This short film about morphine access is incredibly touching. Watch to find out just how many Indians don’t have access to it.

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The psychiatric drug industry is massive. More than $70 billion a year in sales, just in the U.S., are for drugs to treat mental health issues—mainly disorders like anxiety and depression. 

While psychedelic drugs—LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, etc.—have been stigmatized as reckless party drugs that may even cause mental breakdowns themselves, science is proving the opposite is true and that they may be more helpful in supporting mental and emotional health than previously believed.

In a recent study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, MRI scans of brains under the influence of psilocybin were compared with normal brain activity.

“The brains on psilocybin showed radically different connectivity patterns between cortical regions (the parts thought to play an important role in consciousness),” reports the New York Times. “The researchers mapped out these connections, revealing the activity of new neural networks between otherwise disconnected brain regions.”

This discovery may explain the sort of synesthesia experienced while under the influence of psychedelics—tasting sounds, seeing flavors and aromas, hearing colors, etc. While these effects are almost always temporary, the scientists see potential in treating anxiety and depression disorders with these experiences. “The fact that under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way may be medically significant in treating psychological disorders like depression,” the Times explains. “When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,” lead study author Paul Expert of King’s College London told the Times, “One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a ‘proper’ functioning of the brain can be helpful.”

Psychedelics can be life altering, even years after one experience. In the case of addressing depression, a psychedelic experience, the researchers noted, can serve like a brain reboot. “When ingested, psilocybin metabolizes to psilocin, which resembles the chemical structure of serotonin — a neurotransmitter that regulates mood, appetite, sleep, cognitive functions like memory and learning and feelings of pleasure,” the Times explains. “Psilocin may simulate serotonin, and stimulate serotonin receptors in the brain.”

This isn’t the first study to find benefits in psychedelic medications. According to the Times:

One study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2012, rated the vividness of autobiographical memory of subjects on psilocybin and found the drug enhanced their recollection, and ‘subjective well-being’ upon follow-up. The researchers concluded that psilocybin might be useful in psychotherapy as an adjunct therapy to help patients reverse “negative cognitive biases” — a phenomenon common in depression by which one has a greater recall of negative memories than positive ones — and facilitate the recall of important memories.

Other studies have suggested that psilocybin may modify obsessive compulsion by reducing symptoms like repetitive counting or hand-washing, and in a paper published in Neurology in 2006, the authors interviewed cluster headache sufferers who had used psilocybin to treat their horrific condition, and learned that even low doses — less than is needed to actually trip — could bring about remission. (I also know someone who claims psilocybin cured his stuttering.) A study published last year in the journal Experimental Brain Research found that psilocybin eliminated conditioned fear responses in mice, which has implications for sufferers of PTSD. And psilocybin has been shown to relieve anxiety, depression and despair in terminal cancer patients, who describe their experience as giving them a new perspective on their lives.

Psilocybin actually has a history of being explored as a treatment for conditions including alcoholism and aiding the terminally ill as far back as the 1950s, before being banned as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. “But clinical research into psilocybin became professionally marginalized, and research funding dried up about the same time it entered the mainstream as a recreational drug,” reports the Times.

Now, as the Drug War is being exposed as ineffective and incredibly expensive, the perception of psychedelic drugs is changing. Add to that the fact that pharmaceuticals don’t always work for everyone battling mental health issues. It can take a doctor and patient several tries to find a pharmaceutical drug that works for a patient, and the drugs can also have significant side effects. They are expensive, and they can present serious challenges to a patient who decides to stop taking their medication. The author David Foster Wallace’s suicide was connected to his psychiatric medication no longer working when he tried to resume the dosage after a period of time off of the medication.

Anxiety and depression disorders are the most common forms of mental illness in the U.S., with more than 20 percent of Americans taking some sort of mind-altering prescription drugs. These conditions are prevalent around the world, too, considered the leading cause of impairment and disability.

Even with a strong spiritual or religious faith, it’s easy to feel abandoned, anxious, confused, depressed and scared about both living and dying. While there are stigmas about psychedelic drugs, life itself is pretty psychedelic. And enhancing reality with intense psychedelic experiences can reawaken our connections to the mysteriousness of life–and death–taking away some of the anxiety. Often times that includes going directly into our deepest fears first on a psychedelic journey. But it’s the deep clarity and grounded perspective that almost always surfaces after the fear and discomfort of a psychedelic journey that has the potential to last. And if these experiences can reawaken our relationship to ourselves and the earth at a time when we need a good bit of both, isn’t it time we explore all possibilities?

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: afgooey74

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Here’s a story for everyone who has ever suspected there was something in the water in Portland (in other words, everyone).

It seems America’s love of caffeine is such that it’s starting to leak into the rest of the food cycle. A Portland State University graduate has been sampling ocean water at a number of locations on the Oregon coastline and has been finding traces of caffeine, tallying not with population density but with the movement of stormwater. In short: when the rain lashes down, we’re spiking the oceans with our favorite legal psychoactive drug. 

Cause for concern? Compared with the list of other environment-related things to worry about, this may be trifling – and since we’re deeply fascinated by the potential health benefits of caffeine in moderation, we’d be hypocrites to start banging our drums here. Or would we? Because until now we’ve been talking about the effect of caffeine on humans. While everyone currently has no idea how low doses of caffeine will affect marine life, we do know that it severely messes with spiders.

In 1995, NASA researchers dosed up common household spiders with a variety of drugs and left them to weave their webs. The ones “speeding” on benzadrine completed the job in record time but left enormous holes everywhere. The ones under the influence of marijuana did half the job and lost interest. And the one spinning on caffeine? Take a look (above right). It appears the spider was such a jittery mess that it lost the ability to plan ahead. Fascinating and disturbing – but at least it makes great tableware.

To repeat: nobody knows how caffeine will affect marine wildlife. However, tests suggest that the effects of caffeine are most pronounced in birds and mammals, less so in lower vertebrates and still less so in fish and amphibians. If we are indeed dosing up our offshore neighbors in miniscule amounts, let’s hope they’re designed to shrug it off.

Images: GOOD and Matt McGee.

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A fashion industry insider reports.

Charles Frederick Worth was one of the world’s first noted fashion designers (See his Court Dress, above). In 1845, a fashion designer was an artist, highly regarded and sought after by the society of the royal court to advise on their wardrobe choices. Worth’s main concern, as a designer, was to design and handmake one of a kind haute couture that would distinguish each of his customers. Associated with class, distinction, style, and influence, people like Worth have been labeled taste-makers for well over a century. Relics aside, today, the role of a fashion designer is far more complicated, competitive, and multifaceted than ever before.

Well known designers, such as Stella McCartney, have been known to express a desire to run away from the industry after a season. When she received harsh criticism after her debut collection from the press in 2001, McCartney told NY Magazine, “People think I’m strong, but actually I wanted to crawl away. I thought, I’m going to live in the country with my horse and I’ll get a nine-to-five; I don’t need this.”

However, with hundreds of new designers emerging to show at fashion weeks around the world each season, even negative press is better than the alternative of no press. Minor complaints aside, in the past few years, incidents suggest that there are more serious issues afoot plaguing designers than insults from the press. From John Galliano’s drunken Nazi rantings, to Marc Jacob’s repeated drug problems, and the most tragic being Alexander McQueen’s suicide last year, designers seem to be experiencing something beyond the usual industry stress. With all of these melt downs, one has to ask: Might these outbreaks just be symptoms of a larger system failure?

To understand the current circumstances, one must first understand the role of a designer. Today, the designer actually functions as a Creative Director, overseeing many different pieces of the company’s product design, execution, brand imaging and positioning, and much of the marketing and press. Another key part of the role is being accountable to the Financial Officer, also known as the “Money” of the business. Which means a designer really has to understand every step, cost and stage of their business to be able to make well informed decisions on how to steer the business. Below is a diagram to illustrate everything that must be managed and considered in order to produce and sell fashion on a mass market level. The arrows describe the tiers of power throughout the system.

In a cascade system, such as in a fashion house, each part of the system is dependent on the other. Therefore, if one part of the system fails, the entire system collapses. And yet, somehow, up until recently, this system has been quite efficient across the board for most well known fashion houses. This system has been able to maintain because the least powerful and the lowest paid group within the system, the laborers, farmers, and factory workers, make up the largest part of the system’s labor pool, keeping the costs and product prices low. Ironically, these links just happen to be what keeps the whole system going.

The other factor that the fashion system relies heavily upon, but also pays little for, are materials. However, if the costs of labor go up because, for instance, a country like China decides to enforce and increase their labor standards (which is currently happening), the standards raise across the board in other countries. Over time, the price of the product must go up as well. If cotton crops fail repeatedly due to climate changes, the cost of materials increase across the board due to shortages, and the price of the product goes up again. If the price offered to customers goes up dramatically, amidst all the cheep and cheerful overstock product flooding the market from last year, customers simply won’t buy it. After all, most people already have enough stuff. The brand will only sell items on sale, which results in job instability of everyone in the cascade system.

The Designer and the “Money” must take the issue seriously and find a solution before the system can continue on a healthy level. However, limited resources and rising labor costs are not an easy problems to solve, especially when you have an extremely competitive market and are running a complex system already set up to work only one way. Unfortunately, there are only a few options within the fashion industry to stay afloat:

The Iron Fist Solution, á la H&M: Make the customers temporarily happy by making and selling enormous amounts of low price-tag products of cheap quality. In this case, the cost of business operations is covered through the slivers of profit on each item sold, and multiplied by the tens and hundreds of thousands of items that are produced. With this solution, the brand needs to be able to sell directly through their own stores and the designer must have some kind of monopoly over materials and labor to keep the prices of the goods exceptionally low. This technique will destroy the competition, as long as the designer can continue running the business on minimum costs. However in the current environment, this is not a long term solution. The costs of materials and labor will go up as resources continue to run low, which is caused by the mass production of poor quality goods in the first place. At this point, the company is chasing its own tail, and even if  the company using the Iron Fist Strategy can hold out long enough to put the competition out of business, eventually they’ll put themselves out of business if they don’t innovate their process at some point so that they find a solution to materials shortages.

The Velvet Glove Solution a.k.a. the Luxury Market Method: Invest in maintaining the appearance and allure of a “luxury brand” while selling a lot (although maybe not as much as an H&M) of lower cost product at “luxury” prices. Examples of this would be the Diors and Chanels of the world. This is the Iron Fist Solution seasoned with a little better quality and taste, and disguised by marketing that allows the brand to make a much higher mark-up on the sale of each item. Therefore, even if the brand is selling less items across the board, they make more for the operations budget on each item. So while we, the customers, equate Chanel with haute couture dresses and iconic tweed jackets, they’re making their money on selling patent leather (a.k.a. vinyl) shoes, handbags and perfume at exorbitant prices. This also destroys the competition, who can’t compete with the marketed “luxury” brand allure and history. While this solution may last for some time, provided consumers don’t get wise to the marketing schemes or lose their taste for “luxury,”  it again does not address the materials and labor cost increase issue, which eventually will cut into the marketing budget and over time might cause detriment to the brand.

The Performance Solution: They keep the costs of products proportionate to the costs of materials and labor. This solution invests in manufacturing technology, textile engineering, and science to keep ahead of the curb. This would be the Patagonia’s of the world. In this solution, there is almost no competition, you create your own niche market, and through innovations, you gain customer loyalty. Be the only one to know where to get materials that are made of recycled or renewable resources, thus removing the dependency on natural materials costs and you have created a more sustainable future for your company.

The Innovator’s Solution: There are always new designers and businesses springing up with a new way to do things. Whether it’s tackling marketing, design, or materials in new ways, this group of oddball fashion designers and indie-houses are thinking outside the box to drive consumer culture and the market out of the old ways. With the current media and market focusing on all things “green” and “socially responsible,” this new crop of innovative businesses are popping up to fill the hole in the market through the use of unthinkable techniques, collaborations, and technologies. Examples of these designers might be BioCouture, who creates leather jackets from tea film, Christopher Raeburn, who’s been known to use left over parachute material from the military to make windbreakers, or perhaps, Bright Young Things, whose marketing tactics appear to aim to convince people to buy less. While this growing “innovator” circle has not fully matured into well known designers in the mainstream, perhaps the mass market is not an innovative place to be if a designer is trying to plan for a future with fewer resources and fairly paid labor. However, these designers might just be the ones who ultimately find long term solutions to the current fashion crisis.

With all that is going on in the world’s environment, markets, and economies, it is easy to despair. From the standpoint of a designer, who oversees enough of the business to understand how things work (or how things don’t work), it’s like watching the ship going down in slow motion.

From their mast heads, some of the biggest designers of our times seem to be doing just that. Perhaps they’re just on their way to becoming relics themselves, without enough knowledge to change the way that their industry works altogether. Well, not all of them.

Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld is living in his ivory tower which he’s built so high that he might be the only one left with his head just above the water in the end. Recently he was quoted by Vogue as saying, “I have a lot more sympathy for people who have to take the train to work every day. What a load of nonsense.”

Sympathy, eh? “Designers are artisans who are extremely privileged to have a poetic profession. They are not artists. We have to stop saying that they are,”  Lagerfeld adds.

He makes the job look easy. Meanwhile those designers who feel all of the responsibilities behind the job, have panic attacks or worse. But let us remember back in 1975, in the thick of building his career to the empire he now owns, he mentioned to The Observer Magazine his philosophy on his own work practices, “I am a sort of vampire, taking the blood of other people.” With this work ethic he has gone very far, leading some of the most powerful and influential fashion houses in the industry, producing billions of dollars worth of product, and making people on all corners of the planet thirst for a wide range of products on an unprecedented level. Perhaps he actually is the bug that bites.  But then again, according to him, he doesn’t even take himself seriously. It’s a wonder that the rest of the world considers him a fashion guru.

Editor’s Note: Due to sensitive circumstances, the author has asked us to use a pseudonym. We have honored the request in this case.

Image: Joe Paczkowski

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Last year, it was widely reported that drinking water in many major metropolitan areas was contaminated with trace amounts of drugs. All types of drugs – everything from over-the-counter pain medications to antidepressants to prescription medication for high blood pressure and heart disease.

The drugs we ingest pass right through our bodies and are expelled in our urine. These drugs aren’t removed in the water treatment process and the water is released into our rivers and lakes, which serve as our water supply.

The chatter eventually died down with assurances that the amounts were so small they couldn’t possibly impact human health. But how do we know that for certain? The truth is, we don’t know enough about the effects of prolonged exposure and possible interactions between all the different drugs we ingest in our drinking water.

Drugs given to animals enter our water supply in the same way. Not only does this practice contaminate the water with steroids, hormones, and antibiotics, but because antibiotics are overused (given to healthy animals to prevent disease and increase growth) there is a high likelihood of deadly, drug-resistant infections that can be passed onto humans.

Of particular concern is a staph infection called MSRA which is killing more than 18,000 Americans a year and, as was recently reported, is showing up on hog farms.

Another recent story outlines how river fish in urban areas are contaminated with trace amounts of drugs, simply from living in the rivers through which our treated sewage flows. River fish in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando were all tested and compared to fish from a river in New Mexico into which no treated sewage flows.

The fish were tested for 24 different pharmaceuticals and 12 chemicals found in personal care products. Trace concentrations of seven drugs were found in fish at all five of the urban river sites. None were found in the fish from New Mexico.

These issues are part and parcel of the same problem. The drugs we take, dump down the sink or toilet or give to animals end up in the water supply because there is no “away”. When we throw things away or flush our toilets, our stuff has to go somewhere.

Last month, Congress introduced a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. It aims to prohibit farmers from feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals. This is great and long overdue, but it won’t entirely solve our drug problem.

We must also shift our thinking. Planners, policy makers, corporations and individuals all need to remember that we are connected to one another and all things are part of the web of nature. Everything we do has some effect downstream. We must all begin to think less linearly and more holistically about our actions.

In the meantime, you can start by finding out more about the antibiotics issue here.

Image: publik15

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