Bryan Lewis Saunders | Under The Influence

Huffing

Meth

Nitrous and Valium

Pruno (Prison wine)

Bath Salts

Pot

DMT

It’s a topic that’s inspired endless debate—the link between art and creativity and brain-altering chemicals. Usually, the drugs are a lifestyle choice of "creative" types. In the case of artist Bryan Lewis Saunders, they were a key part of the process and end product.

Saunders, a performance and visual artist, undertook a high profile experiment in creativity, starting several years ago whereby, according to the artist, he created a series of self-portraits, each one done under the influence of a different substance—pretty much an A to Z assortment, from prescription meds like Abilify and Xanax to crystal meth. Over the weeks he’d create amazing pieces, suffer mild brain damage and end up hospitalized—all for the sake of art and creation.

... While this was all done in the name of art, Saunders is quick to say that the drug use is nothing to be proud of. "To be honest I’m not proud to be on any drugs in any pictures. I think drugs make me look really ugly. And I’m really a six trick pony, but the world only likes one of my tricks. Each year 500,000 kids around the world discover drugs and so the virus never dies." Saunders, who started creating a self-portrait a day in 1995, has done over 8,600 self-portraits ...

More at FastCoCreate | Bryan Lewis Saunders

Team DPE

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Via FB

Sarah Schoenfeld | All You Can Feel

Caffeine

Ecstasy

Heroin

Speed

Ketamine

Whether you’ve tried mind-altering substances or not one thing remains true: we all have an idea of what a drug feels like, be it imagined, anecdotal, or from direct exposure. So what might the effect of a drug look like? That was the question asked by artist Sarah Schoenfeld who had ample exposure to the realities of drugs while working in a Berlin nightclub. To answer the question she converted her photography studio into a laboratory and exposed legal and illegal liquid drug mixtures to film negatives. The resulting chemical reactions were then greatly magnified into large prints to form a body of work titled All You Can Feel.

These final, otherworldly images of heroin, cocaine, MDMA, and other substances explore a relationship between photography, alchemy, pharmacy and psychology. One can’t help but draw parallels between Schoenfeld’s photos and the perceived effects of various narcotics ...

All You Can Feel | Colossal

Curious Alice | Trippy 70s Warning About Drug Use

YouTube

In Curious Alice (1971), a film intended for eight to ten year olds, our young Alice falls asleep while reading a book. She encounters cigarettes, liquor, and medicines, and realizes that they are all types of drugs. When she sees the “Drink Me” bottle, she understands that it contains something like a drug, yet after a half-second’s consideration, she drinks the entire bottle and enters a fantasy world. In Drug Wonderland, Alice learns about the hard stuff from her new friends the Mad Hatter (LSD), the March Hare (amphetamines), the Dormouse (barbiturates), and the King of Hearts (heroin). The events of Curious Alice play out as an expression of Alice’s drug trip. Unfortunately, the trip is kind of fun and effectively cancels out the film’s anti-drug message.

Read more at Media Matters, U.S. National Archives

Via Dangerous Minds

1960s Narcotics And Dangerous Drugs Identification Kit

Photos: Rusty Blazenhoff and Ken Dashner
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Winston Products for Education created these identification kits for schools, scouting organizations and law enforcement agencies to educate children about the dangers of drugs in the 1960s.

According to the Wiley Online Library:

The Dangerous Drugs—Identification Kit contains harmless facsimiles of the more commonly abused dangerous drugs. The Kit was designed to be used primarily as an instructional aid in educational and training programs directed toward combating the existing narcotics and dangerous drugs problem. It consists of a plastic container which is transparent and durable. Plainly visible within the container are facsimiles of amphetamines and barbituates, reproduced with exacting fidelity in terms of color, size, shape, and other distinguising characteristics.

The Laughing Squid

R.I.P. | Owlsley "Bear" Stanley

Owlsley Stanley with Jerry Garcia

Owsley “Bear” Stanley, an iconic iconoclast and pioneering LSD chef who produced millions of doses in his Bay Area labs (after allegedly finding the recipe in a chemistry journal at UC Berkeley), passed away today in Australia following a car crash near his home in Queensland. He was 76.

From his involvement with the Grateful Dead (a former manager and sound man, Bear co-designed the band’s Lightning Bolt Skull logo), through his friendship with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (as detailed in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), to his product’s inspirational effects on contemporary legends (Jimi Hendrix named “Purple Haze” after a potent batch of so-called Owsley Acid), Bear undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the nascent psychedelic scene.

“I was punished for political reasons,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, referring to a 1970 drug bust that sent him to prison for two years. “Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different.”

He is survived by his wife Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

TDW

"Bravest College Student In North America" | Marisol Valles Garcia

AP Photo

A 20-year-old criminology student has been named the chief of police in one of the most dangerous municipalities in Mexico's violence-wracked northern state of Chihuahua.

Marisol Valles Garcia, the only person to accept the post, took charge of public security for Guadalupe Distrito Bravo on Monday, according to radio station network Notisistema. The district has a population of 9,148 residents, according to newspaper La Jornada, and comes with at least one police car, Notisistema reported.

The state of Chihuahua has borne the brunt of spiraling drug-related violence that has left around 28,000 dead throughout Mexico in the last four years. Guadalupe's former mayor was assassinated in June, and local police have been kidnapped and murdered. At least eight people were slain in the last week alone in Guadalupe, news.com.au reported.

The tiny but energetic Valles Garcia says she wants her 13 officers to practice a special brand of community policing. She plans to hire more women — she currently has three — and assign each to a neighborhood to talk with families, promote civic values and detect potential crimes before they happen.

Valles Garcia said during her swearing in that her job will not be to fight drug trafficking because that responsibility falls on other organs of government, according to Notisistema. Instead, she will focus on preventative programs for schools and neighborhoods, rehabilitating public spaces and fostering better relationships between neighbors in order to improve general security, according to Notisistema.

... Local residents say the drug gangs take over at night, riding through the towns in convoys of SUVs and pickups, assault rifles and even .50 caliber sniper rifles at the ready. The assistant mayor of nearby El Porvenir and the mayor of Distrito Bravos were killed recently even after they took refuge in nearby Ciudad Juarez. Drug cartels in many drug-plagued parts of Mexico have killed or threatened police chiefs and their departments, buying off some officers and prompting some others to quit en masse.

MSNBC via Gawker

Orange Sunshine | The Story Of The Hippie Mafia

Vimeo

An interview with Nicholas Schou, author of Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World. The inside story of the infamous gang of dope-dealing surfers who played a key role in the counterculture of the Sixties. It's a mindblowing --and improbable-- tale of drug smuggling, large scale marihuana farming and LSD distribution --basically, it's the hidden history of how America got turned on. The story of the Brotherhood might've gone to the grave with the participants if not for Nicholas Schou's intriguing history.

Via Dangerous Minds

Morphine-Synthesizing Pathway Found In Mice

Mammals make their own morphine, a new study shows.

Scientists have known for decades that people excrete some morphine in their urine, but most people assumed that the pain-killing drug came from the diet or drug use. A new study shows that mice, and probably humans and other mammals, can make morphine from scratch.

“This paper now really shows that the whole pathway [to synthesize morphine] operates in the mouse,” says Heinz Floss, an emeritus biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the work. The study, published online the week of April 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also shows that the body rapidly uses up morphine’s building blocks by breaking them down or converting them to other chemicals, which helps explain why it has been difficult to determine whether people make the compound, says Floss.

No one yet knows why the body makes morphine, but researchers suspect it could be a natural painkiller or perhaps is used to help nerve cells communicate with each other. Where the morphine is made also remains a mystery.

Read more at Wired