Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Zombie poison: death in the back yard




I'm not sure why this is -  I surely don't go looking for them - but strange stories like this one just seem to drop into my lap. Now, back in 1812 when I was a kid, we did things like smoke banana peels (after the Donovan song Mellow Yellow came out: "Elec-tric-al ba-na-na. . ."), nutmeg which turned out to paralyze the central nervous system, and tea leaves which just made us all sick. We were either too cheap to buy marijuana, or (in my case) had no idea where we were supposed to get it. I simply didn't know any drug dealers, so relied on my brother to bring hashish into the house when he came home from university. I didn't smoke up that many times, but it was far from a mellowing experience for me. I even hallucinated once, white fountains that I am SURE were not produced by cannabis. The strangest effect was the elongation of music, so that one phrase seemed to last about 5 minutes. In fact, I seemed to be able to make it last as long as I liked. Well. Mary Jane is pushing her way into the mainstream now, and becoming more and more acceptable for "medicinal" reasons, including anxiety and depression. You can even get it out of vending machines now, so WHY do people still do stupid things like eating noxious garden weeds to get high? Read on. . . 


Cornwall Seaway News

DEVIL'S SEED: Teens hospitalized after ingesting poisonous plant

Published on September 30, 2014

By Adam Brazeau

CORNWALL, Ontario - Public health officials and police in eastern Ontario are warning the public about a deadly plant that has sent several teens to the emergency room in the past few weeks.




© Kyle Walton

Jimsonweed.

And unlike other deadly toxins people take to get high this one grows wildly and locally.

The Eastern Ontario Health Unit (EOHU) issued a community safety alert on Sept. 29 after a Russell County teen was hospitalized for ingesting Datura stramonium, also known as 'Jimsonweed or Devil's Seed,' earlier in the month at a school.

OPP say the teen was spotted at a campus after school hours by faculty acting strangely and not feeling well. As police investigated the case, he was taken to the hospital.




On Sept. 26, provincial police confirmed the accused was intoxicated by the notorious plant. He has been charged with administering a noxious thing with intent - endanger life or cause bodily harm. The teen is scheduled to appear in L’Orignal Youth Court on October 29.

“Young people are not aware of the serious risk they’re taking," said Dr. Paul Roumeliotis, medical officer of health of the EOHU.

"Some of them may think of jimsonweed as a substitute for other drugs. Unfortunately, this could cost them their lives."

According to the EOHU, all parts of the plant are poisonous and contain a powerful hypnotic sedative as well as a high level of nitrate.

Symptoms usually occur within 30 to 60 minutes after ingestion and may continue for 24 to 48 hours or even longer.

Jimsonweed is described as odorous with pointed green leaves sprouts trumpet-shaped white or purple flowers, as well as a prickly pod filled with dozens of seeds.




Common effects include high fever, racing heart rate, blurry vision, hallucinations and delusions. More severely, the plant can also cause seizures and comas.

Roumeliotis urges parents and caregivers to speak with their children regarding the dangers posed by jimsonweed in order to prevent any further victims.

In 2007, over a dozen teens in the Cornwall area were hospitalizes after ingesting the hallucinogenic plant.

Search for Jimsonweed on www.omafra.gov.on.ca to learn more.

For additional information, contact the Addiction Services of the Cornwall Community Hospital at 613-936-9236 or toll free at 1 800 272-1937.

But hey, folks. There's more to this story, as there usually is. It struck me as idiotic beyond lunacy for kids to be ingesting this obviously-toxic substance. They deserve what they get, don't they? But when I saw the name datura, it rang some sort of ancient bell from 20 years ago, when I took an an anthropology class exploring the roots of indigenous medicine. Wade Davis! The Serpent and the Rainbow! The true cult of the zombie, in which people from Haiti and other spooky juju-infested lands were poisoned to induce a deathlike state, buried, and revived so as to appear to come to life again. All to prove the spectacular powers of the shaman. Along with the anaesthetizing venom of the puffer fish, datura was a crucial ingredient in zombification. Is that why kids are ripping noxious weeds out of their back yards and eating them, or smoking them, or whatever-it-is-they-do?


Home / ZOMBIE SCIENCE / WORLD BELIEFS / “SCARIEST” DRUG CREATES ZOMBIES

“SCARIEST” DRUG CREATES ZOMBIES

“SCARIEST” DRUG CREATES ZOMBIES



Posted by: ZRS Staff in WORLD BELIEFS May 20, 2013 1 Comment
Unlike corpses rising from the grave in George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead, Voodoo zombies are created through a mixture of drugging, religious ritual, and cultural belief.
After being put into a trance-like state that approximates a coma, victims are regularly fed the hallucinogenic drug scopolamine, derived from the Datura stramonium plant, otherwise known as jimsonweed, the zombie cucumber or the Devil’s weed.
Vice Magazine called scopolamine/Datura the scariest drug on the planet because of its ability to completely consume the mind of those who ingest it (see video below).
Webster University Professor Emeritus and Haitian scholar, Bob Corbett, had this to add:
“Eating the zombie cucumber keeps them in their zonked-out state, but otherwise they are just like animals in a pen and will do what they are told to do.  Mainly they’re used as slave labor.”
Corbett went on to emphasize that despite the effect of the drug Voodoo zombies have beating hearts, and normal blood flow and body temperature. They need to sleep and eat regular foods, and are not contagious, dangerous or aggressive in the slightest.


Here we have an example of taking something that has a kernel of truth in it - people being poisoned to render them docile or even make them appear dead - and stretching it in all sorts of bizarre directions. No doubt this has been a boon for the film industry, but it just has nothing to do with reality. Datura doesn't give you an appetite for human flesh - not as far as I know. It doesn't turn you all grainy and black-and-white and make you kill people with shovels. But the phenomenon of one-upping reality, of creating Boogiemen, is a very ancient one. I won't get into Slenderman (yet - I'll probably write about it sooner or later) and all the ludicrous superstitions that can completely disable the rational brain. But the progress of science and technology has done nothing to eradicate or even slow the viral spread of these terror-based beliefs. In fact, what with the internet, social media and other woeful ills of the 21st century, sick superstitious beliefs can rip through the culture like wildfire, damaging our young people most of all.

 So PLEASE do not go out into the back yard with scissors, unless you are planning on trimming the hedges over a very long period of time.



"Mellow Yellow"

I'm just mad about saffron
A-saffron's mad about me
I'm-a just mad about saffron
She's just mad about me

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow

I'm just mad about fourteen
Fourteen's mad about me
I'm-a just mad about a-fourteen
A-she's just mad about me

They call me mellow yellow
They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow




Born-a high forever to fly
A-wind-a velocity nil
Born-a high forever to fly
If you want, your cup I will fill

They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow

So mellow yellow

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase




They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow

Yes, saffron, yeah
I'm just-a mad about her
I'm-a just-a mad about-a saffron
She's just mad about me

They call it mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow (Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow

Oh, so yellow
Oh, so mellow

Donovan
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Welsh-singing voices: As the Deer Pants for the Water

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Monday, September 29, 2014

Lone outrider: Glen Allen's private battle








Glen Allen remembered in his own words
Blogger's note. I happened upon this, as so often is the case, while looking for something else. It was a piece I had seen before, reproduced on someone else's blog. I knew Glen Allen. We never met face-to-face, but we wrote to each other regularly for ten years while he went through storms that I can only imagine. How he functioned as well as he did, for as long as he did, is remarkable, and I strongly suspect the same could be said of Robin Williams.

 After being out of touch for years, I learned Glen's fate in 2005, when I was at the apogee of my own storm: I opened my daily paper and saw his picture under the obituaries. Having just taken a massive overdose, he had wandered out of a psychiatric ward in Toronto and passed out beside the railroad tracks in sub-zero December. How people die says something about the way they lived, and it struck me as oddly apropos that he died like some of the street people he understood and loved so well. 

 What I didn't know, because he never told me, is that he wasn't just a newspaper reporter but an award-winning print journalist, war correspondent, English teacher in China, volunteer in mental health services, radio producer for CBC's Morningside, and no doubt many other things he didn't think significant enough to mention. 

 This piece is very long, but I run it here without edits. Without a doubt, it is the best piece on depression, bipolar disorder and mental illness in general that I have ever read, and it is typical of Glen that he generously shared it even while struggling with his own recovery. Even in the throes of a consuming illness, Glen Allen had a certain unmistakeable quality of grace.



(The following story appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19.
1999, under the headline Angels of Madness. Glen Allen was found frozen
to death last week in Toronto.)

By Glen Allen

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in
a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic
and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. I am
climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.




Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.




It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)




I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.




Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were
reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there
would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to
see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.




And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.




All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.


.


But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.




Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.




Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.




The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?


 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
    It took me years to write, will you take a look



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