“El Chapo” ran a global narcotics crime ring and escaped two maximum security prisons before being captured, extradited to the United States in 2017, found guilty in 2019, and sentenced to life in prison.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman's daughter Alejandrina Guzman just launched a beer branded with her dad's name, because nothing matters.
Excerpt from Reuters:
The beer is part of the “El Chapo 701” brand, which has already launched a clothing line, and gets its name from when Forbes named him the 701st richest person in the world in 2009. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion at the time.
“This is an artisanal beer, with 4% alcohol. This prototype is a lager, and it’s made up of malt, rice and honey so it’s good,” said Adriana Ituarte, a salesperson for the brand. “And the idea is for it to be sold at bars that stock craft beer.”
A 355 ml bottle is due to be priced at 70.10 pesos ($3.73).
Read more:
Drink like a Mexican kingpin: 'El Chapo' beer launched by daughter [reuters.com, Jose Luis Osorio, 1-17-2020, image courtesy El chapo beer] Read the rest
A Georgia man is accused of mailing a holiday card stuffed with illegal drugs to a lady friend in jail. The gentleman who mailed the card ended up getting a surprise all-expenses-paid holiday for himself in jail, officials in Georgia say. Read the rest
That's quite a scene, man. No wonder I'm addicted to the stuff. According to the Sweet Jane blog, a young Bruce Robinson is one of the hep cats. From British Film Institute:
Little is known about this kaleidoscopic cinema short advocating the use of coffee as a stimulant, other than that it was produced by advertising agency Battey, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. Intriguingly, it does not promote a specific brand of coffee.
Far fucking out.
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“Volume decline accelerated in 2019, down 3% through November.”
The new availability of a wide array of legal marijuana products has is beginning to take a bite out of beer consumption in Canada, reports Bloomberg News. Read the rest
Rob Sheridan, one of the creators behind DC's upcoming High Level comic series and NIN's former art director, swallowed an unmeasured handful of 'shrooms before heading into see the "disasterpiece" known as Cats. He soon regretted it.
Birth. Movies. Death. then interviewed him on the experience:
As a masochistic connoisseur of bad cinema, I knew since the Cats trailer came out that I needed to see this hideous disaster, in a theater, and very high. I was visiting with family for the holidays so I didn't get to see it right away when everyone on Twitter was shrieking in horror about what they'd just experienced. So after New Year's, the full Cats experience became a priority. On Monday I have to dive heavily back into work and start a whole health kick, so this strange post-holiday week was pretty much my last chance, and I decided I was going to go all in. Instead of taking an edible as I'd planned, I remembered some mushrooms someone had given me a while back and felt like if there was any chance I was going to enjoy Cats on any level, it would be melting into a psychedelic trip – just get weirded out and giggle and maybe make it fun.
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I live in the rural Southwest, and the recent news that trucking company U-Haul has decided to stop hiring people who smoke cigarettes is a big deal around here. People with few financial options tend to be the ones who take jobs as truckers and the like; those tend to be the same populations who smoke. Read the rest
Finally, researchers are again exploring the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics to treat the likes of depression, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. To provide pharmaceutical-quality compounds for clinical trials, scientists are developing new ways to produce the psychedelics. Chemical engineers at Miami University in Ohio have now genetically engineered E. coli to crank put psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. From Scientific American:
The modified microbes generated up to 1.16 grams of psilocybin per liter of culture medium—the highest yield to date from any engineered organism and a 10-fold increase over the next best attempt. Scaled up, the new method could produce psilocybin for potential therapeutic use.
“The number-one advantage is it's simply cheaper” than—or at least cost-competitive with—other methods, says lead study author Alexandra Adams, an undergraduate student in chemical engineering at Miami University in Ohio...
Adams and her colleagues engineered E. coli that incorporated three genes from the Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, enabling the bacteria to synthesize psilocybin from the cheap and easily obtainable precursor molecule 4-hydroxyindole, and then they optimized the process to produce the drug on a larger scale.
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One fantastic and wonderful origin theory of Santa Claus involves psychedelic mushrooms and shamanic rituals of the indigenous Sámi people who live in northern Finland. Paul Devereux wrote about this incredible hidden history in his fascinating 2008 book The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia. Then, Brooklyn filmmaker Matthew Salton blew mainstream minds with this fantastic New York Times "Op-Doc" short video on the topic.
For more on psychedelic Santa, check out the following pieces by Greg Taylor at the Daily Grail:
• "Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom: Were Modern Christmas Traditions Influenced by Shamanic Folklore?"
• Santa's Long Trip Read the rest
He was only dreaming of a green Christmas, you guys. Read the rest
His name was not Santa Claus.
“Protip: If you’re gonna deliver 20 pounds of meth in an air fryer, make sure it gets to the dealer.”
As scientists make great strides in their research on psychedelic therapies for depression, PTSD, OCD, addiction and other conditions, new ways to deliver the drugs are also emerging from laboratories. Oregon company Silo Wellness announced the availability of a new nasal spray for psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms. The company conducted their research and formulated the product in Jamaica where psilocybin is legal. From the Silo Wellness press release:
The key to the nasal spray is that it bypasses the gut, going directly to the bloodstream through the nasal mucus membranes and eventually the liver for metabolizing.
“Many psilocybin patients, particularly women, complain of upset stomach or vomiting when taking high-doses of mushrooms,” Board Advisor and Silo Wellness investor Becky Rotterman, a Missouri pharmacist, stated. “We want to bring this wonderful natural medicine first to Oregon and then the flyover states – to those who would be afraid to eat a handful of fungi and who feel more comfortable seeing their medicine in a familiar delivery modality, such as a metered-dose nasal spray...."
Regarding the expansion of legalization efforts, Arnold explained that “this is the sort of product that activists can discuss with their legislators to show that safe consumption is possible within a legal framework.”
“With proof of concept in hand, we are taking pre-orders and entertaining licensing proposals for research abroad and manufacturing for the product in advance of jurisdictions coming online legally, similar to Oregon’s proposed medical-marijuana-like psilocybin initiative,” COO Scott Slay, of Eugene, Oregon stated.
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Maybe not the best place to hide your stash. Read the rest
On Sunday, a 16-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly using a remote control car to smuggle meth from Mexico. According to the US Border Patrol, the RC car likely made several trips back and forth to haul more than 50 pounds of meth near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in the San Diego-Tijuana region. From the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Border Patrol agents believe someone on the south side of the U.S.-Mexico border was able to slip the drug-laden car through a gap in the bollard-style fencing and then drive it to the teen waiting on the north side of the fence, said Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco.
An agent spotted the boy hiding in thick brush near the border, about a mile north of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, around 12:30 a.m. Sunday. The teen had two large duffel bags and a remote-controlled car with him, and agents found 50 packages of methamphetamine weighing more than 55 pounds in his bags.
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South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi L. Noem spent $449,000 (more that $0.50 per resident of South Dakota!) on a campaign to educate state residents about the state's program to address its methamphetamine epidemic. That campaign's slogan? "Meth: I'm On It."
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In Arkansas, Henderson State University chemistry professors Terry D. Bateman, 45, and Bradley A. Rowland, 40, were charged on Friday with making methamphetamine. They had been put on administrative leave on October 11. From the New York Times:
(Tina V. Hall, a university associate vice president of marketing and communications) said the school’s Reynolds Science Center had been closed on Oct. 8 because of “a report of an undetermined chemical odor.” Testing revealed an elevated presence of benzyl chloride in a lab, she said...
Stephen J. Madison, who is on the chemistry faculty at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said that benzyl chloride could be used to help make methamphetamine...
It was not clear whether the chemical smell in the school building had prompted the investigation by law enforcement.
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