My Old Friends are Dropping Dead

I just received a call that an old friend of mine dropped dead at age 53. He apparently died in his sleep of a heart attack. It’s hard to say what caused it, but his retarded brother also died young of a heart attack. BA had been a bit overweight, but most importantly, he had been a heavy drinker for about 20 years or so. I do mean a very heavy drinker! I wonder if that gave him a heart attack.

The heavy drinkers are already starting to go. A neighbor of mine, apparently a long time heavy drinker, recently died at about age 47 or so. He died of natural causes!

Another extremely heavy drinker, BJ, died at age 43 or a massive heart attack.. He had been an alcoholic for many years, and in addition, he was very obese.

Another fellow, SL, died recently. He had been a cocaine dealer and very heavy cocaine user for many years. He was so high up in the cocaine dealing business that he no longer had to work and he spent his time just having fun, going out on his fishing boat, etc. I saw him 20 years and he had some weird heart jerking or body jerking movements going on. I wonder if it was all the coke?

His wife left him at some point, and after that, he became a very heavy drinker and in addition, he started chain smoking. I mean lighting one after the other, lighting the newest cigarette with the butt of the old one. He died at age 50 of heart failure! How in Hell do you get heart failure at age 50? You must have to heavily abuse your body for many years. I have a feeling that all those years of cocaine abuse may have contributed to his heart failure at such an early age.

Another old friend, RA, recently beat throat cancer at age 53, but he was in very bad shape for a long time with radiation treatments and whatnot. He could hardly eat anything and lost 30 pounds. Great way to lose weight! He had also gotten to the point where he could barely talk. The throat cancer was apparently caused by years of cigar smoking.

I am 53 years old. You can’t mess around anymore at this age. All the people who abused their bodies for years are starting to see their chickens come home to roost in the worst ways. You either get healthy or you’re going to get sick or get dead, maybe pretty soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tonight. Maybe right the fuck now.

People Are Getting High on Bath Salts

Here.

Actually it is some kind of designer drug being sold over the counter as a bath salts or plant food. Apparently you can use them for those purposes and they work just fine and don’t get you high. You sniff it inject it or smoke it. The drugs in question are mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

Apparently these are stimulants something like methamphetamine, but I don’t know much about them. Looks like a pretty crappy and evil drug, I would say. It’s mostly in Louisiana right now for some reason, and the state has banned the sale of the drugs. But the Feds have not banned them yet since they are not marketed for human consumption. Banning them will take some time. Most users are apparently meth users looking for a new high.

I increasingly agree with the Neurosoup girl on Youtube. She hates meth, cocaine, PCP and heroin. She comes right out and says that they are crappy and evil drugs.She doesn’t like alcohol either. She’s up on marijuana and what she calls entheogens, which is something like hallucinogens.

If a lot of the people using coke, meth, alcohol and heroin started using pot and entheogens instead, our society would look a lot different. I would say that the damage from drugs would go way down. The hallucinogens are somewhat self-limiting in use. They are so strong, and people are so afraid and paranoid of them that people tend to only use them for a short period of time. People want a drug they can get high on regularly.

My generation promoted the use of coke and to some extent speed. I would say we screwed up bad on that one. Those drugs are just crap.

One thing I always hated about drugs were the anti-drug morons. They’re still everywhere; in fact, they’re the majority. Instead of being sensible like the Neurosoup Girl and dividing recreational drugs into different classes, the anti-drug morons just lump them all into one great big mess. They’re all the same. They’re all dope, and they’re all evil. Weed is meth is heroin is coke is LSD is mushrooms. It’s nuts.

I had to deal with this all the time while growing up as a pothead. As a pothead, I was said to be “into drugs” and was lumped in with PCP users, cokeheads, meth freaks and heroin addicts. It was all the same.

To some extent, this was true of drug users too. They weren’t so stupid as to think all drugs are the same – no user is that stupid – but since pot was illegal, and you had to deal with illegal drug users to get it, a lot of pot users were also using and promoting the use of other stuff, often along the lines that the other drug was as easy and safe as pot. Pure pot users were quite rare.

Legalizing pot would put it in the class as alcohol. How many people have you met who drink, often a lot, but won’t touch any “drugs” (LOL)? Lots. Making weed legal would increase the number of pure pot users who don’t mess with other stuff.

One thing I noticed that is people, often the older generation, will talk about someone who ruined their life on drugs, often the son or daughter of a friend. Often I will ask, “What kind of drugs?” A legitimate question, right? After all, I’m an old drug fiend, so I’m very interested in details like that! I always get this frustrated response, “I don’t know!” as if it doesn’t matter. Ok, so they got into weed, is that right? Is that how they ruined their lives? This is more of the, “All drugs are the same,” BS. Very frustrating dealing with this moronitude.

The 50 Craziest Rock Stars Ever

Here.

This article is pretty damn funny.

A lot of rockers are or were seriously nuts!

I’m having a hard time figuring out dx’s for a lot of these people. It seems to be something towards the more extroverted end. I suspect a lot of them are acting this way on purpose, sort of like a lot of artists act “deliberately insane.”

I only see a few who were obviously psychotic: Syd Barrett, Peter Green, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson, Jim Gordon and Skip Spence for starters. I’m familiar with all these cases. They all had schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. It’s commonly said that they are all drug burnouts, but I doubt it.

For one thing, LSD does not appear to cause permanent psychosis. I’ve known too many completely normal folks who have taken it 100-300 times. It’s not even proven to damage your brain. The worst that can be said about it is that very heavy users sometimes do go psychotic and have to be hospitalized. Typically, they get better, but they often go back to heavy LSD use and become mentally ill again. No one has any idea how LSD even makes you temporarily insane.

All of these people simply developed schizophrenia. LSD can trigger schizophrenia, but no one knows how that works either. LSD-induced schizophrenia looks just like the rest of schizophrenia and it responds to the same drugs too. Since acid doesn’t damage your brain, I can’t see how it could cause schizophrenia. There are good reasons not to do acid, but fear of being permanently mentally ill is not one of them.

For the rest of them, dx’s are difficult. Some seem to have issues with narcissism and borderline personality disorder. Some were just seriously whacked out on booze and dope, often cocaine and/or heroin.

Ike Turner used cocaine for some 45 years until it killed him at age 76.

Sly Stone spent years on cocaine, even living on the streets smoking a crack pipe. No one quite knows what is up with Sly these days. He shows up at occasional performance, acts very strange, walks off stage in mid-show, gets on his motorcycle and rides away.

Rick James spent a good 15 years on a crack pipe.

Whitney Houston is ruined and is heavy into cocaine.

David Bowie went nuts on coke in the 1970′s, became full-blown psychotic and embraced Nazism.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard is on crack.

John Frusciante almost killed himself on heroin and coke.

Ozzy Osborne, Jerry Lee Lewis and Liza Minnelli were alcoholics.

Keith Moon was a drunk and a pillhead who liked to blow up toilets with dynamite for fun.

Elvis was a hardcore pillhead who apparently went insane from all the tablets.

Arthur Lee of Love spent 20 years abusing drugs heavily, became homeless, set buildings on fire and shot up his neighbor’s house.

Carlos Santana used acid heavily, then 20 years ago met up with an angel named Metatron who looks like Santa Claus who has been guiding his life ever since. He communicates with Miles Davis, a dead person, on a regular basis.

Miles Davis (while he was alive and not talking to Santana) spent years shooting heroin, beating his wife and just acting weird.

Little Richard spent years binging on cocaine, having sex orgies and sucking cocks in men’s restrooms.

James Taylor was a depressive and a heroin addict.

Some were suicidal.

Wendy O Williams sawed instruments in half with a chainsaw, then retired and blew her brains out.

Ian Curtis recorded some of the most depressing music ever made, then hung himself on the night of his US tour.

Adam Ant is a depressive.

Mariah Carey assaulted staff and reporters and slit her wrists.

Some like Courtney Love and Britney Spears simply cannot seem to function as adults.

Sinéad O’Connor is just a kook.

Lou Reed’s main problem is that he’s a terminal asshole.

R. Keely is just a weirdo with a taste for underage girls.

Sid Vicious assaulted fans, carved up his chest onstage, murdered his girlfriend, then OD’d on heroin as a grand finale.

Jaz Coleman, George Clinton, Captain Beefheart and Julian Cope are unclassifiable.

No one knows what’s up with Sun Ra.

GG Allin was just nuts, dx’d as narcissistic, Borderline PD and masochistic.

Michael Jackson was one of the weirdest of all. No one seems to know what was wrong with him. He seems to have been a homosexual pedophile. I’m familiar with most of his weird antics, but I never knew that he said he had fathered 2 “Aryan” babes named Prince 1 and Prince 2. Weird!

Just because you aren’t psychotic (and most of these folks are not) doesn’t mean you’re not nuts. You can be plenty nuts without being psychotic, plenty.

Dope Makes You Act Intoxicated

Repost from the old site.

Reduces your performance in every way, is incapable of enhancing performance, and other lies.

This is one of the biggest lies of all about dope, and it needs to be challenged head on.

Most, if not all, non-users believe that all drugs make the user obviously intoxicated and reduce performance in all areas. I’ve tried to explain to them that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are stimulants, and hence don’t make you “fucked up.”

Instead, in the short term, they improve mental and physical performance. If you take a test on meth or coke, you will probably do better. The jury is still out on physical performance, but for at least some things, you will do better on coke or speed.

In the Valley here, farm workers are using meth to help them do their jobs. They’re able to work harder, pick more crops faster and work longer before they get tired on meth.

I’ve never driven a car on meth, but I have driven a car on amphetamine tablets. Works great. You can drive just fine on cocaine too. I don’t see why it’s illegal to drive under the influence of these drugs. Might as well make it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee.

Non-users only experience with drugs is with alcohol. Alcohol makes you obviously intoxicated as a general rule. But the other drugs don’t necessarily. Non-users find this clear fact almost impossible to comprehend.

I decided to ask Doperman about this:

Hi Bob, Doperman here. Thanks for letting me post here. Every time I took psychedelics (LSD, LSA, psilocybin, peyote), I assure you I knew completely what was going on.

I even drove a car once for 15 hours on a nice straight highway on a head full of acid. Another time I drove to Mexico with my brother, went to Tecate, cruised around a bit, and went back to the US and stayed at Cuyamaca State Park.

On the 15-hour trip, I don’t think I was normal, because I drove by the Owens River, and there were all these guys fly-fishing there, and they all looked up at me driving by like “What the fuck is with you man???!!!“

I went into stores a few times and bought stuff, and at the end of the voyage, and stopped and got a motel room near the Nevada border at 1 AM. All flying on a head full of LSD.

I can act totally normal on any of those drugs.

Problem is you get these huge saucer eyeballs and it’s verging on a bust right there to be walking around in public. But people on acid don’t necessarily act all that different. You can’t even really tell that they’re on a drug if you see them. They’re not obviously intoxicated.

I once threw a party and at least 200 people showed up. At least among those who showed up at the beginning, a lot of them were on LSD. At the start, there was a house full of people high on acid. It wasn’t really obvious, and no one acted really weird or did anything crazy or stupid. Only a relative few LSD users act stupid or crazy or have to be hauled off by the cops. Most of them make it through the trip acting fairly normally.

Coke is the same way. The coke user is not obviously intoxicated either. You can’t even usually tell if someone is high on coke, because people don’t act all that much different when they are on it.

I don’t think people act all that different on speed either. I’ve seen a lot of people on that stuff and they typically don’t appear intoxicated.

It’s often the case that you cannot tell when someone is high on marijuana.

In my mid-20′s, I was living at home and getting my college degree. I was stoned out of my mind every night. I lived in the basement and had a separate entrance and a separate phone. My living at home included unwritten contracts stating that I could smoke pot and drink all I wanted to, and have visitors over until all hours of the night.

The folks were sleeping two floors up, so we had to turn down the music late at night. I didn’t have the right to fuck women at home, but I fought hard for that one. My Mom wouldn’t budge on that one. I used to violate it anyway. I had a separate entrance, and could sneak women in no problem.

My Mom even heard about the women I sneaked in and fucked, and if they were knock-dead gorgeous (some of them were) she was quite proud of her son in a perverse way. I’ll never be able to match Sexmaniacman (Who can?) but I did my best.

But my Mom could always tell when I was stoned, and she hated it. So if you’re around it a lot, maybe you can tell.

I’m an experienced pot smoker for 35 years off and on, and I typically don’t have the faintest idea if someone is stoned or not. How can you tell anyway?

Lies About the Drug Burnouts

Repost from the old site.

Dope fries your brain, and all ex-dopers are “permafried,” or damaged by drugs. This condition is both immediately obvious and permanent.

This is one of the staples of the anti-drug line, and it appears that the vast majority of Americans have bought into it, including most drug users and former users.

I think it’s utter nonsense, so I’m going to take it on head-on here in this post.

Simply put, I don’t really think that “drug burnouts” exist anymore than “alcohol burnouts” do. The notion comes from the idea that illegal drug use damages the brain. Hence, after years of use of this, that, or various substances, the brain is permanently damaged, and the person is odd, strange, weird, bizarre, permanently spacey, “permafried,” crazy, nuts or mentally ill in some way or another.

The theory is very appealing in that unfortunately, it is starting to look like most of these drugs, at least in heavy use, are capable of damaging the brain. The jury is still somewhat out on cannabis, but even that does not look really encouraging for heavy long-term users.

The theory is typically used to abuse users of hallucinogens and psychedelics, probably because these are the most feared drugs of them all. There is a serious problem with the “fried brains acidheads” line: the hallucinogens are one of the very few drugs that look pretty clean as far as brain damage goes.

When you come out and say that LSD does not cause general damage to the brain, as I am doing now, people tend to get really upset. After all, if anything damages your brain, it must be LSD! After all, if acid, the ultimate evil drug, doesn’t mess with your brain, then surely nothing does.

The truth is much more strange. It’s now clear that the most popular drugs of all, like cocaine and methamphetamine. can damage the brain, often pretty quickly.

Cocaine begins to cause demonstrable brain damage after as few as 12 uses (constriction of the arteries of the brain). After a few grams a month for a few years, clear brain damage shows up on the P300 test (a general slowing of the EEG). There is now evidence for serious changes in white and gray matter with heavy cocaine use.

Meth is much harder to pin down, but heavy current users often appear scattered and damaged. After 1.5 grams a week for 1-2 years, clear signs of damage start showing up. I believe that damage is also starting to show up on white and gray matter tests.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough what bad news these white and gray matter tests are – they indicate destruction of the neurons themselves and the connections between them.

The damage from meth seems to be to dopamine neurons and their connections and is observable with brain diagnostic imaging tools. Whether or not damage occurs at lower doses over shorter periods of time is not known, but meth is starting to look like nasty stuff for your brain.

I still say you can take meth at least a dozen times or so (and possibly much more!) without any permanent damage. At some point though, you are going to start damaging your brain, and we don’t really know what that point is. Want to try to find out when the damage begins? Don’t bother!

Ecstasy or MDMA, formerly up in the air as far as brain damage goes, is looking worse all the time. The best we can say now is that one dose probably does not cause damage. More than one dose almost surely does, and the damage is cumulative. The drug damages serotonin neurons in certain parts of the brain by killing the connections (axons) between the neurons. The neurons themselves are not killed.

It is a common falsehood about drug abuse and the brain that “drugs kill brain cells.” In truth, actual neuronal death is hard to pin down for a lot of these drugs. Instead of killing brain cells outright, drugs often just damage them so they don’t work quite so well. With MDMA, the serotonin axons grow back, but they do not grow back correctly.

I never did MDMA – it was after my time.

Even heavy cannabis use is looking suspect.

Drinking more than two drinks a day over a period of time causes shrinkage of the brain. The shrinkage increases as the drinks per day does up. Periodic heavy drinking depresses brain cells for up to two years, and chronic heavy drinking actually kills neurons.

Now on to the psychedelics. The hard facts are that we do not have good evidence that LSD, peyote, psilocybin and similar drugs damage the brain in any way that would that reduce your intellect, make you odd, strange, weird, bizarre or crazy, or effect your ability to think and feel rationally.

It is true that LSD, psilocybin and MDMA are capable of causing HPPD. That is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. The result is visual aberrations persisting into the period when one is not using the drug. LSD seems to be the worst offender, but some cases are caused by psilocybin. Until a cure or prevention is found, HPPD is an excellent reason to avoid using psychedelics, LSD in particular.

There is a board on the Net for HPPD sufferers, and if you go there and tell them that you are still using acid, they are going to give you a piece of their mind. They aren’t anti-drug ignoramuses or holier than thou moralistic types. They’ve just been there and done that and don’t want to see you in the same boat as they are.

No one has any idea what is causing HPPD, but a Dr. Abraham in Massachusetts has the notion that it is related to damage to the visual system. All LSD users show damage to the visual system. It’s not apparent to most of them, but it shows up on tests. It has to do with how fast you can adjust to from a totally light environment to a totally dark environment. LSD users do poorly on that.

It’s interesting to note that although all of the tests for LSD and brain damage in animals were negative with the exception of very high doses that would be about the equivalent of 1,000 50 mcg. hits at once, LSD was shown to be hypotoxic to the optic nerve in the bird.

These negative findings for brain damage and LSD go back to the 1950′s. We now have over 50 years of negative tests for LSD and brain damage in animals as well as humans.

LSD does some pretty bizarre things to animals. If you give it to a cat and put the cat in an enclosed area with a rat, the cat will cower in terror of the rat, which it normally would try to kill. Strange.

All tests of intellectual function damage for LSD users have come up negative. Some suggested temporary damage on visual function tests (the Trail-Making B Test), but as the HPPD data above suggests, LSD may indeed damage the visual system. Even this finding cleared up one year post-drug

Damage to the visual system would logically cause HPPD. Would it make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, insane and stupid? Why would it? The visual system effects vision. It doesn’t effect psychological stability or the ability to think or feel in a normal way.

That said, there is anecdotal evidence that very heavy LSD is somehow bad for your brain. It seems to go away if you quit, but it’s there nevertheless. There are reports on the net of users who used LSD very heavily – several hits, several times a week, for a year or so. Afterward, they had symptoms of brain damage.

They could no longer do the intellectual work that they could formerly do, and they had a hard time reading. After a year or so off the drug, their intellect seemed to return. The users were not mentally ill at any time.

The notion of mental illness from the use of LSD is very controversial. It seems almost impossible to understand how a drug that has no permanent brain effects outside the visual system could make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, crazy, nuts, insane, or mentally disturbed in any way at all. Surely, if it did so, the etiology could not be from actual brain damage but must be in purely psychological terms: psychogenic.

Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of mental illness after LSD use.

The most frightening to me are reports of mental illness after very heavy use. We have reports of individuals who used LSD very heavily (several times a week at high dose) for a year or two. After that, they became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a hospital. They got better and were released and seemed OK on the outside. But then they got into heavy LSD use again and had to be readmitted.

There are other reports of folks in their 40′s and 50′s who used LSD maybe 2,000-3,000 times. They are reported to be mentally ill to some degree or another.

We don’t yet have any good theory to explain cognitive problems or mental illness in extremely heavy LSD users, but nevertheless, based on anecdotal evidence, one ought to avoid this sort of high-risk behavior.

Timothy Leary probably used LSD between 1,000-2,000 times. I have to admit he looked pretty fried the last few times I saw him on TV. He also used all sorts of other drugs.

As a good general rule though, I haven’t met one person yet who is “permafried” from any kind of drugs. My perception has been that if you quit using, after a while you become normal again. Most of the so-called permafried types are still using drugs heavily. It seems to me that no matter how damaged people seemed, if they quit and sobered up, they seemed to be quite OK once they were clean.

I’ve met some folks who seemed damaged from very heavy dope use, but in the one case I can think of, he wasn’t really strange or weird. He could be socially inappropriate, and his basic problem was he didn’t give a damn about anything. You will find this personality syndrome in a lot of very heavy users that otherwise function pretty well – they seem like they don’t care about much of anything.

He couldn’t hold down a job because he was so damaged that he couldn’t even make change. Yet I was at a party with him once and he picked up this gorgeous young blond ten years his junior and fucked her brains out that night. How nuts can you be if you can pull off something like that?

I met another fellow like that on the streets of San Francisco 15 years ago. Smart guy, Masters Degree from a good university, lived off a trust fund, traveled the world, partied his brains out, in his 40′s.

He had that “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, but I don’t consider that mental illness. Hell, I don’t consider most stuff mental illness! He wasn’t ready for corporate America, but he didn’t want to be either, and I didn’t consider him mentally ill in any way, shape or form.

But then I think the whole notion of “crazy” is horribly abused against people who aren’t even nuts at all.

I’ve known many individuals who used drugs heavily for years who are now more or less sober, although some continue to use cannabis. For the life of me, I can’t see how even one of them has been permanently damaged by their drug use. I haven’t met a permafried person yet, but I guess there’s always a first.

I keep meeting people who used cocaine very heavily for 5-10 years, or so heavily as to have to go into drug treatment, or took LSD up to 300 times or so, or have been smoking pot for 20-30 years and still are, now heavily, in their 40′s. For the life of me, I can’t see anything wrong with them now. Some of them have very good jobs and make $100,000/yr or so.

Despite a lot of theoretical support for the “permafried” notion (in that many of these drugs are now being found to actually damage your brain), I haven’t seen much of it in my life. If anyone knows any “permafried” individuals who are now clean and have been clean for a while, let me know in the comments.

Until then, I think the whole notion is ridiculous.

Dope Sucks

Repost from the old site.

At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn’t a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain. There was a lot of information that said that drugs could be used recreationally in moderation without problems. That was the spirit of the age. It’s dead and gone now, maybe forever.

I keep thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gotten into drugs as much as I did. The drugs all seem so much worse now because our information is greater. My use was really a product of an era as opposed to just some general degenerate tendency of mine.

Cocaine.

Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie Party Drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn’t seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn’t believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.

Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that; they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an “addict”. But if you know anything about coke, you know a little over a gram a year is nothing more than dabbling, and it’s not really serious cocaine use at all. Further, of course you can do coke for 13 years without getting addicted. I did so myself.

But just about everyone I knew who got into coke at least to the extent that I did turned into an addict. Sooner or later, sniffers move on to smoking or shooting, because it’s simply a more economical way to take the drug.

I’m convinced that cocaine is a great big drag. For instance, I’m such a dabbler that I would actually save up coke. I’d get some out for the evening, lay out of a few lines for everyone in attendance, then sit back and drink Heinekens with everyone else. Coke is such a stupid drug that you can’t just give people a little bit of it and then put it away. If you do, you’re risking a riot.

After an hour or two, they start bothering you for more. You tell them that you’re saving it for later. Now they start getting belligerent.

I’ve had people swear right to my face that they were going to come back when I wasn’t home and steal my coke. The very idea of “saving coke” from one night to the next was considered to be the ultimate in stupidity, and they were going to punish me for being a moron.

So, really, coke sucks. It’s no fun. Even if you can somehow stay a dabbler like me, everyone else turns into an addict, and when they do, they’re actually dangerous to be around.

The addict idiots would come over, excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, and then shoot up in there for the next thirty minutes. We’d be out in the room steaming away. When the guy came out, we’d confront him and tell him to quit shooting up in the damned bathroom, but they never would quit. Addicts don’t take no for an answer.

Other coke addicts stole from me, then had the nerve to blame it on the coke, then told me flat out the money was never coming back. No problem, as long as you stay the Hell away. But they wouldn’t. They rip you off, then they keep knocking on your door and coming around.

I kept banning the worst ones, but they would come back, like males who batter their wives, bearing gifts and apologies. Soon they were back into their abusive manipulative addict game again.

One of the reasons I moved to Central California was to get away from some of these morons. I’d banned them over and over, but they kept coming back. I’d known them for many years, and they were still friends with all of our friends. Sometimes to cut yourself off from these idiots, you might just have to pack up and move away from them.

The addict has a personality. The personality is that of a callous, manipulative prick. There are some decent or classy addicts out there, but those are mostly dealers who deal to afford the habit. If they’re not doing that, they’re hungry for cash and all sorts of other stuff all the time, and probably mooching off or using others. The addict is a user. He doesn’t care about you or anyone else. The only thing he cares about is dope.

Speed.

Speed has got to suck even worse than coke. I did meth around three times in my whole life. When I tell this to non-users, they get a snarl of contempt on their face. But I’m comfortable with it. Three times is basically nothing; it’s experimental use. Why should I feel guilty about it because some annoying Puritan shit wants me to be?

The reason I only took it three times is because that’s how long it took me to realize it’s one of the most awful drugs on Earth. The high is excellent. You’re smart, in control, sane, happy and confident. You feel warm and friendly and talk all night with your wonderful friends. You don’t act wild or crazy or insane or anything like that. Your mind is sharp as a pencil, and your emotions are controlled. It lasts a good 18 hours.

The next day you feel like you got hit by a freight train. First it feels like your IQ just dropped 10 points. The stupid feeling gradually goes away after about a week. Your body feels like a sack of bones. It feels like someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked all the energy out of you. That lasts a few days too.

So 18 hours of high is followed by up to one week of crash. Who needs this?

PCP.

PCP is a really strange drug, and I took it about a dozen times, mostly unwittingly. When I tell that to non-users, they get this wild, horrified look in their eyes, but it’s no big deal. A dozen trips is experimental use, and I don’t regret a thing.

Back in the 70′s, scumbag PCP users were common. They were evangelizing, and the way they did it was to pass PCP joints around masquerading as pot joints and not tell you.

You could always figure it out real quick due to the bizarre minty metallic taste, but you were still mad at the dusters for being so dishonest. The first time was out of this world; the rest of the trips were unremarkable. I’ve certainly heard of people doing strange things on the drug, but I’ve never seen it much myself.

I remember once I was at a party in downtown Huntington Beach in 1976. There was a band playing, then people started passing joints. At some point, the dusters sneaked theirs in too. By the time I realized it, I was flying, so I just kept taking hits off the PCP jays.

This was a party of around 20-30 young folks, most around age 18, and everyone was high on PCP. Not one person was acting weird in the slightest. Non-users don’t get it. Even crazy drugs like PCP typically don’t make most folks act nuts.

LSD and psychedelics.

Acid and all the other psychedelics suck because just about everybody on Earth despises them and the people who take them. We were never in the stage of psychedelic acceptance when I was using them from 1974-1988, and I’m not sure if we ever will be.

Nothing strikes terror, rage and disgust into the heart of the non-user like the word LSD.

In truth, psychedelics are probably my favorite drugs of all. I took them about 40 times and never really had a bad trip.

Once on mushrooms on got on a bit of a bad trip – sort of an anxiety – awkwardness – nerd trip where I suddenly felt like the biggest geek on Earth. I was with a tripping partner and he wasn’t cool about me being transformed into Ultra Nerd.

So I turned the trip around. There were bad nerd vibes with strange deep blue colors and energy fields running through my body like waves of electricity. Those were the shitty nerd vibes. The rest of you might refer to them as an emotion. The fascinating thing about psychedelics is the way your feelings actually become extremely electric and even colorful. Joy has one color, sadness another, on and on.

Well, I decided I was going to turn this trip around. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was able to do it. I took the bad nerd electricity, changed it from blue to red and changed its direction. It was going from my skull down all through my body and out my feet in a big fat blue-purple electric drag feeling.

I changed it by reversing it. A new red electricity feeling would start at the toes and go up, fighting the perennial 18 year old vibe in a sort of battle of the feelings. It took me a good 45 minutes to get the good feelings going in an excellent flow that didn’t hang up on the bad stuff on the way up. Then the trip was turned around and a really crappy trip was turned into a fantastic trip.

You know that, you bad trippers? A lot of you can do that. You can change your trips, turn them around, make them go this way and that way. It’s just a drug. You’re still generally steering the ship you call your mind.

I often would buy a hit of LSD and just keep it in my drawer for months or even years until I felt that I was ready to take it. I would wait until a period in my life when I was feeling happier, more together and more mentally healthy and centered than I had in a while. Sometimes I might have to wait a while until I felt my head was ready for it.

That’s really the only way to take LSD. Never take it when you’re out of sorts in any way at all, in a bad mood, or in a bad, down or stressed out phase in your life. That’s how bad trips happen.

I haven’t taken a psychedelic in 20 years. I probably won’t take one ever again.

You really don’t get any credit for being a casual, recreational or responsible doper. It’s hard to do with most drugs anyway, but you can do it with pot and possibly psychedelics.

But you don’t get any credit. If you take a hit off a joint once a year, you’re the same as some guy slamming a gram of coke a day. The non-users hate all dope and all dopers, and that’s one of the sad rules of the game.

With booze, people are pretty sane. If you drink lightly, say no more than 1-2 drinks a day, most non-drinkers are sane enough to recognize that that’s not a problem.

Not so with dope. If you don’t use, you hate it, and you hate people who use it. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a non-user who was tolerant towards any kind of kind of drug use. Ex-users are pretty much the same way. I’m not sure if I’ve ever met an ex-user of even marijuana who was willing to tolerate it in anyone else. Once they put on that ex-doper crown, they get up on that high horse and never get off.

It’s for all of these reasons that I think dope sucks.

Drinking is fun in part because it’s socially acceptable. Things that aren’t socially acceptable are a drag. You’re always paranoid about who to reveal your drug use too, and you’re always running into morons who think that heroin and weed are one and the same.

Not because dope is bad for you or you’re evil or immoral if you use it, but more that the whole scene around it, and the ridiculous non-users, is a great big gigantic drag. If even pot ever gets to the point where non-users can accept it the way they accept social drinking, maybe it might get fun again.

The Pig Farm Murders

Warning: Adverse reactions – vomiting – have occurred from watching the video and even from reading this post. Please read or watch with caution.

I’m not sure I had ever heard of this case before, but it’s really bizarre! Robert Pickton and his equally bizarre brother owned a pig farm in British Colombia. They had a building built next to it for “charity events” hosted by the “Piggy Palace Good Times Society.” These events were actually wild booze-fueled bacchanals with up to 1,800 partiers and “entertainment” by plenty of prostitutes from Vancouver’s raunchy and drug-ridden Downtown Eastside district.

The Downtown Eastside has one of the West’s most concentrated populations of drug addicts, mostly using crack and heroin, but increasingly also meth. Most of the female addicts there support their habits by prostituting themselves. There are an estimated 5-10,000 drug addicts living there at any given time. Despite a vigorous needle exchange program that hands out 2-4 million of free needles a year, the population has one of the West’s highest HIV rates: 1/3 of the population and 80% of the prostitutes are HIV-positive.

Around 1983, three years before the Olympics, prostitutes started disappearing from the area. They continued to disappear until Pickton’s arrest in 2002. In 2007, Pickton was tried and convicted of six homicides, all Downtown Eastside prostitutes. He was charged with 21 more homicides of more Downtown Eastside prostitutes, but he may never be tried for those deaths.

He is also implicated in another five homicides of young British Colombian women. He claims 49 murders. He really wanted to hit 50, but he says he got careless and got caught. He really regrets not hitting the big 5-0.

Some of the testimony coming out of the case is outrageous:

The star witness in the trial of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton testified on Monday that she walked into the barn at his suburban pig farm to find him covered in blood and a woman’s body hanging from a chain.

“There was blood everywhere,” Lynn Ellingsen told the court.

“He told me if I was to say anything, I would be right beside her.”

Good Lord! Ellingsen, a prostitute and crack addict, lived on Pickton’s property for a month. Earlier on the same night when she saw the horrible sight, she and Pickton had gone to Eastside Downtown to pick up crack and a prostitute. They went back to Pickton’s place and smoked crack.

Ellingsen had fallen asleep when she heard a noise. She went into the barn and saw Pickton, covered in blood, with a woman hanging from the same chains he used to hang up his pigs when he slaughtered them. The woman on the chain was the prostitute they had picked up earlier than night. Pickton was skinning the woman when she walked in.

The arrest was not his first brush with the law. Five years earlier, in 1997, a young woman had barely escaped with her life. A drug-addicted prostitute named Wendy Eistetter was handcuffed and stabbed by Pickton. In a wild melee, she somehow got out of her cuffs, disarmed him and stabbed him before escaping. A motorist found her by the side of the road at 1:30 AM, wearing only a coat, with multiple stab wounds and took her to the hospital. Charges were mysteriously dropped.

While the investigation into the charges was going on, an acquaintance came forward and fingered Pickton as a suspect. His description of Pickton was riveting. Pickton spent most of his time downtown picking up whores. His farm was a bizarre and creepy place, patrolled by vicious dogs who roamed the property with a 700 pound boar. The dogs and the boar would all attack you if you came onto the property. Good God. Then there was Pickton’s trailer. What were all those women’s pursues and ID cards doing in there anyway?

Pickton’s brother, David, was also a strange guy. In 1992, he was arrested on sexual assault charges. He had attacked a woman in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. He was given a slap on the wrist. He looks menacing in his photo.

Police found all sorts of horrible things in their investigation. Women’s heads were found in the freezer, sawed in half vertically. Female hands and feet had been stuffed inside the severed heads. The body parts were sharing freezer space with unsold pork.

Female remains were found in a wood chipper. Women had apparently been chopped in the machine and the meat was fed to the pigs on the farm! In 2004, it was revealed that some of the women were ground up and their flesh was mixed with pig meat from the farm. Thankfully, it was not distributed commercially.

A .22 pistol with a dildo on the end was found, apparently a murder a weapon. The dildo was used as a makeshift silencer. Blood-stained clothing was found in the trailer where Pickton lived. A woman’s remains were found in a trash bag at the bottom of a trash can on the property. A woman’s jawbone and teeth were found near the slaughterhouse on the property, where more than pigs were slaughtered. Another jawbone was found in the mud of one of the pigpens.

Night-vision goggles, Spanish fly, fur gloves, .357 ammo, and a syringe with blue windshield wiper fluid inside were also found. Pickton had injected some of the women with windshield washer fluid to kill them. Pickton had told a friend that women were stripped, handcuffed, gagged and taken to a bed where he had sex with them doggy-style. Afterward, he strangled them on bed using a looped wire. Then they were bled and gutted with the main body parts being fed to the pigs and the rest mixed up with pork offal and taken to a rendering plant to be disposed of.

Prostitutes and other guests were invited to the farm. There Pickton cooked for his guests, offered them drugs and hosted wild, neverending parties. It now appears that some of the food he was cooking for them involved pork mixed with ground up female victims.

He had taken the remains of some of the women, mixed them with pork offal, and taken them in barrels to a rendering plant, where the rendering machines like this one were used to grind up his victims’ remains.

After a huge investigation involving 54 anthropologists and huge earthmoving machines, the DNA of 30 different women (some say the figure is now up to 80), was found at the site. 27 were identified, all prostitutes.

It now appears that Pickton, aged 52 when arrested, had been killing women for at least 11 years before he was caught. His first known victim disappeared in 1991, when he was 41 years old. However, as early as 1988 and 1989, he was already regarded as dangerous to women. In 1988, women were warning other women to watch themselves around him. In 1989, people were warning women not to go home with him, admonishing them with terrifying tales.

He had apparently grown to hate prostitutes, whom he had been using for years, after as he put it, they infected him with Hepatitis C, attacked him with a knife, stole from him and used him. His rage at prostitutes did not develop until relatively late in life, which is why he did not start killing until age 41, which is quite late to begin a serial killer career.

There are other unconfirmed aspects of the case, with Ellingsen accusing Pickton of having sex with a dead woman’s corpse. Ellingsen and other drug addict-prostitute, Dinah Taylor, lived with Pickton for a while and helped him to pick up prostitutes and bring them to the farm. There is also a possibility that Taylor may have been involved in some of the killings, but she has never been charged. Pickton told his brother David that Taylor had killed some of the girls.

Good overview of the case here.

My Hero

I wanna be this guy.

Iggy Pop at age 40. The picture of radiant health. Damn he's in good shape. Fuck all you young punks. When my generation retires, so help me God, our retirement communities will be full of all-night parties playing rock music, people coming and going all night long. You will hear the most insane and ought-to-be-illegal rock music all day long.

Look at how great he looks at age 40 here. I saw him in 1981, or yesterday, at the Palladium in Los Angeles. I’d been drinking, smoking dope and sniffing coke, and I was high as a fucking kite. There were beautiful women and young chicks everywhere, real friendly too.

The concert opened rather suddenly. I was with a friend of mine, or my worst enemy, or someone…

I was working as an editor of a magazine at the time. I told some of the girls in the office that I was going to see Iggy Pop, and one girl wanted to go with me. She asked if she could go with me.

Then she took it back, “No way. My boyfriend will kill me.” He was a redneck macho fucker with a great big truck. The office girl was hot, 24, big tits, nice looking. Her best friend was screwing the magazine artist, F. They would go out for two-hour lunches every day and come back with big smiles on their faces.

My boss was a faggot who kept trying to fuck me. He kept buying me lunches all the time. I got my paycheck and tried to pay him back, and he flipped out and started screaming and yelling. “I didn’t buy you those lunches so you could pay me back!” I guess he wanted me to pay him back on my knees or something. The perverted asshole eventually fired me because I wouldn’t suck his dick or whatever he wanted me to do to.

He was sure I was queer for some stupid reason. It was sort of my fault for doing the Mick Jagger (No wait! Iggy Pop-androgynous) thing I guess. If he had eyes, he could have figured out I wasn’t.

Fags don’t look at women. This is the dead giveaway for queers everywhere. There were all these beautiful women in the office hanging coming around my cubicle all the time for this and that. The queer acted like they were part of the walls or the floor or the furniture. They may as well have not even been there. Furthermore, the fag looked at me like I was a Filet Mignon medium rare.

There was another guy in the office, from Europe, macho but sort of faggy in some weird way. He acted like he would screw anything if he was loaded enough. He was dating some Black chick. Sometimes he was my best friend, sometimes he was tearing me up and insulting me to my face. In other words, a typical hyper-competitive super-aggressive young male weenie. He used to trash-talk me for being a pothead. Then he would come buy pot off me. What an ass.

One time in the lunchroom he took me aside and told me the best high of all was speed, injected directly into your arm, preferably after 9 or 10 drinks. This guy wore a jacket and tie to work in an office every time. I tell ya, dopers are everywhere. This guy shoots fucking speed after drinking himself under the table, but I’m a loser for smoking dope.

As you can see, young males are sort of hopeless, so, assuming chicks like you, just shine on the Y chromosomes and hang with the ladies.

After a while, I quit eating with the fag and the other idiot males in the office and just ate lunch with the office girls every day. Back in those days, I was said to be very good looking (male model type). Now I’m old and ugly, but it was fun at the time.

If you’re a guy and you look that good, and if you’re very pretty, most people just assume you’re a fag anyway. You can try to screw your way out of your public image, but even after scores of hot chicks, it’s kind of useless. Usually you get this wonderful consolation prize called, “Wow! Now we know you’re bisexual and we really love you for that!” Damn. I will return that prize, thank you.

Back in those days, a lot of guys always seemed like they either wanted to have sex with me or kick my ass, or a lot of times, oddly enough, both at the same time. I’m telling you, we’re Cavemen. Strip off the Calvin Kleins, give us a bearskin and a club, and we’re the same.

If you’re like that, you may as well learn to love women (They’re not that bad after all) and just hang around chicks all the time. Young men are idiots anyway. All they want to do is fight and fuck, and they often aren’t getting enough. Just hang around chicks all the time, and pretty soon, the less idiotic of the guys will try to make friends with you just so they can join you hanging with the chicks.

What could go wrong hanging around with chicks all the time? Nothing really.

Only a couple of things you need to know. One, make the ground rules clear. No woman, not one, is ever safe with you, not even for one minute. You’re a million times better than her faggot friends who she loves for their harmlessness. In order to differentiate yourself from them, you must be dangerous. Sexually dangerous. At all times. And don’t ever let em forget it.

In addition, I would be mysterious. If you’re out of luck, don’t ever let them know you aren’t getting any. Just be Mr. Mystery With a History. As soon as they find out you aren’t getting any, none of them will want you. If they ask, say, “None of your Goddamned business,” and laugh at them. Say, “Well, I’m not a virgin,” “There’s usually a woman or two in my life. Sometimes one, sometimes more than one, sometimes none. Life is interesting.”

If they ask why you don’t talk about your dates, say, “I’m a secretive guy. I don’t talk about that stuff.” Then when you start dating someone, don’t tell them. Just act the same as ever. If you have a good history of good game, talk about it in the past tense, as if you are talking about drinking water or something, very calm and non-bragging, as if you are embarrassed.

You just need to learn how to act around chicks. You can even talk dirty to them, touch them, grab them. But you need to learn to read body language. Know when the lights are red, yellow, green and changing, and act accordingly.

…It was November 1981, or long ago in another world, and I was wasted at the Palladium. There were all these hot, barely legal rock and roll chickies in Spandex and not wearing a lot of anything. It wasn’t exactly a punk crowd. It was more of a Runaways crowd.

Suddenly there was movement on the stage. Spiderman! Spiderman was running around the stage with a mike, singing something. Who the fuck was that? No one knew.

“That’s him!” I shouted to my friend, who was way more wasted than I was, and was also just starting to recover from the throes of a violent manic-depressive psychosis…

…A few months earlier, he had burned holes in his arm with a cigarette.

“Don’t do that!” I had screamed.

“I can’t feel pain. I feel no pain,.” he had shrugged, shaking the shaggy, puppy-dog hair out of his eyes.

I had accompanied my buddy to a meeting with his psychiatrist. He wanted some moral support.

“I live off hate,” I said. It was the punk era, and that was a cool thing to say. “I love hate. It gives me energy. It makes me live. Makes me get up in the morning. Gets me right out of bed. Gimme some of that hate! It’s life juice!” I almost leaped up in the shrink’s office. The shrink was looking at me like I was seriously disturbed.

My friend jumped up. “See? Even my friends are sick! Look at how sick they are! And they call me sick!” He pointed to me: “He worships the Devil!” Then he jumped out off the couch and ran out of the mental health center and across six lanes of heavy traffic at 3 PM, dodging cars all the way.

The shink looked at me with these eyes, like wells, with thousands of years of sadness in them. Neither of us knew what to say.

I told the shrink I had a Kabbalah Tree of Life on my wall and black candles on the shelves. Weirdest thing about that Tree of Life. Everyone who walked into the room stopped in their tracks and stared at it.

I got my buddies together and chanted evil curses against my enemies and carried magic talismans, like amulets, ankhs and crosses, in my pocket. I rubbed them all the time, took them out and flashed them in chicks’ eyes to freak them out and spellbind them, to spread the magick around, brainwash chicks and try to get laid.

“I’m not nuts. I’m just into magick. Is that ok?” The shrink nodded his head solemnly.

The diagnosis of my friend was “manic depression with schizophrenic overtones.” This was the era of “Family Systems Therapy,” and the family was making my friend nuts. Really the guy’s brain was having some sort of a brownout or hard drive crash. Either that or there was spaghetti code in his brain that needed a serious rewrite.

A month earlier my buddy had smashed a bathroom window at his parent’s house and climbed in the window. He was bleeding and wrote Helter Skelter on the mirror as a joke to freak out his folks.

His folks called me, alarmed. I told them  it was a joke. They didn’t believe me. Cops were getting called all the time. There were wild fights in the living room. Hell, it must have been a barrel of laughs at that place!…

…”No way! That’s Spiderman!”

“That’s him! That’s Iggy Pop! Iggy Pop is Spiderman!” I was laughing so hard I almost fell over.

Indeed, the maniac was running around the stage, dressed in a Goddamned Spiderman suit. It was Iggy Pop! This was the Party tour, and Iggy was 34 years old. I don’t remember much else about it, but the show was great.

Back then, Iggy Pop was still extremely underground. No one had really heard of him all that much. He was pretty subversive, underground, druggy and forbidden.

He’s always been one of the best. Party was a great album. So is The Idiot and Lust For Life. The Stooges, Fun House and Raw Power are all great albums. Raw Power is one of the best albums ever made.

Metallic K.O. is insane; it’s a total mess. You can hear beer bottles flying and all sorts of insane stuff. It’s pretty cool though in a bizarre way. The Stooges were extremely underground, even in the early 1980′s. They were always one of those love em or hate em bands. Most people had just never heard of em.

Iggy Pop at age 60, once again an amazing picture of vitality somehow. And he's in great shape too. This is what rock n roll is all about, not being a walking corpse like Keith Richards or a rotting beached whale like Marianne Faithfull. When I'm 60, I wanna look like this guy. Take your "dirty old man", "old man" comments and slurs and shove em up your ass, kids! I'm thumbing my nose at you young fucking punks! Come get me manchildren!

At 60, Pop has several injuries in his body. He dislocated his shoulder and has lost a lot of cartilage in his hip. Both knees are near shot. He was cramped on economy air flights all the time, and then he took a fall dancing on a fucking amplifier. Now his spine is twisted.

The drug days are in the past. When the Stooges were being formed, around 1969, the 22 year old Pop and the rest of the band was frying on acid all the time. It was the era, you know. Later, in the mid-Seventies, Pop was on heroin, as was the rest of the band. So he spent much of his 20′s on heroin, from 1970-1975 at least.

The drug days mostly ended 20 years ago, around age 40. By age 51, in 1998, he had snorted his last line of coke and smoked his last jay. The heroin was over by age 36, in 1983.

He has an exotic light-skinned Black model babe for girlfriend like his old friend David Bowie. She’s half his age of course. He lives in Miami Beach where he tools around in a Rolls Royce. He’s got life dicked, as my surfer-stoner friends used to say, growing up on the beach.

In an interview at age 56, his model-babe girlfriend was 31, and he was fucking her 10 times a week. Hell with this “dirty old man” shit! Down with Viagra jokes. You tell em, Iggy!

Iggy met his girlfriend 12 years ago in Miami Beach, in 1998. He was tooling along, and he saw her with a friend, both knockouts. The went into a pizza joint and Iggy went into the joint next door to look at them. Iggy admits he has no game when it comes to picking up chicks. He can only get them once they figure out who he is, then they all line and take numbers up to fuck the big hot shot rock star.

Iggy was in his car and they came out of the pizza joint, and he asked them if they wanted a ride. They’ve been together ever since.

He was 48 and she was 23. You see, if an ordinary 48 year old guy makes a play for a 23 year old woman, United Cunts of America, millions of cunts strong, stands up and screams that he’s a pervert, a creep, a weirdo and a dirty old man.

But if Iggy Pop does it, it’s suddenly ok because he’s a millionaire. In which case, I guess a lot of the legions of United Cunts of America seamlessly morphs into United Whores of America and lines up to screw the Ig.

Iggy has a great big huge dick, not that I’m interested. It was legendary. He wore pants that showed off the boa constrictor as part of his image. He used to whip it out on stage for various reasons and non-reasons. Once he laid it on top of an amplifier and let the amp vibrate it. Another time a fan leaped up on stage during a show and gave him a blowjob. The stories never end.

Back in the day, Iggy needed a stick to fight them off. After a typical show, Iggy would have five girls with him heading back to his place. He would call women up, give them a time to come over. They would show up, he would have sex with them, and he would tell them to leave. They would leave, smiling. Some guys have it tough.

The Pedophile Mass Hysteria Losers may be interested to know that of course Iggy is a Pedo too, like many fine upstanding citizens. At age 21, he married a 14 year old girl. Then he knocked her up and had a kid with her. Nowadays, that qualifies for Pedophile.

A bit before that, maybe around age 18-19, he had a 13 year old girlfriend, and yes it was consummated. Now he’s a fucking Pedo for sure! Iggy gets the Roman Polanski Seal of Approval for that starring role.

Despite what you think of rock stars, Iggy was frequently Impotent during much of the 1980′s and 1990′s. He doesn’t give a reason. Interesting that even famous guys often Can’t get it up.

Pop has published an article in a journal of classical scholarship, Classics Ireland (1995). I always knew he was a brain. Just like Mick Jagger and David Bowie, you just know those guys have high IQ’s.

One more thing! Anti-Semites, this means you! Iggy Pop is not Jewish. Old legend, due to his name, James Osterberg. He’s actually Norwegian.

Cannabis Is Neuroprotective

A fascinating new study shows that cannabis offers some neuroprotection to young people who engaged in binge drinking episodes. The binge drinkers were young – aged 16-19. This is an age at which the effects of drugs on the brain may be particularly bad, since the brain is continuing to develop.

What was shocking was that binge drinking in adolescents caused the type and degree of damage that it did. Binge drinking caused actual losses of white matter in the brain, similar to the damage seen with drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.

Briefly, white matter is the axons that connect brain cells to each other. Grey matter consists of the connections and also the cells themselves. So heavy drinking in adolescence causes actual damage to the connections between brain cells. That’s pretty serious stuff. It’s not known if the damage repairs later, or at all. However, connections between cells can grow back.

If the damage does not repair, then a Hell of a lot of adults are walking around with significant brain damage from binge drinking in adolescence. If this is the case, then clearly the brain can handle this sort of damage, since most such folks, assuming they are damaged in this way, are able to function well both cognitively and psychologically.

The study was fascinating because if the adolescents used cannabis in addition to binge drinking, the damage was notably less than if they binge drank alone. Therefore, cannabis use was somewhat neuroprotective to the brain in terms of the damage caused by binge drinking.

This does not mean that cannabis use is good for your brain, or that it does not damage the brain. But no study of cannabis use has ever found anything as dramatic as extensive white matter losses in the brain (that’s a pretty serious type of damage). So, if anything, binge drinking in adolescence (which many adolescents do) is remarkably worse for your brain than using cannabis in adolescence, which is an amazing thing to say right there.

But that’s not exactly what the anti-drug moralfags and fuckwits tell us, is it? In their view, binge drinking is a necessary evil, while cannabis use, especially in adolescence, is a moral and public health catastrophe. God, what a load of shit that is.

Cannabis and Brain Damage: Cannabis Compared to Other Drugs

The original post in its native form was far too long, so I broke it up into seven different posts, in addition to this post. The separate sections are listed below.

The original post, what is left of it, is here.

For an examination of the evidence of whether or not cannabis causes actual structural damage to brain cells, axons or dendrites, see here.

For an analysis of neuropsychological batteries of cannabis users to determine whether or not they suffer brain damage, see here.

For an analysis of EEG testing of cannabis users to discover evidence of brain damage, see here.

For an analysis of studies looking at cerebral blood flow in cannabis users, see here.

For an admittedly impressionistic analysis of whether or not cannabis causes schizotypal symptoms in users, see here.

For a summary of the findings of cannabis and brain damage, see here.

LSD and psilocybin, while not causing permanent brain damage (that we know of so far), can cause HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder), a long-term perceptual disturbance of unknown etiology.

I have HPPD myself from using hallucinogens about 40 times, but “suffering” from HPPD once again is an interesting concept, at least in my case.

All I get are brighter colors, mostly in neon signs and store displays, and only at certain times. Maybe lots of people would love to have this effect, as the world looks so much better this way. I called up an ophthalmologist about it and he laughed me off the phone, saying he doesn’t treat people whose colors improve. It is only my continuing neurosis that causes me to view these changes as frightening instead of integrating them.

LSD does have a deleterious effect on the visual system of the brain – it is hypotoxic to that area in lab animals, for instance, birds – but it doesn’t cause any generalized brain damage at all that we know of, and we have been studying LSD’s effects on the brain for about 50 years or so now.

LSD does cause reductions in 5-HT₂ receptors on serotonin neurons. But this is a case of these receptors retreating back into the cell due to LSD’s assault on those receptors. After about a week, the receptors to poke back out of the cell again.

The most recent evidence also indicates that psilocybin (mushrooms) and mescaline (peyote) also do not cause any generalized brain damage, although psilocybin can cause HPPD. Due to the risks of HPPD, this blog unfortunately does not recommend that anyone use LSD or psilocybin even one time, unless maybe if you are dying.

Ecstasy (MDMA) produces comparatively dramatic harm to the brain after only a handful of doses (2-10 doses), with the effects increasing with continued use. The drug causes degeneration of serotonergic axonal terminals, which afterwards do not grow back correctly, if at all.

There are suggestions that there may be hippocampal damage. On intelligence tests there are deficits in working memory, declining vocabulary, impairments in verbal learning, associative learning and attention and increased distraction. There also seem to be some mood changes.

Perfusion deficits and increased delta waves on EEG have also been found, but the same study did not find these in cannabis users. Impairments were also found in the ability to drive a car in Ecstasy users, even after they were abstinent.

However, a recent study found no persistent effects from one dose of Ecstasy.

Therefore, it appears that using Ecstasy one time is possibly safe. However, taking Ecstasy as few as an average of 3.2 times causes noticeable damage in verbal memory. Ecstasy should be taken no more than once in a lifetime, if at all.

Evidence strongly suggests that the heavy use of PCP, ketamine and DXM may cause permanent brain damage and can often cause schizophrenia-like symptoms which may be related to that damage. The theorized damage involves the vacuolization of neurons (basically a hollowing out and death of the neuron) in various parts of the brain.

The evidence comes from rat studies and the dosages have been criticized, but humans are far more sensitive to the effects of dissociatives than rats are, so the differential doses are probably about right.

The rat evidence has now been challenged by monkey studies, so the matter is far from settled. But until it is, extreme caution, if not outright avoidance, seems to be the best policy for these drugs.

PCP can probably be used up to a dozen or so times in life with no permanent damage. Beyond that, things get a lot touchier. Heavy users show an extremely high rate of schizophrenic and psychotic symptoms, along with symptoms of brain damage. There seems to be some recovery with abstinence, but full recovery is by no means assured.

Evidence indicates that ketamine can be used at least once with no permanent consequences at all to the brain. Beyond that, it is up in the air. Ketamine can surely be used at least a dozen times with no risks to the brain. Beyond that, things get hazier.

Heavy DXM users have reported a very high rate of psychosis and schizophrenia-like symptoms, along with symptoms of organic brain damage. Users should approach DXM use with caution, and heavy use should be ruled out.

Heavy methamphetamine use has been proven to cause permanent damage to dopaminergic systems, especially in the striatum, caudate and putamen (at ½ gram a day, 5 days a week, and 2 years of use). Studies have also shown degeneration of axons on serotonergic neurons and loss (cell death) of up to 15% of the neurons of the hippocampus with heavy use.

In the study above, there was some recovery of the dopaminergic system with abstinence, but it was only partial. Meth can probably be used a dozen or so times without any permanent damage. Beyond that, no guarantees. There is some suggestive evidence of chronic psychosis, depression and anxiety directly related to heavy methamphetamine use (over 10 years of heavy use).

Impairments in learning, processing speed, and working memory, along with delayed recall, are found in meth users. Brain dysfunction is often readily apparent in heavy meth users. This is one category of drug user, in contrast to most other drug users, that does sometimes appear “fried.” Much of this “fried” appearance seems to clear up with abstinence.

Methamphetamine can probably be used up to a dozen times or so in moderation without any permanent consequences to the brain. Nevertheless, some users have reported permanent effects from only 2-3 weeks of very heavy use. Meth is nasty stuff, and it’s best to keep away from it.

Heavy drinking can depress neurons for up to two years. With continued heavy drinking, at some point, there is organic damage, which in many cases is permanent, although there is often significant recovery with abstinence. The case of the “wethead” and “dry drunk,” the former alcoholic who is still damaged, psychologically or cognitively, is well known.

Heavy use of barbiturates over many years causes a damage syndrome that looks like chronic alcoholism and that does not completely recover with abstinence.

Even chronic Valium use causes long-term EEG changes of unknown significance.

Sniffing glue has been proven to be possibly the worst thing you can do to your brain short of putting a bullet in it, and the effects do not recover completely with abstinence.

Cocaine, unfortunately, seems to be capable of causing brain damage with as few as 11 doses (constriction of vessels in the brain). At three years of using several times a week, there is slowing on the P300 event related potentials test, that may not recover fully with abstinence.

Recent studies have also shown that chronic heavy cocaine use causes reductions in gray matter in various parts of the brain. This means that heavy cocaine use causes an actual loss of brain cells in parts of the brain. It may also cause white matter reductions, which means a loss of connections in the brain.

There are also impairments in attention, learning, memory, reaction time and cognitive flexibility in cocaine users. It is not known whether these clear up with abstinence.

This blog recommends that lifetime use of cocaine be limited to 10 times or less. Even there, there is a slight risk of sudden death due to perturbations in the heart’s electrical rhythms. These perturbations can cause a sudden heart attack or even possibly a stroke. Vasoconstriction is probably involved.

In many of the above cases, there is some recovery with abstinence, but often not to the previous level.

Experimental use of PCP, ketamine, cocaine and methamphetamine (use up to a dozen or so times for each one) probably does not cause significant permanent damage. Beyond that, you play with matches.

Compared to other drugs of abuse, such as Ecstasy, PCP, Ketamine, DXM, cocaine, methamphetamine and alcohol, the effects of cannabis on the brain are dramatically less deleterious.

In terms of its effects on the brain for heavy users, cannabis is surely by far least damaging intoxicant of them all, for what that is worth.