Quick Hits (page 3)
Fueled by Kesey's Words, Pranksters' Colorful Bus Hits the Road in Bay Area
By: James Sullivan (SF Chronicle)
Among many other things, the late Ken Kesey was a first-rate coiner of adages. "If you've got it all together," he once proposed, "what's that all around it?"
Kesey knew that it was impossible to keep it all together, so he advocated blowing it apart. Two years after the death of the founding Merry Prankster, his entourage continues to set off sparks.
Further, the current replica of the Pranksters' famous psychedelic bus, will crisscross the Bay Area over the next few days, rumbling into old-school happenings in Sebastopol, Mountain View and Berkeley after an initial stop in the Haight.
On board will be members of the extended Prankster family, including Kesey's son Zane and Ed McClanahan, the feisty author ("The Natural Man," "Famous People I Have Known") who first met Zane's dad in Stanford's renowned writing program of the early 1960s.
The occasion is the publication of two new books, "Kesey's Jail Journal," a scrapbook begun while the Pied Piper was serving time in the San Mateo County Jail, and "Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Kesey," a paperback version of Kesey's on-again, off-again literary magazine featuring tributes from a busload of fellow travelers: Hunter Thompson, Larry McMurtry, Bill Walton, Paul Krassner and many others.
"I think (Kesey) believed that he could somehow invent a spiritual technology," writes the author Robert Stone, "somewhere between Silva mind control and the transistor, that would spare all the humiliating labor that went into the creating of art."
True enough, or as Kesey would have said, "It's true even if it didn't happen." After the formidable beginnings of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion," Kesey devoted himself to the kind of spontaneous combustion that the solitary pursuit of writing can never offer.
He wrote sparingly, yet in later years he still knew how to make words dance, as surely as he knew how to mount a sideshow. In an elegy to Jerry Garcia printed for the first time in the anthology, he describes Garcia's guitar playing as "that merry snake twining through the woodpile," nailing it.
Many of the Kesey elegies are equally evocative. Krassner retells the tale of the Richard Nixon poster that hung in the San Francisco apartment he once shared with Stewart Brand, and how Kesey surreptitiously altered the image, shifting Nixon's gaze from right to left. Film director Gus Van Sant recounts the Polaroids he once took of Kesey, each featuring an uncanny flash of "white-hot electricity" coming out of the burly man's ear. And Kesey's dog, Happy, gets in a few words of his own with some help from a friend.
For Kesey, life was all of those things -- an eye-opener, an inexplicable bolt of energy, a talking dog. His pranks live on in the work of all kinds of tricksters, as we shall see on Dec. 6 at the Lab, where RE/Search publishing will host the Pranks! Festival. Ten cultural anarchists featured in the now-classic 1988 book "Pranks" will take part, including war-toys demonstrators Survival Research Labs, the subversive artist Bruce Conner and Mal Sharpe of the original man-on-the-street hoax team Coyle & Sharpe.
"Always stay in your own movie," Kesey advised. Pranking, Merry or otherwise, ensures it.
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Mary Jane'z Novelties
Growin' Our Own (page 3)
The Higher Side of Jimson Weed
By: Crotchety
Last month we ran a story about Jimson weed. The story explained what it is, what the active ingredients in it are, and how dangerous it is. Enough to scare hell out of people who were thinking of trying it, yes? I know, I know - the story was pretty dry. What do you expect, it was written by a doctor! Should have scared the bejesus right out of you though.
Now let me tell you, from an entirely different perspective, what can happen when you play with those pretty white flowers ...
There is no doubt that Jimson weed is pretty. It has big, bell shaped flowers that can be white to tannish yellow. Around here where it grows wild (it is a weed you know) the stories from folks about it poisoning cattle, horses and various other animals are abundant. You just sorta grow up knowing not to touch it.
"Never touch that shit, the poison can soak through your skin!" "Omigod, you picked one of those? Throw it away and go wash your hands with soap and hot water quick! Do it twice!"
Weeeellllll, what better way to entice someone to mess with something than to forbid them to do so? I'd be willing to bet that most of the folks now in various and sundry jails for pot use would never have touched it if it was legal! Damn goobermint won't ever learn on that one, though. Apparently neither will parents, aunts and uncles, either.
We were like a whole lot of folks in their early twenties - we knew everything that was worth knowing , just ask us. We were also invincible. I mean, in-fucking-vincible. Nothing could touch us. Nothing could hurt us.
Hah!
We'd heard all the horror stories, but we were smart. Smart-assed, more like it. We had read up on Jimson weed. We knew what the active ingredient was. We knew it would only take a little bit of this shit. We also knew about the hallucinogenic side effects.
Weeeelllll ... why buy acid or that other chemical shit when we could get a perfectly good hallucinogen for free right outside the back door? I mean, the American Indians have been using peyote for how long? Why do we have to spend our hard earned money (which we had precious little of anyway) for a good time?
One of our group decided he knew how to fix the Jimson so we could use it. He and a couple the other guys put on some gloves (we were gonna be careful about this - y'know the shit can sink in through your skin, right?) and pick a mess of Jimson. I don't know exactly what they did with it - I was at work that day, and mighty pissed off at having to be when they were having fun, too.
Anyway, the next day, Saturday, we all went up into the high Sierras. We figured it was fitting to go into the 'high' Sierras for this. Now, I don't know if you know anything about the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, but there are some high, craggy areas there. Kaiser Peak is 10,300 feet, and there are many peaks higher than that. Kinda rugged up there. Now, we were going to be smart about this you understand. Somebody had gone to the hardware store and gotten a roll of the colored plastic ribbon you can use to tie around shit in your garden to keep birds out. We figured we'd mark where we were and how to get back to the cars with that so we didn't get lost. Kinda like Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs, except our trail markers wouldn't get eaten and were a whole lot easier to see. We found a place with a meadow that was really secluded and all of us sat down with our beers to take the little gel capsules we had with us. A couple of the guys checked their guns while we waited for the Jimson to hit us. Did I mention we took guns up with us? Yup. Bunch of extra ammo, too. Never know when you'll run into something hungry up in the mountains and we didn't intend to be lunch for any cotton pickin' bear! Not that .22 pistols were going to do much good against a bear when we were ripped out of our minds, but it made us feel better. Besides, we were in-fucking-vincible, remember?
I don't know how long we waited for the Jimson to come on. We were all talking and laughing and looking at weird rock formations around us, not paying attention to the time. Didn't need to, it was early morning - we had all day ahead of us.Then we noticed we were laughing a little more than usual. Actually, we were laughing a lot more than usual. We were laughing at shit that wasn't even funny. We were laughing at shit that wasn't even there. Whoa, Nelly! It was working. I think we examined every blade of grass in that meadow - twice. They all looked different! Sometimes they actually looked like grass. We went from microcosm to macrocosm. We just knew we had solved the entire question of whether or not there is life in outer space when that conversation has sort of drifted into the stream running through the meadow. It was really fascinating to watch the words floating down over the little rocks and ripples, by the way.
I don't recall now who came up with the next bright idea. May have been Wilbur (real name: Gary, but there were four Garys so they all got renamed), or it may have been one of the gals that was with us. Somebody said this is just like being here 150 years ago. We could be cowboys coming through the mountains after lost cattle or something. Oh, shit! Did that casual comment open up a whole world of possibilities. Naturally we all began to wander around the meadow yelling stupid shit, like "Here cow! Here Bossy!" Well, one thing of course led to another and another and another. We went from being cowboys to being astronauts on the surface of some far off planet, back to being cowboys, to being Indians looking for cowboys, to being Texas Rangers looking for Indians, and so on.
While we were being Texas Rangers somebody, one of the Garys I think, decided that was just too old hat. We were now going to play a new game. Some of us were cowboys and the rest of us were ... well, in these politically correct days I won't say what the bad guys were called but the Indians called 'em Buffalo Soldiers. You fill in the very offensive word of your choice.
Have you flashed on the fact that were had guns yet? Loaded guns? We're running around up there, way back of beyond, trippin' our minds out with loaded guns! Playing a game that involves shooting at each other! Of course, real cowboys and ... others wouldn't have stayed out in the open in the meadow, so nether did we. We climbed, crawled, hopped and flew up into the rocks around the meadow. Yes, to this day one of the guys (I believe it is Gary) claims he flew up into the rocks. This was all fine and good until you think about what we were seeing. Here we'd be, running for all we're worth to catch a bad guy, when suddenly everything would change visually. I mean nothing that was there before was there now. You'd have to stop and stand still so you didn't step off into a ravine or off the side of a crag. Standing still had its problems as well. If you stood still, you were a damned good target for someone else!
Somehow we managed to play this game for quite a while without killing anyone. Amazing. Of course, we were in-fucking-vincible, right? One of the gals happened to notice that the sun was getting lower. Oops! We had to hit it a hot lick to get the hell out of there. With all our preparations, we didn't have a single flashlight. All the plastic tape in the world doesn't help if you can't see it in the dark. We made it back to where the cars were, tried to decide who was the most okay to drive, and loaded up for the trip back to town.
The weird thing about the Jimson was how it wore off. Some of us, it wore off after just a few hours. Some of us, it took longer. Some of us, it was just over with, period. No after affects, nothing. Some of us, it felt like it had worn off, then all of a sudden you'd get a visual weirdness again for a few minutes. One of us, I'm sure it was Gary, we thought it wasn't going to wear off at all. He was still trippin' when we got back to town. Guess who got to babysit his scrawny ass?
When we got to town we all went to our separate abodes. Mine happened to be a mother-in-law type shack in someone else's back yard. It had a bed, a couch, a bar sized refrigerator and a hotplate in it. That was all I needed then. I took Gary inside and sat him on the couch. I had been longing for a real bathroom, with toilet paper, since about four that afternoon and it was now seven thirty, so where do you think I went?
When I finished that refreshing pause in my life I went back into the area I euphemistically called my living room. Gary was standing up, facing the blank wall, with his hands twiddling on the wall. Uh oh.
"Gary, what are you doing?"
"Hey, man, your T.V. is all fucked up! I keep trying to get the channel to change, but it won't. All I'm gettin' on this channel is fuckin' ant races!"
"Uh, Gary? I don't have a television."
"No, I'm serious man. You need to get this damned T.V. fixed! None of the knobs are working!"
"Well, you see what you can do with it. I'm going to bed."
When I got up the next morning Gary was gone. Couldn't find him all day Sunday. I drove out past the field where I knew he'd be bailing hay Monday morning. There he was, up on his bailing machine, looking like he'd been eaten by a wolf and shit over a cliff.
"You son of a bitch!" he screamed at me. Then he damned near fell off the bailer laughing.
His next question scared hell out of me, though.
"When are we gonna do that again? I had a great time!"
I decided I wasn't that in-fucking-vincible.
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Pipeline (page 3)
Keep Your Brain From Going to Pot
By: Kristen Philipkoski (Wired)
The active chemical in marijuana can do more for your head than give you a high -- it could protect your brain in emergency situations.
An altered version of cannabis could be the first drug ever to shield the brain from the cascade of injury that follows head trauma.
When the brain is injured in a fall or car accident, the damage does not stop after the impact. When cells in the brain die, they send signals to nearby cells to die also, causing continued, uncontrollable injury. Researchers have been trying to find a way to stop this domino effect for decades, but nothing has worked well yet.
Researchers at Pharmos, a pharmaceutical company in Iselin, New Jersey, are seeing promising results with their injectable synthetic cannabis drug. While pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Bayer have failed at developing emergency treatments for head trauma, Pharmos scientists say theirs will be the one to succeed.
The drug, called Dexanabinol, is a synthetic version of the active chemical in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol, known commonly as THC. The researchers flip its molecules around to form a mirror image of THC. In this form it doesn't cause some of the potential negative effects of hashish or marijuana, such as low blood pressure or impairment of motor function.
"If you ask me 'Is hashish good for health?' well, maybe, but the results are very controversial," said Gad Riesenfeld, president and COO of Pharmos. "We have selected Dexanabinol because of its mechanism of action and efficacy in animal models, and the way it worked in the phase 2 study." It's now in phase 3 of testing; drugs must undergo three phases of trials to be considered for approval by the FDA.
He added that THC at this dosage would cause serious low blood pressure, which can be particularly problematic when coupled with a brain injury.
Other attempts have focused on just one aspect of brain trauma, such as inflammation. But three basic processes contribute to damaging the brain when injury occurs, and the cannabis-derived drug acts on all of them: inflammation, neuron death and the breakdown of communication between neurons called "excitotoxicity."
In Pharmos' phase 2 study of 100 patients with severe traumatic brain trauma, about 30 percent were completely recovered or had just moderate disability six months after their injury when treated with the drug -- compared with 15 percent of those who received a placebo.
"We think the FDA will give approval to a drug that has even 10 percent more patients achieving good outcomes on the Glasgow scale," Riesenfeld said.
Pharmos' phase 3 study will include 900 severe traumatic brain injury patients at 80 clinics around the world. Fifteen of the clinics are in the United States, and 750 patients have been recruited so far.
Performing the trial is complicated by the fact that emergency workers must inject Dexanabinol no more than six hours after the injury. While that seems like a good chunk of time, it can fly by in a triage situation, especially when doctors must get informed-consent documents signed before using an experimental drug, one doctor said.
"Six hours seems long, but when you're doing 'ABC' (a routine check of airway, breathing and circulation), then you begin finding the next of kin -- since many will be unconscious -- the time slips away quickly," said David Bonovich, fellowship program director in neurocritical care at the University of California at San Francisco.
Still, Bonovich said it's a reasonable window of time in which to administer a drug -- it might not do any good if administered later.
About 1.5 million people suffer traumatic brain injuries in the United States every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Riesenfeld said about 150,000 of those could be candidates for the drug. That's not a huge market, but each treatment would cost between $4,000 and $7,000, he said.
Researchers previously hoped that inducing hypothermia might slow the progress of brain injury, because lowering body temperature slows all of the body's processes. They had high hopes for a large study called the National Acute Brain Injury Study using Hypothermia, known as the NABISH trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
But the treatment ultimately failed to show a significant improvement. However, researchers saw some evidence that the treatment could benefit patients who already have a low temperature when they receive hypothermia treatment, so researchers are continuing with a NABISH 2 trial focusing on only those patients.
Pharmos researchers think they have a good chance to do better. They say they have taken great care to learn from past failed trials, to identify the patients who are most likely to benefit from the drug, and to find the proper dosage and time frame in which to administer it. They hope to have approval of the drug in late 2004, and to put it on the market in early 2005.
The researchers are also testing the drug to prevent brain damage that can occur after cardiac surgery, Cook said. Surgeons would give the injection prophylactically.
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Josephine's Reptile Nail & Body Wrap - for information, write to:
P.O. Box 2536
Sun Valley, Idaho, 83353