Cosmic Dispatch

In a move that feels ripped from the pages of some deranged pharmaceutical fever dream, doctors are about to start dripping pure N,N-dimethyltryptamine...that ancient, soul-shattering psychedelic...straight into the veins of stroke patients. Not to send them howling through the ether on a full-blown trip. No. This is colder, more surgical....

We were somewhere in the heart of downtown Nashville on the edge of the legislative session when the rumors of an ibogaine bill began to echo through Printer's Alley. Rep. Bryan Terry and Sen. Page Walley, two good ol' boys from the red-clay heartland, have decided it's time to let...

I was sitting in the dim glow of a motel room television at 4:20 a.m., somewhere off the interstate where the American Dream goes to die, when the ghost of MTV Rewind flickered across my laptop screen like a bad acid flashback. The bottle of Jack Daniel's was half-empty, the...

There is a reason the same hemp-derived product can leave one person floating in creative calm while sending another into a spiral of looping worry about things they haven’t thought about in years.  It isn’t only body chemistry.  It isn’t only tolerance.  It’s the raw, unfiltered truth Timothy Leary hammered...

It was 1972...or maybe '71; the calendar felt irrelevant once the salt air of Taganga mixed with the diesel scent of a borrowed jeep. I’d heard the whisper from a barefoot fisherman on the beach: "La oro colombiano." He pointed inland, toward the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the...

There I was, sprawled in a dimly lit room, the air thick with that sweet, earthy haze of premium indica, as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon pulsed through the speakers like a heartbeat from another dimension. Suddenly, the guitar riffs weren't just sounds, they were electric serpents slithering through...

We were somewhere in downtown Chattanooga when the urge for a decent pre-roll began to take hold.  I remember muttering something like, "Jesus, these things better not be stuffed with that godforsaken shake."  I suddenly found myself standing in a strange, yet familiar coffeeshop, the whole scene exploding into a...

There is a strange arrogance in telling a human being what they may grow in their own dirt. We allow tomatoes. Lavender. Basil. Tobacco, a plant responsible for millions of deaths annually, grows freely in backyards and on farms with the blessing of the state. But cannabis? Suddenly the soil...

Government ownership of cannabis outfits? What a savage joke after half a century of screaming reefer madness, bilking taxpayers blind with a trillion-dollar War on Drugs failure, and shredding millions of American lives into felony confetti.  The government has never operated a business without bleeding red ink like a gut-shot...

We were teetering on the brink, staring into the abyss of the great American propaganda machine, somewhere between the flickering TV screens and the screaming headlines. The sober mind couldn't make sense of this insanity, so I inhaled with a deep sigh to limber up the mind. This nonsense being...

Jesus, there are nights when your stomach decides to declare war on the rest of you. It twists, it heaves, it sends up frantic Morse code signals that say, “Evacuate everything, now.” Maybe it’s the street-vendor burrito that looked innocent under the neon, maybe it’s the chemo poison dripping into...

Buckle up for a wild ride through the foggy realms of the mind, where the green herb dances with the ticking clock of human decay.  We're talking cannabis, that devilish plant that's been demonized by squares and suits since the days when Nixon was huffing his own paranoia.  But hold...