Nate Norman was hanging out with his buddy Topher Clark when he came up with The Idea. The two friends were sitting around Nate's house, a dumpy little place near the cemetery, and both of them were extremely stoned. And yet The Idea had more legs than your typical pot-inspired idea. It did not involve a second Twinkie inside the first one. It did not involve genetically modifying the bugs so their blood would not be blood but windshield-wiper fluid. It was, in fact, based on a practical application of global economic theory. That, and cheap weed in Canada.

Criminals in Shropshire have reportedly started using unmanned drones fitted with heat-seeking cameras to steal from and extort illegal cannabis farms. Apparently taking a leaf out of the book of the police themselves, violent robbers said that the growers make perfect targets because the victims will not report incidents to the authorities.

Hard-hitting and darkly comic music documentary-turned-social commentary following Nicholas Kidd, a young, ordinary guy who shoots to fame overnight when his mock-rap YouTube video goes viral. As he is invited onto talk shows, to awards ceremonies, and even to partake in a charity poetry reading, Kidd illustrates the absurdity of his fame and how disturbingly surreal it is that the joke has got so out of hand. But slowly the tables turn and, lured by sex, drugs and wild partying, we watch Kidd get swept up in the world he started out mocking.

Doctors in Albania say hundreds of people have fallen ill from harvesting cannabis in a lawless region that for years has been out of bounds to police, local media reported on Friday. "In the last two months about seven to eight people arrive in the emergency ward each day and many more have come earlier with disorders from hashish," Hysni Lluka, a Gjirokastër doctor, told Top Channel television. Some 2,000 people, including poor Roma who have set up a camp near Lazarat, have been working for months in the cannabis fields, where producers pay €8 per 10 kilos of processed drug. The illegal practice has flourished in Lazarat over two decades of turbulent transition in Albania since the end of hardline communist rule. Lazarat has become a byword for lawlessness in Albania, with cannabis growers brazen enough to shoot at police officers who venture near their fields. Aerial pictures suggest some 60 hectares have been cultivated in Lazarat, with 300,000 cannabis plants, capable of yielding 500 tonnes or half the total cannabis production in Albania.

Er ist einer der umstrittensten Politiker in Kanada: Seit Rob Ford vor gut drei Jahren zum Bürgermeister von Toronto gewählt wurde, sorgt er für einen Skandal nach dem anderen. Er polarisiert mit rechten Parolen, liefert sich Prügeleien mit Journalisten und pflegt dubiose Freunde im Drogenmilieu. Im Frühjahr war er in ein handfesten Skandal um ein Video verwickelt, das ihn angeblich beim Rauchen einer Crack-Pfeife zeigte. Der schwergewichtige Bürgermeister aber trotzte allen Gegnern. Bis zuletzt regierte er die viertgrößte Stadt in Nordamerika mit harter Hand und schüttelte alle Vorwürfe ab. Auch weil außer zwei Journalisten lange niemand das angeblich kompromittierende Drogen-Video gesehen hatte. Selbst eine über Crowdfunding finanzierte Belohnung von 200.000 Dollar förderte die Aufnahmen nicht zu Tage. Viele Kanadier hatten den Skandal fast vergessen. Am Donnerstag dann der Paukenschlag: Auf einer Pressekonferenz berichtete Torontos Polizeichef Bill Blair völlig überraschend vom Fund des Drogen-Videos.

Es hat ein Wirtschaftswandel stattgefunden: weg von globalen Handelsstrukturen hin zu einer Regionalisierung, wie bei Gemüse aus dem Bioladen. Das gilt für die gesamte Bundesrepublik. Auch das Bundeskriminalamt beschreibt in seinem Lagebericht 2012 den »umfangreichen Cannabisanbau«, den es inzwischen in Deutschland gibt. Wurden 2010 noch 394 Plantagen von der Polizei entdeckt, waren es 2012 bereits 809. In den allermeisten Fällen handelt es sich um sogenannte Indoor-Plantagen, also Cannabis, das nicht unter freiem Himmel wächst, sondern in Kellern, Fabrikhallen oder eben in Berliner WGs.

Meth users called it the "shake- and-bake" or "one-pot" method, and its key feature was to greatly simplify the way meth is synthesized from pseudoephedrine, a decongestant found in cold and allergy medicines like Claritin D and Sudafed. Shake and bake did two things. It took a toxic and volatile process that had once been the province of people with Breaking Bad-style knowledge of chemistry and put it in the bedrooms and kitchens of meth users in rural America. It also produced the most potent methamphetamine anywhere. Since 2007, the number of clandestine meth sites discovered by police has increased 63 percent nationwide. In Kentucky, the number of labs has more than tripled. The Bluegrass State regularly joins its neighbors Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana as the top four states for annual meth lab discoveries. As law enforcement agencies scramble to clean up and dispose of toxic labs, prosecute cooks, and find foster homes for their children, they are waging two battles: one against destitute, strung-out addicts, the other against some of the world's wealthiest and most politically connected drug manufacturers. In the past several years, lawmakers in 25 states have sought to make pseudoephedrine—the one irreplaceable ingredient in a shake-and-bake lab—a prescription drug. In all but two—Oregon and Mississippi—they have failed as the industry, which sells an estimated $605 million worth of pseudoephedrine-based drugs a year, has deployed all-star lobbying teams and campaign-trail tactics such as robocalls and advertising blitzes.

A crack epidemic was raging in Philadelphia in 1989 when Hallam Hurt, then chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center on North Broad Street, began a study to evaluate the effects of in-utero cocaine exposure on babies. In maternity wards in Philadelphia and elsewhere, caregivers were seeing more mothers hooked on cheap, smokable crack cocaine. A 1989 study in Philadelphia found that nearly one in six newborns at city hospitals had mothers who tested positive for cocaine. Some social workers predicted a lost generation - kids with a host of learning and emotional deficits who would overwhelm school systems and not be able to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. The "crack baby" image became symbolic of bad mothering, and some cocaine-using mothers had their babies taken from them or, in a few cases, were arrested. The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition. As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time.

But Kesselman noticed that the watermarks on his rolling papers were affecting the way in which the paper burned. “I’m always trying to improve the process,” he says, “it’s what I like to do. And this is going to sound strange, but when I’m sitting there smoking, I look at the burning embers, I watch them, I try to see what they are doing and what they are trying to tell me. I really try to connect with it. And I noticed that the embers were following the watermark in a certain way, that the watermark was affecting the burn, making it canoe or run. So I started experimenting. At first I tried to approach the way a scientist would. ‘Okay, so we need to make a cube pattern and control the flame, [Arnold Schwarzenegger voice] we must control the flame!’.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, a government behavioral health agency) issued a report on Friday that called energy drinks "a continuing public health concern." Yes, energy drinks like Red Bull, 5-Hour Energy, Monster, Full Throttle, CHARGE!, Neurogasm, Hardcore Energize Bullet, Facedrink, Eruption, Crakshot, Crave, Crunk, DynaPep, Rage Inferno, SLAP, and even good old Venom Death Adder.  Energy drinks are not-uncommonly used along with alcohol and other drugs, so SAMHSA (say it aloud once, it's calming) makes the distinction that, of the 20,783 ED visits in 2011, 58 percent involved energy drinks alone; the remaining also involved other drugs.

Snoop and Doctor Dina have collaborated to grow a practical strain just for him, one that he can smoke all day long without getting too zonked, and that's what we're looking at right now. Dina explains that it contains more Cannabis sativa than Cannabis indica, which ought to help keep Snoop from falling asleep during photo shoots. Snoop will later christen it "Snoop Lion Executive Branch."

The pitch was simple: “John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Blues Brothers, how about it?” But the film The Blues Brothers became a nightmare for Universal Pictures, wildly off schedule and over budget, its fate hanging on the amount of cocaine Belushi consumed. From the 1973 meeting of two young comic geniuses in a Toronto bar through the careening, madcap production of John Landis’s 1980 movie, Ned Zeman chronicles the triumph of an obsession.

[...] most experts estimate that for every 1,000 patients who undergo general anesthesia [...], one to two will experience awareness. Patients who awake hear surgeons’ small talk, the swish and stretch of organs, the suctioning of blood; they feel the probing of fingers, the yanks and tugs on innards; they smell cauterized flesh and singed hair. But because one of the first steps of surgery is to tape patients’ eyes shut, they can’t see. And because another common step is to paralyze patients to prevent muscle twitching, they have no way to alert doctors that they are awake.

But the future of the business may be methamphetamine. During the 1990s, when the market for meth exploded in the United States, new regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of the drug in this country. This presented an opportunity that the Sinaloa quickly exploited. According to Anabel Hernández, author of “Los Señores del Narco,” a book about the cartel, it was one of Chapo’s deputies, a trafficker named Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel, who first spotted the massive potential of methamphetamine. “Nacho was like Steve Jobs,” Hernández told me. “He saw the future.”

Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions. ... Caught in between are millions of children and adults who rely on the pills to help them stay focused and calm. Shortages, particularly of cheaper generics, have become so endemic that some patients say they worry almost constantly about availability.

The drug of choice in the Nineties rave scene is coming back as a powder that can be shared socially like cocaine and distinguishes its more fashion-conscious users from 'pill heads'. Ecstasy, the drug of choice for the clubbers of the early 1990s, is making a comeback. Once synonymous with the rave scene, its popularity declined as the diminishing amount of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, the potent chemical once found in ecstasy tablets, saw a new generation of clubbers seek alternative substances. Now, according to Drugscope, the organisation that monitors street prices of illicit substances, ecstasy is back in demand as producers reintroduce it as a "premium" product. The Drugscope survey found that, after an absence of more than a decade, high MDMA-content ecstasy was on sale in half of the 20 towns and cities featured in its annual survey of the UK drugs scene.

Pedal harder. You called me campione. Pedal harder. You called me cheater. Pedal harder.

The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic "placebos" - we shed our inhibitions.

Doctors are planning the first clinical trial of ecstasy in the UK, to see whether the drug can be beneficial to the traumatised survivors of child abuse, rape and war. Ecstasy and other illegal drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms are potentially useful in treating people with serious psychological disturbance who cannot begin to face up to their distress, some psychiatrists and therapists believe. But because of public fear and tabloid anger about illegal drugs, scientists say they find it almost impossible to explore their potential.

Marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States. Police made 853,838 arrests in 2010 for marijuana-related offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’ annual Uniform crime report, released today. The arrest total is among the highest ever reported by the agency and is nearly identical to the total number of cannabis-related arrests reported in 2009.

Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood, also known as Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, is a short film produced by BBC Omnibus in 1978 on the subject of Hunter S. Thompson, directed by Nigel Finch. The road trip pairs Thompson with Finch's fellow Briton the illustrator Ralph Steadman. The party travel to Hollywood via Death Valley and Barstow from Las Vegas, scene of the pair's 1971 collaboration. It contains interviews with Thompson and Steadman, as well as some short excerpts from some of his work.

But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit. Mark’s acid worked as advertised. “It was quite enjoyable, to be honest,” he said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some “silver haze” pot purchased off Silk Road. “It was legit,” he said. “It was better than anything I’ve seen.”

Eine 14-Jährige kollabierte – offenbar war sie hochgradig alkoholisiert. Später wurde bei dem Mädchen über zwei Promille Alkohol im Blut gemessen. Als es darum ging, der Jugendlichen den Magen auszupumpen, stellten die medizinischen Kräfte fest, dass dieser komplett leer war. Die Begleiterinnen der 14-Jährigen gaben schließlich preis, man habe den Alkohol nicht getrunken, sondern mit Wodka getränkte Tampons eingeführt.

Wiz Khalifa DayToday Season 3 Episode 6. Wiz Khalifa takes viewers on board the Waken Baken Tour across the country in his tour bus and showcases some of his new music and day to day activities.