The Opium Museum
The Opium Museum is, at the heart, about the trade in rare antiques, since opium smoking paraphernalia was outlawed. Still, there are pages and pages of the history of opium and its use in countries all over the world, with many historical photographs.
Beginning in the 18th century, opium accompanied the Chinese diaspora: first to the Chinese quarters of Asian cities, and later to the Chinatowns of the West, particularly North America, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner and with Chinese-made paraphernalia became fashionable among non-Chinese.
Once the drug was banned and its paraphernalia outlawed, these illicit items were heaped into piles and burned in public bonfires. From Shanghai to Saigon to San Francisco, the means to smoke opium were destroyed along with the drug itself. So few examples of these relics remain that most experts on Chinese art are blithely unaware of just how sumptuous and opulent this art form had become during its heyday.
For serious collectors, there is information on how to identify genuine opium tools and have them appraised. Link -via Metafilter
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10 Drug Breakthroughs that Changed the Medical World
WebMD recently consulted with experts to determine the most important drugs from throughout history. They were looking for drugs that changed the medical landscape by either treating a large number of people with a range of problems or by showing that it is possible to treat a disease.
You might be able to guess that penicillin or the smallpox vaccine are included in the list, but others such as aspirin might surprise you. The link below includes a graphic that shows the drugs that made the list and provide information on the hottest selling drugs today and the likely hot one of tomorrow. The original WebMD story discusses the rationale behind choosing each drug.
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Placebos Are Becoming More Effective
The percentage of new pharmaceutical products that fail their effectiveness trials is growing. The culprit is the placebo effect, which appears to be stronger than in years past. If a drug cannot provide relief significantly better than a sugar pill, it won’t go on the market.
The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.
It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.
Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect works, and the various reasons newer drugs don’t compete as well with the mind’s ability to affect our bodies. Link -via Boing Boing
Previously at Neatorama: Prozac: No Better Than Placebo?
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3 Songs About Drugs and 3 Songs That Aren’t
Yes, we all know music largely revolves around sex, drugs and rock and roll, but sometimes it’s hard to actually tell which one the band is talking about. Here are six songs with meanings you may not have originally guessed.
Songs About Drugs:
“Got To Get You Into My Life” by The Beatles
This track really sounds like a love song written for a love interest with lyrics like, “Ooh, I suddenly see you/Ooh, did I need you/Every single day of my life.” Despite how it sounds though, this one is about the first time Paul tried marijuana and his instant love affair with the drug. What more would you expect from soneone who also named a romantic love song (Martha My Dear) after his dog?
Source Image Via Gonzalo Barrientos [Flickr]
“Motorhead” by Hawkwind and Motorhead
Even a lot of Motorhead fans don’t actually know that the name is a slang for a speedfreak. Lemmy wrote the song for the group Hawkwind first and then took it to be the title song for his post-Hawkwind group. Here’s some of the song’s lyrics that really give it away, “Motorhead, you can call me Motorhead, alright/ Brain dead, total amnesia/ Get some mental anesthesia.”
Source
“Hey Mr. Tambourine Man” by Bob Dylan
This one’s a little less certain. You see, although it is widely accepted that this song is about a man looking to score from his dealer, Bob claims none of his songs are about drug use. While I’m usually inclined to accept the artist’s word on his own songs, Mr. Dylan also claims that “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35” A.K.A. “Everybody Gets Stoned” is especially not about drugs. I may be able to concede that he may have meant the song to be more about stonings and social outcasting, I have a hard time accepting a poet as prolific and intelligent as Bob Dylan didn’t realize and fully intend the double meaning of the chorus.
Source Image Via MarkyBon [Flickr]
Songs Not About Drugs:
“Hotel California” by The Eagles
With lyrics like “you can check out anytime, but you can never leave,” it’s easy to see why so many people associated the song with drug use. The reality is that the song is more about the hedonism of the Southern California lifestyle the group was exposed to in the seventies, which, to be fair, did include heavy drug use. Still, the drugs would be no more than a minor part of the song’s deeper meaning. Eagles drummer and writer Don Henley, said it was “basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about.”
Source Image Via Saguayo [Flickr]
“Mirror in the Bathroom” by The English Beat
While many people assume any songs involving mirrors, particularly when the mirror is in a bathroom, must be references to cocaine, this one is actually about narcissism. The writer, Dave Wakeling, said he was inspired to write the song while he was looking in the mirror at himself debating whether or not he could skip work that day. He then started thinking about the self-involvement and narcissism. The line about “a restaurant that’s got glass tables” was actually a direct reference to a fancy restaurant that opened near him that, would you guess it, had glass tables. Funny enough, the success of the song may have helped lead the band into cocaine addictions; Dave later remarked about it that, “songs can become sort of strangely prophetic.”
Source
“Puff the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary
This song really is about a growing up and abandoning an imaginary friend who happens to be a dragon. Although it’s merely a tale of lost childhood innocence, the release of the song in the drug-fueled sixties led to many people assuming that anything with the word “puff” was actually a reference to marijuana. Co-writer Leonard Lipton once said, “I can tell you that at Cornell in 1959 [when the song was written], no one smoked grass.” So, if you were hoping for the song to actually have been about drugs, you almost certainly have already lost that childhood innocence referenced in the song.
Source Image Via CelestialSpirit13 [Flickr]
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Stress Relief from the Good Old Days
The post is titled “9 reasons why there wasn’t stress in the good old days”. Now, you better believe there was plenty of stress in the 19th and 20th centuries, but people were happy to try everything nature and medical science could provide to relieve it. That included cocaine, heroine, opium, amphetamines, and of course, plenty of alcohol for all ages. No prescription needed! The Benzadrine inhaler shown was handed out to airline passengers to treat discomfort. Link -via the Presurfer
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Robotic Ferret Sniffs Out Drugs, Weapons and Illegal Immigrants
Coming soon to a seaport near you: a robot dubbed the "cargo-screening ferret" that will detect drugs, weapons, explosives and even illegal immigrants hidden in cargo containers.
Recent advances in both laser and fibre optic technology now make it possible to detect tiny particles of different substances. The EPSRC-funded project team is developing sensors which incorporate these technologies and that are small enough to be carried on the 30cm-long robot, in order to detect the specific ‘fingerprint’ of illegal substances at much lower concentrations than is now possible.
When placed inside a steel freight container, the ferret will attach itself magnetically to the top, then automatically move around and seek out contraband, sending a steady stream of information back to its controller.
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The Strangest Anti-Drug PSAs Ever
YesButNoButYes blog has a post about anti-drug PSAs that look like they were made by people who were under the influence themselves!
The post includes such gems PSAs by Hanna-Barbera, Pee Wee Herman (I half expected him to giggle by the end), and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Link – via Rue The Day!
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Decriminalizing Drug Use in Portugal: 5 Years Later
While people in the United States endlessly debate what should be done with the country’s drug problem, Portugal went ahead and decriminalize the use and possession of illicit drugs 5 years ago.
Here’s what the country learned:
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.
Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
Brian Vastag of Scientific American has more on the story: Link
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They Paid You For That? 7 Pointless and Crazy Science Experiments
Have you every read about some new science experiment or research study that just seems… well, stupid? If you’ve ever gotten to the point where you’ve wondered what other bogus things they’ll pay people to learn about, you’re in luck. Here’s 7 of the most ridiculous studies ever:
Sex, Drugs and Science
If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.
Elephants on Acid:
If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.
Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”
Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.
Turkey Arousal:
We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.
Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.
Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]
Semen As an Anti-depressant?
I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.
Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious
relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.
Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]
Paging Dr. Obvious
The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:
Head Banging is Bad For You:
Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.
The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more
mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.
Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]
Male science nerds likely to be virgins:
Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.
At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.
Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]
Bullies Like Seeing Pain:
If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?
An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.
Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]
Television Viewers Are Unhappy:
It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):
“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”
Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.
Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?
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Mess With Your Mind Without Drugs
Boston.com has a very cool chart detailing how to mess with your mind’s perceptions, naturally. I think the most interesting one is definitely the first one. It tells you how to hallucinate with ping pong balls and a radio. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go cut some ping pong balls in half and listen to static for the next hour or so.
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Longer Eyelashes, Just A Drug Away
The FDA has just approved a drug that will help lengthen your eyelashes. Hopefully they won’t get quite as long as the ones in this photo, but who knows the long term effects of eyelash medication overdoses?
The drug, Allergan, contains an active ingredient that was originally created to treat glaucoma, but found to have this pleasant side effect. The drug should be available in May and will cost $120 per each month’s supply. It will take about two to four months for the effect to start to show.
Link Photo By Asobitsuchiya [Flickr]
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Cops Raid a House to Find Christmas Trees Under a Grow Light: Where's the Probable Cause Now?
Barry Cooper is a former policeman who now sells DVDs on how not to get busted on drug charges. While I find this approach sort of dubious, his latest "cop-baiting" stunt is quite intriguing: did he show that the police in Odessa, Texas were using illegal means to raid homes?
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
The attorney was handcuffed and later released when eleven KopBuster detectives arrived with the media in tow to question the illegal raid. The police refused to give KopBusters the search warrant affidavit which is suspected to contain the lies regarding the probable cause.
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