First Church of Zenta was meant to deny and counteract the demonization of recreational drug users by the dominant social order as the first line of offense against us.

If you can create a mythology centered on the demonization of illicit drug use and the characterization of illicit drug users as dangerous criminals and enemies of conventional society, deploying ever-increasing numbers of narcotics police to stomp out this evil seems to follow.

When this tissue of horseshit (to quote William Burroughs) is stripped away and the stigma of evilness is removed, the marijuana smoker is revealed instead as a harmless seeker of spiritual truth or a suffering patient in need of medicine. These are not reasonable targets for prosecution as criminals, and the police must move back at least a few steps and sheathe the dreaded nightstick of drug law prosecution.

Now that we have legalized medical marijuana as a potential source of relief for a whole panoply of aches and pains, both physical and mental, and recommends that the state of Michigan certify the applicant as a registered medical marijuana patient, we've taken a big first step away from the reviled War on Drugs. Perhaps it's time to renew the religious argument as well.

Briefly put, we need all the help we can get i to wrest the jackboot of the War on Drugs off the necks of marijuana smokers in our society.

In closing I'd like to point out that I've completed this column upon my arrival in Amsterdam, working my way through my various obligatory stops — the 420 Café, the Cannabis College, the Hempshopper on the Singel Canal — checking in with my peeps around the Centrum and trying to honor my commitment to the paper and my readers at the same time. At the end of the month, I'll be on my way to Florence, Italy, on a personal mission, and I'll file the next column from there. Happy trails! —420 Cafe, Amsterdam

> Email John Sinclair

http://metrotimes.com/mmj/sacramental-herb-1.1151881?smsss=email&at_xt=4ddd19419190a25f%2C0

Psychedelic 'McKenna' Adventures At the edge of the Abyss (on-line course)

The Brothers McKenna are widely known to the psychedelic community.  Their ideas and adventures, explorations of inner (and perhaps outer) space, and their Amazonian odyssey in search of answers to the mysteries of time, history, and being have been well chronicled by Terence, who though he passed on in 2000, still haunts the Net as an avatar and articulator of a radical and highly unconventional perspective on humanity’s current precarious perch on the edge of the singularity.  Even the most skeptical souls can no longer deny that our species is at the threshold of an enormous and irrevocable plunge into novelty; a plunge that will change forever our understanding of who we are as a species, and our place in the scheme of a universe that is marvelous, terrifying, beautiful and puzzling in ways that we cannot begin to comprehend.

US PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click the image above or go to  http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994

 or read more below...

Terence, not by choice, escaped to a hyperspatial redoubt, just as humanity crossed the threshold into the third millennium of its problematic  career on this planet.  His younger brother Dennis continues to grapple with the revelations and insights, perhaps delusions, that the two brothers confronted during their journey to the Amazonian rainforest in 1971 in search of exotic hallucinogens and high adventure. They found both, in spades, and it changed them, and perhaps the world, forever.

Now Dennis has determined that the time has come to tell his side of the story, and is proposing to write a book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss; the title is in recognition of the name the two brothers and their intrepid band of fellow adventurers chose for themselves, partly tongue in cheek, and partly – mostly, as they discovered – deadly serious. Dennis is using Kickstarter.com to garner the resources, and time, needed to write this work, which will be both a memoir of sorts but also a fresh examination of the revelations forced onto them at the climax of that heart-of-darkness journey. Those who may be interested can find a detailed description of this proposal on the Kickstarter web site at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss

The Course


This course is offered as a follow-up to the launch of the writing project and an anticipation of themes that will be explored in depth in the book, slated for release in the fall of 2012. The course will consist of four sessions, with dates set for June 5^th, 12^th, and 25^th and July 2nd.  Using live video, each webinar session will be hosted by Dennis McKenna in wide-ranging conversations with key guests who are recognized leaders on the cutting edge of post-millennial thought: Daniel Pinchbeck, Ralph Abraham, Marc Pesce, Ralph Metzner, Luis Eduardo Luna and Erik Davis.

Most have also been close personal friends of Terence and Dennis over many decades; they have shared Terence and Dennis’ fascination and preoccupations with the concepts under discussion and have been key players in the development, elaboration, and expression of these ideas.  Like Terence and Dennis, they lived through the social, environmental, and political changes that have characterized our ever-accelerating race toward novelty during the late 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st; in many respects, they are the people who have helped to catalyze the radical changes in global consciousness that have resulted.

Each webinar will be 90 minutes in length, with the first 60 minutes devoted to a dialog between Dennis, the host, and one or more invited guests.  The format will be an informal discussion, preceded by a brief exposition outlining the main themes under consideration in that session. There will be ample opportunities for the audience to interact in real time with the host and guests following the hour-long conversation. Participants from the audience will be able to ask questions and offer their own comments and insights via live video chat, text, or email.  If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course.

---

FEATURED GUESTS

Daniel Pinchbeck

Sunday, June 5, 3:00 p.m. EST

In this first session, the role of host and guest will be reversed. Author and commentator Daniel Pinchbeck will fill the role of host and moderator, and Dennis will be the interviewee.  It will take the form of a free-wheeling retrospective look at the influences that led the brothers to forego any hopes of a normal life or careers and head to the Amazon in search of psychedelic secrets in 1971.  It will be a personal reminiscence.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) and Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002). His articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, ArtForum, Arthur, and many other publications. He is currently the editorial director of Reality Sandwich and a national columnist for Conscious Choice magazine. He is also the executive producer of the PostModernTimes series of interviews, directed by Joao Amorim, and is featured in Amorim's upcoming documentary, 2012: Time for Change.

Here are some of the questions he will be asking Dennis about his early years with Terence:

• What were the personal, familial, and societal factors that led to their preoccupation with matters both arcane, and peculiar?
• What was behind their early interest in psychedelics, transdimensional realms, consciousness exploration?
• What did their baffled parents, teachers, priests and peers make of all this?

Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna

Sunday, June 12, 3:00 p.m. EST

The second session will be a conversation between Dennis and his guest, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna. Eduardo is one the closest and oldest  friends of Terence and Dennis.  He also happens to be one of the world’s leading experts on ayahuasca ethnography and New World psychedelic shamanism.
Eduardo was there (almost) from the start. A well-educated but distinctly un-psychedelic seminary student growing up in the tiny Colombian river community of Florencia in 1971, Eduardo’s first encounter with Terence on his way back from his second visit to La Chorrera changed his life forever. Terence was fizzing with fresh revelation when they met and was literally wild-eyed, a Messiah come back from the forest.  Eduardo’s exposure to the strangest ideas in the known universe drove him to abandon his dreams of the priesthood forever and to plunge headlong into the pursuit of psychedelic shamanism. Terence and his companion traveler, the legendary Kumi, lived at Eduardo’s vinca for several months while they worked out what was to become TimeWave Zero and the first draft of the Invisible Landscape.

One of the most influential anthropologists in the field of ayahuasca research, Luis was the first to study the ayahuasca shamanism practiced   by mestizo (or mixed-blood) people in the Amazon. Born and raised in the Colombian Amazon, Luis was educated in Spain and Norway, and always had a foot in both worlds. His work revealed the importance of the diet that ayahuasqueros follow, and the pivotal role played by the icaros, or magic melodies, in shamanic ceremonies. Luis has also studied the Brazilian ayahuasca churches such as Santo Daime, Uniao do Vegetal and Barquinha. He is the director of Wasiwaska, a research center for the study of psychointegrator plants, visionary arts and consciousness, in Brazil, and is the author of several books, including Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (co-authored with Rick Strassman et al.), and his much loved collaboration with the painter Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: the Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman.During this session, Eduardo and Dennis will talk about:

• How the path of Eduardo's life was changed after meeting Terence McKenna
• How the nature of Eduardo and Dennis's collaboration has changed through the years
• The inside scoop on the psychedelic scene they were a part of--between the two of them they know where all the bodies are buried!

Ralph Abraham

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

What is TW0? And does it really describe anything? Terence proclaimed to his dying day that it was a map of the quantum structure of time, and that it could be used to predict the future; even more shocking, he claimed that its spiral structure predicted the collapse of the space/time continuum on a specific date, December 21^st, 2012.  This date just happens to coincide perfectly with the predicted end of time based on the Mayan Calendar, as well as other world traditions that seem to express expectations of a major shift in the planetary world order, if not the cosmic order, on or around that date.

This is the ‘teaching’ that two bemushroomed, raving wild men walked out of the jungle proclaiming??  Dennis is not so sure, and in recent years has begun to publicly question whether it means anything, or whether it means what Terence believed it to mean. No one knows the answer, but many very intelligent people have been both baffled and fascinated by Time Wave Zero.

Ralph Abraham has been involved in the research frontier and the development of dynamical systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields, such as medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, and psychotherapy. He is the author of Foundations of Mechanics with Jerrold Marsden, Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior with Christopher Shaw, Chaos, Gaia, Eros, and Chaos, Cosmos, and Creativity with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna.

Ralph Abraham will join Mark Pesce and Dennis McKenna in a lively debate about the validity of the Time Wave, which Dennis has become more skeptical about in recent years. They will discuss:

• Is the TWO real?
• What is the proof in favor of its existence? 
•  Is there something about it we need to understand before 2012, in order to avert or prepare for global catastrophe?

Mark Pesce

Saturday, June 25, 3:00 p.m. EST

Dennis and Terence disagreed on whatever it was they experienced together following the Experiment at La Chorrera.  Was it a simultaneous psychotic break, a shamanic initiation, an alien abduction, or something even stranger?  They honestly don’t know, and interpretations have changed over the years. What is definitely odd about the La Chorrera “Event”, whatever it may have been, was that they brought something back with them.  This was the mathematical construct derived from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching that has become known as Time Wave Zero. Most psychoses or shamanic experiences do not end up yielding a mathematical tool, particularly one that purports to describe the fractal topology of time, and one that (possibly) predicts the end of the world.

Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster.  In 1994 Pesce co-invented VRML, a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. Pesce founded graduate programs in interactive media at both the University of Southern California’s world-famous Cinema School and the Australian Film, Radio and Television School. In 2006 Pesce founded FutureSt, a Sydney consultancy dedicated to helping clients negotiate the challenges presented by our ‘hyperconnected’ future.

In this session, Mark Pesce will discuss all things Time Wave with Ralph Abraham and Dennis:

• What is TW0? And does it really describe anything?
• Does it really hide the answer to our current ontological and historical dilemma?
• Why does its interpretation coincide so closely with the apocalyptarian predictions of so many other cultures?

Erik Davis

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 P.M., EST

Although Terence did not live to see it, many of his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream cultural zeitgeist--a state of affairs about which he would feel quite comfortable.  He predicted much of the wild changes we are witnessing during this time of global transformation. There can be little doubt that psychedelics, in permeating our culture, in opening the door once again to the rediscovery of parallel worlds and non-human intelligences, have functioned as a major catalyst of that change, and that new transformed worldview. These ideas no longer seem so strange because many people have taken psychedelics; many have confirmed for themselves what Terence and Dennis were raving about. In this session, Erik Davis joins Ralph Metzner and Dennis for a conversation about the evolution and transmission of these ideas.

Erik Davis is a North American writer, social historian, cultural critic and lecturer. He is noted for his study of the history of technology and society and his essays about the fate of the individual in the dawning posthuman era. Although significant aspects of his work include media criticism and technology criticism, his works span across other disciplines to include a larger social history of art, religion, and science, technology, and politics. His books include TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Led Zeppelin IV. 


Erik will be talking to Ralph Metzner and Dennis about the following:

• Is there an impending historical singularity on the horizon?
• What are the possibilities for trans-human metamorphosis and plant-human symbiosis?
• Has alien contact already taken place and what is the likelihood of humanity migrating into space?

Ralph Metzner

Saturday, July 2nd, 3:00 p.m.

Whether or not Time Wave Zero is ‘true’ or not, there is little doubt that it has evolved into a pervasive cultural meme, sharing the space with a whole universe of cultural archetypes that certainly did not exist, or at least were a lot less overt, when Terence and Dennis were growing up in that small town in Colorado in the 1950s.  In the post-millennial, pre-eschatology decade of the third millennium A.D., a whole host of bizarre notions about the impending historical singularity, trans-human metamorphosis, plant-human symbiosis, the emergence of the Gaian planetary intelligence, the globalization of the human nervous system, the archaic revival, alien contact, space migration, transdimensional realities, parallel universes, and many others that would have seemed like schizophrenic delusions to earlier generations, have now become an accepted, almost mundane, component of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist.  Suddenly we find ourselves living in a science-fictional universe; without even noticing it, things seem to be getting stranger and ever more bizarre at a rapidly accelerating pace.
This final session, hosted by Dennis with guests psychedelic pioneer Ralph Metzner and techno-guru Erik Davis, will explore the ways in which many of Terence's predictions about the changing nature of the world have become true.
Ralph Metzner's work has been focused on the transformations of consciousness, and as a graduate student, he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) on the Harvard Psilocybin Projects. He co-wrote The Psychedelic Experience, and was editor of The Psychedelic Review. He is founder of the Green Earth Foundation and His books include The Well of Remembrance, The Unfolding Self, Green Psychology, and two edited collections on the science and the phenomenology of Ayahuasca and Teonanácatl.
The discussion will cover various topics including:

• How have Terence's ideas permeated culture?
• Do psychedelics have an evolutionary function? 
• Can psychedelics help us transition into ahistorical time?

We could ask for no two finer minds with whom to explore these themes. At the end of this final session, you may have a glimmer of some of the answers, but we guarantee, you will have a lot more questions! And it is in that dynamic space between knowing and unknowing, that understanding and insight may flourish.

ABOUT OUR HOST

  Dennis McKenna is a ethnopharmacologist focusing on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices. He is well known for his work with his brother Terence McKenna and their ground breaking research in The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, and is co-founder of the Hefter Research Institute that promotes scientific research on hallucinogenic compounds.

By participating in this online course, you will receive:

• Four 90-minute live video seminars with Dennis McKenna and his featured guests
• 30 minutes of question and answer time in each seminar
• Breakout sessions for student discussion following each seminar
• Participation in a private online community with other students
• Unlimited online access to videos of all seminars
• PDF articles about course topics from Dennis and each of the guests

We hope you join us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the lives and ideas of Terrence and Dennis!

PRICE: $110

Early bird special, through May 20th: $90.00

To join click http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/?af=1350994

Sun Ra - Twin Stars Of Thence

fly agaric, flies, Mushrooms, Reindeer and Urine: a world piss paradise

An art show with live animals where visitors can sleep over and take drugs is all about changing perceptions.

WHAT could be more festive than spending a night in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs? Soma, Carsten Holler's installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to offer exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city's contemporary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped ''floating hotel'' - a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1000 ($A1320) a night. (There's also a raffle for free places.)

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/science-v-art-mustwee-event-20101222-195jr.html

The point of all this, beyond a theme park experience, is 'soma'. Höller has explored the history of this mythical narcotic, which apparently contained the secret to happiness, knowledge and wealth. Poets waxed lyrical about it in Hindu verse written 4,000 years ago. But the recipe has been lost. It is believed to derive from a mushroom (the fly agoria) and was at its most potent when consumed via the urine of a creature, which had eaten the mushrooms. Reindeer ate the mushrooms in their Siberian habitat, and hence their urine was prized. It induced a trance of extraordinary power and insight. Soma was liberation, and maybe it was escape. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/seductive-lure-of-carsten-hllers-living-wonderland-2171904.html

eddie jefferson - mercy, mercy, mercy

Mary Lou Williams - A Fungus A Mungus

'The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls' by Mark Pesce (from Future Present)

Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing 

http://chu51.wikispaces.com/UNEVENLY+DISTRIBUTED

http://www.sharethiscourse.org/

Unevenly Distributed:

Production Models for the 21st Century

 

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the
second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is
the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of
yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the
entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone
knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of
millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another
hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube
grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video,
difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of
YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television
industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure,
absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to
be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is
competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but
rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting
factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet,
even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for
how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown
so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the
real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your
deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone
from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through
limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a
hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until
recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby
the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of
choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to
the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution
channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has
occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into eversmaller
“microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that
YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences
is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely
overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old
boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting
his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM,
surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably
taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a
television, somewhere in the background, or it might be
coming from the Web browser right in front of him.
(Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager
has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even
with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few
hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for
something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good
enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of
YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve
found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately
forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He
views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other
friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other
friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the
media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it
can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it
can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network
no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as
they’re broadcast through the airwaves, but more likely
they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded
from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses.

The broadcast network has been replaced by the social
network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the
newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item
might be something that was created at great expense for a
mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of
media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely
coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster
some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire
that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his
social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along
something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This
factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of
runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch.
Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he
takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all
of his media decisions are weighed against the values and
tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of
choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is
entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the
importance, of that media to the individual and that
individual’s social network. The mass market, with its
enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations.
Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his
mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in
the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that
was uploaded to the Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the
future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two
hundred million videos (probably much more), all available,
all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of
which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much
“there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media
distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could
compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend
some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching
anything is measured against salience: “How important is
this for me, right now?” When you weigh the latest episode of
a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only
to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that
video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him.

As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its
competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices
grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now
through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile
handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is
constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasinglyrelevant
suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his
social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets.
His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-
Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of
distribution. What no one had expected was that the
professional producers would lose control of production. The
difference between an amateur and a professional – in the
media industries – has always centered on the point that the
professional sells their work into distribution, while the
amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that selfdistribution
is more effective than professional distribution,
how do we distinguish between the professional and the
amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t
care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film
and television production and distribution can survive in this
environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the
only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion
slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred yearold
industry with many, many creative professionals. In this
environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a
live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event”
based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live
is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely
designed to support the efficient distribution of live
programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out
blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle
ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts
will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form,
both industries will continue for some years to come, and will
probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s
attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent”
production, a vague term which basically means any
production which takes place outside of the media
megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and
TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media
landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an
audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs
has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have
long been losing economic propositions (except for the most
lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal.
National and regional funding bodies are growing
increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not
find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off,
despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the
Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to
the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that
Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but
Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy
them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder
Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production
values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent
productions; productions which cost not millions of euros,
but hundreds, and which make up for their low production
values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This
tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down;
it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the
videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but
reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era
of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?

Sodtherich by CHU

Immune System Armour - Mushroom Superfood

Terence McKenna - 5/5 - Riding The Range With Marshall Mcluhan

Evolve The Spore

Evolve and revolve to solve the Novelle’
Loose spore, spoor, spell s’poor.
Lou’s Spore

Spore of Destiny. The weir of brandy,
Spart of the Lyf Cycle cycle.

Sports Day. Sport for all. 
Reproductive seed,
Ballistico Spores blowing, 
Spores and cures and 

cleansed pores, 
Rowing a shore with oar to spore.


Dream fish...the Net, an ‘idea’ sized catch?
Starseed Transmissions 2010.

The Intelligence in the Cherry Stone
Words are 

Cryptospores, fossilized messages
Paragraphs in

    the Zoospore, locomotion 


Swarmspore social movement, decentralized, 

self-organized
Natural or artificial? Thought sport?

Moving

away and outword, wayward sores float


Dispersed verse turning a propeller in the wave crush


Water sports thoughts awash with salt

Growing both on the ground and
Underground


Spore Mycollegee Degree
Liberty Butter 

Yeasts and Leomould Bloom

The role of spores

in Decomposition of the matter?

Translove Energies compassion center lights up Eastern Market

Translove Energies compassion center lights up Eastern Market

Maybe Logic Academy on BOINGBOING. Thanks Douglas Rushkoff

A MaybeLogic Academy Course

Douglas Rushkoff at 9:09 AM Thursday, Oct 7, 201.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger. He is the author, most recently, of Program or Be Programmed.

Robert Anton Wilson and his crew set up an online academy for him to teach James Joyce and other subjects to those of us who thrived off his learning and insights. Before he died, he began to invite others to teach courses through the Maybe Logic Academy, and the site has lived on. I was honored to be asked to teach a course based on my new book. It goes for ten weeks, and begins October 11. I'll be donating my proceeds to archive.org. Here's the pitch.

Ten weeks of study and dialogue, ten commands for a digital age. We continue to accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices work and work on us. We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another, instead. And this is a potentially grave mistake. Just as the invention of text utterly transformed human society, disconnecting us from much of what we held sacred, our migration to the digital realm will also require a new template for maintaining our humanity. In this course, Rushkoff shares the biases of digital media, and what that means for how we should use them. The course will be organized along the ten main biases of digital media - time, distance, scale, choice, complexity, identity, social, fact, sharing, and purpose - exploring how digital media is tilted towards one or the other end of each spectrum. We will then discuss how to maintain agency in the face of each of these biases.

DJ fly agaric 23 plays Jungle beats again, for you and your tube

RAW Illumination: Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course Steve "...

RAW Illumination: Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course

Steve "...: "Fly Agaric 23 announces online RAW course Steve 'Fly Agaric' 23 has announced a new online course, 'email to the tribe,' which will run fr..."

Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana

Posted by Paul Armentano at 9:52 am
July 6, 201

Over 20,000 Studies Conducted on Marijuana; What Is It That Scientists Do Not Yet Know?

Posted by Paul Armentano on @ 9:52 am

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/06/theres-been-over-20000-studies-on-marijuana-what-is-it-that-scientists-do-not-yet-know/

US News & World Report recently probed the subject of cannabis science, publishing a pair of stories on the subject here and here.
Neither story particularly breaks any new ground, though the first provides some valuable — if inadvertent — insight into the prohibitionist (or at the very least, statist) mindset.
Quoted in the story is Columbia University researcher Margaret Haney. I’ve written about Haney’s clinical work with cannabis before. In particular, Haney was the lead author of a 2007 clinical trial concluding that inhaled cannabis increased daily caloric intake and body weight in HIV-positive patients in a manner that was far superior to the effects of oral THC (Marinol aka Dronabinol). The study further reported that subjects’ use of marijuana was well tolerated, and did not impair their cognitive performance.

Yet Haney’s comments in US News & World Report ring tepid at best. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
“’I am not anti-marijuana, I’m not pro-marijuana. I want to understand it.’ Haney expresses frustration at what she considers wrongheaded efforts by states to legalize medical marijuana. There is too much, she says, that scientists do not know.”

Haney’s refrain is a common one, and at first glance it appears to make sense. After all, who among us doesn’t want to better understand the interactions between the marijuana plant and the human body? Yet placed in proper context this sentiment appears to be little more than a red herring. Here’s why.
Marijuana is already the most studied plant on Earth, and is arguably one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances known to man. To date, there are now over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to marijuana and its active compounds. That total includes over 2,700 separate papers published on cannabis in 2009 and another 900 published just this year alone (according to a key word search on the search engine PubMed).

And what have we learned from these 20,000+ studies? Not surprisingly, quite a lot. For starters, we know that cannabis and its active constituents are uniquely safe and effective as therapeutic compounds. Unlike most prescription or over-the-counter medications, cannabinoids are virtually non-toxic to health cells or organs, and they are incapable of causing the user to experience a fatal overdose. Unlike opiates, cannabinoids do not depress the central nervous system, and as a result they possess a virtually unparalleled safety profile. In fact, a 2008 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ) reported that cannabis-based drugs were associated with virtually no serious adverse side effects in over 30 years of investigative use.

We also know that the cannabis plant contains in excess of 60 active compounds that likely possess distinctive therapeutic properties. These include THC, THCV, CBD, THCA, CBC, and CBG, among others. In fact, a recent review by Israel’s Raphael Mechoulam of Hebrew University and colleagues identifies nearly 30 separate therapeutic effects — including anti-cancer properties, anti-diabetic properties, neuroprotection, and anti-stroke properties — in cannabinoids other than THC. Most recently, a review by researchers in Germany reported that since 2005 there have been 37 controlled studies assessing the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids, involved a total of 2,563 subjects. By contrast, most FDA-approved drugs go through far fewer trials involving far fewer subjects.

Finally, we know that Western civilization has been using cannabis as a therapeutic agent or recreational intoxicant for thousands of years with relatively few adverse consequences — either to the individual user or to society. In fact, no less than the World Health Organization commissioned a team of experts to compare the health and societal consequences of marijuana use compared to other drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and opiates. After quantifying the harms associated with both drugs, the researchers concluded: “Overall, most of these risks (associated with marijuana) are small to moderate in size. In aggregate they are unlikely to produce public health problems comparable in scale to those currently produced by alcohol and tobacco. On existing patterns of use, cannabis poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”

That, in a nutshell, is what we ‘know’ about cannabis. I’d say that it’s ample enough information to, at the very least, cease the practice arresting people, and seriously ill patients in particular, who possess it. As for what else Dr. Haney and others of a similar mindset would still like to know — and how many additional studies would it take to provide them with that information — well, that’s anybody’s guess.

Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of NORML and the NORML Foundation.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/06/theres-been-over-20000-studies-on-marijuana-what-is-it-that-scientists-do-not-yet-know/

Politics of Psychopharmacology By Timothy Leary

Politics of Psychopharmacology
By Timothy Leary



Without ritalin: a natural approach to ADD
By Samuel A. Berne

Sexs, Drugs & Magick by Robert Anton Wilson (Preface to the 2000 Edition)

Sexs, Drugs & Magick
PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

And the Beast said:
"By their pee shall ye judge them,
and by thy pee shall ye be judged.
And all will be divided by their pee.
And in the snow shall their names be written."
- The Book of Urinomics 1

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

Around the time he wrote this book, Robert Anton Wilson had passed the age of 40, lost the rigid right/wrong ideology he had picked up during the anti-war and anti-segregation movements of the 1960s and thought he had outgrown the dogmatic follies of his youth, achieving a middle-aged and mellow agnosticism about everything. Ten years later, as Ronald Reagan sat in the White House, Wilson reached 50 and, looking back, felt astonished at how much folly had persisted even in his 40s. As he approached 60 a few years ago, he began to realize that he still had his share of human idiocy even in his 50s. Today at 66+ (beginning to merge with him now), I can only wonder how much of the current Robert Anton Wilson literary output of palaver will embarrass me when I reach 75-80...

Nonetheless, I don't feel particularly disgraced by another printing of this book. Some of it still makes a lot of sense to me, after corrections, and I see that in the semi-fictionalized- "case histories" I have accidentally provided a son of "ideogrammic" history of the 1960s—still the most controversial decade of the century, and well worth looking at again, to learn what we can from both its wisdom and its blunders.

The major blunder I acquired from the 1960s counterculture was the notion that the Enemy (with a capital E), was ignorance and that this could be cured by education. I now feel more inclined to accept R. Buckminster Fuller's description of the four major problems confronting the world as "ignorance, fear, greed, and zoning laws." Being untypically brave (like most fools), I always underestimated the role of fear in human affairs; having simple desires, I underestimated greed; and not being an architect, I never grasped the perfidious nature of zoning laws. Above all, I failed to realize the extent to which the synergy of ignorance-fear-greed-zoning laws in maintaining the tyranny that Fuller calls MMAO (Machiavelli, Mafia, Atoms and Oil) - the banks, the mob, and the energy cartels.)

My current thinking about MMAO derives from Fuller and, in relation to the topics of this book, even more from the Sub- Genius Foundation of Dallas, TX, which refers to MMAO as "the Con."

Many think the Con is just a joke or a parody of other conspiracy theories. To such doubters, the Sub-Genius Foundation says that this is "the Time of Pee"—the time foretold, when people would be judged not by works, nor by family, nor even by looks, but by their urine.

They listen to you through your telephone without its even being off the hook, and record you through satellites that can peer down any street, anywhere...

They kick your door in any time they want to. All they have to yell is "DRUGS!" and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs...

Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners...

For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.

- Church of the SubGenius

The 1973 author of this book never could have imagined a State so crazily totalitarian, or a population so brainwashed into sheep-like submissiveness, that such absurdities could occur. But then, only Kafka and Orwell in their most eerie satires on bureaucracy-gone-bonkers could imagine an obscenity like our Piss Police. The State in which we live can only accurately be called Urine Nation.

How can this happen in a once-free Republic where searches of the person are forbidden except by court order after probable cause has been shown? Urine Nation, posing as the representatives of you and me, is engaged in an alleged "War on Drugs." That justifies trashing the Constitution.

Now this is, on the face of it, absurd.

1. Wars on drugs or other insensible things (objects, sub-stances) can only be carried on by lunatics. The Con cannot be accused of insanity: of ignorance, yes, and of fear, greed and zoning laws, but not of being batshit crazy. They are not making war on chemicals—or on the laws of physics, or anything of that sort. They are making war on the American people—on all of us, although only a few of us know that yet.

For instance, as you may read in Pissing Away the American Dream (Pissing Away the American Dream, edited by David Ross, Digit Press), on January 1989 the Minneapolis police smashed down the door of the home of an elderly Black couple, using "flash bang" grenades which accidentally set the house on fire and killed both old people.

The cops were looking for "drugs," but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens (and the total violation of the Fourth Amendment) by saying, "This is war."

The war is being waged against people, not chemicals, and it is people who get killed.

2. Even within the off-kilter logic of its own rhetoric, the "War on Drugs" is nonsense.

If you go out your door and drive a few blocks, they say, you will find at least one store boldly declaring that they sell DRUGS, although some say PHARMACY, which can only be deciphered by those who know Greek roots; and in these stores, hundreds of drugs are available. Nearby is a supermarket where you can buy cigarettes, containing nicotine, a drug more addictive than heroin according to former Surgeon General Koop. Next door is a BAR where you can buy dozens of varieties of C₂H₃0H, a heavily addictive substance, statistically linked to wife and child battering, divorce and violent crime.

Urine Nation, thus, is not making war on all drugs, or drug- users, but only on some. The government asserts that the drugs on their taboo list are the worst ones; skeptics like me say they are merely the ones that are either (a) cheap and effective, like herbal medicines, and/or (b) not easy to monopolize, like marijuana or (c) better than the higher priced drugs manufactured by the large pharmaceutical corporations that financially support both political parties.

The only people literally "at war" with drugs—all drugs—are the Christian Scientists. Eight of them are currently appealing their convictions for refusing to give their children the drugs ordained from on high by the Con/MMAO.

As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made."

Many of the chemicals and herbs forbidden by the Con are not only harmless, but are widely believed to be beneficial. The war against the users of these substances is just as vicious as the wars against all other substances on the taboo list.

Over the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration has engaged in raids on alternative health companies - companies operating openly and, they thought, legally - that more and more tend toward the violence of DEA raids on suspected crack dealers. In every case, the companies were selling vitamins and herbs that a growing minority of the medical profession approves but which MMAO and the FDA do not approve.

For instance, in 1990, the FDA raided the offices of Dr. Jonathan Wright, a fully qualified physician with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School, terrorized the staff with drawn guns, and seized all the vitamins and herbs they could find. They never did file criminal charges against Dr. Wright for the heresy of giving his patients cheap medicines instead of expensive ones, but this raid was only one of hundreds of similar Gestapo-style operations, creating what libertarians call "a chilling effect" on scientific freedom.

As the Life Extension Foundation wrote:

. . . The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.

In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only "offense" of which the Weavers were guilty. They didn't annoy their neighbors and they didn't plot an insurrection against the government: they just tried to avoid and evade it. This alone was too much for the Feds. They sent in an informant to make friends with Randy and eventually entrap him into selling a shotgun. With that excuse, the FBI and ATF made war on the Weaver family, killing Vicki while she stood holding her baby in her arms, killing the older son, and even killing the family dog.

The Weavers sure had a lot of nutty ideas; nobody but another Fundamentalist would deny that. But maybe their idea of the nature of the current U.S. government, and its attitude toward its serfs and subjects, was a hell of a lot more accurate than the ideas you read in liberal journals.

Please visit: http://www.rawilson.com/sexdrugs.html

No Dope without Dope

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
--Albert Einstein

I once had a band in New Orleans, 2003.
We called ourselves
The Pharmageddon Arkestra.

Dope/Hope meme splicing.
There is always dope
Keep your dope up
Dope for Tomorrow

All my dopes and dreams
Your Building my dope up now.
Land of Dope and Glory

No dope without Dope
Dopeless
Dope I’m getting through to you

Dope you are feeling better
Dope Arkensaw, home of the resident
Kid Hope

Dopes and dreams of a nation
Dopefully Dopeless.
Cape of Good Dope

Doppler Effect.
Pharmacratic Tyranny.
Tales of a hope fiend
Global pharamalogical and Digital
Con tricks unveiled.

Tales of a hope fiend

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.
--Martin Luther King

Ceremonial chemistry: the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers
By Thomas Stephen Szasz



The influence of the pharmaceutical industry: volume II:



Coercion as cure: a critical history of psychiatry
By Thomas Stephen Szasz


PR - a persuasive industry?: spin, public relations, and the shaping of the ...
By Trevor Morris, Simon Goldsworthy



Presentation planning and media relations for the pharmaceutical industry
By John Lidstone



J.R.R. Tolkien encyclopedia: scholarship and critical assessment
By Michael D. C. Drout

Leaglize Marijuana in Detroit NOW! and leave them kids alone.

YES, of course POT should be decriminalized and legalized, for medical and non-medical purposes, the 'war on drugs' or more correctly 'The war on SOME drugs' has failed in every way, if you value 'life' and 'freedom' and 'tolerance' as success, the war on drugs is a failure.

However, if you happen to be a sado-masochistic authority type with the word of god in your ear that mankind must behave, abide by the law, pay taxes and not make any noise or complain, you may see the 'war on drugs' as a success, with all those dope fiends and criminals drug addicts locked up, away in Prison. Is this their sick dream, to lock peaceful folks away and live their 'drug free' life. With Nukes, Oil and Booze and guns forever?

Please ask yourself, and others around you, are these people so ill as to want this? to criminalize human beings for simply ingesting a plant based substance, and lock them away, or give them a criminal record, a stigma?

Do all the cops and law enforcement agents really believe in these 'harmful' and 'out dated' laws that we see enforced as prohibition policy around the world?

I think not, I feel that if we simply had access to all the information and could share the 'frustration' and the 'positive' attributes of marijuana in an 'open debate' without wildly wrongheaded political operations slurring and confusing the direct communications between scentists, researchers, lawyers, policy makers and well, the rest of humanity, not trying to take over everybody's lives with all pervasive rules and laws to coerce.

--Steve




Sound Off: Should Pot be Legalized in Detroit?

Updated: Friday, 18 Jun 2010, 10:48 AM EDT
Published : Friday, 18 Jun 2010, 10:47 AM EDT

(myFOXDetroit.com Staff Reports) - Detroit voters may actually get to vote on allowing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

A group called the Coalition for a Safer Detroit is working to get the issue on November's ballot. The measure would allow adults over the age of 21 to possess, and we assume use, one ounce or less of pot on private property.

Tim Beck, a registered marijuana user who's leading the pot petition, joined FOX 2's Huel Perkins on Thursday to discuss the impact of the measure. Click the video player to watch the interview.

Information from the Coalition's Web site:

What is the Safer Detroit Initiative?
It is a ballot initiative sponsored by the Coalition for a Safer Detroit proposing to amend the Detroit City Code to decriminalize use or possession of an ounce or less of marijuana on private property, by anyone who has attained the age of 21 years.

Has this ever been done before?
Yes. The cities of Denver, CO, and Seattle, WA recently made use or possession of small amounts of marijuana their lowest law enforcement priority. Here in Michigan the City of Ann Arbor, made possession of small amounts of marijuana a minor "civil infraction" (like a traffic ticket) in the early 1970's. None of these jurisdictions has experienced any significant, negative consequences as a result. Marijuana is safer then alcohol. It is time we treat it accordingly.

What has been the result in these other cities?
All three are nationally recognized for their prosperity, quality of life, and educated, creative populations. Even more important, police and prosecutors in these cities have been freed up to focus on crimes with victims -- those that have a direct impact on the community, such as vandalism, auto theft, breaking and entering, and domestic violence.


http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/should-pot-be-legalized-in-detroit-20100618-mr


Pot legalization on track in Detroit

Published: June 17, 2010 at 6:44 PM

DETROIT, June 17 (UPI) -- Possession of small amounts of marijuana on private property could soon be legal in Detroit, organizers of a legalization effort said.

The city council's internal operations committee decided Wednesday against amending the proposed ordinance, the Detroit Free Press reported. The last step is election commission approval of the language for the November ballot.

The ordinance would allow anyone 21 or older to possess less than an ounce of marijuana on private property without fear of arrest. Medical marijuana for registered users has been legal in Detroit since a 2004 referendum.

Tim Beck, a registered medical marijuana user, spearheaded the effort to get the legalization ordinance on the ballot. He argues police will be able to focus on "crimes with actual victims."

Dennis Mazurek, an assistant corporation counsel, told the city council committee the ordinance conflicts with Michigan state law, which take precedence. But Beck is confident of victory.


"It's going to win -- I have no doubt of that," he said.


Med Grow's Nick Tennant with a marijuana plant at his school

Roy Ritchie for TIME

This is what a medical-marijuana class looks like. Twenty-five or so students — men, women, young, middle-aged — listen attentively as an instructor holds up a leafy green plant and runs down the list of nutrients it needs. Nitrogen: stimulates leaf and stem growth. Magnesium: helps leaf structure. Phosphorous: aids in the germination of seeds. Michigan's Med Grow Cannabis College is one of several unaccredited schools to have sprung up in the 14 states and the District of Columbia that have legalized medical use of marijuana. Many of its students suffer from chronic pain. Others are looking to supply those in need of relief. (See pictures of cannabis conventions.)

The Med Grow campus sits across the street from a KFC in Southfield, a relatively prosperous suburb of Detroit. Nearly one-fifth of its 90 or so students are former auto-industry workers. These recent enrollees — and the more than 1,000 people who have completed courses at Med Grow since it opened in September — are betting that studying such topics as bloom cycles and advanced pruning techniques will help them succeed in what may be one of the few growth industries in Michigan, home of the nation's highest unemployment rate: 14%. With medical marijuana fetching as much as $500 for 1 oz. (28 g), providing it to a mere five patients could generate $10,000 a month in sales.

Six-week courses at Med Grow cost $475, and the school is planning to open campuses in Colorado and New Jersey within roughly the next year. Meanwhile, the nation's first marijuana school, the three-year-old Oaksterdam University, has expanded from Oakland, Calif., to locations in Los Angeles and one in Flint, Mich., and may open more. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Great American Pot Smoke-Out.")

But as Med Grow founder Nick Tennant can attest, it's not easy being a leader of an emerging industry. Tennant, a very lean, very blond 24-year-old, grew up in the Detroit suburb of Warren and watched the auto-detailing business he started after high school founder along with the region's economy. Then, in 2008, a surprising majority of Michigan voters approved a measure to allow people with cancer, Crohn's disease, AIDS and other ailments to apply for state-issued cards to grow or obtain marijuana. He recalls thinking, "You could sit there and watch the industry evolve or step into the game."

So he wrote up a business plan for a marijuana-growers school and approached his car-detailing clients as potential investors. Many thought it was a joke, but enough took him seriously. He declines to say how much money he raised.

The next step was finding a landlord. One told him flatly, "I don't want to take on the risk." To which Tennant replied, "If you want to let your building sit vacant, go for it." He eventually settled on 5,000 sq. ft. (465 sq m) in an office building in Southfield, a half hour's drive north of downtown Detroit.

The first thing you notice when you walk into Med Grow is the pungent smell of marijuana. One of the school's two grow rooms showcases a single massive marijuana plant that, in terms of height and canopy, is about the size of a kitchen table.

Watch TIME's video "An L.A. Medical Marijuana Odyssey."

See pictures of stoner cinema.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1997455,00.html

ELECTRONIC REEFER?

An electronic cigarette, also known as an e-cigarette or personal vaporizer, is a battery-powered device that provides inhaled doses of nicotine by way of a vaporized solution. It is an alternative to smoked tobacco products, such as cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. In addition to purported nicotine delivery,^[1] this vapor also provides a flavor and physical sensation similar to that of inhaled tobacco smoke, while no smoke or combustion is actually involved in its operation.

An electronic cigarette takes the form of some manner of elongated tube, though many are designed to resemble the outward appearance of real smoking products, like cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Another common design is the "pen-style", so named for its visual resemblance to a ballpoint pen. Most electronic cigarettes are reusable devices with replaceable and refillable parts. A number of disposable electronic cigarettes have also been developed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette