For their study, Marie-France Marin and her team evaluated the effects of metyrapone on a group of young men shown a slide show that documented the serious injury of a young girl. In it, the girl is building a birdhouse with her grandparents until a serious accident lands her in the emergency room. In the end, the girl is okay, but the details of her injury involve lots of blood and other disturbing imagery.

Three days after viewing the images of this story, the team gave either a single 750 milligram (mg) dose of metyrapone, a double dose, or a placebo pill to the men in the group. None of the men knew which pill they received. The team then asked the men to retell the story of the girl as they recalled it, both right after receiving the pill, and again four days after taking the pills.

The team found that the men who took the double dose of meyrapone remembered far less of the negative imagery than did the men taking the single or placebo dose. Men in the placebo group scored between 40 and 50 percent in their negative imagery memory test, while men who took the double dose of metyrapone scored around 30 percent.

In explaining these results to Reuters Health, Marin and her team expressed their belief that because metyrapone artificially lowers cortisol levels, it interferes with the way the brain stores memories. These alterations appear to remove the emotional aspects from negative memories that give them a basis in reality, thus changing actual reality into a type of artificial fantasy world.

‘Global Commission’ Of Former Officials Says War On Drugs Has Failed

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes several former heads of state and UN officials, has released a report calling the global war on drugs a failure.

“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” the report reads. “Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”

Among the members of the commission are former presidents of Columbia, Mexico and Brazil, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz and former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, among others.

The report calls for an end to the “criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others,” and for governments to experiment with ways to regulate drugs so as to undercut organized crime and improve public health.

Meanwhile, bittorrent for drugs: The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.

But even Silk Road has limits: You won’t find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of “anything who’s purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction.”

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure….

Sellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road’s users with computer forensics, they’d have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user’s tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to “creatively disguise” their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn’t accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.

Bitcoins have been called a “crypto-currency,” the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders’ computers. (The name “Bitcoin” is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.

Mexican soldiers look as 134 tonnes of marijuana are incinerated at Morelos military base in Tijuana October 20, 2010. Soldiers seized the drug on Monday in Mexico’s biggest-ever pot haul, the army said. Heavily armed soldiers raided a series of homes in a poor suburb of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California, and came under fire at least once as they took the drugs, also arresting 11 suspected traffickers. REUTERS/Jorge Duenes

Via an extraordinarily harrowing collection of pictures from the drug war. And yet “maybe someone will drive high” or “someone will be high at work” is the rallying cry against legalization.

Proposition 19 – The New Leaf from ISHOTHIM on Vimeo.

vs:

In the 60-second ad, a female narrator says, “Imagine coming out of surgery, and the nurse caring for you was high. Or having to work hard on your job to make up for a co-worker who shows up high on pot. It could happen in California if Proposition 19 passes.”

Hmmn, if you’re high at work, you’ll get fired.  Just like it is right now.

One day we’ll look back and gawk at the strange police state we’re living in. For the record, I kind of hate smoking pot. Calls attention to my – and everyone else’s – weird insecurities.  Smoked a lot when I was 15, the feeling hasn’t left me.  Maybe I’ll get over that in a thousand years.