We’ve finallllly done it! Last December (2009), you may remember a tonne of legal highs got banned for a number of bullshit reasons, including our super popular Mellow Yellow. Well, now, after months of anticipation, Coffeesh0p.com (John & Jo’s Coffeeshop Ltd ) has bought out another new, amazing incense: Meen Green!

It’s in the same “homemade” packaging as the Mellow Yellow, but it still looks awesome. The incense itself is a lovely green colour, very fluffy and burns evenly.

So How Can You Get Some For Free?

Before I continue, I’m afraid it’s only available to those in the UK for now. If this changes, I’ll be sure to let you know. So, if you’re in the UK, here’s how to score a freebie:

1) Comment on this post asking for some! I’ll give 3g to the first commenter and 1g to the next 10 commenters! I want some feedback though, so you have to let me know what you think of it.

2) If you’re on Twitter, retweet this message! I’ll pick a handful of people to give some to, depending on how many people participate.

3) Place an order with Coffeesh0p for £30 or more and we’ll throw in a free gram. This offer will be available for a couple of days at least, but after that, we can’t guarantee it.

In case you can’t tell, I’m super excited.

I’m very excited! Coffeesh0p has just brought out its own brand of delicious incense – Mellow Yellow!

I’ve never done anything like this before, so working out how to “release a product” was an interesting experience. My first problem was finding some decent bags to put it in. I spent about a million hours searching Google and emailing people trying to find the perfect packaging, but everything I came across was unacceptable for one reason or another. I eventually settled for some 3×5″ resealable antistatic bags, which do look pretty cool, but are perhaps a little bit big. They’ve also got some nasty printing on the one side, but that’s ingeniously covered up by the labels we had printed. To a “professional incense merchant”, they may look a little tacky, but most people should be pleased. I’m sure customers would rather I save a little bit of money on packaging and pass the saving along to them.

The incense itself is really light and fluffy, so you do get quite a large volume of it. It’s mainly yellow, hence the name, but with flecks of orange wild dagga flowers, blue lotus petals and purple lavender. It burns very evenly and its relaxing effects can last for several hours. This is definitely my favourite incense on the market at the moment – that might sound like bollocks, but I’m not going to put our name to something terrible am I?

I probably won’t give away any on here, but we’ll include a free 1g sample with all orders over £30, while stocks last.

As any regular visitor to Coffeesh0p will know, I try and trickle new products onto the site fairly regularly.  The most notable (and most anticipated) products to be added recently are Magic Silver and Magic Gold smoking mixes, but today, I added Koru Instant Energy Strips,  and I’ve got enough samples for 20 people to give away!

Koru Instant Energy Strips are a cool new way to get a much needed caffeine kick. You place one on your tongue and just let it dissolve, which gets the goodness into your blood stream much faster than drinking a cup of coffee. Since they’re so convenient and, well, instant, they’re perfect for just about every situation where you’d like to be a little more alert, without taking something that’ll blow your tits off (like Charge, for example).

So, how can you win some? Firstly, do you meet the following criteria?

1. You live in the UK
2. You’re not pregnant
3. You’re not a child
4. You’re not unusually sensitive to caffeine
5. You don’t mind the taste of mint

If you said “Yes!” to all of the above, all you need to do is leave a comment below. The first 20 people to leave a comment will get a couple of strips to try out. Please don’t leave your address in the comments – I’ll get in touch with you about that.

I don’t usually just repost other news, because it’s boring and lazy, but today is different because we’re actually in the news. This weekend, the cover story of The Observer Magazine was “The Rise and Rise of Legal Highs“, and features not only a few quotes from us, but you can also see my nipples. Intrigued? Read on…

The article itself contains points from some pretty important people, which is actually a massive compliment. It feels pretty good to get quoted in an article alongside Martin Barnes, DrugScope’s chief executive, and John Huffman, the guy that discovered the JWH series of compounds (such as JWH-018). Since it’s such a long article, I won’t post the lot here – just a few select bits. I really would suggest reading the entire article though on the Observer website.

One more thing I have to mention before you go any further. That Mac that the misses is holding is not her Mac. In an ideal world, she would have been holding her far superior laptop, but it would have made for a worse photo. Here we go:

How can you get high without breaking the law? A survey of friends and colleagues. “Smoke nutmeg,” said an actor. “Find a dodgy Starbucks barista who’ll sell you the nitrous oxide cans they use to whip cream,” said a banker. “Ask around for something called Methedrome, or Mephedrone, or Mephedrome,” advised an account manager. “Lick a newt,” texted a doctor, “and don’t ask me things like this again.” One PR directed me towards news stories about Spice, an over-the-counter smoking mixture that was reported to have effects similar to cannabis; a web developer directed me to a recent issue of Mixmag, announcing the new popularity of “analogue drugs” such as Mephedrone (aha!) in British clubs. Something known as “that purple drank” was a favourite of American rappers in the 1990s, an A&R man told me: “I think it was a mixture of cough syrup and Sprite and it made everything move very slowly.” A teacher remembered that a fistful of ProPlus worked when he was younger. A civil servant had tried snorting Dreft detergent, to no effect.

The industry presented a friendlier, more modern face in the home of John Clarke and Jo Hall, recent graduates from Birmingham University, who run an online retailer of legal highs called Coffeesh0p.com. The couple had propped a giant teddy bear next to a waist-high stack of Tupperware boxes containing colourful lotus leaves, powdered toadstool and Hawaiian woodrose seeds; above a chest of drawers stuffed with cardboard envelopes of guarano pills and pre-rolled kratom joints was a poster of Sean Bean in Sharpe.

“It pays the bills,” said Clarke, 22, who started the business three years ago when he was studying for a degree in pharmacology. Today, his customers range from students attracted by the ease of shopping online, to professionals looking for substances that wouldn’t show up on drug tests at work. There was a professor from the local university who made regular purchases; also a photographer, a shop assistant, and a yacht salesman. “We sold to a couple in their 30s last month. It was their anniversary, a weekend without the kids, and they wanted an interesting time. I think you’d be surprised that our customers are not just 18-year-olds wanting to get high. There’s an entire culture of sensible people out there.”

“The not-for-human-consumption thing is probably the worst thing, morally, that we do as an industry,” said Hall. They likened their jobs to running a “naughty Holland & Barrett”, but like my salesman in Edinburgh, the couple have to play a game of avoid-the-tide with legislators: legal highs need to be effective enough to attract a market, but not effective enough to attract the eye of the Advisory Council, which becomes aware of substances when they show up in amnesty bins at clubs, or when users report to treatment centres with problems, or when the tabloids start making a stink.

In the days leading up to my visit, news had broken that two more legal substances – BZP, a stimulant similar to ecstasy, and GBL, a derivative of GHB that had caused the death of a student in April – were to be brought under the Misuse of Drugs Act alongside Spice. “It was a blow when magic mushrooms were banned in 2005, but the industry survived,” said Hall. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

“Sitting at home, smoking a joint of Spice and watching Sharpe. Doesn’t sound like much of a crime, does it?” said Clarke.

DrugScope’s recent survey highlighted the falling quality of street drugs as a reason why legal highs are growing in popularity. The Mephedrone Tim took was far cleaner than anything he was likely to have bought from a dealer. It had not been cut with chalk, or mashed-up aspirin, or Dreft detergent; it had been mass-produced in a factory, probably in China, imported by a wholesaler, and sold to him by a head shop – pure. He posted a description of his experience on an online drug forum, to warn others about making the same misjudgment.

This is another advantage of legal highs, according to Clarke. When people have better evidence as to what they’ve taken – because a substance bears a brand name, or because it is produced in a factory to roughly the same strength from dose to dose – effects can be compared with some kind of accuracy. Sites such as Drugs-Forum.com and Erowid.org throb with testimonials and advice. “With generic ecstasy there are so many different pills out there with different things in them that their effect is not going to be consistent,” says Clarke. “It makes similar discussion almost impossible.”

We also got a quality link back to our site from their website and a shitload more orders than usual. Check out our traffic:

Monday was a LONG day...

We’re well chuffed! I just hope Sean Bean isn’t some anti-drugs nazi…

The other day, everyone’s favourite advisory council, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), decided that “harms of the synthetic cannabinoids” in Spice and similar (fucking powerful) smoking mixtures “are broadly commensurate with those of cannabis and that they should be classified accordingly.” Apparently, “they have no recognised medical use“, which of course means we must ban them straight away! You can read the full report here [PDF; 128 kb] (except the bits that are withheld from the public… perhaps we can’t handle the truth?!).

Let us pause for a moment to consider the numerous medical applications of tobacco & alcohol… Oh, wait! What’s that, ACMD? There are none?! Didn’t think so. Apart from the blatant double standards, let’s talk about why they’re wrong.

Medical Marajuana: By the looks of these doobs, this patient probably has Parkinson's

Cannabinoids bind to cannabinoid receptors in your brain and immune system. These includes the synthetics, such as JWH-018, THC in cannabis and of course our body’s own cannabinoid compounds (called endocannabinoids, which include Anandamide and many others). The fact that our body not only has these receptors, but also produces compounds to act on them means they’re important, otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved. Unfortunately, research into the cannabinoid system is difficult, because cannabis is illegal, so synthetic cannabinoids which aren’t flat-out illegal are a useful tool in the lab, both to help us learn more about the cannabinoid system and related processes such as feeding & anxiety, and in the quest to develop new drugs. Also, if very little research has been conducted using these compounds about to be banned, it’s no wonder that no specific medical uses have been discovered! These things take time.

One more interesting point… Cannabis itself has medical uses, so how can these similar compounds have none? In fact, just today, the BBC reported that Cannabis may prevent Osteoporosis. I’m not going to list all the medical reasons for legalising cannabis, because I’d be writing all day. If it had no uses what so ever, why do medical dispensaries exist in the US? Banning these compounds is a massive step backwards for medical science.

Needless to say, this has been picked up by a shitload of big news outlets, including The Guardian, The Metro, Sky News, BBC Radio 1 and The Times (who listed Coffeesh0p as a source! It’s a poor article, but christ, that cheered me up!)  A lot of those sites allow users to comment under the article, so let’s take a look at a few:

Simple solution to stop people using Spice –
Legalise cannabis.
Sorted.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Banning a drug because of its “potential harm” with little research is laughable, especially seeing as it is reported to have similiar effectto cannabis of all things.

Is anyone able to explain whats implicitly wrong with psychoactive drugs in the first place?

I fail to see why spice should be banned without any evidence that it is dangerous. It seems to me our government just doesn’t like people getting high, probably incase they start thinking.

The powers that be like to control us, in other words – if it makes you feel good, or gives you some happiness, then ban it.

The stresses of paying tax are bad for me. Are they going to ban that too?

Everything we eat or do kill us slowly. Air kills us, although slowly. Time kills us. How much are they going to ban? Let people do what they want with their bodies, that is the meaning of life. If I want to smoke cannaboloids [sic] with chemicals on it, slap a warning on there and let me decide.

If they are going to ban this stuff for health reasons then they HAVE to ban alcohol and tobacco too, as they are just as, if not more, dangerous – except, of course, they provide the Govt with Tax..

Well we can’t have people getting high on anything but alcohol now can we?
After all it’s America’s recreational drug of choice and the UK’s too.

Now, these aren’t from threads found on pro-drugs forums, or comments under a pro-drugs blog, these are comments under actual articles on massive news sites. Not just one site, but all of those sites I mentioned that allow comments. I’m not saying that the internet-savvy people that’re likely to leave comments are representative of the population as a whole, but surely it says something about what the people want? I don’t think I’ll bother voting next time.  Seriously.

In short, it looks like our Smoking Mixtures section won’t be around for too much longer. Get them while you can!

Since me ‘n’ the misses have finished our degrees (just waiting on the results now…) & almost finished moving house, hopefully we’ll be doing some cool blog & Coffeesh0p stuff soon.

For the blog, firstly I intend to do a couple of interviews with some interesting people. While I like to talk a lot about drugs, medicines, pharmacology, etc, I’m also a bit of a nerd, so I’m looking forward to talking to a few like-minded people who run drugs-related sites. I’ve also got a bong I’d like to give away, but I want to do it in a much more awesome way than the last competition. I’m thinking …joint rolling contest? Would that be something you guys would be interested in? The details (and legality) would need to be worked out, but that sounds like it might be a laugh. I figure before you should be granted bong access, you must first appreciate and master the art of rolling.

Any other suggestions? If you can suggest anything better, I’m all ears. Well… mostly.

Now uni has finished and we’ve moved into a bigger house, we can finally give Coffeesh0p a go full-time, something we’ve been looking forward to for ages. Firstly, now we have more space, we can start buying entheogens (such as Salvia & Kratom) by the kilo directly from their source. That should mean we’ll be able to sell them to you for much cheaper. Also, we’ve got the room to expand our range again, so keep an eye out for loads of new products. If there’s anything we don’t sell that you’d like, leave a comment and I’ll try and hunt it down.

Since I’ll now be making Coffeesh0p (and this blog, of course) my number one priority, I’ll be able to make some interesting changes. I’ve already done a bit of housekeeping stuff, like made the basket page look a little friendlier and put some cooler buttons on all the forms. I also had a go at adding a delivery address option on the checkout, but that’s not working right. (If anyone wants stuff sent to an alternate delivery address, btw, just email me. ) I’ve got a few ideas on what to do next, but I’d also reallllly like your input. In fact, here’s your chance to be a harsh as possible – what looks shit? What’s completely defunct? How could I make it look 110% more awesome? What essential, must-have features are we missing? If you can think of anything at all, please enter a comment below!

In case the idea hasn’t sunk in yet, I’m looking for your opinion on all these things. Leaving a comment couldn’t be simpler – just enter a name & email (don’t worry, no one but me will see your email address, and it doesn’t have to be a real name), and then pour your opinion all over the comment box. Hit submit and you’re done. Even if you’ve never left a comment anywhere in your life and this is the first bit of communicating you’ve done online, please write something!

© Synchronium – stealing other people’s ideas since 2006.

Out of my three final exams, I’ve taken the two hardest ones already, leaving one small one for next week. Since this is an ethics exam which I can’t revise for, I’ve finally found a bit of time to do some interesting Coffeesh0p work.

Navigation

If you’ve been on the site before now, you might have noticed the simple breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page under the search box. What we used to have was a simple list of pages all the way back up to the home page.  It helps not only with navigation, but also with search engine optimisation, linking the site together to give a much more structured feel. One problem though – it looked totally shit.

Today, I gave it a bit of a facelift:

As you can see, it now looks like it’s supposed to be there, instead of like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It also shows a drop down list containing all the subcategories for a particular category, hopefully making navigation a bit easier too as well as linking the site up more solidly.  I’ve also moved the search box to the left and brought the category jump menu up beside it to make more room. Unfortunately, it only works on the shop pages for now. I think a good potion of tomorrow will be spent applying it to the rest of the site.

Advert

I also got a bit of time this week to have a proper go on Photoshop in order to design an advert for the next edition of Wasted comic. We advertised in the first issue, but a) that advert looked worse and b) our old Photoshop guy no longer works for us, giving me the perfect opportunity to flex my skillz:

What do you think? Your criticism is more than welcome – it’s the only way I’ll learn.

Competition Winner

Oh, and before I forget, the final competition winner is Virusboy. Your pills will be shipped on Monday!

Everyone else: Don’t be too disheartened. I’ve got some more stuff to give away in the near future, I just need to decide on the most awesome way to give it away, so stick around!

Wellllll, my dissertation is finally handed in, so I thought I’d write a bit of a long post about Kratom today. Kratom is probably my favourite entheogen, so I’m surprised I haven’t written about it before. Actually, it did get a brief mention in JWH-018, Spice & Me (to the disappointment of a couple of kratom vendors more interested in profit than helping to spread factual information), but I think it’s worthy of a post of its own. I also recently added a tonne of kratom products to Coffeesh0p that I want to talk about too, so a post about kratom is about due.

It’s a shame that I don’t have any more presentations to give (well, kind of, because I hate giving presentations) because Kratom would definitely be the subject of the next one. So…

What is Kratom?

Kratom refers to the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa tree that’s native to Southeast Asia. A member of the Rubiaceae family, Kratom is also related to the Coffee plant (Coffea spp.) and Psychotria viridis, a hallucinogenic shrub used throughout the Amazon. It’s effects include analgesia (ie, it’s a pain killer), stimulation at low doses and sedation at higher doses accompanied by euphoria. Sounds awesome, right?

Kratom Use

So, how is kratom used? Traditionally, workers of Southeast Asia would chew on the fresh leaves for a mild stimulatory effect and also as a pain killer. Sounds like a perfect natural remedy to get you through a long day, but unfortunately, fresh leaves are pretty scarce outside their country of origin. Luckily for us though, dried leaf retains its potency, so can be shipped worldwide – just don’t try and chew it. Dried leaf can be be brewed into a tea, refined into an extract (which can also be brewed up or eaten) or smoked, although the effects of smoking it are limited.

Kratom tea is generally prepared by boiling your leaf (see below for dosage info) in water and lemon juice for about 15 minutes. This is then strained and more water/lemon juice added to the leaves and the process repeated. The lemon juice is important, as the citric acid present in it acidifies your tea, meaning more of the alkaloids present in kratom will be extracted into solution. Once the leaves are strained for a second time, they can be chucked away, leaving you with a murky brown liquid that doesn’t taste amazing. This large quantity of liquid can be boiled down further to reduce the volume, but it’s not essential. You might want to add some sugar or honey for taste though. My lab rat and his gerbil friend tend to make their tea up to the nearest 100 ml, so it can be taken as 50 ml shots throughout the evening. Turning your particular dosage of kratom leaves into approximately 200 ml of tea is enough for 4 shots. If you’re new to kratom, try spacing these shots out every half an hour to an hour. This way, you won’t take too much and you can experience all of the subtleties kratom has to offer instead of diving straight in at the deep end. Alternatively, some people just throw all of their crushed leaf into a glass of juice, stir it up and just knock it back. This can be just as effective if you’ve got the stomach for it.

As far as smoking goes, it’s really not that great. If you’re going to smoke kratom, it’s far more rewarding to smoke some alongside a cup of kratom tea than just smoking it exclusively.

Kratom Dosage & Effects

An effective dosage for one person may be completely different for another person, as a tolerance can develop, especially with daily use. Other factors can also affect how much you might need (more on that later), so the best thing to do is start off with a low dose and increase it by small increments each time until you arrive at a dosage you’re comfortable with. This advice should be followed whenever you try something new, not just for kratom.

Here’s a rough dosage guide:

Dosages greater than 15g can be too much for some people, while dosages above 25g will be too much for most people. It’s statistically likely that you are included in the “most people” group, so please be careful!

Kratom Pharmacology

Kratom contains a number of active alkaloids, including mitragynine, 7-hydroxymitragynine & mitraphylline, which are structurally similar to the hallucinogenic tryptamines (eg LSD, psilocybin), as if this plant wasn’t interesting enough! At low doses, these alkaloids are thought to act on the adrenergic system (the same sets of receptors that respond to adrenaline & noradrenaline), responsible for the plant’s stimulatory effects.

At higher doses, however, these compounds start to activate your opioid receptors. These are the same receptors that opiates such as codeine, morphine and heroin bind to which cause the same sedation, analgesia and euphoria associated with opiate use. 7-hydroxymitragynine actually appears to be 17x more potent than morphine at these receptors. Powerful stuff! It’s no surprise then that:

1. Kratom can be used to help opiate addicts overcome their addiction
2. An effective kratom dosage depends on any pre-existing opiate tolerance
3. Kratom itself can be habit forming, just like opiates (so don’t use it every day!)

Growing Kratom

Unfortunately, growing kratom will be more hassle that it’s worth. Mitragyna Speciosa prefers the warm, swampy conditions of Southeast Asia, which makes growing it outside impossible in most areas of the world. Even a green house won’t be enough. If you’re going to grow it, you need to be serious about it. You’ll need an area of your house set aside for climate control, lamps, etc. Here’s the final blow: the kratom you grow yourself will likely be of inferior quality compared to that grown natively. Sorry to disappoint.

If you still want to go ahead, you’ll need to find a rooted clone, as you won’t find any seeds commercially available, or if you do, they might be fake, and cuttings tend to be vulnerable to infection.

Kratom Products

There are a number of kratom products available for purchase. I’m always on the lookout for more because I think this plant is truly amazing, so if you find something you think I should be stocking, let me know! Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve got so far:

Kratom Leaf This is just bog-standard, dried, crushed kratom leaf.

Thai Dragonfly Liquid Kratom Extract Each bottle of liquid kratom extract contains 20 ml. I’m not sure what strength this extract is, but it suggests a dose of 5 to 10 ml will be sufficient.

Kratom 15x Extract This extract is 15x stronger the plain leaf. Each pack contains 2g of powered extract. Unfortunately, this is a little expensive compared to the rest of the kratom products available, because it comes in fancy packaging and I have to import it.

Freeze Dried Kratom 20x Extract This brittle, resinous extract is 20x stronger than plain leaf.

Kratom Gold 35x Extract Capsules Each pack contains 3 capsules of 500mg 35x extract. A convenient way to consume your kratom!

It’s a sad day. Once our current stock of Spice has run out, then there’ll be no more Spice. I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be banned, or if our suppliers just can’t get hold of it any more, but what I can tell you is that similar smoking mixtures are still available. We’ve still got Sence & Aroma on the site, and I added Smoke this morning, but here’s what we hope to get hold of in the next few weeks:

Yucatan Fire Genie Mojo Red Ball Ignite Cahoots Chill Zo Hai Eclipse

Hold tight, Spice fans!

Competition Winner

The first of three packs of Hypnotic Pills goes to Paracaine! Although that’s not your real name, you should know who you are. Actually, I emailed you yesterday, but no response. Perhaps the phases “randomly selected“, “winner” and “legal pills” tripped some sort of spam filter? Who knows! Anyway, Paracaine, can you drop me an email or comment on this post when you see this? You’ve got until next Saturday to get in touch…

Here’s some good news. Thanks to the endless badgering of a few Americans, I’ve decided to open the competition up worldwide! Yes, that’s right, the remaining two packs of pills can be won by anyone! All you need to do is subscribe to this blog by email to be in with a chance to win.

New Products

Over the past week, we’ve added a couple of new products to the site:

• Snoberry – the younger, hotter, strawberry-flavoured sister of Snow Blow herbal snuff
• Hummer 4 Pills – Turns out we had the old 3 pill pack on the site and the manufacturers changed them to 2 and 4 pill packs. I thought I was going crazy when I couldn’t find a 3 pill pack that someone had ordered, but now both the 4 and 2 pill packs are on the site.
• Hypnotic Pills – Yes, that’s right, you can now by the 4 pill pack and 2 pill pack if you can’t wait to win them!

The Best Thing On The Internet

I think Sam Harris may have been wrong about religion keeping drugs illegal. These evangelical Christians appear to be totally battered:

(Drum & bass added for emphasis)