For those in the temperate climes, welcome to the butthole of winter. It’s cold, it’s gray, and it will sap whatever positivity you might have, if you let it. A friend of mine once told me that the winter is always the hardest time to stay sober. He told me that every time he relapsed, and there were several times, it had been during the winter. Well, with the winter now going strong and thoroughly starting to fuck with me, I can see some evidence of winter being the relapse season.

One of my best friends, we'll call him N, whom I met while in rehab and then lived in the same halfway house with, went back out in a bad, bad way. It started off with the classic “one more time” move. He came back from the usual job search time we were given at the house. We had to be out from 8 a.m. and could return no earlier than 3 p.m. or so. He came back late, when our group had already started, at around 6:30.

It was the day I was leaving the house and everyone said their official "goodbye' to me, but by the time he got there, it was over. I could tell something was up, but I just didn’t want to think he was high. Long story short, he admitted the next day, after my almost talking to the counselor about it, that he had indeed gotten high.

He made his pilgrimage to the West side, scored some bags and a jab, and went to town. He dodged the piss tests and played it cool for the next week. I didn’t hear from him much. He admitted, though perhaps I persuaded him, that the small amount of pleasure was not worth the next week of hassle and almost going back to jail.

Later however, I received a call from my roommate, who had been in rehab with both N and me, telling me that N was in jail. He had been picked up in Chicago at the scene of a head-on collision between his truck and another car. He was both drunk and high. He totaled the truck that he was so proud to have just gotten working again. N now sits in jail, ready for the court to send him to another rehab facility in the city, to start the process all over again.

Another friend of mine, a girl who I had dated briefly after rehab, seemed on the right path. Though she got pregnant by a friend of mine (who ended up being that same roommate I just mentioned, who went to rehab with all of the people thus far mentioned) and things had been rocky, she stayed positive. We even made a pact to quit smoking, which I have thus far kept. But recently, she found out that the baby had died in the womb. This precipitated in a break-up between her and my roommate, then in her relapse.

Though it seems she did it once, she is doing nothing to get back into recovery. Whereas she used to attend meetings all the time, she now pushes that issue aside in conversation. She has commenced to hang out with old friends, who may or may not get high. The situation has a certain stink to it. I attempted to accompany her to a meeting, purposely staying around town later than I normally would before making my hour commute back home. I was politely ditched. But I really was not surprised.

There are more people I know diving back into the icy waters. It’s disheartening, and it’s all new to me, so it’s hard to know what to make of it. I don’t want to get jaded, but I also don’t want to be so naïve and allow these very common occurrences to rip away a piece of me each time they happen. Some might hear this and think, “Why bother? These dumbasses did this to themselves, and in doing it all over again prove themselves to be even dumber –– they deserve what they get”.

Sure, I guess that’s an easy way to go through life without learning to truly care about others. But I have been on that end. I have been confronted, given a chance, and tossed it away to keep getting high. I know that at least for me, it had little to do with smarts, because I did some really clever things to stop myself from getting caught, to keep getting drugs after being monitored, to pass drug tests, etc.

For me it had everything to do with running on autopilot, pursuing only pleasure at the cost of everything else. It wasn’t until I was basically kicked in the balls by everyone around me, and the law, that I realized I couldn’t get a grip on the way I had been operating. But how do I convey the urgency to those around me? How do I get the people I have come to care about to see that they don’t have to give up –– that they can do this? At this point, I’m not sure. I have no answers except this: winter is fucking mean, it’s a time that is even harder for those already depressed and fighting.

I can say all I want that I don’t plan on going down, but that won’t make it so. I’ve heard my fair share of horror stories, and I don’t wish to repeat them. But I was surprised to hear that there is still some hubris out there, still some people who have managed to climb out of the shit, but are continuing to tempt the beast. A fellow in my outpatient therapy class is one such person.

He is, as all of us are, court mandated to be there. He has been sober 5 months, yet done all 12 steps and every weekend goes to the bar with his friends and drinks only water. He admittedly has PTSD and is under the stress of simultaneously finding a job and fighting a court case.

I found it odd that he is willing to walk back into a bar frequently when it was that same kind of place that landed him in his current situation. I asked him how, with so many other uncertainties in his life, he could throw one more uncertainty in the mix. He claimed confidence in himself and said that he was able to control himself. But he could not point out to me what exactly made him not able to control himself merely 5 months ago. It seems that the only thing that changed was having a program. But what match is that for your old friend, Jack Daniels, as he stares you dead in the face when all you want is to forget about your shit day?

I just wonder why one would leave that to chance? Really, it’s just not playing the odds. But that is the type of person that might just beat those odds, and if they do, more power to them. However, I still can’t swallow the idea of throwing yourself into a situation where the thing that tempts you most is constantly in your face. It seems like living the rest of my life is more important than just being able to “hang out” in a bar. I place no importance in that ability, it seems like pure hubris, pride before the fall. Some people need to feel cocky, but to me, it just doesn’t make sense. And I’ve seen it end with relapse too many times to even take this fellow’s claim seriously. Apologies for sounding crass, perhaps I am jaded after all.

So I guess if there’s one thing to take away from this whole rant I’ve just laid out, it’s that whatever us addicts usually do to stay sober, we need to go hardcore at right now. This seems to be the time when people start to drop like flies, and if I as an addict am to be of any help to anyone in need, I must be solid in my recovery. I must stay vigilant and never forget the place from whence I came.

Keep on keeping on, folks. And to steal a quote from the great Kevin Seconds: “Use your head, be aware, give….a….fuck!!!!!”


Disclaimer: This article is written from the point of view of one single addict. It is not intended to give any definitive answers to medical, psychological, or legal issues. Anyone having problems with addiction/alcoholism should contact either their doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, nearest substance abuse treatment center, Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous hotline, or all of the aforementioned. Support can also be found at SG's own Sobriety Group

When the man played famously by Charlton Heston witnessed the Plagues, parted the Red Sea, and fought all those damn dirty apes, they may not have been acts of the Lord, but Moses simply tripping balls.

The marriage of drugs and religion is nothing new. In 2003, the BBC reported that Jesus and the Apostles used cannabis to heal the crippled. Many Hindus use pot in worship of Shiva, who is said to have sought shade under a marijuana plant and then gave the plant to mankind as thanks.

Shanon noted Moses being stoned on a Biblical scale is plausible, given the goods available as well as the professor's own personal experiences.

Of course, the narcs of the Orthodox Jewish community were not amused by this claim.

All in all, it gives new credence to the little known 11th Commandment:

"Thou shalt not get high on thy own supply."


The closest thefreak ever got to seeing God while high was watching Tron.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much VH1, but when during the course of my scanning the Internet for the latest news I come across a paragraph like:

I immediately think to myself “What, did Paris Hilton name a drunken elephant ‘Mohammed’ or something?”

But no, the death threats in question are being made against an actual bitch, an 8-year-old Maltese dog named “Trouble”. While the urge to kill a small yappy dog with a penchant for biting people may be understandable, Trouble is not your average canine. Up until recently, Trouble was the pet of Leona Helmsley, the controversial New York City hotel mogul and philanthropist. While Leona earned the nickname “The Queen of Mean” for how poorly she treated her employees, and claimed that “only the little people pay taxes” before serving 18 months in prison for tax evasion, she spent the last decade attempting to rehabilitate her public persona by donating large amounts of her fortune to charity. She also spent a lot of time pampering her faithful canine companion Trouble.

After Leona died in August, all three of those aspects of her personality were on display when her will was made public. While she donated the bulk of her $4 billion fortune to a charitable trust, she left $12 million to Trouble to pay for her upkeep while leaving two of her grandchildren nothing.

If $12 million seems like an excessive amount of cash to set aside for the upkeep of a dog, remember when I said she was not your average canine? Providing Trouble with the medical care, grooming, security and chef-prepared meals she’s accustomed to costs $300,000 a year. Of course, with this inheritance came death and kidnapping threats, so recently Trouble was flown via private jet down to Florida under an assumed name, because of course nobody would want to kill that other small yappy dog who enjoys gourmet meals, private jets and biting people.

One reason that Trouble may be inspiring death threats is that once she dies, all of the cash that remains in her name gets donated to the Helmsley charitable trust. So if the concept of snuffing out a small, mean, pampered yappy dog wasn’t appealing enough, now you can do it for charity!

While the “kill one small yappy dog, send seven human kids to Columbia University for a year” equation may appeal to class warriors, a recent scientific study shows that it might be a better investment to send seven chimpanzees to college instead.

Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University conducted a memory test that pitted five-year-old chimps against university students. Both the monkeys and the undergrads were presented with a touch screen, on which a random sequence of numbers one through nine were briefly displayed in random locations and then replaced with blank white squares. The subjects then had to touch the squares in ascending numerical order. All of the young chimps turned out to be both faster and more accurate at recalling the number patterns than the humans, even when the numbers were displayed on screen for as little as 210 milliseconds, a speed too fast for the human or chimp eye to scan across the entire screen.

The researchers think this indicates that young chimps have a photographic memory, and theorize that once early humans developed language they lost the need for such sharp short-term memory skills, causing those skills to decline below chimp level.

Or as lead researcher Dr. Tetsuro Matsuzawa phrased it:

Spoken like someone who hasn’t seen a Planet Of The Apes movie, or read the pilot script for the gripping legal drama I’m currently pitching to various TV executives, "Mr. Bubbles: Chimpanzee At Law".

While human beings may have lost the short-term memory race to chimpanzees, we still have at least one thing that sets us apart as a species from other primates: a seemingly unquenchable desire to get high. Although if young chimpanzees were exposed to a lack of parental supervision, cheap drugs and an Intro To Philosophy class that they might catch up to college students in that department as well.

While personally I’m a bit of a fuddy duddy when it comes to drug use, I’m fascinated by the lengths that people can and will go to in order to get a buzz. I’m sure that one of the reasons that privatized space exploration hasn’t been much of a success is that space dust doesn’t get you high. If Neil Armstrong’s first words from the Moon had been “That’s one small step for man…wow, I’m seeing such fucked up colors, dude!”, by now a small army of tech-savvy stoners would have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and colonized the fuck out of our solar system.

Alas, the urge to self-medicate remains terrestrial, and while that avoids things like belts of deadly radiation and the icy, airless void of space, the quest for new and novel methods of altering one’s state of consciousness is not without peril.

For example, the Kansas City Police Department recently announced that they’d arrested a local man on, among other things, one count of possessing drug paraphernalia.

That “drug paraphernalia” was a live poisonous toad.

According to police, the man allegedly planned to frighten or anger the toad, harvest the poison the toad would then secrete, then smoke the poison in order to get high on the supposedly psychotropic chemicals the poison contains. Kansas City police and health officials expressed concern that this was part of a new epidemic of “toad smoking”, a new variation on “toad licking” that was corrupting our nation’s youth, or at least freaking out our nation’s toads:

Of course, being the semi-responsible quasi-journalist that I am, I had to at least pretend to do some research into this new “toad smoking” craze, especially since the same article contained a similar warning about the hoax drug “Jenkem”. I was worried that typing “toad licking” into a search engine would dredge up the type of brain-scarring, savage internet weirdness that normally only results from searching for “anime porn” or “pandas are dicks”, but apparently there’s actually been a decent amount of actual scientific research into psychedelic toads. While there’s apparently a consensus that “toad licking” is an urban myth (since by the time you licked enough toads to get you high, the poison would have already sickened or killed you), the mind-altering aspects of certain toad poisons are unclear, as is the safety and effectiveness of smoking the poison as opposed to licking it.

Of course, even if toad secretions didn’t get you high and would probably kill you if you tried to smoke it, thanks to the magic of the internet, there’d still be a bunch of morons who’d try. Or as one Kansas City health official phrases it:

Wow, the Internet can provide me with porn and kill off gullible kids? Is there no end to the awesomeness that is the misinformation superhighway?

I always like it when mamas talk about what motherhood is actually like, rather than faking the Stepford soccer mom personality we all feel like we're "supposed" to have. Today was the first day of school for my kid and I'm frazzled, so in honor of mamas everywhere who are gearing up for the new school year and dragging themselves and their kids through Target or KMart in search of the lists of required school supplies, I thought I'd say a little bit today about parents and drug use.

Y'all might (or might not) remember the flamewars about meth users and women who drink while pregnant. And maybe you're aware of Frank Owen's new book about meth, which is getting good reviews --Owen argues that each era has its representative drug, and that meth is all the rage right now in part because it serves our desire for busy, focused, productivity, which makes sense to me.

And here's another nice piece that goes beyond the conventional wisdom about drug use, specifically, drug use as a parent. In Highlights, Babble's "Bad Parent" column, L.J. Wilson, bless her, talks about why smoking pot makes her a better parent, dammit.

Amen, my sister. I don't smoke pot--it just makes me paranoid, and I don't really enjoy it--but god knows there are days when mama needs a drink and a cigarette, thankyouverymuch. And of course there's the anti-depressants. What can I say, I'm a traditionalist: the old-school mother's little helpers work just fine for me. But hey, if Mama Wilson wants to smoke a joint now and again, far be it from me to criticize her for that.

Now of course, before everyone gets all shrill n' shit, blah blah drug addiction is a serious problem, blah blah bad example for the kiddos, blah blah children are the Most Important Things In Our Lives, blah blah. The point here isn't to promote parental addiction. The point is that parents are actual human beings, just like everyone else. Some of us are as conventional and safe as Ward and June; but some of us enjoy a drink or a joint or an occasional lost weekend just like anyone else. And yeah, some of us are seriously fucked up. But just like "regular" people, most parents are actually capable of using yer common recreational drugs responsibly (and those who aren't, aren't gonna stop being fucked up just because Society Disapproves, alas.)

So yeah. If you're a mom (or a dad) with that brain-dead "jesus, how many stores do I have to go to to find oil pastels, dammit" thing going on, or if you're an impatient child-free sort who feels bitchy and impatient with all those back-to-school families that seem to be everywhere again, pour yourself a fucking drink, fire up a joint, whatever. Chill out. In a few weeks we'll all be back to normal again--whatever that means.

Bitch_PhD is, in fact, a soccer mom this year.

People can sometimes make you feel like a prude for not using illegal drugs. I never feel more square than when I'm invited to hang out with people but someone who is hip and aware of my lifestyle choices decides to talk for me.

"Hey you guys wanna hang out, maybe smoke a joint?" says the really cute girl. "Oh, Colin doesn't smoke, how 'bout we meet up with you later, buddy?" says my former friend the stupid ass, who is totally lame when he's high, anyway.

Now though, thanks to the Lancet, the next time someone makes me feel like I don't know how to have a good time, I can remind them that I have no problems consuming the fifth most dangerous drug available to the human race: Alcohol. Well, except if I have to work the next day. I am so hangover prone.

Take that, hippie.

The powerhouses heroine and cocaine came out on top, then barbiturates, street methadone and in fifth place alcohol. Noticeably absent from the list was cannabis, which came in at 11th. And ecstacy was considered even lower according to Nutt's research. Here are the top ten:

The list was tabulated by asking two groups of experts: Psychiatrists with expertise in addiction, and legal officials who are experienced in the science, behavior and medical aspects of drug use. The results will challenge the current notion of harmful drugs and their regulation. While Nutt warns that all drugs are dangerous, his research suggests that our perception of illegal and recreational drugs needs some readjustment.

SYLVANIA, Alabama - It turns out that you can be charged with a DUI...even when you're not in a car. A drugged-out cowgirl found that out the hard way.

After police received a call that a woman was riding a horse in the middle of the street, an officer confronted Melissa Byrum York, 40, and asked her to stop.

Miss York was arrested and charged with a list of crimes, including:

• DUI on suspicion of riding the horse under the influence of a controlled substance


• Drug possession (crystal meth and marijuana)


• Possession of drug paraphernalia (pipe)


• Resisting arrest


• Assault


• Attempting to elude police


• Cruelty to animals

York was released from the DeKalb County jail on $4,000 bond, then, to add insult to injury, was transferred to a different jail for an unrelated charge.

Remember, kids, drugs are bad mmmkay...

There used to be a hardcore band in Cleveland called God On Drugs. They changed their name to Spike In Vain, which I found very disappointing. Not the band itself. They were still great. But I liked the old name better. Many years later, one of the members of God On Drugs founded Scat Records and had the foresight to put out Guided By Voices’ magnificent Bee Thousand album when nobody else wanted to know. This Summer Scat Records will release my movie Cleveland’s Screaming on DVD. More on that later, though.

At the time God On Drugs was playing I was thinking hard about the idea of finding God by using drugs. I was Straight Edge then. For you kids who don’t remember, Straight Edge was a philosophy advocated by Ian MacKaye of the DC hardcore band Minor Threat, which rejected recreational drug abuse. I’d smoked dope in high school, but by the time I got out I was resolutely anti-drug. Still, I was very much interested in Eastern religions. So I picked up a book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass. The book was all about how Ram Dass, formerly Harvard professor Richard Alpert, was set on the path to God realization through the use of LSD and other psychedelics — what the wankers of today call “entheogens.” There was a line I think I found in the book that compared the arduous spiritual path taken by the ancient mystics to that of the modern day user of psychedelics. The goal is the same, it said, but you can go there on foot or you can take a jet plane, that “jet plane” being, of course, a wicked hit of really good acid.

I was intrigued. Here I’d been reading about masters and monks slogging away for decade upon decade of hard practice to finally get the teeniest glimpse of the truth and now I found out you could get the same effect in mere hours by giving your local sleezeball hippie burn-out dealer three bucks for a hit of blotter out of his stinky old freezer. I was in!

Do you see the problem here? I didn’t, so I can understand if you don’t. Imagine you’re an aspiring guitarist. You want to play like Randy Rhoads, but you don’t want to spend 12 hours a day running down scales in your basement for ten years like he did. Along comes someone who tells you that while he was on acid he picked up a guitar for the first time in his life and — sha-zay-yam! — he could instantly play just exactly like Randy! What do you think it’s gonna sound like when he plays you the tape he made that night?

Of course you’d know his playing was toad turds the second he turned on the recorder. So would he if he’d come down of f the drugs by then. That’s because we have certain culturally shared criteria for what constitutes “playing like Randy Rhoads.” But imagine you played the tape for someone who did not have any such criteria. All he knows is that Randy Rhoads played really, really loud electric guitar with lots of distortion and the guy on the tape is also playing really loud with lots of distortion. To him it would sound like pretty much the same thing.

People who think that you can get the effect of decades of meditative practice by tripping out on drugs think so because they have no criteria by which to understand the effects of meditative practice. Guys on dope say stuff that makes no sense, and so do Zen Masters. Therefore the effect must be exactly the same. But as a guy who’s done acid, and done it, by the way, in settings supposedly conducive to mystical inquiry, and who’s also done Zazen for twenty-some years I can tell you that there really is no comparison at all between the two. Believe me if you want or not. But it's the truth.

The human imagination is a powerful thing, almost immeasurably so. Drugs can enhance its power in ways you can’t anticipate. If you have dreams of what an Enlightened or “higher” state might be like, drugs can make you think you’ve attained that state. You’ll be so certain of your great achievement — or at least the drug’s great achievement — that it can take years of practice to shake off the effects of just a few acid trips. Again, I know this from personal experience.

Guys who like to get wasted and call it “spirituality” always point to ancient religious traditions as the basis for their path. But just because a practice is very old and comes from a place that’s now a third world country doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Ancient peoples also tore the hearts out of living sacrifices and cut holes in each other’s skulls. But those practices don’t auger as well for a kick-ass night out as gobbling some ‘shrooms. Besides which the people I’ve seen who claim to use “entheogens” as a religious sacrament never seem to know dip about the ancient religions they claim to practice anyway.

There are also those who claim that drugs are somehow part of the path to Enlightenment, although they may not produce Enlightenment itself. Some even claim they're one of the "skillfull means" spoken of in lots of sutras. I don’t get this one at all, though I hear it a whole lot. Apparently whatever you did before you started a real practice was something that led you to that practice and therefore to be recommended to others. So I guess guys who nearly drank themselves to death before coming to AA ought to recommend others to get plastered all the time cuz otherwise how can they find the way to get sober? I just don’t follow.

Then there’s the crowd that claims drugs give you some kind of “opening” experience that leads to further spiritual investigation. These are usually the same people who believe that roasting their synapses on E or mescaline is what an “Enlightenment experience” is like. I’m not a big fan of so-called “opening” experiences. Not even the ones claimed to have been gotten through meditation. There’s a very popular school of thought that holds that Enlightenment is some kind of Big Wow moment, like the greatest rollercoaster ride ever. This is the same kind of unbalanced view of life that causes all the trouble in the world. To most of us, now is boring. Now is when we do the dishes, or write a report for work, or try to get that weird orange stuff off the toilet. We want Big Enlightenment Experiences, something to lift us out of our ordinary humdrum existence. But your life here and now is reality, no matter whether it seems humdrum or kick-ass. The more far out experiences you have, the less you’ll be interested in your real life. Plus you always have to come down off of any drug. Why is that? Could it be that the normal state is what you really like best? If you can’t find the truth while waiting in line at the DMV straight sober at 8 AM, how are you going to find it while out of your mind on peyote? Anyone who thinks they got their first glimpse of the dharma while zonked out on something concocted in a basement drug lab or even some psychedelic plant doesn’t have the faintest clue what the word dharma means.

But the most telling thing about the drugs-are-enlightenment crowd is the way they always seek validation from supposed experts in spirituality. Both Be Here Now and the more recent pile of excrement, sorry, book Zig Zag Zen amount to little more than a desperate search by drug abusers for validation from supposed spiritual authority figures. I won’t tell you not to do drugs. You’ll do whatever you want anyway. But I can and will withhold validation of that nonsense forever. You’ll need to look elsewhere.

Hallucinogenic drugs — let’s not dignify them by pretending they don’t make you hallucinate — destroy the natural ability of the body/mind to find balance. Drugs in general are not a very good solution to any problem. A neuropsychologist friend of mine was telling me once how the drugs used in her profession work. I said it sounded like trying to tune a piano with a sledgehammer. You might get one string in tune, but you mess up everything else. Same with hallucinogens. Only I don’t think you even manage to get one string tuned up with those. All drugs work more-or-less the same way. The body is always better at healing itself. Really, drugs are only good when something has gone terribly wrong with the body’s systems of self-repair. What we’re after in Buddhism is a natural mind/body balance, not the chemically induced realization of some deeply held fantasy.

Drugs suck, OK.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and the forthcoming Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

A man by the name of Rick James (may he rest in peace) once said on the Dave Chapelle Show, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug!" But then again, he said a number of ridiculous things during the duration of his life because 95-percent of the time he was fucked up on coke. But, then again, so was everyone else in the 80s.

Speaking of which, today's generation seems to be extremely influenced by the 80s. With our ever-so-fashion-oriented scenesters, and with all the new wave-retro-electronica music out nowadays, it's no secret that romanticizing 80s excess is cool again. However, depending on your personal habits, a not-so-good 80s influence that seems to be "blowing" up again is the drug cocaine—better known as coke, blow, white girl, snow, white-white or yay.

The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, apparently has big plans for cocaine in his country as well. Plans which involve major expansion in regards to the legal production of coca (the main ingredient being, of course, cocaine) in Bolivia by more than 60-percent. Morales says he wants to fight against drug trafficking. Sure you do, buddy. Keep in mind Bolivia is the world's third largest producer of cocaine.

In wee little Scotland, the number of cocaine users has doubled in the past few years, rising from a mere 600 users in 2002 to over 1,200 in 2006. And this consensus is only counting the Scots that actually admitted to using cocaine. This still doesn't count all the closeted coke heads. Needless to say, Parliament is more than peeved about the number of Scots who'll be ringing in the new year with a Ziplock full of nose confetti. Parliament wants to end the winter-wonderland bender, get Scotland off of the powder and work on an assertive solution to the growing drug problem. As if Train Spotting didn't clue them in enough. Good luck, Scotland. I salute you!

In other cocaine news, WebMD says that cocaine is, quote, "The most abused major stimulant in America today." Doesn't sound like news to me. It seems that these days, everyone is dusting their noses. But the habit is pricey. Because you can't just have a bump of coke. You have to have a bump of coke and a joint. Or a hot rail and a white russian. It all ends the same way—with your life in shambles and your rent money down the shitter. So have fun all you lovers of the nose-nonsense...just don't come to my house and pawn my TV so you can become another statistic.

Remember that old anti-heroin ad where Rachel Leigh Cook smashed a kitchen with a pan? She fucked those dishes up, and her thrashing around made it clear that we did not want any of what she was having.



Well, it's no wonder kids are more into drugs than ever these days, considering the anti-drug ads on now. Directed by 31-year-old David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls), the series of ambivalent spots leaves the viewer unsure of whether they want to toke up or just say no.

Wow, this kid with the weird scar is the biggest sucker ever. The commercial plays like Driving Miss Daisy for potheads. Still not convinced to put down that bong for a split second? Try watching "Pete's Couch." Hell, try watching it stoned; maybe it's more persuasive that way.


photo location

The HIV drug cocktail sometimes called “highly active antiretroviral therapy” and usually consists of a mixture of three drugs that, when taken in specific quantities at specific times of day, have the ability to suppress HIV for many years. The problem with these drugs is that they are extremely expensive and must be taken at precise times. For the majority of AIDS patients that live in Africa, access to these drugs has been a topic of controversy. Drug companies refuse to give the drugs to patients in Africa because of liability and expenses incurred. Instead, people have to acquire the anti-retroviral drugs through unsavory ways. Couple this with the fact that it is next to impossible to track the millions of rural patients with AIDS and medications will never make it to those that need it.

Now with the FDA’s approval, a new pill that combines three antiretroviral drugs into one pill will give those that don’t have the ability to track their own drug regimen a chance.

While three-in-one pills have been available since 2002, this is the first to win FDA approval—an important step to make these drugs more available to those that need it.