The Agony and the Ecstasy

The medical profession have long made a habit of chucking bombshells at anything that people are having fun with. You could happily smoke 80 Capstan Full Strength a day and live to a hundred until some white coat discovered cancer.

You could drink 20 pints as night and drive without a seat belt the wrong way up one-way streets until the white coats came along and pointed out the pitfalls.

Not so long ago it was cellphones - some Florida dude stood up in a courtroom in '93 and attempted to prove that his tumor was directly related to cellie-abuse. The phonewallahs freaked. Since then have chucked good money after bad trying to prove otherwise, eventually they reckon they've managed to achieve a level of proof and that we can stick these radioactive transmission devices as close to our brain cells as possible as often as we damn well like. Some sponsored white coats gave the thumbs up.

Online garden fence chatter spoke of other, more sinister menaces, like Glucuronolactone, this artificial stimulant developed for GIs in the 60s by the US government that somehow became a crucial ingreed in Red Bull. It turned out that Glucuriwotsit - listed right there on the tin - is nothing of the sort, but not before a whole heap of people started worrying about that Voddy/RB hangover...

And now its our old mate Methileen Dioxie - E fer short - that is the subject of a well-scary think piece in Science Magazine.

Here's the skinny.

Popping the party pieces two or three times within a few hours is running a serious risk of triggering Parkinson's. No shit. It says right here.

They had to frazzle the brains of a few hundred monkeys and baboons to reach the conclusion that E kills off a damn sight more than a few serotoninergic neurons. You get some pretty heavy jitters way on down the line. The white coats seem a bit worked up about all this, as you can imagine.

This follows on from a pretty full on warning that the demise of the Taliban will flood the world with dirt-cheap over-pure H. Afghanistan is after all the supplier of 75% of the world supply.

Personally I've had it with anything sold in a plastic bag by a strango focussed primarily on my pound notes. It could be anything from a kids vitamin tablet to roach poison he's dealing in. You can hardly nip back the next day for a refund - that's if you're not already too out of it to notice. Praps I just grew up not trusting strangers hanging around the school gates with a full bag of spice and my instincts just stayed locked in.

Come to think about it I'm not swallowing any round little pills unless the supplier's listed on NASDAQ. Even then I'd need a proper reason, like extreme pain, and cirtainly not because my mates were doing it to 'enhance the experience'. Get real. The way to enhance your experience is to break your stupid habits and put yourself in a happy space. If I'm on some cool dancefloor surrounded by gyrating, happy, semi-clothed chicks and some banging tune is getting an airing who in their right mind wants to get any higher than that?

To me it doesn't matter of it's pain killers, prozac or sherbet dib dabs, I stopped trying to escape from reality when I figured out that reality is, well, kind of cool really. After that I wasn't looking to escape from anything. Except worrying about what kind of crap I'm putting into my digestive system.

Now about your big juicy pork sausage, mate!

"What you need is some of this MRM to get your arteries clogging. MDMA's got nothing on THIS stuff. I've got this mate who works a meat counter down Leeds market. You want some MRM, dude? I can fix you up with some prime cut grade A saturates..."

Blogga.