Synchronium

More Shoddy Journalism

October 12, 2008

Space Cadets

[This is the first post by my girlfriend and Coffeesh0p partner Mrs_Synch!]

What’s wrong with this article?

We can all debate until we’re blue in the face about alcohol, drugs, their legal alternatives, tobacco and whatever else is a source of controversy in this country. My problem with this article, however, is not that I disagree with the journalist’s point of view (although I do). It’s that if this is what counts as journalism these days (on the BBC news website no less!) I am, quite frankly, shocked and disappointed. These are some of the reasons I felt so strongly about it (I’ll address each point in the order they come in the article):

‘The pills or liquid’ — what? How vague is this? I know it’s only the second paragraph but read on and the trend continues. There are no names of the brands, retailers or wholesalers they are referring to. They mention none of the ingredients they claim are so dangerous apart from this deliberately controversial reference to BZP. As a herbal highs retailer in the UK, I can personally say that I know of no wholesalers that are willing to sell us any products containing BZP. Although the legal status of BZP does seem to be a bit dodgy (the article said it becomes illegal in March, but I’m pretty sure it’s tightly controlled here already), as far as herbal high sellers go BZP is not readily available in the UK. It is certainly not ‘one of the main ingredients in many products’ in the industry. This is quite simply a lie, and a demonstration of the lack of research done on the part of the journalist. Ten minutes on Google could have told her this is not the case.
‘Twenty-five-year-old Alex from Birmingham’ — Right, I see. So the whole substance of this piece comes from a girl who got pissed, took EIGHT unidentified legal pills, slept in a field all weekend and then got the shits. Come on BBC, this is really poor. The symptoms Alex lists are also, incidentally, ones you can expect from your common or garden hangover. Admittedly the guy who sold her the pills was obviously an idiot, but you get a great many idiots in bars who continue to serve people who are so drunk they can barely stand up. I have also never seen a pack of legal pills which do not explicitly carry the warning ‘Do not drink’, and by her own admission she and her friends were already drunk.
“These things are packets of tablets and capsules sold as herbal highs, but are in no way herbal. These things are purely synthetic chemicals,” he said. — Yes, this is a quote from a doctor so it seems almost credible, but again, the vagueness of this point just makes it stupid. Yes, I’m sure there are pills out there that are advertised as herbal and aren’t. But certainly not all of them, and there are a large number of reputable retailers out there who actually do give a shit about the safety of what they sell. There is one very obvious example of legal pills that ARE undeniably entirely herbal, and that’s Happy Caps. If this journalist had done her research, she would have found out in minutes that Happy Caps are capsules, not tablets (so not even any harmless tabletting agents), and that they contain ground up herbs and extracts. Hell, you can SEE what’s inside them if you pull the gel cap apart, and it’s planty and quite definitely herbal.

Whilst this journalist clearly has an agenda (read: drugs are bad), this poorly written piece of tripe has given me no information whatsoever. I’m always interested to hear someone else’s point of view, and when I saw the title, was excited about reading it and possibly reporting on it for Coffeesh0p. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed in both this journalist and the standard of reporting that is obviously publishable these days. BBC news editors, you should be ashamed of yourselves!

Posted in Drugs | Tagged herbal highs, media |

Salvia Divinorum is NOT like LSD!

October 11, 2008

Arrrghhh! We’ve all seen the media’s sensationalist take on Salvia Divinorum. I swear I’ve seen it mentioned as “the next LSD” and “the next marijuana” in the SAME article before. I’m sure it makes compelling reading for those conservative types, wielding the banning stick, but come on!

Just yesterday, I received a newspaper clipping through the post entitled “Concern over craze for ‘psycho sage’ videos”. The article focused mainly on those tw@s that think it’s fun to post videos of themselves on YouTube smoking salvia, which is fair enough, but in approximately 250 words of ill-informed “journalism”, I can see LSD mentioned twice.

Salvia != LSD

Why This Is Fucking Stupid

Anything labelled so consistently as “LSD-Like” is sure to receive a banning from any MP wanting to appear “tough on drugs”. We all know how Gordon Brown likes to ignore scientific evidence when it comes to drugs, so I don’t think the fact that salvia divinorum is NOTHING like LSD will be mentioned at all. Considering that this amazing herb does actually have a lot of medicinal potential, is it really worth comparing it to LSD just to make exciting reading? This is a sure fire way to get it banned. Arsehole Journalist: I’m sure all those people with Parkinson’s will thank you! (NB: that’s not to say LSD doesn’t have any clinical use — in fact, it shows amazing potential in curing addiction far quicker than regular therapy — shame no one wants to research it any more because it’s such a ballache to get permission…)
The public tends to believe it, and may get hurt! If that many places are reporting its similarity to LSD, then the uninformed public will take it as read. Last night, someone submitted an anonymous report on Salvia Trip, entitled “Not for me”. This bloke is a 36 year old programmer, who used to be into LSD back in the good old days. He goes on to say that he’s heard about salvia and wanted a similar experience. As you’d expect, he didn’t enjoy it. Thankfully, nothing bad happened, but there is certainly the potential for something to go wrong. This is only one report (and the inspiration behind this post), so imagine how many more people this has happened to. This piss-poor excuse for a journalist is going to do more harm than good.

Posted in Drugs | Tagged lsd, media, salvia divinorum |

Egyptian Ecstasy - Blue Lotus

October 9, 2008

The Egyptian Blue Lotus, Nymphaea caerulea, (also known as any combination of Egyptian, sacred, blue, lily or lotus), has been called the ancient Egyptian equivalent of ecstasy, but it’s psychoactive properties have only recently been (re)descovered. In an inspiring piece of shocking journalism, combined with insane photoshop skillz, I, Synchronium, and my trusty girlfriend find out what all this fuss is about.

Look at that image again. That same white/blue flower in each painting is what I’m talking about. It appears all over the place in Egyptian artwork, and now it seems it was the plant’s psychoactive properties that made it so popular to the Egyptians. It seems we still know very little about this interesting plant, however. Both the Wikipedia and Erowid entries say next to nothing, particularly on the pharmacological aspects. I’m currently waiting for someone on SpiritGarden forums to get back to me about a rather more comprehensive paper he found which focuses on the chemistry — the only problem is, it’s not in English. :-/ More updates on that later, I hope. All I’ve gathered so far is it contains nuciferine and apomorphine, a dopamine agonist.

So, the only piece of interesting information about the plant is from the 50 minute long documentary Sacred Weeds — Blue Lily. This came out in 1998, so the only copy I found isn’t great quality. It’s totally worth a watch, though, so I’ve included it at the end of this post. Wikipedia has the following to say:

The series ended with the investigation of the psychoactive effects of the Blue Lily (Nymphaea caerulea), a sacred plant in ancient Egypt. Michael Carmichael [hah!] suggested that the psychoactive effects of the blue lily and other psychoactive plants established a new foundation for understanding the origins of philosophy and religion in ancient Egypt. Alan Lloyd, the ranking took a more cautious approach. After witnessing the effects of the plant in two volunteers, all parties agreed that it was a psychoactive plant. Sherratt accepted the new paradigm for the origins of ancient philosophy and religion in his summation of the series.

Only one avenue remained unturned — trying it ourselves. Someone’s got to do these things, right?

Method - Two People

Take one bottle of generic £7 rosé wine and 25g dried blue lotus. Uncork the wine and pour yourself a little bit — if you don’t, the plant material won’t fit into the bottle. If you haven’t worked it out by now, the next step is put the plant material in the bottle. Then re-cork, shake a bit, and put back in the fridge. In about three days (yes, three days; serious journalism and scientific research need to be planned in advance!), your wine should have taken on a much darker hue.

When the time comes, you first need to filter the wine. Generic coffee filters are great for this, but you can use a clean tea towel too. Just pour your wine into a filter slowly until only soggy lotus flowers remain in the bottle. I found the best way to get these out was a long pointy thing and lots of patience. As they come out one by one, put them in a sieve over a jug of some description. Once you’ve got them all out, press them into the sieve to get as much wine out as possible. Once it’s all filtered, rinse out your wine bottle and put the wine, sans flowers, back in the bottle for storage. Drink the bottle between two people in the space of about one to two hours. On Sacred Weeds, they also ate the flowers when they realised they had no more wine left. Bear in mind that they had to import these fresh from Egypt at the time, so I think I’d have done the same! You can totally eat the once-dried flowers that you can buy today, but they won’t be a nice as the fresh flowers. Just like Guarana, this is one of those plants that actually tastes pretty nice.

Results

The wine taste alright. It’s more bitter than usual, as you’d expect, but nothing like dream herb or kratom tea. It’s easy enough to knock back, but if you’re a big girl, you can mix it half and half with lemonade. The effects of the lotus itself come about at the same time as the alcohol — about 10 – 15 minutes after drinking. The effects are subtle and enjoyable, getting more pronounced the more you drink. Relaxation is the first thing you’ll notice, as well as a more talkative demeanour. Things seem more amusing and perhaps a little more enjoyable. You will definitely adopt a more cheerful disposition!

I don’t know if it was the lotus, or if I was just knackered after a long day, but by about midnight, I was falling asleep with my clothes on. More investigation is necessary before conclusions can be drawn!

Conclusion
Pros:
Easy to prepare
Feels great
Tastes pretty nice
Cons:
It's quite pricey @ £8 per person.
It takes a while to soak
There's not a lot more to say, really. I wouldn't say the lotus made me ecstatic, but for an ancient herbal equivalent, it's not half bad. This is definitely a plant I'd try again, and recommend to others.

Sacred Weeds

As promised, here is the Sacred Weeds - Blue Lily episode. Sit back, relax and enjoy!

In other news, I'll be launching some competitions soon, so keep an eye out for chances to win loads of cool stuff.

Posted in Drugs | Tagged blue lotus, ecstasy, sacred weeds |

The ATA vs Jacqui Smith

October 8, 2008

Recently, everyone’s favourite Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, set a few disturbing proposals to House of Commons, following advice by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (AMCD), regarding the sale of cannabis seeds and smoking paraphernalia. Let’s have a little look, shall we?

The AMCD recommends investigating:

“whether it might be practical to bring cannabis seeds within the scope of the Misuse of Drugs Act”

and also recommends that:

“The Home Office should assess the extent to which the trade in cannabis paraphernalia might be more effectively regulated”.

So wait, everyone ignores the AMCD unless they agree with your agenda? Brilliant! As if stopping the sale of king-size rizlas will result in massive, country-wide decline in pot smoking, anyway…

Enter The ATA

Naturally, this dick-move is a very unsettling one for anyone that sells cannabis seeds, or smoking paraphernalia, such as myself. Enter the ATA — the Alternative Trade Association! They describe themselves as a “coalition of UK wholesalers, attempting to stop these misguided proposals becoming law”. They not only provide you with a weath of information about the subject and how to keep your business safe (including updates about any future legislative changes), but they also have plenty of retained legal muscle to defend any action taken against the industry.

They’re also setting up a website, Smoke-Aware.co.uk, to educate people on the risks of smoking and the problems drug use can bring. On top of that, they’re also apparently planning to launch some kind of media campaign, but I’m not too sure what that will involve.

For a start, it’s great to see people not lying back and taking this crap, so well done ATA! Let’s hope we can get everyone involved — surely there’s strength in numbers? With any luck, these ridiculous proposals will be nipped in the bud before our government start looking any more stupid.

For any internet-marketing-savvy wholesalers out there, signing up gets you a search engine friendly, high quality link directly to your site. That can only help you in the search engines. On the downside, they do require all members to link back to them, which automatically makes me somewhat wary. But for all you get in return, one link back isn’t going to hurt.

Update: It seems herbal highs are under threat as well. Current Government: “Let’s ban everything until we know it’s safe” — I can hardly see them actively allowing the sale of anything, can you?

Posted in Internet Marketing, Legislation |

Salvia Trip

October 6, 2008

Today, I’m going to talk about my most recent project (apart from this blog), Salvia Trip.

Back Story

Originally, most of the experience reports came from SalviaSource (in my mind, the number one salvia divinorum community), but due to a decision by the owner (Paradoxic) to move away from the experience and focus more on the cultivation and the science behind it all, the reports were removed from the site. In a stroke of benevolent wisdom, Paradoxic decided to compile all of the reports in both a Word document and SQL format. Seeing a massive cache of free, keyword-rich and relatively unique content, I jumped at the chance to download the lot, determined to do something worthwhile with it.

Picking the Domain

Using Google’s free Keyword Research Tool, I played around with a few words including “salvia”, “divinorum”, “experience” and “trip” in various combinations. It turns out the phrase “Salvia Trip” gets approximately 12,000 searches per month on Google, and with only 138,000 competing sites, some domain featuring the words “Salvia” and “Trip” was going to work best. Salvia-Trip.net and Salvia-Trip.com were both available, so I registered both of them, and pointed .com to the .net extension.

Giving Something Back

When I was first tossing ideas around about what to do with these reports, my incentives were two-fold. Make a bit of money myself and give something back to the salvia community. Initially, I had just wanted to create a place that the community would be able to use and enjoy, while keeping any income from the site seperate. I had considered a single “shop” page on the site through which to sell some salvia, but I thought that might be a bit tacky, and more likely to land me in hot water somewhere down the line. So, I decided I’d put some adverts around the trip reports, and that’s when I realised I could combine both of my goals in a single elegant solution — give the members some of the advertising revenue! The user registration form now allows you to input your Adsense publisher id, if you have one, so we can display adverts belonging to your own Adsense account 25% of the time.

Design

I wanted to keep it simple. Well, maybe I did. Maybe it’s also down to the fact that I totally suck at Photoshop. Whatever the reason, I knocked up a quick design and got things up and running as soon as possible. My first real Photoshop attempt was designing the header — not bad, I reckon. In case you can’t tell, I did pretty much exactly the same thing for the header and rss button here.

Progress

So far, things seem to be going well. A few links have been exchanged and SalviaSource now recommends all its users submit their trip there for comment. That’s got to be good, right? More importantly though, how’s it doing in Google, the biggest, baddest search engine of them all? Well, it’s been up for little over a month now, and already we’re on the front page. No doubt I’ll talk about this site again in the future, so I’ll keep everyone up to date with it’s progress.

Anyone can submit their reports anonymously, or by creating an account first. In the not-too-distant future, I might be giving away some salvia to the top members, who have contributed the most, so keep an eye out for that.

Posted in Drugs, Internet Marketing | Tagged keyword research, salvia divinorum, salvia trip |

Salvia Divinorum Presentation

October 5, 2008

It’s been a week now since I started back at university, and everything’s going great — we’ve dived head first into my first module, Pharmacology: from Molecules to Man. This comprises of 25% coursework and a 75% exam right at the end. The coursework is further divided up into essays, lab write-ups and …a 10 minute presentation on the topic of my choice! Right now, I’m pretty certain I’ll be talking about Salvia Divinorum, as it’s just plain more interesting than anything else, both for me to talk about for ten minutes and for everyone else to listen to it. Soooo, what to talk about for ten minutes?

Although this will be a serious pharmacological talk, I think I can get away with a bit of history of it’s use and what the plant represented to the ancient civilization that used it. If anyone has any interesting facts, now’s the time to share them! But what about the serious pharmacology stuff? Well, these papers are pretty good.

The first talks about the extremely selective action of Salvinorin-A on kappa opioid receptors. The

Salvinorin-A

hallucinogenic properties of this compound, mediated by activation of these receptors could be useful clinically. If activation of these receptors is capable of bringing about hallucinations, turning them off (with a selective antagonist) could help diseases in which hallucinations are promenant, such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

The second paper is much more easy going. This one focuses on the method of absorption and its effect on the experience. By comparing what happens when the compound is vaporised and inhaled, absorbed sublingually (under the tongue) and eaten, it proves that absorption through the gut has little or no effect.

But what else is there to talk about? Any other papers worth a read? I might write up a transcript of the presentation here, along with the PowerPoint presentation itself.

Posted in Pharmacology | Tagged salvia divinorum |

Guarana In My Coffee

October 3, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I am not a morning person. Every day, my alarm goes off. Every day, I hit “Snooze” at least five times. The worst parts of my day are a) the 30 second countdown before I tell myself I have to actually get out of bed, b) the approach to the bathroom, anticipating the sub-zero tiles on the bathroom floor, c) turning the shower off and d) drying my hair — the moment I apply a towel, I can feel my icy hair sapping away any remaining warmth.

I get the feeling I’m the only person that cannot bear getting out of bed. At 9am, everyone else seems cheery; I’m feeling miserable, trying to pry my eyes open. Sometimes, I even feel delirious, just trying to force myself to stay awake. So, I decided to do something about it.

This morning, I cracked open a tub of powdered Guarana, aka Paullinia cupana, a Brazilian herbal stimulant, and added a teaspoon-full to my coffee. This is one of those (seemingly rare) herbs that actually tastes nice as well as possessing psychoactive properties. Right now, at 9:51, I’m wide awake and not too bothered that it’s another 15 hours before I’m asleep once more. I’m just praying the effects won’t wear off and leave me in an unsuspecting heap on the lab floor.

One thing to look out for with Guarana is making sure you stir your coffee properly. If you don’t, the last dregs are full of powdery chunks, but it’s not the end of the world. Did I mention that this actually tastes pleasant?

Guaranine, the compound responsible for keeping my eyes open, is chemically identical to caffeine, derived from other sources, but that leaves out the plant’s other xanthine alkaloids, such as theobromine and theophylline. These stimulate the heart, among other things, so it definitely gets you going.

If Guarana really is this good, I think I’ll be using it every day. My quality of life has just increased dramatically!

Posted in Drugs | Tagged guarana |

Good News From Google

September 30, 2008

…For me, anyway! This quarter’s toolbar PageRank update has been a good one.

Coffeesh0p has gone from 2 to 3, with all my main categories having a PageRank of at least 1
Salvia Trip has gone from 0 to 2
A-muscaria & P-viridis have both gone from 0 to 1

For those that don’t know what PageRank is, it is one of many metrics that Google uses to rate your site, and is generally determined by the links to your site from other pages. If one page has a high PageRank itself and links out to only a few other sites, more of that “Link Juice” is going to flow down each of those links. If a page has a low, or non-existant PageRank and links to many sites, those links won’t pass as much juice. It’s these links to your site, or backlinks, as they’re known in the industry, that govern where you appear in Google’s search results. Relevent sites, with high PageRank that link back to your own site can really provide you with a boost in rankings.

Remember, PageRank is only one factor that Google uses when thinking about your site. As a general rule, pages with a higher PageRank should be more trustworthey than those without. Having little or no PageRank is a good indictor that a site is new, or doesn’t get a lot of traffic. You can see the PageRank of any site you visit by installing the Google Toolbar.

Posted in Internet Marketing | Tagged google, pagerank, seo |

First Day

September 29, 2008

The first day back at university and the first day owning a blog! Hello, everyone, and welcome.

About Me

I’ve just started my 3^rd year at university, studying medical science, with a particular emphasis on pharmacology. I also run Coffeesh0p with my girlfriend — we sell all sorts of stuff, working from home. I’ve always got little sideline projects on the go, too, so never a dull moment.

About This Blog

I’ve set this blog up for many reasons. Firstly, it seemed like it might be fun. Secondly, I thought the stuff I do is really interesting, so perhaps others might like to read about it. It will also provide me a much more casual opportunity to talk to a public audience than through the more business-orientated Coffeesh0p.

So, I’ll be posting on all sorts of things, mainly on drugs and Internet marketing, and my unique position where I can combine the two.

Right now, I’m currently learning how to use WordPress — I’m not quite sure how all this blogging stuff works yet. I guess the first step is make it look half decent. I’ve already found myself a nice green theme, and added my own header and a massive RSS button (please subscribe!), but there’s a lot more to do!

That’s all for now. Another day at university tomorrow, and hopefully some more developments here!

Posted in About This Site, Personal | Tagged blogging |

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