This nation of ours, America, was built upon the backs of hardworking slaves, the key word being "hardworking." Careful readers will notice what we did not say that this great nation was built upon: drugs and "getting high" on illegal drugs.
The U.S. Navy has had some recent trouble with bath salt usage among its sailors, so they did what any forward thinking branch of the military would do: They released a bizarre PSA about the drug. According to the video, at least one of the following will occur if you ingest bath salts: 1) you'll vomit, 2) you'll punch your girlfriend while bowling, and 3) your friends will transform into demons before your eyes. Also: you'll only be able to hear dubstep.
Your family doesn't get you at all. This Christmas, they got you $50 gift card to Forever 21, a $25 certificate to Starbucks, and a $30 card to Blinds to Go, when at heart, you're a caffeine-allergic nudist who lives in a windowless hut. Why couldn't they have just given you cash?
Last Sunday, officials at JFK International Airport arrested a woman for allegedly trying to smuggle over seven pounds of cocaine inside Toblerone chocolate bars and boxes.
Earlier today, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper signed an executive order adding Amendment 64 to the state's constitution. In case you're not up to date on your Colorado state amendments, this means recreational use of marijuana is now legal in Colorado. Great news. But decriminalized weed raises several interesting legal challenges, the most challenging of which is: How high is too high to drive?
During the Cold War, the U.S. Army pursued a research program that used soldiers as lab rats to test the effects of various chemical agents—ranging "from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX." As a huge class action suit against the government by those who were experimented upon nears its trial date, the New Yorker has dropped a huge piece full of details on just how much crazy shit our military was doing in a single secret facility in Maryland.
On Friday, two University of Colorado Boulder students brought brownies to one of their classes as part of something called "Bring Food Friday." They shared the snacks with their fellow classmates and their professor. Normal enough, right? Well, it turns out the brownies were laced with pot and everyone who ate them freaked out, necessitating multiple trips to the hospital.
In 2012, it's very possible for a rapper to get signed to a major label after the success of just one viral hit song — for evidence of that, one needs only to look at artists like Azealia Banks or Kreayshawn. But a new rapper, Trinidad James, has burst on to the scene in the last few weeks armed with a single that has some catchy lines about "molly" and "sweating."
Someone in L.A. is having a really shitty day, even though he may not know it yet. That's because a Silver Lake resident named Mack Reed (not to be confused with Gawker's Max Read, who would never find himself in the vicinity of marijuana) just so happened to stumble upon $175,000 worth of weed buried in his backyard, as chronicled on his Tumblr today. Reed promptly called the LAPD ("fucking narc, dude," says someone looking up from a bong rip), which means that there is a person in the L.A. drug game in a lot of trouble right now.
Above, left, Ohio woman Melissa Wolf in July of last year; above, right, Wolf after being arrested yesterday. (Acting on a tip, police found "several propane tanks, some containing anhydrous ammonia, chemicals to manufacture meth and a small amount of marijuana" at her home.) Should you do meth? No, you should not do meth. Wolf's mugshot, in full:
Four Ohio college students were indicted earlier this month on a multitude of drug charges, after they were caught last May trying to steal chemicals from a school chemistry lab in order to cook up some ecstasy in "an empty dorm room." An all too typical tale. For purposes of instruction—and to ensure that future college ecstasy labs are more professionally run—allow us to examine what mistakes they made in their budding criminal enterprise, all detailed exhaustively in this Plain-Dealer story:
It's tough to beat the New York Post's lede - "There's no business like snow business" - so I'll let it stand. In what authorities are describing as a "dramatic drug gang takedown," New York State police seized over 100 pounds of cocaine – worth an estimated $5 million – from the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Times Square last month.
"Tripping" on illegal hallucinatory "Las Drogas" is back in a major way, party people. The evidence: Steve Jobs used to do it, and so did 79 year-old Oliver Sacks, and so did some guy on a TV show set in the 1960s. Also, somebody on Fringe.
There are very few days 50 million people get permission by their employers and city officials to "stay home and be safe" which some people interpret as an open bar until Hurricane Sandy's temper tantrum ends. So please inform us in the discussion system what state of inebriation you're planning to be in once those gale-force winds start uprooting trees and stray cats across the city in the next few hours. If you plan on adding any illegal substances to your Emergency Stay-At-Home Pack please feel free to suggest your own concoctions since some Gawker editors are mulling how to best enjoy the Frankenstorm show but still maintain enough capacitation to evacuate in a makeshift canoe.
"Dubstep" (or EDM) is generally terrible music beloved by America's teenagers. These children go see their favorite DJs in arenas or at festivals, where they chug liquor out of water bottles and/or take various forms of MDMA and whatever else gross adult drug dealers sell them. The problem is that teenagers don't understand how to take drugs without nearly killing themselves, which means that things like this happen at events like Haunted Coliseum at the Nassau Coliseum.
I gravitated to the fucked up writers. Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Charles Bukowski, William Faulkner. There weren't many women in my list. Dorothy Parker, and that was about it. Somehow, hand in hand with booze and drugs, the terrible dance that substances led me on became one that I must perfect to be a writer. It was a required necessity, an essential rite of passage, and my writing heroes' words were the proof. I drank, gurned, snorted, swallowed and hallucinated like they did. That waltz into the dark was absolutely crucial for me in order to write like them—even if the familiar, haunting beautiful chimes of The Blue Danube led me instead to the depths of degradation, I could still write about it.
