DON'T GET HIGH WITHOUT IT

The Vaults Of Erowid Supplies The Ultimate Trip Buddy: Information

Early last February, a 19-year-old sophomore dragged himself into the psychiatric emergency ward at a large American university hospital, complaining that his friends and family were plotting against him. Though the fellow knew his thoughts were irrational, he could not shake his bout of paranoia.

He also told the receiving staff that six weeks earlier he had swallowed an unknown amount of 2C-I, a recreational drug that, in his case, produced bright colors and swirling patterns and a suffocating onslaught of cosmic dread.

The bad vibes had recurred with increasing ferocity in the intervening weeks, until he finally decided to check himself in.

When a third-year medical student named Jack Ludlow showed up for his shift, the receiving staff were asking themselves the same question that probably just crossed your own mind: What the hell is 2C-I? Luckily, Ludlow knew something about the esoteric world of substance use and abuse among young adults, and identified 2C-I as a rare hallucinogenic phenethylamine. But his search of the usual medical databases for more detailed information turned up zilch.

Then he aimed his Web browser toward The Vaults of Erowid ( www.erowid.org ), where he found data about the chemical structure of 2C-I and a link to the EU's recent scientific review of the substance. "This information helped us to treat this patient's symptoms," Ludlow wrote in a letter thanking Erowid. "We expect that his symptoms will resolve completely."

Ludlow's tale is a conventional enough story of medicine in the age of the Internet, except that Erowid is not your conventional medical database. It is an independent Web site run by a couple of neo-hippie data geeks without Ph.D.s, institutional backup or government funding. Two longtime partners who go by the names Earth and Fire ( she's the Fire ), they've built the most comprehensive encyclopedia of psychoactive substances online.

Erowid holds 4,500 archived images and over 25,000 individual documents, including dosage charts, indexes of research articles, FAQs and legal briefs.

You can feast your eyes on detailed pharmacological charts, JPEGs of freebase pipes and mushroom spores, a vibrant vault of psychedelic art, and thousands of links to everything from the Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center to the DEA. But Erowid is more than a vast library of documents concerning those plants, powders and poisons that continue to bedevil and enchant the human nervous system.

The Web site is also an example of online culture jamming at its most rigorous and mature.

The topic of psychoactive drugs is a many-headed beast, encompassing pharmacology and federal law, dirty needles and God. The structure of Erowid reflects this multidimensional approach: You open the vault for a single substance, like AMT or heroin, and from there branch out into chemistry, health, history, legal issues and personal testimonies. By far the most entertaining vault contains thousands of "experience reports" logged by psychonauts flying high ( and taking notes ) on exotic cacti, prescription pharmaceuticals, and newfangled phenethylamines like 2C-I. At once formulaic and bizarre, these reports provide details about dosage, timing and body load largely lacking in the hazy trip tales of yore. An individual going by the name of Fu, for example, reports that s/he consumed one gram of Harmala extract, followed 40 minutes later by 60 grams of fresh psilocybe cubensis mushrooms:

From 7:00-7:45 I began to progressively watch my ego disintegrate itself into the aethyr.

This process of ego dissolution started out as a delicate web-like structure that appeared to be made of silver illuminating threads of silk emanating from the center of my field of vision. This web continued to increase in detail and otherworldliness as multi-colored translucent tentacles began to spiral around each silver thread of this "web."

Strange and sometimes hilarious, these mad-science micro-memoirs recall nothing so much as 19th-century toxicology, when scientists routinely tested poisons and psychoactive compounds on themselves while systematically recording subjective effects.

Though Earth and Fire post many pieces themselves, Erowid is basically a collection of other people's documents, many of which contradict one another. Psychoactives are a deeply confounding dimension of the human experience, and the site lets these loose ends dangle in plain sight, avoiding pat generalizations and absolute claims.

They do not attempt to vet every wild and wacky claim, though they strive to maintain an overall tone of caution, pragmatism and healthy skepticism. Warnings of known dangers are prominently posted, but moralizing is abandoned in favor of fact and reasonable conjecture. The site will not tell you, for example, whether MDMA will damage your brain.

What you will learn is that a guy named BJ Logan didn't detect any neurotoxicity in randomly bred albino rats injected with 25 mg/kg MDMA, while another researcher found that Dark Agouti rats showed serotonin depletions at doses as low as 4 mg/kg. The rest, as they say, is up to you.

Erowid is an enormous hit. The site serves an average 400,000 page views to over 30,000 unique visitors a day, and recently logged more than half a million page hits in one 24-hour period.

Surfers view an average of 13 pages each, which significantly outpaces most Web sites. Based on Erowid's own surveys, its visitors include teachers, cops, chemists and pediatricians. By far the largest chunk are students, 3 million or so in 2003, the bulk of whom are undergrads. That's why Erowid's server traffic dips noticeably during summer and December vacations.

"Erowid is the trusted source for young people who want to get information that's as uncontaminated by hidden agendas as possible," says Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies ( MAPS ), which maintains close ties to the site. As an example, Doblin compares Erowid to Freevibe, a sassy anti-drug Web site created by Disney and the Office of National Drug Control Policy ( ONDCP ). "Freevibe is designed to attract young people, but their MDMA page is bullshit.

By providing misinformation or inaccurate information, you destroy your credibility. Kids go elsewhere." Doblin believes that Erowid is performing a public service by providing information that citizens can use to make good choices. "Erowid shouldn't have to do what it's doing.

In an ideal world, it wouldn't exist. This work would be done by the government."

Inside the psychedelic, rave and harm-reduction communities, Earth and Fire are considered leaders, even heroes.

But they insist they're just a pair of librarians -- archivists and "Internet dorks" who believe that better access to better information just makes for better decisions in the long run. "Basically, we act as if there isn't prohibition," says Earth. "We are trying to publish this information as if the world were already making rational choices around this complicated area."

Rationality, however, rarely claws its way into the public discussion of drug use in this country.

Despite widespread disgust with the war on drugs, the dominant American narrative hasn't budged much since Reefer Madness, which assumed that people are defenseless lemmings unable to withstand the seductive and all-consuming call of horribly damaging drugs and their demonic proponents. After years working under the radar, Erowid is now being painted into this patronizing, B-movie tableau. A year ago, CBS News ran an "Eye on America" that focused on the Web site, which they faintly praised as "the encyclopedia of altered states." Their flash case was a 17-year-old who fell unconscious after taking a combination of 5-MeO-DMT, a mighty psychedelic tryptamine, and Syrian rue, a plant rich in a monoamine-oxidase inhibitor, or MAOI, called harmaline.

By temporarily squelching enzymes that metabolize organic amines such as DMT, MAOIs significantly extend the tryptamine's flight time. The fellow learned about this rather risky combo from Erowid, which CBS claimed had given the fellow "a brand-new way to flirt with death." Later that year, Fox News ran a predictably hysterical piece about online drug information that showed screen shots of Erowid, although the site's name had been blurred out. Perhaps Fox knew that CBS's earlier spot had doubled Erowid's server traffic for days.

These reports cast Erowid as little more than cheerleaders proffering recipes for gray-matter mischief. "Erowid are presented as somehow opposite the government, as totally positive rather than constantly negative," says MAPS's Doblin. "But that's just wrong.

They're not pro-drug. They're pro-choice, and the choice should lie with the individual who has access to good information." Doblin points out that only an idiot could mistake the 5-MeO-DMT vault for a pusher's hard sell. Tales of crystalline entities and the implosion of space-time abound -- and these are the positive reports.

Add this to the prominent list of contraindications ( which includes MAOIs ), and most reasonably responsible people would think very hard before embarking on the good ship 5-MeO-DMT.

But that's the rub: How many of Erowid's users can be said to be reasonably responsible? Leaving aside the fact that many people turn to drugs to escape the world of reason and responsibility, Doblin's pro-choice argument requires that users are already capable of critical thinking -- not to mention navigating the basics of pharmacology. "Most people who get on Erowid are bright and well educated," says Edward Boyer, the toxicologist and emergency-room physician who treated the young man in the CBS story. "But not everyone is. I mean, how many people know what 'contraindication' means?

When I started medical school, I didn't know what it was."

Boyer first started tracking online drug sites in 1996, after treating two fellows who poisoned themselves with a batch of GHB they had whipped up after discovering a recipe online.

In 2001, the New England Journal of Medicine published his letter accusing Erowid and other "partisan" Web sites of providing dangerous misinformation. ( Unfortunately, the research and methodology Boyer used were not included in his letter, nor did the Journal deign to print Erowid's rebuttal. ) Though Boyer has since come to cautiously admire Earth and Fire, and no longer refers to their site as "partisan," he still argues that Erowid minimizes adverse effects and includes too much dodgy -- and potentially harmful -- data in its quest to present all sides. "Erowid is so comprehensive, and so much of the information is correct, that unless you're an expert in medical toxicology you may miss the dangerous information that's close to the surface."

Boyer wants the assurances provided by the professional system of peer review and expertise.

The problem is that, when it comes to recreational drugs in America, politics have largely hijacked these noble mechanisms. Last year, for example, the Johns Hopkins neuroscientist George Ricaurte, a prominent and tireless critic of MDMA, issued a retraction of a controversial and widely hyped paper published the previous year in the prestigious journal Science. Ricaurte's original study reported that monkeys shot up with only moderately strong doses of MDMA experienced "severe" damage to their dopamine systems, leading to Parkinson's-like symptoms and some deaths. Embarrassingly, it turned out that Ricaurte's grad students had actually been shooting up the animals with methamphetamine. Though some interpreted the retraction as evidence of the self-correcting nature of science, the real question -- posed by the prominent British medical researchers Colin Blakemore and Les Iversen, among others -- was why Ricaurte's report was published in the first place, given that its results were so out of whack with what we know about the very real neurotoxicity of MDMA. If Ricaurte's study were true, then ravers would routinely be forced to dance over the corpses of their triple-dosing peers.

The unspoken reality is that, in today's America, politics overwhelms the scientific investigation of recreational drugs.

Ricaurte, for example, receives the bulk of his large research funds from the National Institute on Drug Abuse ( NIDA ), while researchers interested in exploring the positive aspect of drugs like MDMA not only face a lack of funding or federal approval, but professional suicide.

As Earth explains, "The people who know the most about this subject don't talk about it publicly, because they are legitimately afraid for their careers."

By creating an anonymous and evolving space of discussion, debate and trust, Erowid has not abandoned peer review, but precariously extended its boundaries. Published research findings cohabit with postings from anonymous research scientists and the interpenetrating comments of freelance alchemists, wackos and all manner of drug nerds.

Earth calls it "grassroots peer review," a process that involves self-selecting contributors whose collective intelligence increases through the dynamics of a highly networked and committed community.

Though it largely ignores policy debates, Erowid is a striking example of guerrilla information war. Millions of people, particularly young people, regularly access a repository of data whose very accessibility erodes the coercive exaggerations, hysteria and outright lies common to government and mainstream-media discussion of drugs.

In addition, the very form of Erowid, which presents a model of an honest and open-minded psychoactive culture, encourages intelligent decision making. Earth and Fire don't take up guns in the drug war; they blanket the battleground with leaflets.

I met Earth and Fire a few years ago through a rave collective that held its parties in an Episcopal church in San Francisco before the hedonic glee broke the limits of divine tolerance.

Now in their mid-30s, the couple have been together since they were teenagers.

Both are recognizably Midwestern: Fire's Bjork-ish moon face is framed by straight brown hair, while Earth has a towering Nordic frame, shoulder-length blond hair and a firm, determined jaw decorated with a wispy goatee.

She speaks with a clipped, fiercely intelligent directness that might come off as oddly masculine were it not for Earth's equally fierce, if more verbose, ray-gun patter.

In both their dress and their self-possessed manner, they seem uncannily symbiotic. In person and even on the phone, they often finish each other's sentences.

This conviviality is a good thing, since they spend nearly all their time together, slumped side by side before their monitors, cranking away at their Web site for up to 80 hours a week. They work out of a rambling ranch house in the foothills of the Sierras, with two cats named Circe and Pan and a growing library of drug books.

Their mind-altering substance of choice is not mushrooms or pot but caffeine, which they consume in rather enormous quantities. Erowid, they joke, is fueled by Mountain Dew.

Erowid accepts no advertising, and Earth and Fire's shoestring budget is based solely on contributions. Though their site receives outside donations, Earth and Fire have no institutional support, and no trust funds to draw from. For the last few years, nearly half of their costs were floated by Bob Wallace, employee number nine at Microsoft and a strong supporter of psychedelic research.

But Wallace died unexpectedly in his San Rafael home in the fall of 2002, and Erowid's coffers are now basically empty.

The couple are trying to motivate themselves to fund-raise. "One of the positive things about being broke is that we don't feel comfortable asking for money until we don't have any," Earth jokes.

Earth and Fire first met in high school near Minneapolis. Fire prefers not to talk on record about her family, but Earth explains that his father was an engineer who filled their house with computers way back in the 1970s. His dad was committed to lifelong learning and believed that people should hang out with folks of widely different ages. He also believed that Coca-Cola makes you smarter.

He encouraged the neighborhood kids to hang out with him at their house, and calmed their somewhat puzzled parents with the promise that the kids' grades would go up -- but only if they were allowed to drink as much Coke as they desired. He was usually right.

From the get-go, Earth developed a logical and fiercely independent turn of mind. But he was not a rebel, and in junior high, he was actively critical of drug use. The only stoner in his class was a jerk, and that kid's older brother had stolen Earth's bicycle. "So the model I had was that people who did drugs were losers and thieves." This view was confirmed by the Reagan-era "Just Say No" messages saturating the educational system.

Then one day, Earth's health teacher claimed that human beings were the only animals stupid enough to use drugs.

This contradicted a Science News story Earth had recently read about belligerent African elephants tearing through large structures in order to get their snouts into booze. "I started to realize that the information I was getting was . . ."

"Tangential to the truth," says Fire.

During senior year, Earth was asked by his fellow student-council members to help man the door at the freshman dance.

To spice up the evening, the council president suggested they % smoke pot together. Earth was shocked.

Asking around, he soon discovered that most of the top students in his class had experimented with cannabis but didn't want him to know about their delectation because of his hard-ass stance on the issue.

Earth had pierced through one of the many falsehoods presented by prohibitionist propaganda, which is that balanced and successful people don't use illicit psychoactives.

Earth and Fire started going out after high school, when both of them attended a small university in Florida where they majored in humanities. ( Earth, who later designed scientific databases, had no interest in doing computer science; the computers he had at home were much better than those at school. ) It wasn't until after they graduated that the couple took acid -- or, in Earth's typically more exacting description, "a random piece of paper that I was given and told was LSD." They briefly returned to Minnesota, where they felt self-consciously freaky in their embroidered jeans and long hair. So they decided to move to the Bay Area, where they could be, as Earth puts it, "somewhat conservative normal people."

It was 1994, and the Bay Area was riding high on the combined energies of the Internet boom, the rave scene and an increasingly self-conscious psychedelic revival.

Earth and Fire met large numbers of psychedelic users who broke the usual stereotypes. Earth once again confronted the lesson of his student-council year. "I encountered people who were dynamic, interesting and creative intellectuals -- successful people who told me that I should try taking these things.

This was dissonant with the government's information." ( This, by the way, is how Earth talks. )

In order to resolve that dissonance, Earth and Fire started researching, and soon found themselves hooked -- not on the drugs, but on the work. "The world is full of psychoactives," says Fire. "When you see that it's not just LSD and heroin and cocaine, that there are plants everywhere, you start to realize how deep the field is, and how much information there is to keep track of. You also realize how lacking the government information is. Not only was the minimal data we were getting on the Web contradictory to government sources, but it was contradictory to itself."

Their desire to organize and provide access to such a vast and multifaceted field of data led them to found Erowid in 1995. "Each person on the planet has something that fits them," says Fire, who serves as Erowid's designer and information architect and writes many of the site's basic pages. "Very quickly after starting this project, it became clear that it fit me. In college I found it difficult to get excited about focusing on one discipline for the rest of my life. Erowid is extremely interdisciplinary, so it has allowed me to follow my interests in chemistry, botany, history, anthropology and law."

Earth explains that Erowid satisfied an archival urge he traces back to Dungeons & Dragons, which he once played religiously. The role-playing game exploits the fetish for mapping and collecting stuff and presents, like drug lore, a curious balance of the fantastic and the technical. Fire also used to write stories with her friends and draw detailed pictures of the floor plans of the characters' homes. "It was very D&D but from a different angle."

"From a girlie angle," Earth adds.

"It wasn't that girlie."

But it was geeky.

Earth calls the commonality "an idle-ish, paperwork, detail-oriented kind of systems thinking -- a kind of externalization of memory. That's a huge part of what Erowid is. There is no way to keep track of that amount of information without a robot assistant." In other words, arranging and programming a good database actually makes the information more intelligent.

Initially, the Erowid robot had the modest goal of supplementing Hyperreal, then the largest purveyor of drug data online.

The couple were particularly drawn to obscure and highly technical information about extraction techniques, alkaloid contents and improvements in psilocybin cultivation. In 1996, the administrators for Hyperreal ceased maintaining the site, and within two years, Erowid moved onto the Hyperreal server and absorbed the older site, instantly doubling its traffic.

Though another site, called the Lycaeum, also provides a healthy, if wilder, brew of data ( at www.lycaeum.org ), and scores of sites devote themselves to individual compounds, Erowid comes closest to a comprehensive archive of contemporary psychoactive-drug information.

It's not an easy place to be. The couple are perpetually overwhelmed by the need to manage, update and publish a torrent of information. "It doesn't take an informed person five minutes to find huge gaps," says Earth. Their tobacco and caffeine vaults are tiny, and the MDMA FAQ is horribly out of date. Large tracts of their site lie fallow. "Areas like 'Ask Erowid,' where visitors can ask questions that aren't addressed on the site, are a source of unending suffering," says Fire. "Months go by without a question being answered. If I think about that, I start to feel sick."

But Erowid now has more-pressing demands.

E-mails from emergency medical technicians and physicians attest that Erowid has saved lives, and scores of health professionals have made the site their primary online source when dealing with unfamiliar drug problems.

And young adults are turning to it in droves. "When we first started, we were interested in documenting the cutting edge of information about psychoactives," says Fire. "That had to change as it became clear that people were using Erowid in a way we had not originally intended.

Not having the basic background information seemed dangerous in some ways." The flip side of this public service is a mountain of responsibility -- pressure that makes for the sort of high-minded workaholism that, combined with empty coffers, can easily lead to burnout.

Paranoia also waits in the wings.

Though the couple keep the site free from the sort of tasty bits useful to law enforcement, and will literally turn away from conversations that tell them more than they want to know about individuals involved in manufacture and supply, Earth and Fire sometimes fear they will get harassed simply out of spite.

Along with mistaking Earth and Fire for ravenous drug fiends, people often assume that they're radical libertarians on the issue of drug legalization. "No controls?" counters Earth. "That seems crazed to me. I like government controls in a lot of ways. I think stop signs at four-way intersections are fantastic." What concerns the couple is how prohibition distorts the understanding of our world's psychoactive reality. "Consciousness is a chemically mediated process," says Earth. "The pretense of the drug war is that, if we could just get rid of all these crazy chemicals, people wouldn't be faced with the choice of whether to take strong psychoactives. In fact, today I can buy all manner of antidepressants, anxiolytics and stimulants. From a very early age, we are faced with caffeine, which our society only pretends isn't a powerful psychoactive."

And we ain't seen nothing yet. According to Earth, we are now witnessing the early stages of what will be an explosion of more or less approved mind-altering technologies -- not just drugs, but powerful digital technologies as well. "In the next 20 years, we will be faced with some very sticky issues.

By oversimplifying the complicated moral, ethical and medical questions surrounding such technologies, the authorities infantilize the general public.

They don't provide tools for people to make rational choices.

Instead they manipulate emotion through fear. They present a model where there is only a single answer."

Earth and Fire are the first to admit that Erowid's philosophy is a gamble. "There isn't anything that I don't question about our work," Earth admits. "Every piece of information that we put up is potentially misusable." Dangerous recipes and "pseudo-facts" permeate the site. But Earth and Fire argue that important discussions should not be limited by the specter of what an uncorked or foolish person might do in its vicinity. "People do stupid things no matter what," says Fire. "The drug war started long before the Internet, and there's no reason to believe that people's actions have become more stupid due to the online availability of information about psychoactives."

Still, Earth readily admits that one of Erowid's major problems is that crackpot or out-of-date documents, included for the sake of diversity or historical interest, could easily be misinterpreted by a naive user as gospel writ. One of the main goals of Erowid 3.0, a massive upgrade that the couple are coding this summer, is to provide users with quick in-house ratings of documents as well as a way to track their history and origin.

But the real issue is not the quality of Erowid's data, which is largely published elsewhere and which even critics like Boyer acknowledge is pretty high. The real issue concerns the cultural consequences of creating a handy, one-stop online database of such tantalizing lore. The experience reports, for example, are a veritable Penthouse Forum of psychoactive escapades -- a "virtual peer group" in Boyer's terms, and one that certainly encourages use.

But prohibition eggs people on, too. David Franklin, a counselor at a private high school in Richmond, California, who works with at-risk kids, tells the story of two boys who decided to try pot simply because they knew they were getting a fish story. "A lot of kids realize that they've been given false information about drugs," says Franklin. "They don't know what's a lie or what's a truth.

They think everything is false." Unlike the government, Franklin believes that, when presented with real options and solid information, kids are generally able to make good decisions.

He was once faced with a depressed 15-year-old girl who wanted to try LSD. Along with explaining the potential dark side of acid, he sent her to Erowid to read about other people's experiences. After poring through the material, she decided that her visit to electric ladyland could wait.

Even Boyer admits that online information may turn off as many potential partiers as it turns on. At NIDA's behest, he is currently studying the relationship between the Internet and illicit drug use among at-risk kids. So far, the results are ambiguous. "We've had people who are not drug users read about Salvia divinorum and thought it was cool and started using it. By the same token, we've had people who used to snort Ritalin get on the Web, find out that it was bad, and quit."

The role the Internet plays in psychoactive use is also complicated by the steady trickle of new designer drugs, or "research chemicals" as Erowid calls them, many of which, like 2C-I, modify known psychoactive molecules. Because of this close resemblance, most of these substances are, arguably, restricted under the Analogue Act of 1986, which prohibits drugs that are "substantially similar" to scheduled compounds. Given the vagueness of this language, though, a steady stream of quasi-legal powders provide highs that stay one step ahead of the DEA's scheduling process.

Often based on the chemist Alexander Shulgin's magisterial research work with his wife, Ann, in their catalogs of firsthand experiences, PiHKAL and TiHKAL, these chemicals begin their life circulating through "boutique markets" or what Fire calls "family networks" of dedicated psychonauts. Some of the more fun ones then move into a larger gray market, where they overlap or supplement established club drugs.

As with the well-known ( and loved ) 2C-B, synthesized by Shulgin in 1974 but not marketed until the late 1980s, these more popular compounds often become controlled substances themselves. In 2002, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DiPT ( a.k.a. "Foxy" ) and the obscure but venerable AMT all wound up scheduled alongside acid and heroin.

The role that information plays in this cycle is, as Earth might say, nontrivial. Early on, potential users need to know that such substances exist, and are reportedly interesting, before they face the task of buying them online or getting a chemist friend to synthesize them. By providing information about these compounds, especially in the pivotal matter of dosage, Erowid inevitably drives the culture.

A few years ago, the couple decided to label new research chemicals with a fat yellow biohazard symbol to indicate to potential psychonauts that, given the paucity of data, they were taking their brains in their own hands. To Erowid's considerable chagrin, some gray-market vendors began using the very same symbol to hype their latest wares.

Clearly, online drug information is another one of those escaped genies that are now ravaging consensus reality.

The best hope -- and the one that motivates Earth and Fire -- is to force the evolution of intelligence through good data, an ethos of responsibility and courage, and a seductive culture of critical thinking. "The belief that got us started and carried us forward is that everybody should have access to the same information," says Fire. "Then we can actually discuss what's true and not, the problems and benefits.

But if law is working off one set of data, and users on their lore, and physicians on journals that no one can afford to subscribe to, then there's no way to integrate the data and make better decisions."

In any case, prohibition will never be the same. Erowid has already forced government sources like NIDA and ONDCP to become more sophisticated as they face a widening credibility gap with young people. In 2002, Earth and Fire were flabbergasted to receive an invitation to speak at a small NIDA conference on "Drugs, Youth, and the Internet." The couple felt that the meetings, though surreal, went well. During one discussion about possible collaborations between NIDA and Erowid, one NIDA researcher argued strongly that the two groups should not work together.

Such collaboration, he said, might ruin Erowid's reputation.
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US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Authors: Ritt Goldstein*


The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.

The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity".

Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the Patriot Act, there is potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens.

As with the Patriot Act, TIPS is being pursued as part of the so-called war against terrorism. It is a Department of Justice project.

Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.

A pilot program, described on the government Web site http://www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage. Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people.

Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states. According to a 1992 report by Harvard University's Project on Justice, the accuracy of informant reports is problematic, with some informants having embellished the truth, and others suspected of having fabricated their reports.

Present Justice Department procedures mean that informant reports will enter databases for future reference and/or action. The information will then be broadly available within the department, related agencies and local police forces. The targeted individual will remain unaware of the existence of the report and of its contents.

The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted.

At state and local levels the TIPS program will be co-ordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which

was given sweeping new powers, including internment, as part of the Reagan Administration's national security initiatives. Many key figures of the Reagan era are part of the Bush Administration.

The creation of a US "shadow government", operating in secret, was another Reagan national security initiative.
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* Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He has lived in Sweden since 1997, seeking political asylum there, saying he was the victim of life-threatening assaults in retaliation for his accountability efforts. His application has been supported by the European Parliament, five of Sweden's seven big political parties, clergy, and Amnesty and other rights groups.

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US med-pot courtroom victory
by Daniel Forbes and Dana Larsen (23 Mar, 2004) Appeal court rules that feds cannot bust non-commercial med-pot grow ops.

On December 16, 2003, American medical marijuana patients won a major court victory. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government has no authority to arrest or charge those who possess and grow medical pot in a state which allows it, as long as no selling is involved.

The decision came as the result of a lawsuit filed against Attorney General John Ashcroft and DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson in October 2002.

The lawsuit, launched by medical marijuana patients Angel McClary Raich and Diane Monson, plus Raich's two anonymous caregiver growers, charged that Ashcroft and Hutchinson exceeded their authority by having their agents seize privately-grown medical cannabis from California patients and caregivers.

Raich suffers from an inoperable brain tumor and wasting syndrome, and credits cannabis with freeing her from her wheelchair. Monson suffers from a degenerative spinal condition. Raich sued after her six-plant grow – apparently a major threat to Homeland security – had been destroyed by federal agents.

The panel of judges agreed, two to one, that the feds have no jurisdiction because "the intrastate, non-commercial cultivation, possession and use of marijuana, for personal medical purposes on the advice of a physician is, in fact, different in kind from drug trafficking."

The ruling covers the seven states in the Ninth Circuit that have passed medical marijuana laws: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. Federal agents who make arrests for possession or cultivation of non-commercial medical pot in these states will be in contempt of court.

Legal issues

Federal prosecutors have traditionally claimed that federal anti-pot laws automatically override state laws which allow cannabis to be grown and used for medical reasons.

The Raich decision is a rare example of a court questioning the federal government's power to regulate drug trafficking under the so-called "commerce clause" of the US Constitution. The entire Controlled Substances Act (CSA) derives its constitutional authority from this clause. Federal prosecutors typically stretch the term "commerce" to include growing personal marijuana at home.

The ruling means that the underpinning of the modern American drug war, the CSA, was found to be unconstitutional, at least in part. "It's the first encroachment on the CSA in its almost 33 years," said David Michael, one of the Raich attorneys. "Never before has it been tinkered with by an appellate court."

Should the decision survive review by the full Ninth Circuit, as seems likely, then the feds will no doubt appeal to the Supreme Court. Conservatives on the Supreme Court who have long sought to limit federal interference in state matters will have to tie their own prior rulings in knots not to uphold this ruling.

This court ruling will also have an impact in the upcoming combined appeal of the Santa Cruz Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) and the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative (OCBC). WAMM does not sell marijuana, instead sharing it, and so they should be covered by this ruling. However, the OCBC sold their med-pot to patients, so the outcome of their appeal is by no means certain.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas pretty much called for patients to bring it on in his 2001 opinion striking down the strict medical necessity defense in the original OCBC case. Perhaps this time the Supremes won't dodge the overarching issues of commerce, states' rights and a citizens right to remain free from pain and suffering – the "underlying constitutional issues" that in 2001 Justice Thomas deferred to another day.

Referring to Justices Thomas and Scalia's prior efforts to limit federal control of commerce, another Raich/Monson lawyer, Randy Barnett, wrote in the National Review, "If this case eventually goes to the Supreme Court, we will learn whether the more conservative Justices who developed this doctrine have the courage of their convictions when it applies to activities of which they may disapprove."


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WESTERN AUSTRALIA EASES RULES ON CANNABIS

CANBERRA - Western Australia has become the second state to decriminalise cannabis in a bid to reduce the police and courts workload and divert more users to counselling.

Possession of small amounts of cannabis is already decriminalised in South Australia, and in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory - both self-governing, but still subject to federal Parliament.

The new WA laws, which came into effect yesterday, are part of a growing trend to ease prosecutions for cannabis possession, which make up by far the largest drug caseload for Australia's law agencies.

Although no Government has accepted arguments for the legalisation of the drug, numerous reports and studies have recommended its removal from criminal sanctions. New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland still treat cannabis possession as a criminal offence, but give police wide discretion.

The new WA laws provide for fines of up to A$150 ( $170 ) and compulsory drug education classes for people caught with up to 30g of cannabis, or a A$200 fine for growing two plants.

As in South Australia, the far more potent hydroponically grown plants remain illegal, and dealing is still a criminal offence. In SA, fines of up to A$150 may be imposed on people caught with less than 100g grams or one non-hydroponically grown.

The Liberal Opposition has condemned the new laws and has promised to repeal them when it is returned to power.



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This next article/report comes from a site I often go to called erowid.org. Its a report written by a man who took a legal drug (in America, in australia its illegal) called salvia divinorum, which is a plant. I wouldn't normally post something like this but I found this particular one interesting, funny and a good read. Enjoy.

(Warning: Get comfortable. It is possible that the Bible is shorter than this report, though I’ve not actually done a word count.)

The evening started great: my package came in the mail, and I was delighted. I ordered a bunch of stuff… wormwood, yohimbe bark, morning glory seeds, baby Hawaiian woodrose seeds, the Blend, and with it all came a small sample of salvia 5x leaves.

Normally, my wife and I go to a friend’s house on Wednesday to watch TV and eat dinner, but I had a phone call to make at 9:30, and didn’t feel especially social anyway, so I’d decided to stay home and do some accounting work on my computer. Getting the package was a bonus in this respect; I figured while she was away and I had the flat to myself, I might as well play with all these new toys.

Sitting at my computer, I figured it couldn’t hurt to smoke a bowl of Diviner’s Three to see if this herbal shit was for real or not. I honestly didn’t expect anything to happen, given my rather regular use of that OTHER herb, but I was actually pleasantly surprised: I did indeed get a buzz, and it was a very pleasant (if strong/harsh) smoke! It was mostly a body buzz – the physical sensations of being on a light (one-three tokes) grass buzz, but none of the mental side effects: physically stoned, mentally sober. It was a nice, enjoyable feeling, and I recall a swell of relief – in time, I betcha this would very adequately replace pot as my relaxation-drug-of-choice. I began to wonder at the possibilities… maybe I should get some raw dagga flowers, maybe I should immediately order more of this shit… it was cool and I was happy. It wasn’t exactly the same as grass – if grass were coke, this was a root beer; different flavors, one a bit more potent than the other, but both brownish carbonated liquids that will quench the thirst for such.

I finished my work faster than expected… surprisingly so, considering that I was kinda stoned here. I figured that since I had a few minutes (it was 9:18 when I closed Quicken) and some actual cannabis, I should take a hit to celebrate. I did so, and didn’t get any higher. Hm. Suddenly, my memory knocked on the back of my brain and whispered, “Hey, dude. Why don’t you smoke a bowl of this new blend with a little Salvia 5x sprinkled in it? You are done with your work, after all…”

And this struck me as a very good idea. I did just that, putting the Salvia in the bottom of the bowl and the blend at the top. Most of the bowl got me only a little higher – the last hit, which was almost pure Salvia 5x, did… something else. I dunno what it was – it wasn’t stoned, it wasn’t drunk, it was somewhere in the middle and also something foreign, and I was left just looking at the ashes in my pipe and marveling at the fact that this was A) cheap, and B) delivered to my house through the mail without any fear that The Law would have anything to say about it. This was all new and different, and naturally, wondering how far this herbal shit can go, I decided that it would be an even better idea to really “open her up” and see what it could show me.

I packed about two hits worth of pure Salvia 5x into the pipe…

(We interrupt this story for an important message from our sponsor.)

Kids: Do NOT do this. Like, EVER.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.)

…and took the first hit. I was somehow able to hold it in for a bit, and I can distinctly remember thinking, “Whoa. WHOA!” to myself. I began to sweat. I felt like I was floating. I had roomspin, not nauseating like with alcohol, but not nearly as slow either - in order to look at something specific, my eyes had to re-center on the object about ten times every single second, whereas with alcohol they would have to readjust about once a second. But I was still fully in control of my mental faculties. I was elated. This shit was FOR REAL, man.

A few minutes later, I took the second hit. This was a great big massive hit, as most of the Salvia was singed and warm now, and much more conducive to burning. When I let off the carb on my glass pipe, I got a lungful of smoke that was far beyond my expectations. Under normal circumstances (i.e., with grass) I would have coughed up 1.48 lungs at this point, but somehow, SOMEhow, I managed to hold this in. It was a struggle, and I was going to win. In fact, my last memory before the shit completely destroyed the fan was of resting my arms on the desk, staring into the pipe’s bowl, and fighting to keep this hit in.

And then, life as I had come to know and understand it over the last 28 years shattered utterly and completely, with no warning whatsoever.

In less time than it takes to comprehend, my consciousness – my sense of self, my personality, my five senses and the things those senses perceive to make the cohesive whole that I understood as reality (including my desk, my body, my computer screen) all of it - instantly shattered into approximately 1000 pieces.

Vertical pieces, at that.

There were now 1000 me’s, each only able to perceive and interact with 1/1000th of my life and reality in and of themselves, each having individual thoughts and ideas… and this was simply too much for my mind to handle, I think. In response to this abrupt overload, “I” – my “internal” person, the guy who is constantly making a running commentary inside my head of everything that is going on, the person talking to you now – settled into only one of the 1000 different me’s that I had become. I was aware of the other 999 as separate entities… it was a little like being one member of a team. If my eyesight could be compared to a monitor display, then I could only see a vertical sliver one pixel wide (for lack of a better way to phrase it) of my reality. I could only feel 1/1000th of my body – one of the wafer-thin slices in the middle. I was only able to hear, touch, or otherwise experience 1/1000th of life, and it was only a little sliver so thin that light could easily pass through it.

I could not hear – everything was as quiet as I’d imagine outer space to be. Time stopped. Everything was black except for that one vertical sliver of different shades of brown (I must have been facing my desk). This was all that remained of my world, and I remember thinking that I was dead.

But I couldn’t be dead if I could at least think this. There was hope. So, being a very physical person, I decided to take a deep breath – this is usually the first step used to ground someone. But I couldn’t breathe… more importantly, I didn’t breathe, just like I don’t fly or I don’t have six arms. I tried to turn my head to my right, just face a different direction… something, anything physical just to prove that I was still alive. And then things got even stranger.

I realized, at this point, that we issue commands from our brain in order to do nifty things, like moving our bodies. I do not consciously recognize these commands as separate activities, and I doubt many of us do - when I want to move my arm, I just Do It. But they are there, these commands, and I understood that I had issued that command to turn around, but the response to this command was strange indeed. I was dimly aware that the 1/1000th of myself all the way to the right did “his” part by turning just a little bit. The part next to him followed suit.

The horrifying reality of this began to set in: If I wanted to turn around, we ALL had to turn around. Oh, hell.

I was relieved that the my particular sliver was at least partially in control of the rest - the Drill Sergent of this platoon, so to speak. I had just given the order to turn my head, and all of the slivers were obeying… but they were obeying in sequence, instead of all at once. It was like a line of dominoes falling. I could hear a low rumbling sound, getting louder and higher, as those on my right complied and my “turn” to do my part in moving my head was coming up fast. That sound was some kind of Doppler effect in my brain – it was as if someone had taped my apartment’s ambient sounds and was playing them far too slowly, but the playing speed would increase just a notch every time one of my slivers did his part. The fraction of a second when it WAS my turn, I did my part, and everything for at least an instant sounded like it should… and then, to my left, I could hear the sounds of my apartment speeding up as the slivers of myself on that side also contributed in the moving action.

After about five, maybe ten minutes, we were all done and it was silent again. My sliver of life was just a touch different. We had all moved my head just a little bit to the right. Go ME (or ME’S, as it were)! Another low rumble to my right told me that phase two (of about one million) was underway, and we were all going to move a little bit more. This second “wave” took about as long as the first – roughly ten minutes. Hell, this wasn’t so bad. I figured at this rate, we’d be done moving my head in about two days.

…which is right about when I panicked.

All I could see, hear, or otherwise experience was this one little sliver of life. A line on a screen, a split second for every ten minutes where sound made sense. Nothing else existed for me, outside of a dim awareness that there were a lot more of me, and we were all in the same predicament. I remember thinking - as wave after wave of my tiny slivers of motion and sound washed over and around me from right to left - that I had well and truly screwed the entire pooch here. I somehow had managed to completely and irrevocably destroy my brain on my first voyage out. I did the mental equivalent of shooting a gall-bladder sized hole in my thought meats, and I would never be the same. I would never learn how to program in C, or understand music as it played, or walk, or talk, or have a conversation with my wife, or have sex, or anything else, ever again. This Was It© - all I had were memories of how I once was.

I let out a scream. Except that I didn’t: My mind issued the command to let out a scream, and it was now in the queue… to be executed after the rest of us finished turning our collective head.

This is already long-winded, so I’ll spare the mortifying fucking eternity that transpired after that. Unable to move unless it was my turn, unable to interrupt this action, feeling the absolute dread that is being utterly trapped in this sliver-of-a-consciousness and out of time and synch with the rest of existence. Wondering if this was permanent; and if so, feeling the terrible, terrible guilt of leaving my wife with a vegetable wearing a wedding ring. I could feel emotion, but couldn’t express it at all… all I could do was think, and I seemed to have about six eternities worth of thought as my sole possession.

I would have gladly shat myself in public if I thought I could have even a chance of getting out of this.

…but then, a ray of hope.

I began to notice my sliver of existence widening. With each pass, the sliver either to the right or left of me would join with my own – there were less me’s, and mine was absorbing the others’ thought processes and perceptions, making theirs my own. About five or six passes went by before I realized this, but realize it I did: my sliver was now five or six pixels wide, instead of one. I could see flesh tone, and green and yellow amongst the brown… what was that? Something’s coming together, here….

Things began to quicken. Each wave took less and less time – from ten minutes to five per wave, and gradually decreasing. When I was about 30% “put back together,” I heard something… something that sounded as I remembered sound used to be so long ago. Sounded a bit like… “aaaaAAAAAAHhh…”

Then I realized it was me. That scream that was in the queue? It finally made it out, if only as a retarded whimper.

Things were really starting to come into focus now. I was far from all right, but my field of perception (all senses) was wide enough for me to recognize things. Years, I repeat, YEARS, had quite literally passed since that time, long ago, when I decided to smoke some Salvia, and I felt every second of them. But in all that time, I seem to only have turned my head a little bit, so much so that I was still staring at the pipe in my hand. I issued the command to look up at the screen of my computer… this happened, albeit in slow motion (it took roughly a minute, but this was more than acceptable to me at the time – in fact, I thought I was the Flash). I tried to put the pipe down – eventual success was mine. I sat there until I was about halfway back together, still aware that there were five hundred more slivers of myself, but that they were all falling into place at what seemed to be record time.

That’s when I realized that I was still alive, that I was actually one person being re-assembled, and that I had things to do… namely, I had to pick my wife up from our friend’s house. Oh, crap, I had to pick my wife up from my friend’s house!! She wasn’t there! How late was it? I thought she would get a ride at about eleven o’clock, when she found herself unable to contact me (because I was damned SURE I was unreachable for quite some time!). Dear god, where was she? How many weeks have I been here? I peered at the monitor, and was shocked – SHOCKED to see my reflection in the glare shield: I had not aged. My beard hadn’t even gotten longer. I looked at the time in my system tray.

It read 9:22pm.

I double clicked on the clock… it still said 9:22pm, and it was still November 19th, 2003. I squinted in disbelief (this took a minute). I picked up my cell phone (eventually) and managed to remember how to check the time and date on it. It confirmed everything: in all this time, all these days, hours, or years that I’d been trapped within a piece of myself, terrified but unable to do anything about that - I had been gone a grand total of about four minutes. Probably less, now that I think about it.

I (or, more appropriately, “Me and the Gang”) were suddenly aware of being soaked in sweat, and burning up. I decided that we should take a walk in the cool night air, smoke a cigar… the things we normally do, just to prove to ourselves that things were at least marginally okay and that we were still alive and somewhat functional. If it was difficult going down the stairs, then pulling the cigar out of my pocketed tin and lighting it was the equivalent to a monkey trying to solve a calculus derivative. Somehow, we prevailed, though. I made it about a block when the majority of myself was reassembled, and I noticed that most everything I saw was tilted about forty five degrees. I stopped walking when I noticed that, and then realized that the problem was that my head was tilted to the right. Everything else was fine. After correcting this, I really started to feel like I was sobering up, and headed back to my apartment to lay down. I was exhausted. That lying bastard of a clock may have suggested that I was only sitting at my desk for two minutes, but I had been there for goddamned years, without rest.

For the next hour or so, I was kind of stoned. This actually felt really, really nice. Come to think of it, EVERYTHING felt nice. Everything was actually great. I did eventually pick my wife up, and never have I so richly enjoyed driving on a cool night with the wind in my hair and the music playing. I was able to tell her a little bit about it, but nothing like the detail that’s involved here.

I slept like a baby.

It’s about lunchtime here, and I’m going to grab some eats, but I have thought about little else this entire day. I am not, as my story might suggest, completely wigged out or turned off by this event. In fact, I am – oddly – thankful for the experience, and happy/upbeat about the whole thing. I got my ass handed to me, sure, but that was my fault completely… it seems that the relative weakness of the smoking blend (and, hell, actual cannabis itself) threw me off, and I oh-so-completely underestimated how much business even a little Salvia 5x means as a result. But it has, at least for the moment, changed the hell out of me. What I experienced was as utterly remarkable as it was horrifying, and at least for the moment, I’m convinced that my timeline will forever be separated into two parts – before this trip, and after. I’m not quite “back” yet – I seem to have most of my faculties back, but I’m not as instinctually comfortable with them as I recall being – I get the impression that I’m driving a car or a mech, instead of just moving my body around.

But I’m here, and I’m enjoying everything in my life in a way I never did before. All the little things… the morning cup of coffee, conversations with co-workers, the ride in to work, hell, even the work itself are fulfilling in ways they never were. Guess you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till its gone.

Thus endeth the longest trip report in history. If you’ve made it this far, you are a trooper indeed, and you should request… nay, DEMAND, a sucker from the receptionist on the way out. ;-)
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CANADIANS TO BUSH: HOPE YOU LOSE, EH

According To A New Poll, Only 15 Per Cent Of Us Would Vote For The President

Maybe it's that smug little smile.

His penchant for fantastically expensive military photo-ops. Or the swaggering, belt-hitching walk that cries out for a pair of swinging saloon doors. And though, God knows, we have too many of our own syntactically challenged politicians to be casting stones, shouldn't the leader of the free world know that "misunderestimate" isn't a word?

Yes, we're cavilling, but clearly there is something about George W. Bush that gets under the skin of Canadians. After all, vehemently disagreeing with the policies of American presidents is almost a national pastime.

There has to be another explanation for our extreme reaction, the desire afoot in the land to see him turfed from office. That and the unprintable sentiment about him and the horse he rode in on. Even before we know whom he will be running against this fall, Canadians have made their decision.

Only 15 per cent, according to an exclusive new Maclean's poll, would definitely cast a ballot for Bush if they had the opportunity. And if Americans remain almost evenly divided -- some 50 per cent approve of his performance in the White House and he's running neck and neck with his likely Democratic challengers -- there is no such dithering on this side of the border.

Just 12 per cent of us feel Canada is better off since he took office, and only a third of respondents will admit to liking the world's most powerful man, even just a little bit.

It's an antipathy that appears to extend far beyond our traditional coolness towards Republicans, says Michael Marzolini, chairman of Pollara Inc., the Toronto-based opinion research firm that conducted the national survey.

With a political spectrum that skews to the left of America's -- legalized same-sex marriage and the promise of looser marijuana laws being the most recent, and in some quarters, celebrated examples -- we've generally perceived Democratic presidents as being more in tune with our values.

But where Ronald Reagan and Bush the elder were at least grudgingly respected, Dubya is decidedly not.

Despite a spate of polls showing a broad desire for improved relations with the United States after the often rocky Chretien years, there is a sense that this administration isn't one we want to do business with. "These numbers really show the difficulty for Paul Martin," says Marzolini, the long-time pollster for the federal Liberal party. "He has to get closer to the Americans, but he can't get too close to George Bush. It's a fine balance." The intense sympathy Canadians felt following the attacks of 9/11 - -- something that manifested itself not just in acts of mourning and charity, but in a willingness to support whatever actions the U.S. deemed necessary -- has dissipated. In its place is a deep dislike of the bellicose new global reality, and a lingering distrust of Bush's motives.

It's evident even within sight of the frontier.

Stopping to take a picture of icy Niagara Falls on a recent frigid day, Mike Mitreveski tried to explain why he's uneasy about Bush. "I get a sense that he's in it for himself first and then the country," said the Windsor, Ont., graduate student. "And I worry that he's doing all of this stuff in Iraq for the oil industry.

He used to be part of it and has lots of high-ranking friends." David Kowalewski, an engineering consultant from Niagara Falls, Ont., says he initially supported Bush's foreign policy, but now has grave doubts. "I thought it was noble at first, but now they've gone security crazy." Life has changed for the worse in his community, said Kowalewski, citing long delays at the border, and the fallout for local businesses that depend on tourism.

A trio of physicians taking in the sights on a day off were no kinder to Bush. On sober reflection, all asked that their names not be used. "Please, someone, teach him how to pronounce nuclear," said one, a Toronto pediatrician. Another, an American who has lived on this side of the border for the past 14 years, said she understands why Canadians dislike so many of Bush's stances, even though she is troubled by the tone of the debate.

A doctor friend from the Netherlands provided a reminder that opinions of the President are often even harsher abroad. "In Amsterdam," she said, "we think he is kind of stupid."

On the humid night in August 2000 when George W. Bush officially became the Republican nominee for president, the thousands of delegates and reporters packed into a Philadelphia arena were given a peek at what party strategists planned to sell to the American people.

The beautifully realized infomercial was mostly shots of Bush at his Crawford, Tex., ranch, tending stock, mending fences, driving a vintage pickup truck with his spaniel perched on his lap, all the while talking about his vision of a big country with small-town values.

It was a persona lifted straight from a Hollywood Western. The likeable, soft-talking cowpoke who knows the value of an honest day's work and isn't afraid to take on the guys in the black hats when the town's in trouble. Reagan successfully mined the same vein for eight years.

And it's an image that continues to pay dividends for Bush, playing off his folksy, good-natured strengths, and positioning him as someone who might reasonably be excused for not reading newspapers or knowing the names of his foreign counterparts. Clearing brush on the back forty is a lot more man-of-the-people than weekending at the palatial family compound in Kennebunkport, Me.

But Canadians have never been that comfortable with the type of cowboys who take the law into their own hands.

Our frontier heroes were the scarlet-clad North West Mounted Police, not lone gunslingers. In a pre-9/11 world, when Bush was vowing to be a domestic-policy president, it didn't seem to matter that much. But over the past 2 1/2 years, his muscular commitment to protecting and advancing U.S. interests abroad -- unilaterally if allies and international bodies such as the UN fail to sign on -- has unsettled many around the world.

There is a burgeoning cottage industry of writers and analysts exploring the underpinnings and fallout of this new American "imperialism." In Canada, a country that has always fretted about being swallowed up, either territorially or culturally, by the behemoth to the south, the spectre of an expanding American Empire feeds a deep-seated paranoia.

At least for some.

David Frum, the Canadian author and pundit who spent 13 months working as a speech writer for Bush -- he is credited with co-authorship of the infamous "axis of evil" line -- says he doesn't believe polls that suggest a yawning chasm between American and Canadian perceptions of the President. "My contention is that the differences are much less dramatic than they are usually made out to be," he says. And if Bush is held in less esteem north of the border, adds Frum, it is largely because of the distorted lens the public sees him through. "The Canadian media have generally taken a very belittling approach to him. By and large, they do not take the terror problem very seriously, and they communicate that to public opinion."

Canadians might understandably prefer presidents who are reluctant to flex their global political power, either economically or militarily, says Frum, but when it comes to things that really matter, we should have the good grace to at least not stand in the way. "There's no expectation in Washington that Canada and the U.S. should agree on every issue. But they do, as a friend, expect to be given the benefit of the doubt on issues that they regard as essential to their security."

It's a point of view that many Canadians find difficult to swallow, given the dubious claims of weapons of mass destruction and hostile intentions that fuelled America's foray into Iraq. ( The Maclean's annual year-end poll found that 75 per cent of Canadians believe Ottawa was right to refuse to commit troops to Iraq, even if it annoyed our closest trading partner. ) Yes, we're friends and neighbours, but with feelings running so high, there is a danger that our distaste for the leader will spill over to the people he represents.

Clifford Krauss, Canadian correspondent for the New York Times, recently encountered two young boys on the street outside his Toronto home, holding a sign that read Honk if you hate President Bush! ( This is a school project. ) "I was shocked because of the word hate," says Krauss. "You'd never see a sign like that about Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic." It's a virulent strain of anti-Americanism that the Times reporter says he encounters more and more frequently. "I've experienced rude and prejudiced behaviour, just because I'm an American," says Krauss. "I've lived in countries in Latin America that have tricky relationships with the U.S., but I didn't expect that sort of thing here."

Truth is, we might well be the ones in need of a dose of perspective. With the Canadian political landscape now virtually emptied of leaders we feel passionately about -- either negatively or positively -- we might be guilty of transference. Our growing distaste for Bush is smug and more than a bit juvenile, argues Reginald Stuart, a Mount Saint Vincent University expert on U.S.-Canada relations, now in residence at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center. "When the Communists were in power, we dealt with Russian leaders that we disagreed vehemently with on some very fundamental issues," he notes.

Our worries that the Bush administration, viewed by the bulk of the Canadian public as overly religious and conservative, will somehow interfere with progressive social policies in this country ( the Maclean's year-end poll identified same-sex marriage and proposals to relax marijuana laws as new "wellsprings of national pride" ) are overblown, says Stuart. In Canada, there is still no surer kiss of death for a politician than caving into American pressure.

For decades now, we have alternately railed against, and revelled in, the generalized American ignorance of Canada. At the same time, we have prided ourselves on being one of our neighbour's harshest critics.

At the centre of our relationship is the conceit that so much of what we produce -- resources, goods, culture, people -- flows south, that America must really need us. Now, with the U.S. showing a willingness to stand alone and demand the obeisance due to the last remaining superpower, Canada, like the rest of the world, is caught up in an uncomfortable new reality.

Bush's repeated "with us or against us" declarations have made it clear that there are new, tougher requirements for being America's ally. And as long as he remains well-positioned for another four years in the White House, we may have to do our share of puckering up. Canadians know that. We just don't have to like it.
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IN ENGLAND last thursday marijuana was reclassified to a Class C drug. "What the hell does that mean?" I hear you ask. Well in England they have three classes of drugs, Class A, which includes really bad ones like Cocaine, Heroin and the like, Class B, which includes speed and Class C, which includes stuff like Valium, Steroids and now Cannabis. What this means is that in England you can no longer be arrested for carrying small amounts of marijuana around, or for smoking it in a private place. As soon as the law came into effect, cannabis cafe's opened around the country, well at least a few did. They are still sort of illegal but they believed that since police could no longer arrest you they would be OK. Time will tell at least in England, cause in Scotland they are tending to still take a hardline approach. As Canada enacts similar laws soon when their parliarment gets back into business, times will get very interesting. Maybe Australia will soon follow? We can only hope.
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