kpunk99 Mark Fisher
Sunday 26 June 2011
Billy the Kid portrait sells for $2.3 million
The tintype on Saturday evening went to private collector William Koch at Brian Lebel's 22nd Annual Old West Show & Auction, where auction spokeswoman Melissa McCracken said the image of the 1800s outlaw was the most expensive piece ever sold at the event.
A 15 percent fee was added to the bidding price, making the selling price more than $2.6 million. Organizers had expected it could fetch between $300,000 and $400,000.
The tintype is believed to have been taken in 1879 or 1880 in Fort Sumner, N.M. It shows the outlaw dressed in a rumpled hat and layers of clothes, including a bulky sweater. He's standing with one hand resting on a Winchester carbine on his right side and a Colt revolver holstered on his left side.
Tintypes were an early form of photography that used metal plates. They are reverse images, and the Billy the Kid tintype led to the mistaken belief that Billy the Kid was a lefty. The myth inspired the 1958 movie "The Left Handed Gun", starring Paul Newman as Billy.
Billy the Kid gave the image to a friend, Dan Dedrick, and the tintype has been owned by his descendants, the Upham family, ever since. It has only been publicly displayed during the 1980s at a museum in Lincoln County, N.M.
McCracken said it's recognizable around the world as a classic image of the Old West.
"There's only one photo of Billy the Kid, and I think that's why it captivates people's imagination," she said before Saturday's auction.
The tintype was auctioned off along with more than 400 other Western-themed items, including documents from Buffalo Bill's aborted divorce, Native American antiquities, and a painting from Andy Warhol's "Cowboys and Indians" series depicting a Navajo woman with a baby on her back.
Via
The tintype was auctioned off along with more than 400 other Western-themed items, including documents from Buffalo Bill's aborted divorce, Native American antiquities, and a painting from Andy Warhol's "Cowboys and Indians" series depicting a Navajo woman with a baby on her back.
Via
Slow Train To Dawn
Sex, Drugs, Violence & Gore are what's in store for your 30min video mixtape lunch date with IndoorFin, Burroughs, and Cronenberg in the nude.
1. Two Hours Time - Cinnamon Chasers
2. Dreamboat (RAC Remix) - Psychic Powers
3. Climbing Walls - Strange Talk
4. Static On The Wire (RAC Remix) - Holy Ghost!
5. Young Blood (Dave Sitek Remix) - The Naked And Famous
6. Old Age - 13 & God
7. The Truth (Jump Jump Dance Dance Remix) - PNAU
indoorfin.tumblr.com
50 days of Lulz
Friends around the globe,
We are Lulz Security, and this is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. 50 days ago, we set sail with our humble ship on an uneasy and brutal ocean: the Internet. The hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us.
For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others - vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It's what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures. You are not failures. You have not blown away. You can get what you want and you are worth having it, believe in yourself.
While we are responsible for everything that The Lulz Boat is, we are not tied to this identity permanently. Behind this jolly visage of rainbows and top hats, we are people. People with a preference for music, a preference for food; we have varying taste in clothes and television, we are just like you. Even Hitler and Osama Bin Laden had these unique variations and style, and isn't that interesting to know? The mediocre painter turned supervillain liked cats more than we did.
Again, behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve. So with those last thoughts, it's time to say bon voyage. Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind - we hope - inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere.
Thank you for sailing with us. The breeze is fresh and the sun is setting, so now we head for the horizon.
Let it flow...
Lulz Security - our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011, and a shout-out to all of our battlefleet members and supporters across the globe
Our mayhem: http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/
Our chaos: http://thepiratebay.org/user/LulzSec/
Our final release: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6495523/50_Days_of_Lulz
Please make mirrors of material on the website, because we're not renewing the hosting. Goodbye. <3
Via
We are Lulz Security, and this is our final release, as today marks something meaningful to us. 50 days ago, we set sail with our humble ship on an uneasy and brutal ocean: the Internet. The hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us.
For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others - vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love. The raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy. It's what we all crave, even the seemingly lifeless politicians and emotionless, middle-aged self-titled failures. You are not failures. You have not blown away. You can get what you want and you are worth having it, believe in yourself.
While we are responsible for everything that The Lulz Boat is, we are not tied to this identity permanently. Behind this jolly visage of rainbows and top hats, we are people. People with a preference for music, a preference for food; we have varying taste in clothes and television, we are just like you. Even Hitler and Osama Bin Laden had these unique variations and style, and isn't that interesting to know? The mediocre painter turned supervillain liked cats more than we did.
Again, behind the mask, behind the insanity and mayhem, we truly believe in the AntiSec movement. We believe in it so strongly that we brought it back, much to the dismay of those looking for more anarchic lulz. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve. So with those last thoughts, it's time to say bon voyage. Our planned 50 day cruise has expired, and we must now sail into the distance, leaving behind - we hope - inspiration, fear, denial, happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment, thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope we had a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere. Anywhere.
Thank you for sailing with us. The breeze is fresh and the sun is setting, so now we head for the horizon.
Let it flow...
Lulz Security - our crew of six wishes you a happy 2011, and a shout-out to all of our battlefleet members and supporters across the globe
Our mayhem: http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/
Our chaos: http://thepiratebay.org/user/LulzSec/
Our final release: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6495523/50_Days_of_Lulz
Please make mirrors of material on the website, because we're not renewing the hosting. Goodbye. <3
Via
Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method' coming soon...
A Dangerous Method is an upcoming historical film, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassel. The screenplay was adapted by Academy Award-winning writer Christopher Hampton from his 2002 stage play The Talking Cure, itself based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method.
The film marks the third collaboration between Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen (after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises). This is also the third film British film producer Jeremy Thomas has made with Cronenberg, after together completing the William Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch and the J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash. A Dangerous Method was a German/Canadian co-production.
PLOT : Set on the eve of the World War I, A Dangerous Method is based on the turbulent relationships between fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, the troubled but beautiful young woman who comes between them.
CAST :
Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung
Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein
Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross
Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung
The film marks the third collaboration between Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen (after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises). This is also the third film British film producer Jeremy Thomas has made with Cronenberg, after together completing the William Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch and the J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash. A Dangerous Method was a German/Canadian co-production.
PLOT : Set on the eve of the World War I, A Dangerous Method is based on the turbulent relationships between fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, the troubled but beautiful young woman who comes between them.
CAST :
Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung
Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein
Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross
Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung
Japan's 'throwaway' nuclear workers
Then, as now, a small army of transient workers was put to work to try to stem the damage at the oldest nuclear reactor run by Japan's largest utility.
At the time, workers were racing to finish an unprecedented repair to address a dangerous defect: cracks in the drum-like steel assembly known as the "shroud" surrounding the radioactive core of the reactor.
But in 1997, the effort to save the 21-year-old reactor from being scrapped at a large loss to its operator, Tokyo Electric, also included a quiet effort to skirt Japan's safety rules: foreign workers were brought in for the most dangerous jobs, a manager of the project said.
"It's not well known, but I know what happened," Kazunori Fujii, who managed part of the shroud replacement in 1997, told Reuters. "What we did would not have been allowed under Japanese safety standards."
The previously undisclosed hiring of welders from the United States and Southeast Asia underscores the way Tokyo Electric, a powerful monopoly with deep political connections in Japan, outsourced its riskiest work and developed a lax safety culture in the years leading to the Fukushima disaster, experts say.
A 9.0 earthquake on March 11 triggered a 15-meter tsunami that smashed into the seaside Fukushima Daiichi plant and set off a series of events that caused its reactors to start melting down.
Hydrogen explosions scattered debris across the complex and sent up a plume of radioactive steam that forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents near the plant, about 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo. Enough radioactive water to fill 40 Olympic swimming pools has also been collected at the plant and threatens to leak into the groundwater.
The repeated failures that have dogged Tokyo Electric in the three months the Fukushima plant has been in crisis have undercut confidence in the response to the disaster and dismayed outside experts, given corporate Japan's reputation for relentless organization.
Hastily hired workers were sent into the plant without radiation meters. Two splashed into radioactive water wearing street shoes because rubber boots were not available. Even now, few have been given training on radiation risks that meets international standards, according to their accounts and the evaluation of experts...
BBC attacked over coverage of 'misleading' methadone report
The charity DrugScope has written to the corporation complaining about its coverage of a report by a rightwing thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies, that warned the prescription of the heroin substitute methadone was "entrenching addiction".
The report, Breaking the Habit, said prescribing addicts with methadone had been an expensive failure and claimed there were 320,000 problem drug users on benefits, costing the taxpayer billions of pounds.
The row has highlighted the increasingly polarised nature of the debate on treatment for heroin addicts. Last year the prime minister, David Cameron, described methadone as "a government-authorised form of opium".
The centre's report claims there are as many addicts today as there were in 2004-05. It notes: "Fewer than 4% of addicts emerge from treatment free from dependency. Drug deaths have continued to rise."
The thinktank suggested that instead of prescribing methadone, greater success would be achieved by funding small rehabilitation units that would encourage abstinence on a payment by results basis. Its hard-hitting claims have attracted extensive coverage and last week provoked a national debate on drug addiction treatment.
While many in the drug treatment industry welcomed the centre's call to reconsider how the UK treats long-term addicts, the thinktank has been attacked over "misleading" figures. DrugScope said that it had written to the BBC to complain that, by giving extensive coverage to the report, the corporation had failed "to check the accuracy of claims made, particularly about the cost of treatment and methadone prescribing".
Martin Barnes, DrugScope's chief executive, asked why the corporation had repeated the report's claim that "methadone prescribing costs £730m a year", saying the figure was for the drug treatment system as a whole.
Barnes outlined a series of further examples where he said the report had conflated the true cost of methadone treatment and benefits paid to drug addicts. He pointed out that last year the National Audit Office concluded that drug treatment represents "good value for money" for the taxpayer.
Barnes said: "Not only are the misleading claims potentially damaging to public confidence in drug treatment at a time of spending cuts and competing priorities, they risk reinforcing the stigma and barriers many people in recovery experience."
A spokesman for the BBC confirmed it had received the complaint.
Jamie Doward @'The Guardian'
Origin of Song: Gil Scott-Heron’s Revolution of the Mind
“The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In four parts without commercial interruptions.”
Excoriating the media and marketing, the song’s structure burrowed its way into the collective conscious of musicians—both mainstream and underground—and listeners alike; it is referenced throughout music, and rather un-ironically the title phrase has been repurposed to advertise consumer goods, from sneakers to television itself. The piece is also, of course, foundational to hip-hop, its words potent and direct, even if some of the allusions and references may be lost on those uneducated in ‘60s or ‘70s culture. It also sounds great, which explains why musically it’s a standard-bearer for everything from politicized and sexy neo-soul with funk grooves to jazz. Yet pulsing throughout the piece is Scott-Heron’s projection, similar to the theories of McLuhan and scientists like Tesla who foreshadowed the actual facts of global connectivity as well as the pacifying effect on the brain from viewing from a small screen. Heron was channeling his times while bringing a word to the wise:In four parts without commercial interruptions.”
“The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal…
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised.”
We’re heard via media channels that the revolution will be “digitized,” the revolution will be “synthesized,” but so far, the revolution has not been “organized.” One ill-fated ad campaign suggested the revolution will be televised. But Scott-Heron was well ahead of the ball when he posited a necessary parsing of media-generated “reality” from truth and set his poem to music on his 1971 album, Pieces of a Man. With that release, Scott-Heron was caught in the chasm between jazz and soul, poetry and rock, and few knew just what to do with the new poet and big bass voice on the scene, though time would reveal his impact, as he would later weigh in on matters environmental and racial, as well as political and social. Though often his was a cry in wilderness, it served as a clarion for future generations of conscious voices...The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised.”
Continue reading
Denise Sullivan @'Crawdaddy'
Do you feel that you have been cheated? A rant at U2 live at ‘Glasto’
'ohnoit'sbon(g)o' yesterday
Do you ever feel you have been cheated?There will be a mighty roar when the dark prince Bono takes to the Glastonbury stage this evening- like a choreographered rally thankfully punctuated by the UK UNCUT protestors waving the placards of doom at the showbiz monolith U2 winning the war in the law of averages.
We will stand there, dumbfounded, soaked in Bono’s vile sweat as the clown prince of Jesus Rock stalks onto the stage in his midget heels, with his God hard on and back pocket stuffed with business cards from the Bush family and I will be left wondering just where it all went wrong, knowing that the Wombles are not only sexier but more rock n roll than his band.
Somehow, as a rancid schoolboy, I was conned by the great froth mouthed, amphetamined sex beast known as punk rock into believing that I was going to be part of some sort of stink breathed, gakk infested, terror monkey stukka diving assault onto the vile and badly haired pop mainstream.
For a few brief months I took the beatings on behalf of the skinny trousered punk rock uberlords as I stalked the beer washed streets of my windswept hometown of Blackpool where anti punk violence was an Aperitif before the main course of lard soaked fish and chips.
It was worth it because I felt like I was on the barricades for some sort of revolution collecting bruises was all part of the punk rock experience as much as collecting seven inch singles.
Imagine my shock and disappointment when I realised that all this was for nowt. And that all we were doing was paving the highway for the likes of U2 to launch into their huge international taking the piss philanthropist carrier by bolting together the genius guitar of John McGeogh (god bless his brilliant soul) the bass lines of Lord Peter Hook and the Combat rock chic of our beloved Clash.
They then worked hard and grinned like Christians in an orgy and became the biggest band in the world that no-one really loved.
It all felt very wrong but the Americans made them superstars and their admittedly okey dokey songs sold out the stadiums that superior bands would not even be allowed to piss on.
This all came rushing back to me when I heard that the band were to be playing Glastonbury and that somewhere in the middle of all that mud and expensive Wellington boots there would be the most hideous shrieking since Sting was told that he was not an ‘interlektual’.
The thought that Bongo and his cloth eared Afrika corpse corps would be stukka diving Glass Stoned Bury and entertaining the backstage great unwashed micro celebs who would be leaving their expensive portacabins that are larger and more comfortable than your flat for a glimpse of the pint sized messiah was too much to bear. The micro celebs and their jolly hockey sticks good friends the Eton Rifle Tories will be glorying at the side of the stage, dancing like accountants at a Christmas party whilst on their mobile phones as the band launch into their ill gotten booty of hits whilst I unleash my lunatic fringe and spray-paint the computer screen with spittle and furious words in a spray gun of molten word jism of AK! AK! AK! AK47 adjectives that somehow fail to capture my dissolution with my utterly wasted youth as I realise with a sickening curse that…
U2 made punk rock a waste of fucking time...
John Robb @'Louder Than War'
hmmm...
Photo
I SO hope that is spit...
and why oh why did NATO not authorise a humanitarian bombing sorty that cld have got rid of Coldplay at the same time?
I SO hope that is spit...
and why oh why did NATO not authorise a humanitarian bombing sorty that cld have got rid of Coldplay at the same time?
Saturday 25 June 2011
If you mention George Clinton or Funkadelic I will sing to you...
p_funk_bot GC Bot
@exilestreet I'm glad to come back and help raise your kids Show you the way, the right way I feel you gotta live
LulzSec Arizona Leak: We Called Public Safety Officers' Cell Phones, and They're Not Laughing
LulzSec, the anonymous hacker group best known for attacking
... has yet to be determined. But the LulzSec hack into the Arizona Department of Public Safety servers yesterday was the groups's most significant yet -- both in terms of volume and personal impact at the other end.
We began by calling Lieutenant Larry Parks, from the DPS' Highway Patrol division, on his cell phone. "You're the first one who's called," he says.
And he's surprised. Although Parks says he has no clue "what they put on there," he didn't think his cell phone had been leaked. (Parks' number was not included in the LulzSec press release, like a few of the other officers; instead, interested parties had to download the 470 MB file to find it. Call us devoted.) The officer says he feels terrible for a few of his colleagues, who had their personal info -- wives' names, home addresses, cell phones -- posted on the "Chinga la Migra" home page.
"I find that a little disconcerting," he says. "It makes it a little personal -- makes you worry every time the phone rings."
We called the rest, too. Steven Loya's cell had been disconnected. Horacio Lomeli and Daniel Scott's phones went straight to message. And Charles Springstun Jr., turns out, had gone so far to get a stuffy lawyer-sounding lady to record the following public service announcement for all callers:
"You the public have been victimized by Internet hackers attempting to incite harm, riots and disobedience by stealing the Springstun identity and the employee identities from the Department of Public Safety. DPS employs police officers, secretaries, records clerks, photographers, mechanics, forensic experts and many other occupations of all races and ages. ... Mr. Springstun was a retiree, but due to the economy, had to seek employment and was hired by DPS earlier this year. ... The Springstuns have not made any statements or opinions on the Internet. the Springstuns have not sent or made made any emails, statements or opinions on SB 1070."Parks says DPS has "launched an investigation" into how such a security breach was made possible. (Good luck with that. Judging by the DPS web correspondance released by LulzSec, officials are still on page 2 of their 'puter manuals.) FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson says, ever cryptically, that it "wouldn't be uncommon for the FBI to assist" in such an investigation -- but the FBI isn't exactly one step ahead of the Lulzers, either.
However, Parks does confirm that the DPS email server can now only be accessed from within department buildings -- making much of the leaked login/password info pretty useless to the general public.
We asked him what he thinks LulzSec wants to get from all this.
"I'm familiar with what an anarchist group is," he says, "but we don't really run into these kind of individuals in my part of the state."
Parks says he patrols the "rural northeast" -- where towns aren't likely to come much larger than 6,000 people. He tries to think of an equivalent near Los Angeles, but can't. "I'm kind of in the sticks," he says.
Because of the smalltime, intimate nature of the e-mails in LulzSec's mass download (and with no time for redactions, a la Palin's Alaska stock!), the DPS correspondence contains many a facepalmy, "Reno 911" moment, like when officers can't get their dial-up Dells to work, or when they use their government accounts to talk about their wives' labor pains. Awkward.
But there are also borderline admissions to racial profiling, by way of warnings to each other -- having everything to do with SB 1070, and making the alleged LulzSec mission, well, kind of accomplished.
For instance, re: ACLU racial-profiling probe, one official says:
"The statistics are from our own data. We need to monitor our personnel and act if there are indications of bias. If we fail to act, I am confident that an outside entity will be established to act for us."Officers are also very wary of the media:
"Though media representatives may tell you that all of them are critical and time sensitive... if in doubt as to whether a release is time sensitive, it is probably not. Please do not overuse this option."In one Yuma County traffic stop, a vehicle is pulled over because it looks "suspicious" (aka, has brown people inside); soon after, both driver and passenger are found to be "illegally present in the United States." Kind of hard to pretend that one didn't put a little profiling to use.
The emails and attachments go on in that fashion. No blatant admissions, but lots of gaps in judicial process and cautionary tales between coppers.
Best of all, though, are the hilariously designed "newsletters" and various for-dummies guides (i.e., "How to Crack Your Child's Secret Online Language") circulated within the department. As with the Palin emails, the leak is more embarrassing than anything. Very "The Office." (Boing Boing has a pretty nice collection of excerpts going, too.)
Still, one non-lulzy thing is clear: Arizona law-enforcement officials, however bumbling, knew not to be blatant.
We'd be very interested to see a leak like this in SoCal, perhaps in Orange or San Diego Counties -- those closet Yumas where officials feel they can get away with anything under the guise of being a liberal blue state. Not that we're asking a major hacker group for a highly illegal government breach or anything. Ahem.
[@simone_electra/swilson@laweekly.com]
Simone Wilson @'LAWeekly'
Acid Tests
Leary contemplates his navel
The psychedelic era of the 1960s is remembered for its music, its art and, of course, its drugs. Its science is somewhat further down the list. But before the rise of the counterculture, researchers had been studying LSD as a treatment for everything from alcoholism to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), with promising results. Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard University, was one of the best-known workers in the field, but it was also he who was widely blamed for discrediting it, by his unconventional research methods and his lax handling of drugs. Now, the details of Leary’s research will be made public, with the recent purchase of his papers by the New York Public Library. These papers will be interesting not only culturally, but also scientifically, as they reflect what happened between the early medical promise of hallucinogens and their subsequent blacklisting by authorities around the world.
American researchers began experimenting with LSD in 1949, at first using it to simulate mental illness. Once its psychedelic effects were realised, they then tried it in psychotherapy and as a treatment for alcoholism, for which it became known at the time as a miracle cure.
By 1965 over 1,000 papers had been published describing positive results for LSD therapy. It, and its close chemical relative psilocybin, isolated from hallucinogenic mushrooms, were reported as having potential for treating anxiety disorders, OCD, depression, bereavement and even sexual dysfunction. Unfortunately, most of the studies that came to these conclusions were flawed: many results were anecdotal, and control groups were not established to take account of the placebo effect.
Still, the field was ripe for further study. But alongside growing public fear of LSD, Leary’s leadership had become a liability. He was seen less and less as a disinterested researcher, and more and more as a propagandist. In 1962, amid wide publicity, the Harvard Psilocybin Project was shut down. Leary took his research to an estate in upstate New York, where he also hosted a stream of drug parties. Eventually both LSD and psilocybin were proscribed.
Which was a pity because, like many other drugs the authorities have taken against as a result of their recreational uses, hallucinogens have medical applications as well. But time heals all wounds and now, cautiously, study of the medical use of hallucinogens is returning.
Psilocybin has shown promise in treating forms of OCD that are resistant to other therapies, in relieving cluster headaches (a common form of chronic headache) and in alleviating the anxiety experienced by terminally ill cancer patients. The first clinical study of LSD in over 35 years, also on terminally ill patients, is expected to finish this summer. Peter Gasser, the Swiss doctor leading the experiment, says that a combination of LSD and psychotherapy reduced anxiety levels of all 12 participants in the study, though the statistical significance of the data has yet to be analysed.
Research into LSD is not confined to medicine. Franz Vollenweider, of the Heffter Research Institute in Zurich, for example, is scanning people’s brains to try to understand how hallucinogenic drugs cause changes in consciousness.
And biotechnology may lead to a new generation of hallucinogenic drugs. Edwin Wintermute and his colleagues at Harvard have engineered yeast cells to carry out two of six steps in the pathway needed to make lysergic acid, the precursor of LSD. They hope to add the other four shortly. Once the pathway has been created, it can be tweaked. That might result in LSD-like drugs that are better than the original.
Even if that does not happen, making lysergic acid in yeast is still a good idea. The chemical is used as the starting point for other drugs, including nicergoline, a treatment for senile dementia. The current process for manufacturing it is a rather messy one involving ergot, a parasite of rye.
It may, of course, be that LSD has no clinical uses. Even when no stigma attaches to the drugs involved, most clinical trials end in failure. But it is worth seeing whether LSD might fulfil its early promise. And if the publication of Leary’s archive speeds that process up by exorcising a ghost that still haunts LSD research, then the New York Public Library will have done the world a service.
@'The Economist'
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