Wine Protects Women Against Dementia

• Drinking a small glass of wine a day can protect women against dementia, a new study has claimed.
  
  Research by academics at the University of Glasgow suggests that moderate alcohol consumption may improve the function of older women's brains.
  
  Doctors analysed the performance of more than 5,800 people aged between 70 to 82 in a range of memory and language tests.
  
  Although the results among male drinkers and non-drinkers were similar, women who consumed between one and seven units of alcohol a week performed significantly better than those who seldom drank or were teetotal.
  
  A unit of alcohol is a 125ml glass of wine at about 8% alcohol by volume. Current government guidelines recommend that women drink no more than two to three units per day and men no more than three to four.
  
  The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, concludes that drinking one to seven units of alcohol a week may delay cognitive decline and the onset of dementia, a degenerative condition that affects memory, attention, language and problem-solving.
  
  Scientists believe alcohol may stimulate the release of oestrogen in women, a hormone thought to protect the brain. However, the mechanism by which it is triggered is not fully understood.
  
  Alcohol is also associated with the release of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in memory.
  
  We were interested in exploring the effects of alcohol on memory, thinking and cognition, said David Stott, professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Glasgow.
  
  We found that modest amounts of alcohol in women seem to be associated with a delay in cognitive decline, such as speed of thought and how you use language and words. If these become serious, they can be signs of dementia.
  
  This is not an endorsement to drink to excess - large amounts of alcohol will damage your brain - but the occasional tipple may do you some good.
  
  After adjusting for factors such as smoking, body mass index and history of vascular disease, the volunteers from Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands, took part in a series of tests to assess memory and recognition. These were repeated over a three-year period.
  
  One involved participants remembering 15 images immediately after being shown them and again 20 minutes later. Women who drank at least three units of alcohol per week were consistently able to remember more images than teetotallers.

Drink and Blue Eyes

Did you know that being shy is correlated with having blue eyes? Neither did I. I found it out this week from Chris Dillow's Stumbling and Mumbling blog. That isn't so surprising, since this is one of the very best blogs around if you are interested in quirky research and new ideas. More surprising is that neither shyness nor blue eyes was really Dillow's subject. He was debating whether putting up alcohol prices made an impact on binge drinking.

Dillow had stumbled upon a University of Oslo paper by two economists - Jason Shogren and Eric Naevdal - that looks at the relationship between genetic variation and group social behaviour. The paper starts with the observation I began this article with. There is an association between having blue eyes and being shy. One study showed that in a sample of preschool children, 30 per cent of the boys with blue eyes fell into the category of socially wary compared with 3 per cent of those without blue eyes. And there is plenty of similar work.

Their next observation is that shy people are more likely to binge drink. Actually, most of the time, the economists don't call it binge drinking. They use a wonderful acronym - EDSS, standing for excessive drinking in social situations. EDSS is well known as a coping strategy for shyness.

Now, if there is a genetic cause, indirectly, behind much binge drinking, it is possible that you will see geographical concentrations of EDSS. You may, for instance, see more EDSS in blue-eyed Scandinavia. And so you do. Even more striking (because it eliminates climate from our list of suspects) is this. Which US states have the biggest problem with binge drinking? Correct. Prevalence of EDSS is in this order: North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana. And they are? Right again. The states with the largest proportion of citizens with Scandinavian ancestries.

This brings us on to the creation of social norms. As numerous experiments - and common sense - suggest, we copy the behaviour of others. And, in this copying, numbers matter. In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris shows how our personality is changed by our peer group. You gravitate to people like you and huddle together, but if there aren't enough people exactly like you, you work to fit in with a bigger, somewhat different group. Concentrations of those prone to binge drinking creates a group social norm in which EDSS is more acceptable. The behaviour therefore spreads.

Chocolate Wine

Heston Blumenthal, the Michelin-starred chef and kitchen chemist who gave the world egg and bacon ice-cream, has won another award for his latest Frankenstein food - warm chocolate wine.

The velvety, frothy drink is made by whisking a red dessert wine with sugar and chocolate.

A spokeswoman at the Conde Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Awards said that judges had been seduced by the unusual combination.Splicing grapes with cocoa beans and coming up with a surprising chocolate wine has proved a winning formula for Blumenthal, she said.

Chocolate wine, which dates back to 1710 and used to be made by whisking claret or port with sugar and chocolate, has been a favourite dessert at The Fat Duck, Blumenthal's restaurant, where it shares a place on the menu alongside other palate-puzzlers such as salmon poached in liquorice gel, snail porridge and mango and Douglas fir puree.

While other dishes are developed with the help of petri dishes and a dash of liquid nitrogen, Blumenthal uses a centrifuge to separate the solids in preparation for the chocolate wine.

Aspiring molecular gastronomists can attempt the dish at home by bringing the wine to the boil until it is a syrupy reduction. Adding grated chocolate and milk should produce a dessert with a difference.

Blumenthal is self-taught and has been appointed OBE for services to food. He is also almost certainly the only chef to have a scientific paper published on monoglutamate ribo-nucleotides in tomatoes.

The Fat Duck opened in 1995 and was awarded its third Michelin star in January 2004. Two years later Blumenthal was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of science by the University of Reading for his research, and was also admitted to the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The awards, which were held on Monday evening at the Marriott Hotel in Grosvenor Square, Central London, also featured categories including technology, sustainability, style, culture and aviation.

Chanel was honoured in the retail category for its revamped Rodeo Drive store in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. The facade features a milky Microglass edged in black steel, making it an architectural copy of the Chanel No 5 box. David Marks and Julia Barfield, the architects responsible for the London Eye, also won an innovation award for designing the Treetop Walkway, which opens at Kew Gardens next month.

How to make chocolate wine

- Bring wine to boil. Set it alight and allow flame to burn off. Boil until liquid becomes syrupy and reduces to 150ml

- Grate or finely chop chocolate and put to one side. In a separate pan, bring milk slowly to the boil, pour it over the chocolate and stir

- Add reduced wine to the chocolate milk, heat and froth using a whisk or hand blender. Serve immediately

Failure of the War Against Drugs

When President Nixon announced the beginning of the War on Drugs in 1971, the stated goal was to reduce illegal drug trade and to diminish demand for substances deemed immoral, harmful, dangerous, or undesirable. During the Nixon era, the goal was not to incarcerate and punish drug users, but to stop the drug trade and begin programs to help Americans reduce their dependence on narcotics. It was the only time that more funding went towards treatment than law enforcement.

But like many government programs that start with the best of intentions, the war became distorted by those seeking political gain through appearing tough on crime, and the anti-drug warriors turned their attention inwards. The end result has been the highest percentage of incarcerated Americans of any time in our history. Over 2.2 million people are behind bars, a quadrupling of our prison population, with over 37 million arrests since 1971 on non-violent drug charges. Worse yet, in the past three decades, the number of deaths related to drug overdoses has risen more than 540 percent.

The Federal Government's Household Survey on Drug Abuse, conducted annually, is the most commonly cited set of statistics on the prevalence of drug use. According to the latest surveys, about 12.7 million people have used some illegal drug in the last month, and perhaps 30 to 40 million have used some illegal drug within the last year. Of the 12.7 million who used illegal drugs in the last month, about 10 million are presumed to be casual drug users, and about 2.7 million are addicts.

The stated goals of current U.S. drug policy - reducing crime, drug addiction, and juvenile drug use - have not been achieved, even after nearly four decades, claims Jack A. Cole, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were at the beginning of the war on drugs. We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition.

The members of LEAP are far from the only voices asking for a fresh look at current drug laws and alternatives. Others include California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent calls to open the debate on legalizing marijuana (not to mention California's long-running battle with federal drug agencies over medical marijuana), to longtime anti-marijuana advocate Donald Tashkin, whose three decades of research were funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Early on, when our research appeared as if there would be a negative impact on lung health, I was opposed to legalization because I thought it would lead to increased use and that would lead to increased health effects, Tashkin says. But at this point, I'd be in favor of legalization. I wouldn't encourage anybody to smoke any substances. But I don't think it should be stigmatized as an illegal substance. Tobacco smoking causes far more harm. And in terms of an intoxicant, alcohol causes far more harm.

And for the first time since the War on Drugs began, the majority of Americans also support the legalization of marijuana. A national Zogby poll, released just two weeks ago, found that 52 percent of respondents want the government to lift strict punishments for the drug and nationalize its production, using tax revenues to support a wounded economy. In fact, it is becoming ever harder to find mainstream advocates who support the continued draconian drug laws as applied to marijuana.

But what about illicit drugs other than marijuana?

Of the most commonly used drugs in the United States, the top five are pharmaceuticals, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. Regionally, use of each drug is quite different. Here in the Southeast, for example, cocaine is by far the illicit drug of choice, with slightly more than 50 percent of drug users imbibing some form of the narcotic. Meth is second in popularity, followed by pharmaceuticals and marijuana, with heroin a distant fifth.

The growth of methamphetamine use, which is at epidemic levels out West, has been making steady inroads in the South over the past decade. It is seen by medical professionals as one of the most dangerous drugs ever developed. It is nearly instantly addictive and requires higher doses with each subsequent use in order to match the initial high. It also has been proven to destroy brain cells and irreparably impair the central nervous system, among many other harmful side effects.

Unlike marijuana, which has never been conclusively shown to be physically addictive, the other four drugs produce strong physical dependence. The grip of drug addiction leads directly to criminal acts, such as robbery and prostitution, in order to purchase more drugs. This is in addition to well-known criminal enterprises surrounding the production, transport and sale of the drugs by organized crime, foreign cartels, and local street gangs. Would legalizing, or even de-criminalizing such harmful substances be in the best interest of the public welfare?

It's a question that has long perplexed proponents of ending the War on Drugs. Many of the more extreme in the legalization movement point to the physical harms and addictions related to alcohol as an argument in favor of legalizing all drugs, noting that strong government regulation and control of alcohol have been able to combat the more egregious negative effects of drinking. For many, though, that argument rings hollow, as they view the thousands of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lost productivity caused by alcohol abuse each year.

Yet even some in the medical profession challenge the conventional wisdom that the harder drugs are as dangerous and addictive as is widely believed. Dr. Benson Roe, Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, has directly called into question such beliefs. The widespread propaganda that illegal drugs are 'deadly poisons' is a hoax, he claims. There is little or no medical evidence of long term ill effects from sustained, moderate consumption of uncontaminated marijuana, cocaine or heroin. If these substances - most of them have been consumed in large quantities for centuries - were responsible for any chronic, progressive or disabling diseases, they certainly would have shown up in clinical practice and/or on the autopsy table.

He goes on to call out the media for our portrayal of drug users. Media focus on the 'junkie' has generated a mistaken impression that all users of illegal drugs are devastated by their habit. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that the small population of visible addicts must constitute only a fraction of the $150 billion per year illegal drug market. This industry is so huge that it necessarily encompasses a very large portion of the ordinary population, who are typically employed, productive, responsible and not significantly impaired from leading conventional lives. These drug users are not addicts, just as the vast majority of alcohol users are not alcoholics.

Another argument in favor of complete legalization of all drugs, including meth, comes from Marc Victor, a practicing criminal defense attorney in Chandler, Arizona. He does not dispute the effects of meth use and has firsthand experience representing users of the drug in the courts. Few drugs are more addictive or dangerous than meth, he says. Many of those who oppose legalization of meth identify the horrors of meth use. I entirely agree with their assessment of meth's dangers. However, asking whether meth is dangerous or unhealthy or addictive is not the right question.

His argument in favor of legalization is based on the concept of a truly free society, about who gets to decide what you can and cannot do as a free person. The question of who gets to make decisions about the disposition of certain property is central to understanding freedom, he explains. Who gets to decide what activities are too dangerous for you? Should I get to decide what activities are too dangerous for you? What about your neighbor? Or the majority? Or the president? Or Congress? Or some judge? In a free society, the owner of the property gets to decide how the property is used. Because you own your body, I assert that you should decide how your body is used or abused.

The final piece of the legalization puzzle is purely economic. At a time when the country is struggling to recover from one of the worst economic recessions since the end of the Great Depression, many lawmakers and tax-weary citizens are swayed by the promise of the large tax revenue legalization might generate, as well as ever-increasing price tags associated with the War on Drugs. Countless billions of dollars have been spent since Nixon launched the war, money that a growing number of people from all walks of life feel has been almost or completely wasted.

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, was joined by Nobel Laureate George Akerlof and other notable economists, including Daron Acemoglu of MIT, Howard Margolis of the University of Chicago, and Walter Williams of George Mason University, in urging President Obama to seriously consider legalizing marijuana.

The basis for the argument was a report by Professor Jeffrey A. Miron, stating that marijuana legalization would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement - and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it could generate as much as $6.2 billion annually.

We therefore urge the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition, Friedman wrote in his open letter to Obama. We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods. At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.

Obama, though, is so far unswayed by the arguments of Friedman and others. At a recent town hall meeting, he was asked why the federal government was not looking at turning a failed War on Drugs into a money-making, money-saving boost to the economy. His response was simple and direct: The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.

However, the debate is far from over and is in fact growing stronger at every level. Norm Stamper, the former chief of police of Seattle, speaks passionately about what he feels are the real casualties of the War on Drugs. Tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans are incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families are ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders are shot dead on city streets; narcotics officers are assassinated here and abroad, Stamper says.

The War on Drugs has obviously been lost. Now is the time when everyone, from regular citizens on up to our highest elected leaders, need to take a long, hard look at what price we are willing to pay to continue this fruitless and destructive war. The answers are not obvious; there are still many questions to be asked and debated, but there is no longer any excuse for us as nation to keep our heads in the sand.

The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced, said no less a thinker than esteemed physicist Albert Einstein, looking back at the failure of Prohibition, a lesson that seems not yet learned by those who continue to support the War on Drugs.

Example of Portugal

LISBON, Portugal -- These days, Casal Ventoso is an ordinary blue-collar community - mothers push baby strollers, men smoke outside cafes, buses chug up and down the cobbled main street.

Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a "drug supermarket" where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts, some with maggots squirming under track marks, staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.

At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people - an astonishing 1 percent of the population - were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.

Now, the United States, which has waged a 40-year, $1 trillion war on drugs, is looking for answers in tiny Portugal, which is reaping the benefits of what once looked like a dangerous gamble. White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske visited Portugal in September to learn about its drug reforms, and other countries - including Norway, Denmark, Australia and Peru - have taken interest, too.

"The disasters that were predicted by critics didn't happen," said University of Kent professor Alex Stevens, who has studied Portugal's program. "The answer was simple: Provide treatment."

Drugs in Portugal are still illegal. But here's what Portugal did: It changed the law so that users are sent to counseling and sometimes treatment instead of criminal courts and prison. The switch from drugs as a criminal issue to a public health one was aimed at preventing users from going underground.

Other European countries treat drugs as a public health problem, too, but Portugal stands out as the only one that has written that approach into law. The result: More people tried drugs, but fewer ended up addicted.

Here's what happened between 2000 and 2008:

- There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users, such as drug addicts and prisoners.

- Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.

- Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number fell to 28 percent.

- The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine - figures which show decriminalization brought no surge in drug use.

- The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, one of the chief architects of Portugal's new drug strategy, says he was inspired partly by his own experience of helping his brother beat addiction.

"It was a very hard change to make at the time because the drug issue involves lots of prejudices," he said. "You just need to rid yourselves of prejudice and take an intelligent approach."

Officials have not yet worked out the cost of the program, but they expect no increase in spending, since most of the money was diverted from the justice system to the public health service.

In Portugal today, outreach health workers provide addicts with fresh needles, swabs, little dishes to cook up the injectable mixture, disinfectant and condoms. But anyone caught with even a small amount of drugs is automatically sent to what is known as a Dissuasion Committee for counseling. The committees include legal experts, psychologists and social workers.

Health works shepherd some addicts off the streets directly into treatment. That's what happened to 33-year-old Tiago, who is struggling to kick heroin at a Lisbon rehab facility.Failure to turn up can result in fines, mandatory treatment or other sanctions. In serious cases, the panel recommends the user be sent to a treatment center.

Tiago, who requested his first name only be used to protect his privacy, started taking heroin when he was 20. He shot up four or five times a day, sleeping for years in an abandoned car where, with his addicted girlfriend, he fathered a child he has never seen.

At the airy Lisbon treatment center where he now lives, Tiago plays table tennis, surfs the Internet and watches TV. He helps with cleaning and other odd jobs. And he's back to his normal weight after dropping to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) during his addiction.

After almost six months on methadone, each day trimming his intake, he brims with hope about his upcoming move to a home run by the Catholic church where recovered addicts are offered a fresh start.

"I just ask God that it'll be the first and last time - the first time I go to a home and the last time I go through detox," he said.

Portugal's program is widely seen as effective, but some say it has shortcomings.

Antonio Lourenco Martins, a former Portuguese Supreme Court judge who sat on a 1998 commission that drafted the new drug strategy and was one of two on the nine-member panel who voted against decriminalization, admits the law has done some good, but complains that its approach is too soft.

Francisco Chaves, who runs a Lisbon treatment center, also recognizes that addicts might exploit good will.

"We know that (when there is) a lack of pressure, none of us change or are willing to change," Chaves said.

Worldwide, a record 93 countries offered alternatives to jail time for drug abuse in 2010, according to the International Harm Reduction Association. They range from needle exchanges in Cambodia to methadone treatment in Poland.

Vancouver, Canada, has North America's first legal drug consumption room - dubbed as "a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health care services." Brazil and Uruguay have eliminated jail time for people carrying small amounts of drugs for personal use.

Whether the alternative approaches work seems to depend on how they are carried out. In the Netherlands, where police ignore the peaceful consumption of illegal drugs, drug use and dealing are rising, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Five Dutch cities are implementing new restrictions on marijuana cafes after a wave of drug-related gang violence.

However, in Switzerland, where addicts are supervised as they inject heroin, addiction has steadily declined. No one has died from an overdose since the program began in 1994, according to medical studies. The program is credited with reducing crime and improving addicts' health. The Obama administration firmly opposes the legalization of drugs, saying that it would increase access and promote acceptance, according to drug czar Kerlikowske. The U.S. is spending $74 billion this year on criminal and court proceedings for drug offenders, compared with $3.6 billion for treatment. But even the U.S. has taken small steps toward Portugal's approach of more intervention and treatment programs. And Kerlikowske has called for an end to the "War on Drugs" rhetoric. "Calling it a war really limits your resources," he said. "Looking at this as both a public safety problem and a public health problem seems to make a lot more sense." There is no guarantee that Portugal's approach would work in the U.S. For one, the U.S. population is 29 times larger than Portugal's 10.6 million. Still, an increasing number of American cities are offering nonviolent drug offenders a chance to choose treatment over jail, and the approach appears to be working. In San Francisco's gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, Tyrone Cooper, a 52-year-old lifelong drug addict, can't stop laughing at how a system that has put him in jail a dozen times now has him on the road to recovery. "Instead of going to smoke crack, I went to a rehab meeting," he said. "Can you believe it? Me! A meeting! I mean, there were my boys, right there smoking crack, and Tyrone walked right past them. 'Sorry,' I told them, 'I gotta get to this meeting.'" Cooper is one of hundreds of San Franciscans who landed in a court program this year where judges offered them a chance to go to rehab, get jobs, move into houses, find primary care physicians, even remove their tattoos. There is enough data now to show that these alternative courts reduce recidivism and save money.

Nationally, between 4 and 29 percent of drug court participants will get caught using drugs again, compared with 48 percent of those who go through traditional courts.

San Francisco's drug court saves the city $14,297 per offender, officials said. Expanding drug courts to all 1.5 million drug offenders in the U.S. would cost more than $13 billion annually, but would return more than $40 billion, according to a study by John Roman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center.

The first drug court opened in the U.S. 21 years ago. By 1999, there were 472; by 2005, 1,250.

This year, new drug courts opened every week around the U.S., as states faced budget crises exarcebated by the high rate of incarceration on drug offenses. There are now drug courts in every state, more than 2,400 serving 120,000 people.

Last year, New York lawmakers followed counterparts across the U.S. who have tossed out tough, 40-year-old drug laws and mandatory sentences, giving judges unprecedented sentencing options. Also, the Department of Health and Human Services is training doctors to screen patients for potential addiction, and reimbursing Medicare and Medicaid providers who do so.

Arizona recently became the 15th state in the nation to approve medical use of marijuana, following California's 2006 legislation.

In Portugal, the blight that once destroyed the Casal Ventoso neighborhood is a distant memory.

Americo Nave, a 39-year-old psychologist, remembers the chilling stories his colleagues brought back after Portuguese authorities sent a first team of health workers into the Casal Ventoso neighborhood in the late 1990s. Some addicts had gangrene, and their arms had to be amputated.

Those days are past, though there are vestiges. About a dozen frail, mostly unkempt men recently gathered next to a bus stop to get new needles and swabs in small green plastic bags from health workers, as part of a twice-weekly program. Some ducked out of sight behind walls to shoot up, and one crouched behind trash cans, trying to shield his lighter flame from the wind.

A 37-year-old man who would only identify himself as Joao said he's been using heroin for 22 years. He has contracted Hepatitis C, and recalls picking up used, bloody needles from the sidewalk. Now he comes regularly to the needle exchange.

"These teams ... have helped a lot of people," he said, struggling to concentrate as he draws on a cigarette.

An Early Prohibition Fail

When Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner, from 1895 to 1897, he tried to stop the sales of beer, wine and liquor on Sundays in saloons.

Men and women, who worked six days a week in that era, were not amused. New York State Sabbath laws already forbade attending sporting events or theater performances, or selling groceries, after 10 a.m. on Sundays; the excise laws also made it illegal to sell alcohol in bars, saloons and taverns all 24 hours of the Lord's Day.

New Yorkers in droves defied that particular edict. (Sunday actually marked the barkeep's biggest sales day.) Saloon owners handed a bribe to precinct cops who forwarded some loot to Tammany politicians, and the city's thirsty could discreetly slip in the side doors of saloons. For almost 40 years, it was a popular pragmatic compromise.

Enter Roosevelt. Fearless and bullheaded, the new commissioner vowed to enforce the law, both to root out bribery in the Police Department and also to reunite families on Sundays. He gave speeches envisioning hard-working men picnicking with wives and children. He anticipated a drop in drunk and disorderly arrests (then the city's highest arrest category) and a decline in Monday hospital visits. He expected that wages saved from saloons would help feed families and pay the rent. Roosevelt soon encouraged cops to shut down the bars at the stroke of midnight on Saturday.

New Yorkers, during that Sahara summer of 1895, fled to Coney Island, then part of a separate city, Brooklyn. "The excise law didn't bother us, and we didn't bother the excise law," explained a police officer on Surf Avenue. People turned to harsh-tasting medicinal liquor, then sold by druggists. "It'll keep you walking when you get it," observed a Tammany politician. "You're afraid if you lay down, you'll die."

Cartoons depicted Roosevelt as a Puritan in buckle-shoes walking late-night lantern watch to make sure residents were a-bed. He was also accused of being a hypocrite, since the wealthy could afford to drink at home or at private clubs or at hotels, partially exempt from the law. Critics further charged that he was trying to cleanse the city's vast German and Irish populations of their decadent habits and make them more 'American.'

Roosevelt vowed not to back down. "It is true I may never be heard of again, but I will have kept my oath of office," he once shouted at a crowd of angry Germans at City Hall. Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, The New York World, called him a "little tin czar."

During the November elections in 1895, corrupt Tammany Democrats won in a landslide by campaigning against Rooseveltism and dry Sundays. Undaunted, Roosevelt lobbied the Republican-dominated legislature to pass even tougher excise laws. On April 1, 1896, the Raines Law went into effect, expanding the Sunday shut-down hours from midnight Saturday to 5 a.m. Monday, banning 'free lunch' counters, and requiring that saloon doors be kept locked and blinds raised to let police peer inside. The law also exempted hotels with 10 rooms, which could serve guests liquor with a meal 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In a New York minute (actually the next few months), more than 1,000 saloons added 10 dinky rooms. Tammany building inspectors didn't care if some had four-foot-high ceilings or were in former coal bins. "Ten beers and one hard-boiled egg scarcely constitute a meal," complained Roosevelt, but local judges disagreed, allowing most anything to pass for food. The playwright Eugene O'Neill once described on a saloon table "an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese which only the drunkest yokel from the sticks" would ever dream of eating.

New York - already awash in illegal casinos and brothels - was transformed into the city that never sleeps. These Raines Law saloon-hotels could serve round the clock. Even the Metropolitan Opera added 10 bedrooms to be able to offer late-night wine. And those saloon bedrooms, located a drunken stagger from the bar, provided a haven for prostitutes and a temptation to couples who'd had a few too many drinks. Adding 10,000 cheap beds was bound to loosen the city's morals.

Roosevelt's liquor crackdown backfired; so did the Raines Law. The city's spirit of place, what Stephen Crane once dubbed New York's 'wild impulse,' refused to be tamed.

Theodore Roosevelt the reformer was deeply proud of his efforts to clean up New York but in his illustrious later days, running for governor, then for vice president, then president, he never won a majority vote in the city. Never take a beer away from a New Yorker.

The Hi-jacked Brain

Of all the philosophical discussions that surface in contemporary life, the question of free will - mainly, the debate over whether or not we have it - is certainly one of the most persistent.

A popular analogy clouds our understanding of addiction.

That might seem odd, as the average person rarely seems to pause to reflect on whether their choices on, say, where they live, whom they marry, or what they eat for dinner, are their own or the inevitable outcome of a deterministic universe. Still, as James Atlas pointed out last month, the spate of "can't help yourself" books would indicate that people are in fact deeply concerned with how much of their lives they can control. Perhaps that's because, upon further reflection, we find that our understanding of free will lurks beneath many essential aspects of our existence.

One particularly interesting variation on this question appears in scientific, academic and therapeutic discussions about addiction. Many times, the question is framed as follows: "Is addiction a disease or a choice?"

The argument runs along these lines: If addiction is a disease, then in some ways it is out of our control and forecloses choices. A disease is a medical condition that develops outside of our control; it is, then, not a matter of choice. In the absence of choice, the addicted person is essentially relieved of responsibility. The addict has been overpowered by her addiction.

The counterargument describes addictive behavior as a choice. People whose use of drugs and alcohol leads to obvious problems but who continue to use them anyway are making choices to do so. Since those choices lead to addiction, blame and responsibility clearly rest on the addict's shoulders. It then becomes more a matter of free will.

Recent scientific studies on the biochemical responses of the brain are currently tipping the scales toward the more deterministic view - of addiction as a disease. The structure of the brain's reward system combined with certain biochemical responses and certain environments, they appear to show, cause people to become addicted.

In such studies, and in reports of them to news media, the term "the hijacked brain" often appears, along with other language that emphasizes the addict's lack of choice in the matter. Sometimes the pleasure-reward system has been "commandeered." Other times it "goes rogue." These expressions are often accompanied by the conclusion that there are "addicted brains."

The word "hijacked" is especially evocative; people often have a visceral reaction to it. I imagine that this is precisely why this term is becoming more commonly used in connection with addiction. But it is important to be aware of the effects of such language on our understanding.

When most people think of a hijacking, they picture a person, sometimes wearing a mask and always wielding some sort of weapon, who takes control of a car, plane or train. The hijacker may not himself drive or pilot the vehicle, but the violence involved leaves no doubt who is in charge. Someone can hijack a vehicle for a variety of reasons, but mostly it boils down to needing to escape or wanting to use the vehicle itself as a weapon in a greater plan. Hijacking is a means to an end; it is always and only oriented to the goals of the hijacker. Innocent victims are ripped from their normal lives by the violent intrusion of the hijacker.

In the "hijacked" view of addiction, the brain is the innocent victim of certain substances - alcohol, cocaine, nicotine or heroin, for example - as well as certain behaviors like eating, gambling or sexual activity. The drugs or the neurochemicals produced by the behaviors overpower and redirect the brain's normal responses, and thus take control of (hijack) it. For addicted people, that martini or cigarette is the weapon-wielding hijacker who is going to compel certain behaviors.

To do this, drugs like alcohol and cocaine and behaviors like gambling light up the brain's pleasure circuitry, often bringing a burst of euphoria. Other studies indicate that people who are addicted have lower dopamine and serotonin levels in their brains, which means that it takes more of a particular substance or behavior for them to experience pleasure or to reach a certain threshold of pleasure. People tend to want to maximize pleasure; we tend to do things that bring more of it. We also tend to chase it when it subsides, trying hard to recreate the same level of pleasure we have experienced in the past. It is not uncommon to hear addicts talking about wanting to experience the euphoria of a first high. Often they never reach it, but keep trying. All of this lends credence to the description of the brain as hijacked.

Analogies and comparisons can be very effective and powerful tools in explanation, especially when the objects compared are not overtly and obviously similar at first glance. A comparison can be especially compelling when one of the objects is familiar or common and is wrested from its usual context. Similarities shared between disparate cases can help to highlight features in each that might otherwise escape notice. But analogies and comparisons always start to break down at some point, often when the differences are seen to be greater than similarities. This, I submit, is the case with understanding addiction as hijacking.

A hijacker comes from outside and takes control by violent means. A hijacker takes a vehicle that is not his; hijacking is always a form of stealing and kidnapping. A hijacker always takes someone else's vehicle; you cannot hijack your own car. That is a type of nonsense or category mistake. Ludwig Wittgenstein offered that money passed from your left hand to your right is not a gift. The practical consequences of this action are not the same as those of a gift. Writing yourself a thank-you note would be absurd.

The analogy of addiction and hijacking involves the same category mistake as the money switched from hand to hand. You can treat yourself poorly, callously or violently. In such cases, we might say the person is engaging in acts of self-abuse and self-harm. Self-abuse can involve acting in ways that you know are not in your self-interest in some larger sense or that are contrary to your desires. This, however, is not hijacking; the practical consequences are quite different.

It might be tempting to claim that in an addiction scenario, the drugs or behaviors are the hijackers. However, those drugs and behaviors need to be done by the person herself (barring cases in which someone is given drugs and may be made chemically dependent). In the usual cases, an individual is the one putting chemicals into her body or engaging in certain behaviors in the hopes of getting high. This simply pushes the question back to whether a person can hijack herself.

There is a kind of intentionality to hijacking that clearly is absent in addiction. No one plans to become an addict. One certainly may plan to drink in reckless or dangerous ways, not with the intention of becoming an addict somewhere down the road. Addiction develops over time and requires repeated and worsening use.

In a hijacking situation, it is very easy to assign blame and responsibility. The villain is easy to identify. So are the victims, people who have had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hijacked people are given no choice in the matter.

A little logic is helpful here, since the "choice or disease" question rests on a false dilemma. This fallacy posits that only two options exist. Since there are only two options, they must be mutually exclusive. If we think, however, of addiction as involving both choice and disease, our outlook is likely to become more nuanced. For instance, the progression of many medical diseases is affected by the choices that individuals make. A patient who knows he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and refuses to wear a respirator or at least a mask while using noxious chemicals is making a choice that exacerbates his condition. A person who knows he meets the D.S.M.-IV criteria for chemical abuse, and that abuse is often the precursor to dependency, and still continues to use drugs, is making a choice, and thus bears responsibility for it.

Linking choice and responsibility is right in many ways, so long as we acknowledge that choice can be constrained in ways other than by force or overt coercion. There is no doubt that the choices of people progressing to addiction are constrained; compulsion and impulsiveness constrain choices. Many addicts will say that they choose to take that first drink or drug and that once they start they cannot stop. A classic binge drinker is a prime example; his choices are constrained with the first drink. He both has and does not have a choice. (That moment before the first drink or drug is what the philosopher Owen Flanagan describes as a "zone of control.") But he still bears some degree of responsibility to others and to himself.

The complexity of each person's experience with addiction should caution us to avoid false quandaries, like the one that requires us to define addiction as either disease or choice, and to adopt more nuanced conceptions. Addicts are neither hijackers nor victims. It is time to retire this analogy.

The Sports Drink Myths

The British Medical Journal published a scathing investigation into the influence of the sports drink industry over academia, in the interest of marketing the science of hydration. The lengthy piece by Deborah Cohen documents how, over the past several decades, mandates regarding the necessity of hydrating during exercise entered the public consciousness to the point that they're now thought of as common sense. Here are some highlights:

The key players: Pepsico, which produces Gatorade, the Coca-Cola company, which owns Powerade (the official sports drink of the Olympics), and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which makes the British sports drink Lucozade.

Before the hype: The first New York marathon, in 1970, inspired a new interest in running. At the time, however, little scientific attention was played to the role of hydration in runners' performance. Throughout the 1970s, in fact, "marathon runners were discouraged from drinking fluids for fear that it would slow them down."

Undermining the body's signals: Cohen claims that one of the greatest accomplishments of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, established in 1985, was to convince the public that thirst is an unreliable indicator of dehydration. There is ample evidence of ways in which the experts who propagated this information were funded or "supported" by sports drinks companies, and while this in itself isn't necessarily wrong, she argues that researchers who have conflicts of interest are not objective enough to be writing guidelines, as is the case here. There is no good evidence to support the ideas, for example, that "Without realizing, you may not be drinking enough to restore your fluid balance after working out" (Powerade), or that urine color is a reliable indicator of the body's hydration levels.

A better alternative to water: The journal recounts that hyponotraemia -- a drop in one's serum sodium levels -- has a bad track record of causing illness and death in marathon runners, and that we know that drinking too much water can cause hyponatremia. But it then makes the point that sports drinks do not preclude hyponatremia and that there was an article in The New England Journal of Medicine that found no correlation between hyponatremia and the type of fluid consumed.

Starting young: Both GSK and Gatorade have developed school outreach programs that further the case for sports drink consumption during exercise. Though the Institute of Medicine says that, in children, "Thirst and consumption of beverages at meals are adequate to maintain hydration," studies either directly funded by or involving authors with financial ties to Gatorade make a major case for the need to promote hydration, claiming, for example, that "children are particularly likely to forget to drink unless reminded to do so."

Distinguishing between Olympic athletes and the rest of us: The European Food Safety Authority upheld the claims that sports drinks hydrate better than water and help maintain performance during endurance exercise -- but added that this did not apply to the ordinary, light exerciser. Says Tim Noakes, Discovery health chair of exercise and sports science at Cape Town University, "They are never going to study a person who trains for two hours per week, who walks most of the marathon -- which form the majority of users of sports drinks," and the majority of people at whom sports drinks marketing is aimed.

Flawed research: GSK was the only company that provided the BMJ with a list of studies attesting to the beneficial effects of sports drinks, which identified a number of major flaws in their methodology: small sample sizes, poorly designed research, data dredging, and other problematic practices. Upon analysis, the journal concludes that "only three (2.7%) of the studies the team was able to assess were judged to be of high quality and at low risk of bias." Scientists with links to the manufacturers of sports drinks have prominent editorial roles in key journals in sports medicine. Cohen suggests a link between this and that negative studies questioning the role of hydration are, according to sources, extremely difficult to get published in journals.

Harmful, not healthful: And, of course, there is the suggestion that sports drink consumption among children is contributing to growing obesity levels. Their association with hydration and athletics means they're not thought of as being unhealthy in the way that other sugary drinks, like soda, are (note that Mayor Bloomberg included sports drinks in his super-size ban). Several studies highlight consumer beliefs that sports drinks are healthy, even essential, showing just how far marketers have been able to push exercise science in the support of sports drinks.

Cohen concludes with an argument that dehydration has been overblown into the "dreaded disease of exercise," in yet another example of fear mongering for the sake of corporate interest.

Alcohol Protects Your Bones

Later in life, drinking one to two alcoholic drinks daily may curb bone loss - so much so that just a two-week break from alcohol hastened bone decline in women in a new study.

Researchers looked at the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on "bone turnover," or the breaking down of old bone cells, in healthy post-menopausal women. After menopause, women's production of new bone cells slows, but the rate of shedding old cells does not slow as much. In other words, the "out with the old" outpaces the "in with the new," leading to a porous skeleton that easily fractures.

But past studies have shown that women who drink moderately (one or two alcoholic beverages per day) have higher bone density than non-drinkers or heavy drinkers. Now, the new study suggests why: Alcohol appears to reduce bone loss in middle-age women by suppressing the rate at which their bones shed old cells.

In line with previously observed trends, the women in the study who drank more alcohol (up to two drinks per day) had denser hip bones than those who drank less (as little as half a drink per day).

More tellingly, blood tests showed that abstaining from drinking for just two weeks triggered an acceleration of bone turnover in all the women. After a 14-day alcohol holiday, the women's blood contained heightened levels of a molecule that gets released during bone turnover. And less than a day after the women resumed their normal drinking, blood levels of that molecule dropped again.

"After less than 24 hours, to see such a measurable effect was really unexpected," said study researcher Urszula Iwaniec, associate professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University.

It is yet to be determined whether alcohol also benefits younger drinkers' bones. In one past study, 20- to 47-year-old women experienced a drop in the marker of bone turnover after they drank two beers, but "longer-duration studies are required before any conclusions can be made regarding the beneficial or detrimental effects of moderate alcohol on bone health on younger individuals," Iwaniec told Life's Little Mysteries.

She added that it is possible alcohol "may be detrimental to the growing skeleton, but have beneficial effects on the aging skeleton."

Drinking too much alcohol (at any age) undeniably causes health problems, the researchers noted, but the new findings cast one more vote in favor of moderate alcohol consumption as part of a healthy diet in middle age. Past studies have linked moderate drinking with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of stroke in women and lower mortality in general

When Was Beer Invented?

Just before the hangover. Okay, actually beer likely dates back to the dawn of cereal agriculture, loosely pinpointed at 10,000 B.C.E. in ancient Mesopotamia, the region of southwest Asia currently occupied by Iraq.

The alcoholic inception is reckoned to have occurred when some early farmer sampled water in which bread had been sitting (and fermenting) for a day or two. The first brews would have been concoctions of crushed or malted grain steeped and heated slowly in water, and then baked and submerged again. The oldest recorded evidence of brewing is in the epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2500 B.C.E. or 3500 B.C.E by differing accounts), related by the Sumerians on clay tablets. By 2000 B.C.E. the Sumerians had concocted recipes for eight different beers made from barley and eight from wheat. These syrupy, nutritious beers ranged from "strong" to "red brown" to "good dark" - and they soon caught on elsewhere.

The ancient Egyptians loved their suds, preferring beer to water (which was often contaminated). The Egyptians in turn spread beer to the Greeks, who, as you might have guessed, preferred wine as their Dionysian drink.

Cannabis Effectively Decriminalised In Britain

CANNABOOST plant food is one of the best selling products at the Hydroexpress hydroponics store in Stirchley, a working-class part of Birmingham. The small shop, its windows filled with graffiti-style posters, also sells fertilisers with names like Nirvana and Bud Candy, alongside strong lights and giant rolls of tin foil to line greenhouses. In one corner, a couple of juicy-looking tomato plants grow in a demonstration set-up. But the youth behind the counter guesses that his customers are not all growing tomatoes.

Birmingham now has 58 hydroponics shops, up from 42 just a year ago. Whether aided by the latest plant-growing technology or not, cannabis production is soaring. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers, the number of cannabis factories detected each year increased from around 800 in 2004 to 7,000 in 2010. Birmingham is one of the most fertile areas; West Midlands Police, which set up a Cannabis Disposal Unit in 2010 to tackle the problem, dismantled more than 500 factories last year.

Your correspondent visited one recently closed by police; the gardener was a cocaine-addicted woman growing a few plants in a spare room in the hope of earning a cut. Other set-ups have been found in tents in the bedrooms of high-rise council flats and in the lofts of terraced family houses. Many growers are simply feeding their own habits. As one officer on the West Midlands Police drugs team says, "It's becoming the most popular cottage industry in the country."

Small growers are squeezing out both importers and the well-connected, often Vietnamese, gangs that once dominated domestic production. The big cannabis factories set up by the latter, with their telltale heat hazes, are fairly easy to spot. Smaller operations are often uncovered only when the electric lights start fires, or when local teenagers mount a burglary.

The police and the courts can neither keep up with the surge in small-scale production, nor are they desperately keen to do so. Last month the government published new sentencing guidelines that advised judges to treat small cultivators less strictly. Attitudes to smokers are softening, too. The reclassification of cannabis in 2009, from class C to the more stringent class B, was oddly accompanied by a more liberal approach to policing consumption. Users caught on the street are rarely arrested; rather, they are issued 'cannabis cautions' (a reprimand which doesn't appear on a criminal record) or fined.

In Brixton, a south London neighbourhood, an open-air cannabis market exists within ten minutes' walk of the underground station. The dealers are frequently moved on but they soon regroup elsewhere. As one dealer admits, his competitors are a bigger hassle than the police. "They get to fightin', over money and things," he says in a deep Caribbean drawl. Violence is far more likely to get a dealer into legal trouble than business.

Strangely, this lackadaisical approach is not encouraging people to take up the reefer habit. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the proportion of people who admit to having used cannabis in Britain has fallen more quickly than in any other European country over the past few years. Just 6.8% of adults told another survey that they used cannabis in 2010, down from 10.9% eight years earlier. The herb is now ubiquitous and effectively tolerated - and, perhaps as a result, not all that alluring.

How genetics shape our addictions

Have you ever wondered why some people find it so much easier to stop smoking than others? New research shows that vulnerability to smoking addiction is shaped by our genes. A study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro, McGill University shows that people with genetically fast nicotine metabolism have a significantly greater brain response to smoking cues than those with slow nicotine metabolism. Previous research shows that greater reactivity to smoking cues predicts decreased success at smoking cessation and that environmental cues promote increased nicotine intake in animals and humans.This new finding that nicotine metabolism rates affect the brain's response to smoking may lead the way for tailoring smoking cessation programs based on individual genetics.

Smoking cues, such as the sight of cigarettes or smokers, affect smoking behavior and are linked to relapse and cigarette use. Nicotine metabolism, by a liver enzyme, also influences smoking behavior. Variations in the gene that codes for this enzyme determine slow or fast rates of metabolism and therefore, the level of nicotine in the blood that reaches the brain. In the study smokers were screened for their nicotine metabolism rates and their enzyme genotype. Participants were aged 18 - 35 and smoked 5-25 cigarettes daily for a minimum of 2 years. People with the slowest and fastest metabolism had their brain response to visual smoking cues measured using functional MRI. Fast metabolizers had significantly greater response to visual cigarette cues than slow metabolizers in brain areas linked to memory, motivation and reward, namely the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, insula, and cingulate cortex.

"The finding that nicotine metabolism rate has an impact on the brain's response to smoking cues supports our hypothesis that individuals with fast nicotine metabolism rates would have a greater brain response to smoking cues because of close coupling in everyday life between exposure to cigarettes and surges in blood nicotine concentration. In other words they learn to associate cigarette smoking with the nicotine surge," says clinician-scientist Dr. Alain Dagher, lead investigator at The Neuro. "In contrast, individuals with slow metabolism rates, who have relatively constant nicotine blood levels throughout the day, are less likely to develop conditioned responses to cues. For them, smoking is not associated with brief nicotine surges, so they are smoking for other reasons. Possibilities include maintenance of constant brain nicotine levels for cognitive enhancement (ie, improved attention, memory), or relief of stress or anxiety."

Future research could focus on improving smoking cessation methods by tailoring treatments for different types of smokers. One possibility is to measure the rate of nicotine metabolism as part of the therapeutic decision-making process. For example, targeting cue-induced relapse risk may not help those with slow nicotine metabolism, who are more likely to benefit from long-acting cholinergic drugs such as the nicotine patch, consistent with previous clinical trials. Conversely the use of non-nicotine based therapies aimed at reducing craving may help fast metabolizers, as demonstrated for buproprion, an anti-depressant that has been used for smoking cessation.

Mathematicians invent a new way to pour stout

ON MARCH 17th, St Patrick's day, countless pints of Irish stout will be poured in pubs and homes around the world. As they sup their beer, revellers might do well to give a nod to the technology that makes possible the creamy head which sits atop it - for unlike the natural head on an ale or a lager, the head on stout is a work of art.

To make it foam, draught stout is forced through a special plate. Bottled and canned versions require the intervention of a tiny beer-widget. This is a hollow plastic sphere that, upon the container being opened, releases a jet of gas into the beer. When introduced, the widget was the subject of an incredibly irritating advertising campaign, apparently conceived by marketing types who were terrified their customers might be put off by such an elegant piece of technology.

The widget's days, though, may be numbered, for a crack group of mathematicians from the University of Limerick, led by William Lee, has modelled bubble formation in stout beers in detail. Their work suggests that lining the rims of cans and bottles with a material similar to an ordinary coffee filter would be a simpler, cheaper alternative to the widget. The team's calculations show that a copious number of bubbles would form from air trapped inside the hollow fibres making up this lining. They have just submitted their work for publication in Physical Review E and are hoping that industry will soon begin testing their proposal.

Most beers are pressurised with carbon dioxide. Stouts, though, use a mixture of that gas and four times its volume of nitrogen. This makes the beer less acidic, and also produces smaller, creamier bubbles. But nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide. Hence the need for the widget. And the widget adds to the container's cost, so brewers of stout would be delighted to find a way to get rid of it.

In that spirit representatives of Diageo, which owns Guinness, one of the most widely sold brands of stout, approached Dr Lee in 2009. They wondered if he might be able to construct a mathematical model of the formation and growth of bubbles in stout. Dr Lee was happy to oblige. And once he had produced the model, he started thinking more about the problem. He wondered why the normal mechanism of bubbling in beers and sparkling wines does not appear to work in stouts.

Conventional wisdom used to hold that once the pressure inside a bottle or can has been released by opening it, the bubbles in a fizzy drink, whether alcoholic or not, are seeded by pockets of air trapped in scratches and imperfections on the surface of the glass being drunk from. Over the past decade, however, scientific scrutiny has revealed that most bubbles actually form on fibres of cellulose that have either fallen into the glass from the air or been left behind when it was dried with a towel. These fibres, which are generally hollow, trap a small amount of air in their interiors.

To see what is going on in stouts, Dr Lee and his team wrote down the equations governing the physics of the dissolved gases and fibres. They found that molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide are able to diffuse from the liquid through the walls of the fibres into the air pockets trapped inside them, causing those pockets of air to expand. If a pocket reaches the end of a fibre, it breaks off as a bubble.

The problem, as far as stouts are concerned, is that the low concentration of dissolved nitrogen means the process works at only a 15th of the rate seen in ales and lagers. But Dr Lee has an answer to that: more cellulose. He and his team spiked their beer with extra fibres from a cut-up coffee filter and watched the bubbles form under a microscope. By crunching the numbers from these observations, they calculate that lining a can of stout with nine square centimetres of fibres should form a head as good as that produced by a widget. If their method works on an industrial scale it will have two benefits. Stout will be cheaper. And those irritating adverts proclaiming that you do not need to know how a widget works in order to enjoy its benefits will disappear for ever.

400 Year Old Tankard

Drinking habits in Shakespearean England may have led to some filthy hangovers, judging by a tankard found preserved in the mud of the River Thames.

A wooden tankard marked with the initials RH pulled from the river bed in East London can hold three pints, suggesting that its owner would routinely consume large quantities of beer in a single sitting.

The mug, which is made from beech, is thought to date from the late 16th or early 17th century. It is the only surviving example from its era apart from some eight-pint jugs discovered in the wreckage of the Mary Rose near Portsmouth. Those jugs were probably used to transfer beer rather than be used as drinking vessels.

Wooden objects rarely survive unless they are kept in an airless environment. The tankard is being displayed in a tank of water at the Museum of London's Docklands site to prevent it from decaying.

The Case For Prohibition

No government has ever created a commercial pot market. But next week voters in Colorado and Washington State are poised to do just that, passing ballot initiatives that legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana much like alcohol. Both efforts are polling above 50 percent, but regardless of whether they pass, the country is bending toward historic reforms and the remaining prohibitionists are on the run.

Only about one in three Americans think pot should remain illegal, and that shrinking block of opposition is poorly organized and underfunded, producing no formidable spokesperson, not even a sad-sack orator to argue futilely, that legalization is the devil's work. "It's actually hard for us to find people to debate," says Rob Kampia, cofounder of the Marijuana Policy Project, a leading national reform organization. "I think a lot of folks have given up."

But such a profound policy shift deserves a two-sided debate. And, yes, despite the gin-clear failures of prohibition and the face-raking lies told about marijuana in the past, there remains a prohibitionist case to be made. This much is obvious: the upsides of legalization have been wildly oversold, and the potential downsides blithely ignored. I'd like to correct that balance, not because I support prohibition but because I think legalization should succeed or fail on the merits, as much as they can be known.

Perhaps the best neutral source on the subject is Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. The book is the work of four scholars who collectively bring nearly 70 years of experience to the issue. Because there is no 'objective' choice on marijuana policy, they provide a stew of good data and best guesses: the raw material for an honest, logical debate they hope will benefit all sides. In the end, however, the prohibitionist side seems to benefit most of all.

The case against legalization begins with a defense of its opposite: the benefits of prohibition. Reformers sometimes say prohibition is pointless, because everyone who wants to use pot already does. But as state laws have softened, pot use has risen sharply. More than three million people started smoking it regularly in the past five years, and the rate of high-school experimentation is at a 30-year high. One in 15 high school seniors are smoking daily or near daily. And when a kid first lights up at about age 16, it's usually not with a cigarette.

Prohibition prevents an even more tremendous uptick, according to Marijuana Legalization. Remove it and you can expect a doubling or even tripling of the existing market, a spike to levels far surpassing any on record, and this in a country that already consumes the plant at three times the global average. What would be the health and welfare cost of such an explosion? The honest answer is: we don't know. No one actually knows what legalizing marijuana will do to adult use, teen experimentation, and public health and safety overall. No one knows because no modern society has ever tried it.

We know enough, however, for serious concern. The mantra of marijuana legalization is "Safer than Alcohol," which - to be fair - is generally true. But safer than alcohol is not the same as "safe." Every year about 375,000 people end up in the ER with marijuana-related averse reactions, more than any drug other than cocaine. Some of those cases are the result of multiple drug interactions, where marijuana gets the blame while cocaine does the damage. But for many tens of thousands of ER visits marijuana is the only drug mentioned. And there's even data suggesting that, as the authors of Marijuana Legalization put it, marijuana can kill. Between 1999 and 2007, the Centers for Disease Control, somewhat curiously, attributed 26 deaths to cannabis use - half in the subcategory "dependence."

But at least pot isn't addictive, right? Wrong. More than 4 million people self-report behavior that meets the clinical criteria for marijuana dependency or abuse. The "capture rate," as scholars call it, was once about 9 percent, according to one study, but for people who start before age 25 - as almost everyone does today - it jumps to 15 percent, the same capture rate as alcohol and just a percentage point less than cocaine. Drug treatment programs for marijuana have fives times the number of enrollees as they did just two decades ago. Most are referred by the U.S. criminal justice system, but many are not - and enrollment has more than doubled in European and Australian programs as well.

The most common explanation is that pot has grown more potent over that period. In the 1960s and '70s, the percentage of THC (the stuff that gets you high) in good bud was usually less than 10 percent. Today, it's often 15 percent and higher, with average potency more than doubling since the mid-1990s, according to tests run on seized pot.

Marijuana has also become more variable, coming in hundreds of strains and edible forms. One medical marijuana company makes a chocolate truffle with 60 times the THC of a joint. Others make hash, hash oil, and specialty bud with more than 25 percent THC. This isn't automatically a problem, especially if potency means people use less to get high. But it's hard to judge whether your first truffle has hit the spot before you have an urge to eat another. And a greater percentage of THC means a greater high - so much greater that the Netherlands has proposed policing all products with 15-percent-THC-and-up like 'hard drugs.'

The upsides of legalization have been wildly oversold, and the potential downsides blithely ignored.

This high potency pot is pricey, and comprises only a fraction of the existing black market. But, again, that's only because of prohibition. If legalization were passed, high potency products would probably fall in price and blanket the market, according to Marijuana Legalization. That's worrying because even studies of low-power pot use - the only kind of studies available - show significant risks, especially for young people. Research released this past summer connected teenage pot use to a permanent drop in IQ between the first puff and early middle age. Other emerging literature suggests that pot use elevates the risk of schizophrenia and psychotic symptoms.

Besides harming themselves, pot users also put others at risk: driving high raises one's likelihood of crashing - and driving with a little booze and little pot is much more dangerous than driving with either alone. Marijuana use may also have measurable domestic costs. Only two holidays a year show a spike in sudden-infant-deaths: New Year's Day is one, and the other is the day after 4/20, when pot use is celebrated.

Finally, there are the long-term ramifications of legalization. Under prohibition, marijuana is an out-of-sight product with little branding and virtually no advertising. Expect that to change. The alcohol and tobacco industries traditionally get 80 percent of their profits from heavy users, and there's every reason to believe that marijuana sellers would need at least the same ratio. That means the pot business could be the basis for a third huge, blood-sucking vice industry, dependent on converting kids and supporting heavy users. "If we create a licit market," write the authors of Marijuana Legalization, "we should expect the industry's product design, pricing and marketing to be devoted to creating as much addiction as possible."

Is there anything good that would come with legalization? Reformers argue that legalizing weed would goose the economy, free law enforcement resources to pursue more serious crime, and unclog the criminal justice system. They say it would empty prisons and undercut the black market. The problem is: none of this is necessarily true.

Start with the economics. Marijuana is not America's largest cash crop, contrary to a boast so widely repeated it's assumed to be true. The value at the farm-gate is no more than $4.3 billion, or somewhere between almonds and hay, according to authors of Marijuana Legalization. Sales would skyrocket with legalization, but prices would plummet, deflating the overall market value. Bottom line: pot's not the new corn.

It's also not a surefire tax winner. The proposed tax is between $30 and $60 an ounce. Tobacco tax evasion is rampant at a fraction of that rate. And even if all the tax dollars came in, much of it would go not to schools or other worthy programs but to the costs of regulating and enforcing the new marijuana law. Lastly, because legal pot would be so easy grow, its job-creating power would be weak. It probably wouldn't support more than 15,000 growers and an army of minimum-wage service workers - not the kind of jobs someone touts on the campaign trail.

As for the war on pot, it's just not as high stakes as you might assume. About 750,000 people are arrested on possession charges every year, a howlingly large number. But virtually none of those folks end up in prison. Fewer than 400 people are serving state or federal sentences for marijuana possession alone, and many of those people plead down to that charge, or have serious histories of violence. Legalization wouldn't mean the end of marijuana arrests either, because police will still be called on to enforce the new laws, just as they do with alcohol. And it wouldn't mean the end of the Mexican gangs, which, contrary to another common boast, are diversified enough to survive entirely without marijuana profits.

And yet despite all this I still am not a prohibitionist. As the Seattle Times recently put it in an editorial endorsing legalization in Washington State, the relevant question isn't whether marijuana is good: 'It is whether prohibition is good. It is whether the people who use marijuana shall be subject to arrest, and whether the people who supply them shall be sent to prison. The question is whether the war on marijuana is worth what it costs.'

Quite obviously, the answer is no. In fact, of all the available options the status quo of arresting hundreds of thousands of people - most of them nonwhite, poor, and in for a world of collateral damage as a result of their arrest - is probably the least attractive choice, worse only than full legalization. The better decision is incremental reforms at the state level and a hands-off approach from the feds. Let people grow pot, and sell it, but not for profit, and without advertising, and in a tightly regulated marketplace. Tinker every year, adding new provisions and privileges as much needed new research comes in. And always update the law with a sunset provision. That way the process can't be hijacked by lobbyists and special interests - and only one thing goes up in smoke.

Drunk Birds

AFTER overindulging in berries, flocks of cedar waxwings flew drunkenly to their doom. Several times between 2005 and 2007 the birds crashed into buildings in the Los Angeles area.

Hailu Kinde and colleagues at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab in San Bernardino, found that the birds had gorged on berries from the Brazilian pepper tree (Journal of Ornithology, DOI: 10.1007/s10336-012-0858-7).

Cedar waxwings don't have a crop - an expandable pouch near the throat used to store food - so they stow berries in a distensible oesophagus, where they ferment. They ingested so many that their livers could not keep up with the alcohol production, leaving them too drunk to fly safely.

The Legal Model

Legalisation is the only direction. But beware the Dutch model, which creates an economy ripe for organised crime.

Earlier this summer, on the walkway behind Venice Beach in Los Angeles, a doctor rolled past me on a skateboard. I could tell he was a doctor because he was wearing green surgical scrubs and they had the word DOCTOR printed on them. 'Yo,' he said, or words to that effect. 'What's your ailment?'

I could have said anything. I could have told the truth, even, which would have been, 'jetlag, mild back pain, psoriasis, asthma, lingering addictions to chocolate and cigarettes and allergies to most cats and some mushrooms', but I don't think it would have made much difference. He'd still have said exactly what he did say when I told him I was fine, thanks, which was: 'Prescriptions are fifty dollars.' And then, maybe, 'dude'.

Reader, relax. This was not Obamacare in action. Rather, it was the pointy end of literally a local growth industry. For this doctor - let's call him Brad - had only one prescription to offer me and that was for marijuana. California has an estimated 1,000 medical marijuana dispensaries. By all accounts the medical clause is fairly accommodating.

Alas, I was on holiday with two small children and life was already dreamy enough. But the system seemed to me a good one. It's a shame that yesterday's much-publicised report, A Fresh Approach to Drugs, by the UK Drug Policy Commission, didn't mention California at all. To my mind, it's the future to be hoped for. High five, Brad.

Rather, this report - a brave and wise report, for the most part - focused on the Dutch model. It's not only the Dutch model (it's also been adopted to varying degrees elsewhere, notably in Portugal) but the Dutch have certainly led the way. And if your pre-eminent concern is public health, as models go it's a pretty good one. There, possession of small amounts of almost anything is decriminalised. Some drugs (such as cannabis) can be bought openly in coffee shops. Addiction is static, even as the population grows, and a high proportion of addicts are in treatment. Drug use among teenagers is lower than it is in Britain and they don't learn to run instinctively away from policemen. The idea is that drug use is a health issue, rather than a criminal one, and it seems to work.

Where it stops working, though, is behind the coffee shop door. Drug use may have been decriminalised in the Netherlands but drug production and supply have not been. This means that, while a lump of cannabis can be bought openly over the counter, something altogether more murky has gone on for it to have got there in the first place. Or, to put it another way, what we have here is an (almost) legal demand that cannot be legally supplied. Indeed, dealers, growers and traffickers are still prosecuted in the Netherlands with vigour. The UKDPC suggests something similar here.

In effect this creates an economy ripe for organised crime and in the Netherlands that's precisely what has happened. Some studies (the Dutch criminologist Cyrille Fijnaut is your essential reading on this) now put the country at the nexus of organised crime across Europe. It seems to be a fairly restrained sort of organised crime, admittedly, rarely bothering the rest of Dutch society, but it is organised crime nonetheless. It pays no tax, it operates with menaces and it creates routes that can be - and are - exploited by those with even less savoury wares to peddle, such as guns and human traffic.

This is not the case in California. The genius of the medical marijuana wheeze is that it extracted the whole supply chain from criminality, turning an unlawful conspiracy into something akin to a cottage industry. Rather than being smuggled into the state, marijuana started being grown openly on farms. And not, as it turned out, all that profitably. What started as something of a gold rush during the end of the last decade seems to have plunged into horrific downturn by about 2010, due to feverish oversupply by overexcited hippies. Marijuana is, after all, just a weed. Why should it cost any more than oregano?

The experiment has not been without its hitches, admittedly, and may yet collapse messily. Sixteen US states consider medical marijuana to be legal, but the Federal Government does not agree with them. This means you have Drug Enforcement Agency officials raiding businesses that have valid local permits, numerous court cases, and panicked - or possibly stoned - regional authorities issuing contradictory rulings every other week. Whatever happens, nobody will be hoping for prohibition to return more vehemently than the murderous cartels over the border in Mexico. Marijuana used to give them 60 per cent of their profits. Maybe it soon will again.

Nobody knows what proportion of British criminality is linked to the drugs trade, but estimates put it as anywhere up to a fifth. Decriminalisation of users would prevent essentially innocent people from becoming a part of that, which surely has to be welcomed. But it also leaves a whole, immense industry in the hands of criminals. Yesterday's report nodded at this, with the suggestion that home-growers of cannabis could be more leniently treated so as to prise the industry away from the gangs. But why would it? Gangs have sheds, too.

The logic of drugs leads only one way, which is towards legalisation and regulation. Politicians must know this but they obfuscate, perhaps terrified by the gap between reality and the traditional rhetoric. 'The Home Office says levels of drug use are falling and it won't alter its approach,' my radio told me yesterday. But does any minister or official honestly believe that this decline has anything to do with this policy, or that initiative? Come off it. In truth, even the drop only goes to highlight the sheer impotence of government at influencing what people do or don't want to do.

Where government could have a real effect is on the other side. Three years ago mephedrone was a legal high; sold as plant food. Possibly dangerous, it was a public health issue. Now illegal, it's a criminal issue, too; a new challenging problem recast as part of an old intractable one. Who gained?

There do not need to be narco-states, or armed gangs in our inner cities, or generations of kids who see their blinged-up elder brothers on street corners and conclude that actual jobs are a mug's game. They'[re the results of a vast global industry that government after government in country after country only ever tries to squash, and never tries to manage. Decriminalisation is all about where drugs go, and it's a good start. But where they come from matters too.

Conservatives Changing View On Drug War

One morning last month a farmer in Arizona discovered an unusual crop in one of his ploughed fields: more than 30 large soup cans were lodged in the ridges and furrows. The cans turned out to contain 85lb of cannabis, worth $42,500. Police believe they had been fired across the border from Mexico by drug smugglers using a cannon.

The ingenious scheme was dreamt up by drug gangs desperate to get their merchandise into America after the tightening of security along the border. In recent years smugglers have attempted to hide contraband in everything from golf balls to flip-flops and even inside puppies masquerading as show dogs.

It is all too easy to imagine the weary sighs of the police officers who were called to the field of cans. Being on the front line of America's war on drugs must often feel like being part of a losing battle - a reality that is now being acknowledged on a number of surprising fronts.

Last year two American states, Washington and Colorado, voted to legalise, regulate and tax cannabis. The politicians who pushed through the legislation were not bleeding-heart liberals, but hard-headed conservatives. Their argument was that pot was harmful to developing teenage brains but while it was illegal it was impossible to control its use - all a child had to do to get hold of it was ask around in the playground.

Parents should be able to keep their children away from cannabis the same way they were able to protect them from cigarettes and alcohol, they argued. Under new legislation in both states, cannabis, like alcohol, is banned for those under the age of 21, and driving while stoned is against the law. Adults can buy the drug from approved dispensaries.

Now two leading economists have entered the debate and declared the war on drugs a waste of money after carrying out a detailed cost-benefit analysis of the estimated $40bn a year spent in America on policing the drug trade, imprisoning those convicted of drug offences and treating addicts.

In a report published in The Wall Street Journal last week, Gary Becker - a Nobel prize winner - and Kevin Murphy, both professors at the University of Chicago, said the war was not just expensive and pointless but counterproductive.

"The paradox of the war on drugs is that the harder governments push the fight, the higher drug prices become to compensate for the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished," they wrote.

"This is why larger drug gangs often benefit from a tougher war on drugs, especially if the war mainly targets small-fry dealers and not the major drug gangs. Moreover, to the extent that a more aggressive war on drugs leads dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption, an increase in enforcement can exacerbate the costs imposed on society."

Like the legislators in Washington and Colorado, the professors are not campaigners but cool-headed academics whose work, according to Paul Ormerod, a leading British economist, "you just have to take seriously". The professors contend that the war on drugs is not only a waste of public money, but also helps ruin lives as addicts have few places to turn for help.

"Many people addicted to smoking and to drinking alcohol manage to break their addictions when they get married or find good jobs . . . they also often get help from groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, or by using patches and 'fake' cigarettes that gradually wean them from their addiction to nicotine," they wrote.

"It is generally harder to break an addiction to illegal goods. Drug addicts may be leery of going to clinics or to non-profit 'drugs anonymous' groups for help. They fear they will be reported for consuming illegal substances."

Becker and Murphy recommend the full decriminalisation of drugs, not just for users but for dealers too. This would "lower drug prices, reduce the role of criminals in producing and selling drugs, improve many inner-city neighbourhoods, encourage more minority students in the US to finish high school, substantially lessen the drug problems of Mexico and other countries involved in supplying drugs, greatly reduce the number of state and federal prisoners and the harmful effects on drug offenders of spending years in prison, and save the financial resources of government."

Are there lessons for Britain in the American debate? Almost certainly, if we would listen. Last month Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, condemned the conspiracy of silence over drugs in British politics when he backed a report by MPs on the home affairs committee that said the government should consider legalising cannabis and stop prosecuting those caught using cocaine and heroin.

We still give people significant sentences for drug dealing. It's harsh when compared with violent offences David Cameron slapped Clegg down, making it clear that he did not support the decriminalisation of drugs and would not set up a royal commission to look into the issue. Before he became Tory leader, Cameron took a different view, saying we needed fresh thinking on drugs, the policing of which has been estimated to cost £14bn a year.

"Whatever their views, politicians in power tend to zip it about drugs because it's not a vote-winner," says Max Daly, co-author of Narcomania, an account of the drug trade in Britain.

"There is a long list of former cabinet ministers and chief constables who start talking about how unworkable our current system is as soon as they leave office. But no one in office wants to talk about it because they know they'll get shot down."

Yet many of the issues the American professors touch on in their report Daly saw reflected as he travelled around Britain - how the drug trade encourages youths in deprived areas to drop out of school, for instance: "Kids with no qualifications feel locked out of the mainstream economy. They can go on the dole or they can join the alternative economy, the drug economy," he says. "Some of these people are almost entrepreneurs, they're the ones who want to leave the estate - in a BMW."

Becker and Murphy point out that becoming a drug dealer is a rational economic decision for many young people in deprived areas, given the exceptionally high profit margins on drugs.

The Home Affairs committee that produced last month's report looked at an experimental scheme in Portugal, where possession of a small amount of drugs - even class A drugs such as heroin and cocaine - is no longer a criminal offence. Those found with up to 2g of cocaine or 25g of cannabis are given an on-the-spot fine and addicts are encouraged to seek treatment.

"We're still giving people significant sentences for drug dealing in Britain. If you're caught with a kilo of cocaine the starting sentence is 8-11 years in prison, compared with five years for rape and three years for grievous bodily harm. It's incredibly harsh when you compare it with violent offences," says Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release, which campaigns on drug law.

"The 1961 convention on narcotic drugs - the first global agreement - talks about drug use being an 'evil' to mankind. So we have a problem in that drug policy has grown out of this moral stance that says drugs are a danger to individuals, communities and society and that it is the role of government to protect society from that danger."

The 1961 convention was signed in America, the country that now seems to be leading the way to a new, utilitarian approach to illegal drugs. Eastwood says the evidence from Washington and Colorado on the impact of a regulated market over the next year or two is the most exciting thing that's happening in drug policy reform.

Even if drug use increases in those states, it will not necessarily be problematic, she says, as "it might reduce alcohol use and we have to balance public health benefits". Other benefits might accrue from the tax revenue on the sale of cannabis, some of which may go into education.

But just as drug traffickers keep dreaming up schemes to outwit the police, many drug users are already one step ahead of the legislators. In the past few years the legal highs sold over the internet or in clubs have proliferated. The reality for legislators here and in America is that by the time the law has caught up with one substance, party-goers are on to the next.

How To Reduce Drinking

IMAGINE, if you can, drinking 33 litres of vodka. Not easy - but if you're an average British adult that's roughly the amount of booze you put away in a year, enough to exceed the government's recommended limits week in, week out.

The Brits deserve their reputation for booziness, but most other western countries are worse or not far behind. Even supposedly abstemious Americans each knock back the equivalent of 24 litres of vodka per year.

With so many people drinking at unsafe levels, it's no surprise that alcohol is rising up the public health agenda. In May 2010, the World Health Organization published its first comprehensive strategy on reducing the harm caused by alcohol, seen as the launch of a worldwide war on booze.

The WHO was stung into action by a grim toll of disease and death. According to its own figures, harmful drinking kills 2.5 million people annually - around twice as many as die in road accidents. Excessive drinking accounts for an estimated 5.5 per cent of the total global burden of disease and premature death. Overall, it is the third most important contributor to ill health, behind only high blood pressure and tobacco.

Even the alcohol industry, with global sales of some $1 trillion a year, accepts that excessive drinking is a problem, and that it has a responsibility to do something about it. Indeed, the WHO's strategy acknowledges that industry has a role to play. But behind the scenes, the two are locked in a struggle for control of the health agenda.

The mantra of the alcohol industry is "drink responsibly". Its prescription is a mixture of personal restraint and industry self-regulation: targeting problem drinkers, promoting the use of designated drivers and adopting voluntary codes to prevent advertising from targeting children. Who could argue with that?

But here's the rub: the industry's preferred policies are not the most effective. An extensive evidence base makes it clear that the best policies are those imposed by governments - increasing price, restricting availability and banning advertising.

The clash between these two perspectives is now playing out on a global scale. The WHO is encouraging governments to use the levers of price, availability and curbs on advertising to treat humanity's collective drink problem. But it must compete with the multinational companies' own, rather different, approach.

To the casual observer, this struggle can seem like a phoney war. Rather than directly challenging the WHO, the industry talks in terms of "corporate social responsibility". It also speaks the language of science, drawing especially on the output of a think tank in Washington DC called the International Center for Alcohol Policies. ICAP is bankrolled by some of the world's largest alcohol companies.

Critics complain that ICAP's publications either downplay the evidence on price and availability, or claim there is debate among researchers on these issues where there is not. "They are experts at muddying the scientific waters," claims David Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who recently published a critical review of ICAP's science and its strategies for influencing policy (American Journal of Public Health, vol 102, p 80).

At the same time, alcohol producers are investing heavily in marketing, including campaigns that critics claim are calculated to reach underage drinkers - a charge that the companies involved vigorously deny (see "Joe Camel in a bottle?").

Sound familiar? These tactics more or less follow the playbook written by the tobacco industry as it fought measures to restrict sales and advertising of its products - though with one significant difference.

"Tobacco companies made a huge tactical error in taking the stance that their products don't cause harm," says James Mosher, an alcohol-policy consultant based in Felton, California. That approach exploded in the industry's face in the 1990s after US states sued tobacco firms to recover healthcare costs caused by smoking. The action laid bare internal company documents showing that executives understood the science very well, yet pursued an aggressive strategy of denial.

Those documents also revealed covert attempts to manipulate science, including paying consultants to place industry-friendly papers in journals and even the creation of a scientific society to question the evidence on passive smoking.

In contrast to big tobacco's secrecy, the alcohol industry has long acknowledged that excessive drinking is harmful and is transparent in its support for ICAP. These tactics seem to work. While tobacco companies today have pariah status, the alcohol industry has retained a generally positive public image, and has the ear of many powerful politicians.

There are still reasons for concern, however. ICAP's stance is notably industry-friendly. Its key publication is the Blue Book, a guide to policy that focuses on targeting heavy drinkers. This may help, but conspicuously absent, note critics, are statements on the effectiveness of raising the price, restricting availability and banning adverts.

Jernigan concedes that ICAP's publications contain some useful contributions, but he complains that proven policies are either neglected or covered in a way that stresses uncertainty. For instance, ICAP's briefing on taxation states: "The impact and effectiveness of taxation as a health policy tool remain the source of much debate."

Pressed on this point, ICAP does not dispute that increasing taxes can reduce overall harm. But its deputy president, Marjana Martinic, questions whether it is effective for the heaviest drinkers, who may "trade down" to cheaper forms of alcohol.

Priced out

It's true that the effects of higher taxes are weaker for the heaviest drinkers. Still, when results from many studies are considered together, it is clear that increasing the price significantly reduces consumption - including for heavy boozers (Addiction, vol 104, p 179).

Despite this evidence, industry executives are bullish in rejecting policies based on price, availability and curbs on advertising. "While these measures may reduce overall consumption, they would have precious little impact on hazardous and underage drinking," argues Guy Smith, executive vice-president for corporate relations with Diageo, the world's largest producer of distilled spirits.

Diageo instead backs approaches including Screening and Brief Intervention, which aims to identify people with a drink problem or a risk of developing one and get them into treatment.

There is good evidence that this is a necessary component of a comprehensive strategy. But in terms of bangs for buck it falls short of what can be done by increasing price and restricting sales.

If you look at who drinks and how much, it's hardly surprising that manufacturers should be wary of measures that could strongly curtail excessive drinking. "They basically live off harmful consumption," claims Jurgen Rehm of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada, who studies the global health burden caused by drinking.

In the UK, for instance, the heaviest-drinking 10 per cent consumes about 45 per cent of the alcohol sold; in the US that figure is 55 per cent. What's more, total consumption in nations such as the UK is at such high levels that even relatively moderate drinkers are still endangering their health.

The reason that controls on price and availability work so well is that they seem to cut drinking across the board, delaying the onset of diseases like liver cirrhosis in the heaviest drinkers, while preventing others from reaching harmful levels of consumption.

So if that's the message from science, should we worry that the industry takes a different view? Yes, say advocates for public health, who are especially worried about the industry's influence in developing countries.

"The elephant in the room is that you've got huge markets - in South Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa and Latin America - where young people are coming to prime drinking age," says Thomas Babor, a specialist in alcohol and public health at the University of Connecticut in Farmington.

These territories represent the alcohol companies' main opportunity for growth and are where their marketing and lobbying are increasingly being brought to bear.

Making a connection between alcohol companies and the promotion of policies that favour their interests is hard, but one case has been documented. In 2008 Oystein Bakke and Dag Endal of Forut, a Norwegian NGO, analysed draft alcohol policies being developed by Botswana, Lesotho, Uganda and Malawi. The documents were broadly in line with ICAP's recommendations and the texts were remarkably similar to one another. In two cases, the Microsoft Word files indicated that the "author" was Mitch Ramsey, policy and issues manager with the African arm of brewer SABMiller, one of ICAP's sponsors and the facilitator of workshops from which the drafts emerged (Addiction, vol 105, p 22). The documents largely ignored WHO's policy recommendations.

Global action

That affair may have caused some embarrassment, but it has not stopped the industry pursuing its preferred policies. Through an initiative called Global Actions on Harmful Drinking, many of the biggest companies are backing efforts led by ICAP to promote self-regulation across the world - including key emerging markets such as Brazil, Mexico, China and India.

These efforts are a complement to government regulation, not an alternative, says ICAP's Martinic. But critics fear that in many of the countries, it will be the industry's position that prevails. "They are investing tremendous resources in the promotion of self-regulation," says Babor.

Is there any hope of reducing the harm caused by alcohol? Right now, the most encouraging signs come from countries that are reaping a devastating harvest from decades of industry-friendly policies.

Step forward Scotland, where consumption has doubled over the past five decades as the price of alcohol has fallen and controls on sales have been relaxed. Alcohol-related health problems now cost this nation of 5.25 million people £3.6 billion each year. "In 1960, Scotland had one of the lowest liver cirrhosis death rates in western Europe. Today we have one of the highest," says Evelyn Gillan of Alcohol Focus Scotland.

In a bold move, the Scottish government intends by April to impose a minimum price of 50 pence per unit (10 millilitres) of alcohol. According to economic simulations run by a team at the University of Sheffield, UK, this would cut overall consumption by 5.7 per cent.

Minimum pricing has an important advantage over hiking taxes. Tax increases can be partly absorbed by producers and retailers, but a minimum unit price must be borne by consumers. That will eliminate the bargain-basement booze favoured by some of the heaviest drinkers - white cider, for example, which can be bought for less than 13 pence a unit. This would address concerns about trading down. The Sheffield team's simulations suggest that consumption by the heaviest drinkers - men drinking more than 50 units a week and women 35 - would fall by 10.7 per cent.

The move faces a legal challenge from industry groups, due to be heard on 15 January in Scotland's highest civil court. As well as questioning the evidence that minimum prices cut consumption, the challenge argues that it breaches European competition law.

But the sobering idea is taking hold: the UK government is in the middle of a consultation period on a 45-pence minimum unit price for England and Wales, which the modelling suggests should cut overall consumption by 4.3 per cent and reduce the annual number of alcohol-related deaths in England by more than 2000 a year. Ireland also says it intends to follow Scotland's lead.

As the boozy British Isles rethinks the merits of decades of industry-friendly policies, the rest of the world will be watching with interest. The health of millions of people could hinge on the outcome.

Joe Camel in a bottle?

Joe Camel knew how to catch 'em young. The cartoon character was the public face of Camel cigarettes, dropped in 1997 by tobacco firm R. J. Reynolds in the face of legal action and criticism that Joe was calculated to appeal to children.

Today, similar arguments surround the marketing of alcohol, notably alcopops. Critics claim that they appeal to underage drinkers, who later transfer their brand loyalty to related brands.

One brand under particular scrutiny is Diageo's Smirnoff Ice, which accounted for about half of all US alcopop advertising in 2001. Sales of Smirnoff vodka soared after the introduction of Ice in 1999, reversing a slow decline, but Diageo denies the suggestion that it markets to underage drinkers.

"Diageo does not market to underage youth," says Guy Smith, the company's executive vice-president for corporate relations. "We do not want the business of anyone under the legal drinking age. It's that simple."

James Mosher, an alcohol policy consultant in Felton, California, has analysed the marketing of the Smirnoff brand. He cites evidence that, in 2005, more than 10 per cent of US TV ads for Smirnoff Ice and Smirnoff vodka were placed against shows with an underage viewership of 30 per cent or more, breaching the industry's own voluntary advertising code (American Journal of Public Health, vol 102, p 56). Several other big companies, including Bacardi and SABMiller, also breached this code.

Diageo's Smith disputes these findings, pointing to a 2008 report from the US Federal Trade Commission that concluded that the drinks industry has made "good faith efforts" to comply with its own code.

With the action now switching to social media, this may already be yesterday's debate. In 2011, for example, Diageo credited its "multimillion dollar strategic partnership" with Facebook for increasing US sales of five key brands by 20 per cent.

"The use of new media channels to market alcohol is a clear area of concern due to their youth appeal, relative lack of regulation and the sheer volume of promotional messages," concluded a 2010 report from the Institute for Social Marketing at the University of Stirling, UK.

Critics fear that the industry has struck marketing gold. "It's infinitely more powerful for a message to come from your mate than from Diageo," says Gerard Hastings at Stirling.

Double Standard on Drugs

Did you read The Times sports pages yesterday? On facing pages, we carried the latest details of post-confessional Lance Armstrong and stuff about the reformed drug user Dwain Chambers. It's pretty clear that drugs are a bad thing. Drug users that repenteth are allowed back grudgingly, if at all.

Turn, then, to the middle pages of the paper, where The Times greeted the return of Fleetwood Mac and the re-release of their album Rumours with a big interview. Christine McVie told Will Hodgkinson: "If you got too high you had a drink, and if you got too drunk you had another line of coke. We did that every night until three or four in the morning."

The memory was produced, Hodgkinson wrote, "in the fond manner of someone remembering high jinks at school". There was no moral condemnation, rather the reverse. The line about coke was lifted out and printed in large type. Rock stars not only take drugs, their drug use is acceptable. Even, in a way, morally appropriate.

I was in The Times office this week and noticed a framed copy of an old front page. The Times had bought serial rights to Keith Richards's autobiography: the headline was 'Sex, drugs and me, by Keith Richards'. The implication was that Richards was a great man, not in spite of the drugs but because of the drugs. He was a man to be celebrated: piratical survivor and living national treasure.

The louche lifestyle is an aspect of the art of Richards and the Rolling Stones and drugs were part of the creative process of performance and composition. Drugs gave us the Stones, so drugs are, at least in a way, a good thing. Drugs are part of the history of rock music. They are accepted as an equivocal thing at worst, sometimes as unambiguously good.

Without drugs the Beatles would not have given us Tomorrow Never Knows, She Said She Said, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. One of their accepted masterpieces, A Day in the Life, deals with the fragmented experiences and moments of transcendence associated with drugs. It ends: 'I'd love to turn you on.'

Bob Dylan is the nearest thing rock music has to Shakespeare. His works include the comic masterpiece Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, which has a chorus line of 'Everybody must get stoned'. To call Mr Tambourine Man a drugs song would be a failure to understand it, but it's got drugs in it all right: 'Take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind . . .' A more significant line hints that drugged experience is related to the elusive experience of songwriting: 'If you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme . . .' The song is not only (in part) about drugs, it's also written with their assistance. Many rate this as one of the greatest songs ever written: it wouldn't have happened without performance-enhancing drugs.

Drugs have been part of the creation of some of the finest works in popular music, a fact we mostly accept without comment. We celebrate the survivors such as Richards and Eric Clapton. As for the casualties - Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon - we still have their music, don-t we? 'Scuse me, while I kiss the sky,' sang Jimi, and it wasn't a song about pole-vaulting. But when we dwell on Hendrix, we think of the soaring music, not his sordid death. He is not condemned by history as a druggie and a loser; he is celebrated as a musician of genius who did drugs.

Drugs have inspired musicians across the ages. If we love the music, we must accept the drugs. Bob Marley smoked a lot of ganga; his songs are still adored. The performances of musicians, live, in the studio, in the throes of composition, have often been enhanced by drugs and the experience of drugs. We accept this entirely in the word of music; and yet when we turn to sport, we spit on someone who tested positive for an inappropriate cold cure. Christine Ohuruogu became a national hate figure and she didn't even fail a drugs test, she just missed a few from sloppy diary-keeping.

It is clear, then, that we have different standards about drugs for musicians and athletes. Why? Perhaps it's because sport is competitive . . . as if the music business were not. An athlete will do an awful lot to gain an edge; a musician's life is dedicated to finding a good song. Drugs helped Ben Johnson and they helped Bob Dylan.

Drugs can be destructive no matter what reason they're taken for. Lives have been ruined by steroids, alcohol, barbiturates, cocaine, LSD, heroin. Drugs can harm you when they're legal and when they're illegal. Drugs kill rock stars who write inspiring music, they kill people who merely listen to it, they kill people who hate the bloody stuff.

Perhaps the difference is that drugs taken for sport affect the body while the drugs musicians take affect the mind. But that doesn't really stand up. Johnson knew he was full of the 'right stuff' that blazing day in Seoul. I bet if he'd been given Smarties and told they were the business, he'd still have won.

Armstrong gained a massive psychological advantage on those mad climbs by knowing that he was backed up by one of the most professional doping organisations in the history of sport.

All drugs have a psychological effect, just as all drugs have a physical effect. That's why we take 'em.

We have radically different standards for the people who bring us our favourite songs and the people who bring us our greatest sporting moments. Ben in Seoul, Jimi playing The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock: two high points of drugs culture - one a transcendent moment of greatness, the other a moment of eternal shame.

And it goes on. Amy Winehouse sang about rehab and died. She is remembered as a great singer with a powerful story.

Meanwhile, Armstrong is reviled.

I don't have the answer to this, as columnists are supposed to. I'm not arguing that we should take drugs less seriously in sport or more seriously in music. I am just pointing out that our acceptance of drug use is profoundly inconsistent. We don't have an absolute moral stance on drugs. Profession matters. Just as we are more shocked by a vicar's sexual shenanigans than those of a professional athlete, we are more shocked by the drug use of an athlete than that of a musician.

There's absolute morality . . . and then again, there's the morality of taste. We demand higher standards of professional athletes than we do of most other people in public life. We love sport at least partly because we want to believe that the winner is not only brilliant but morally sound. We love Jessica Ennis because we believe that she is not only a great athlete, she is also a very decent person. We want our winners to be good.

Sport represents our strait-laced, moral, puritanical side. When we need to stress the libertine within ourselves, we face the music and dance - and do so beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands . . .

A Summary of Drugs Debate

If drugs were legal we'd still have idiots that couldn't use them without leaving their stinking rotting bodies lying around on other peoples property. Same as we have now.

Only for two big differences: 1) gangs wouldn't control distribution, and 2) it would be less of a shame-based issue to deal with addictions, and more of a medical-based issue.

We'd still have the incompetent f-ups who couldn't hold a job but kept drinking and drugging. But there wouldn't be the threat of prison involved in the cleanup. Just .. get you some medicine now off you go.

But then the following entities would be out of work:

- Criminal defense attorneys
- 3/4 of the prison beds in America
- Most large drug gangs
- Major dent in the pharmaceutical industry's profits, since most illegal drugs are more in demand than legal ones.
- Criminal prosecution industry, all those DA's with less work than now
- DEA disbanded and all their mission-creep into civil rights gone overnight
- Various other alphabet agencies whose job involves spying on Americans to find drug trafficking, gone

Pretty impressive list. Now imagine out of all these how many of them have lobbyists and profit significantly from the status quo of today.

If we ended the drug war, we'd have money to help those that really needed help, and to do so properly. Not the infinite band-aids we have now, that results in drugged out and drunk people sleeping on streets regularly in every city in America, or filling up prisons, or feeding this vast array of government like DEA and FBI investigations.

Resveratrol Is Useless

It's been a confusing couple of weeks for lovers of red wine and longevity. On March 8, Science published a paper demonstrating the mechanism by which certain molecules activate a family of proteins called sirtuins, which are thought to be responsible for some of the benefits of caloric restriction. (Those would include improved metabolism, resistance to cancer, and possibly increased longevity.)

IF EVER THERE WAS A DRUG TAILOR-MADE FOR OVERWEIGHT AMERICANS, THIS SEEMED TO BE IT.

Since one of those molecules was resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, headline writers across the globe freaked out. "Red Wine Pill - Like Drinking 100 Glasses a Day Could Cure Major Diseases," blared Fox News. Even Pravda weighed in, with "Red Wine Pill Could Extend Human Life Expectancy to 150 Years."

Then, last Tuesday, GlaxoSmithKline suddenly announced that it was shutting down its Sirtris division, the Boston-based company that was actually supposed to be making the 'red wine pills,' and which GSK had bought for $720 million just five years ago. Wait, what?

The announcement marked a new, confusing phase in the long red-wine-pill saga, which kicked off with a front-page story in the New York Times on November 2, 2006. As the Times reported, Harvard researchers led by David Sinclair had found that resveratrol extended the lifespans of obese laboratory mice; that is, the mice pigged out on high-fat food, but their health did not seem to suffer. Thanks to the resveratrol, they lived just as long as normal mice. If anything, they did better: In videos, the chubby, resveratrol-treated mice jogged away happily on treadmills.

If ever there was a drug tailor-made for overweight Americans, this seemed to be it. Six months later, Sirtris - the company Sinclair cofounded to develop resveratrol-based drugs - had its IPO. Eleven months after that, in April 2008, GSK bought Sirtris outright for $720 million, or nearly double its stock-market valuation. Five years later, contra the headlines, there are still no red-wine longevity pills on the horizon. What happened?

Resveratrol itself is amazing stuff. It's produced in the skins of grapes, late in their maturation, as a kind of natural antifungal agent. In 2003, Sinclair had discovered that it seemed to activate a longevity-promoting gene in yeast called SIR2. Similar genes are present in nearly all animals, including humans; in mammals, they're called sirtuins, and they appear to be activated by caloric restriction. Resveratrol seemed to offer an easier, starvation-free route to sirtuin activation, and Sinclair and others then found that the stuff had similar effects on nematode worms, mice, and even fish. In a 2008 study, Sinclair even found that resveratrol helped turn normal mice into super-athletes with extraordinary endurance. (Paging Lance Armstrong ...)

Beyond that, resveratrol also seemed to combat certain kinds of cancers, and it is a powerful antioxidant. It also has strong cardioprotective effects, and was thought to be responsible for the 'French paradox,' the mysterious French ability to remain (relatively) healthy despite pigging out on Camembert and confit de canard. And it has been shown to fight diabetes, inflammation, and even neurological disorders.

As a pharmaceutical, though, resveratrol has issues. Sinclair calls it "a dirty drug," meaning it has too many targets in the cell. But that may be moot, because it seems to have extremely low bioavailability in humans. (Translation: Most of it exits via your bladder.) That doesn't stop people from spending $30 million a year on resveratrol supplements, including Sinclair himself (as he told the Times in 2006). But relatively few human studies have been done on resveratrol, and the results are modestly positive, but far from overwhelming, particularly in healthy adults.

Finally, and fatally, as a natural compound, resveratrol itself cannot be patented and sold by a pharmaceutical company. It was Sirtris's job to try to make new, improved, and potentially profitable versions of resveratrol, as well as entirely new compounds that would target the sirtuins. The company launched several clinical trials of possible sirtuin-activating drugs. But then, one by one, those trials were halted, at least two of them due to unexpected side effects. That leaves only one Sirtris compound, SRT2104, still under active study, for psoriasis and ulcerative colitis.

In the labs, as well, the sirtuin theory of aging was taking heavy fire. In 2011, another group published a paper in Nature that challenged Sinclair's research directly: His results, it was claimed, were an artifact of the way he did his experiments. The Science paper, published earlier this month, was Sinclair's triumphant rebuttal, outlining in precise detail how resveratrol and friends actually work on the sirtuin pathway. Just four days later, GSK pulled the plug. A GSK spokeswoman says the company will continue to work on sirtuin activators, but says that aside from SRT2104, there are none in the pipeline. Also, she adds, "they don't have anything to do with red wine."

Says Sinclair, who is still a scientific adviser to GSK: "We know the science is real; the problem now is to push it over the goal line. If they don't end up as drugs in our lifetime, it's not the fault of scientists, and more of a business decision."

Which is too bad, but at least red wine itself is still good for you. And until that longevity pill comes along, it's all we've got. Just be sure you use a proper dose: In at least two major studies of wine and health, the greatest benefits were seen in people who consumed between three and five glasses of the red stuff.

Per day..

The New Psychedelics

The Teafaerie wears patched jeans and a coat of many colours; her hair is tied with a rainbow of rags and ribbons. Anyone who has visited Burning Man in Nevada's Black Rock Desert will be able to conjure her image in a moment. When she goes out at night, she wears glittery wings and carries a lightsaber. When she gets high on psychedelics, she packs a Dictaphone, the better to file her trip reports.

The Teafaerie is a 'psychonaut', a digital update on the breed of drug-takers who document their journeys to the inner space. Psychonauts don't get wasted, they take drugs with mind-expanding intent. Where it was once LSD and mescaline, the new drugs are usually invented in Chinese laboratories by faceless characters who tweak the illegal highs, producing hundreds of new ones. These are delivered, in a plain package, to the Teafaerie's front door.

Her travelogues appear on erowid.org, which, along with drugs-forum.com and bluelight.ru, is where the trip reports with the most gravitas pop up. These are the broadsheets of drug culture, with moderators who are strict about swearing, scientific methodology and relevance. Teafaerie is sensible; she exists in the kind and cuddly corner of the counterculture found in the Healing Field at Glastonbury. "None of these new chemicals has a long history of human use," she says. "It pays to do your homework."

At the last count, there were 300 forum-type websites. Most are inane and represent the macho drug culture of 'oy-oy' lads getting loaded on toxins and bragging about it. The big three geek sheets listed above, however, have zero tolerance of idiots. The revenge of the nerds is that they have the best drugs, but to hang with them is to play by their rules. Three weeks' talking online, being almost totally ignored as the thick kid, was a swift reminder of school chemistry lessons. On one of the websites where legal highs are sold, customers can look for drugs using their structural formulas; searches also yield similar compounds available to buy.

The psychonaut treats drug-taking like a laboratory experiment. They do not snort or sniff, bomb or smoke; they insufflate, take orally, anally or in solution. This is a universe where drug-takers all have a chemistry degree. Dr Paolo Deluca, of the addictions department at King's College London, is studying legal highs. There are no bunnies getting high here, "but there are a few rats". Much of his data comes from humans, however, from the psychonauts' trip reports on the forums. Another researcher, Dr Ben Sessa, described the psychonauts as 'geeks with mice, who buy the latest research chemicals and sit in dark rooms, probably playing computer games and without girlfriends'.

This characterisation seems unduly harsh, given the snuggly vision of the psychonaut presented by the Teafaerie: "I like to do a little consecration ceremony before I take psychedelics. It's like saying grace before diving into a delicious meal." I wonder if she might be in the minority - I fail to meet another female on this journey - but you never know. The psychonauts never use their real names and usually write up their experiences using non-incriminating acronyms such as Swim (Someone who isn't me) and Afoaf (A friend of a friend). On the ukchemicalresearch.org site, there is a whole gaming forum for psychonauts to play together when they're high. What they aren't is what the police call 'problem drug-users'. They are not found foaming at the mouth in town centres or carried from nightclubs overcooked on a toxic cocktail of who knows what. Researchers such as Deluca use the psychonauts' reports to try to identify new highs and discover more about their toxicity, which in turn will help the less sensible drug-takers when they end up in A&E.

The psychonauts take their test-bunny role seriously. They know their pentedrone from their methylone, and their larocaine from their ethcathinone. They do not use the expression 'legal high'. Nobody uses the expression 'legal high' except journalists and worried parents. Those in authority, the police and government, call them 'novel psychoactive substances', and educated users call them 'research chemicals' (RCs) or 'analogues', because they are all comparable to the 'classics'. On the street, any baggy full of unknown white crystals or powder is called 'bubble' or 'bath salts'.

For Harry, a classic 'oy-oy', any negative or excitable media attention around a research chemical - if someone dies while taking it, say - is an invitation to try it. I pursue him for comment and, both times we speak, he is on a 'ketamine analogue' - he's not sure which one, but it is 'probably' the best known, methoxetamine. Even Harry does his homework and reads the detailed trip reports on the geek sheets, however.

"The psychonauts have a good understanding of chemicals: you can trust them," says Deluca, who has been studying them since 2002. "Rats are not humans: we can infer physical effects from them, but rats can't tell you the social consequences."

So the psychonauts are like talking lab rabbits with a PhD, I say. "I am not endorsing what they do, but there is a market and it is an unknown. Forums are the only way of knowing what is coming up in the world of psychopharmaceutical effects. You must understand that they are not doing us a favour, but it is impossible to ignore such an accumulation of data."

In 2011, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction counted 49 new psychoactive substances, more than double the number recorded in 2009. Harry asked me which new chemicals I was planning on mentioning, 'because I should put in an order before they clamp down'.

An email arrives from China offering an alphabetti-numberetti spaghetti of research chemicals at $80 for 10g, with a $50 shipping charge. Some compounds are so new and rare that Google has never heard of them, but drugs-forum.com has. A836, despite what Google tells me, is not the road to John o' Groats, but a synthetic cannabinoid. Like any good journalist, I make my excuses and leave. Others do not.

The ethics around humans providing academia with information about mystery compounds long before a laboratory can officially let a mouse loose on them are confusing. The politics of prohibition, unsurprisingly, are never far away. One psychonaut, Legion, says: "The government is allowing the population to be used as guinea pigs."

The psychonaut's approach to getting high is miles distant from the desperate junkie's or the self-absorbed, braying, middle-class cokehead's. The Teafaerie calls psychedelic drugs 'wonderful medicines'. Often, she acts as a trip 'sitter', a straight buddy for friends. The Teafaerie starts a trip, not with 10 pints, but with a piece of toast, and they always end with a nice cup of tea.

Wine and Your Face

I write this in the week that I will be turning 42. Since puberty, I have been scrupulously cautious about the sun, and a non-smoker. My weight has not fluctuated greatly and I eat pretty well. My stress levels, I imagine, have been about average.

So far, so good, regarding my facial ageing. And, yet, there is one thing that I have undoubtedly done to sabotage my looks and it is something that I have in common with the rest of my generation. I possess what one may unwinningly refer to as The British Booze Face.

Urban legend has it that today's women drink seven times more alcohol than their Edwardian counterparts. My grandmothers enjoyed the occasional pre-prandial sherry on high days and holidays. My mother downs nothing whatsoever. Her daughter drinks like the proverbial (hammered) fish. And I am not alone, from teenage 'vertical then rapidly more horizontal' drinking, or Mumsnet wine o'clock.

Dr Michael Prager is the man on the receiving end of such behaviours, being the authority on cosmetic medicine that women increasingly seek out to rectify the damage drink has ravaged. He shrugs philosophically: "How many patients do I see who don't drink? They are rare. So much of my work is about people not looking after themselves. This ladette thing girls do in their 20s? If you carry on 'til 40, you'll be physically wasted - facially, not least.

"When I was training, an alcoholic was someone who felt they needed to drink every day. Now that's the whole of society." The doctor, late forties yet fresh-faced looking, virtuously sips green tea throughout the day.

According to a 2009 YouGov survey, the 'average' wine drinker purports to down a bottle a week, but who among us knows any such paragons? The new normal drinking is of the at least half a bottle most nights sort and it is wreaking havoc on our ageing. It is an irony that - in an era of hair dyes, cunning cosmetics, and fiftysomething yoga bodies - facially, at least, we are making ourselves look older than the dowdy and grey-haired generations that preceded us.

Dr Prager continues: "So many women come and see me in their thirties to ask my advice about ageing. I point out that drink is damaging their looks in a way that will only become worse. But, they tell me: "It's vital to my professional and personal lives that I socialise. This is something I cannot give up." And, then, in their forties, they come back in a panic. There are things that I can do but they have inflicted this upon themselves."

Alcohol is basically sugar, only with 50 per cent more calories. A gram of fat has nine kilocalories, carbohydrates have four and a half and alcohol seven. We see a speeded up version of the ageing effect of this with diabetes. Sugar causes glycosylation, ageing cells and tissues through higher levels of insulin, changes in the DNA and tissue oxidisation. This impacts upon cells in a multitude of negative ways: causing free radical damage, reducing cell proliferation and collagen production, slowing everything down.

Alcohol is also a diuretic: it dehydrates you, skin included. You absorb nutrients less successfully and crave salt. In women it changes hormone levels, creating higher levels of testosterone, leading to things such as spots and the taking on of a masculine guise, with a diminished waist, barrel-like middle, bloated moonface, skinny legs, and hair loss (all of which increases with the menopause as it is).

Wine is especially ageing, being our great, socially sanctioned sugar hit. "People will 'healthily' reject chocolate and cake but happily gorge on wine," Prager says. And then, of course, drink so often proves the gateway to other ageing behaviours: smoking, eating junk food, lack of sleep and other addictions.

I myself received evidence of the positive effects of renouncing the bottle back in the autumn, when an exploding appendix meant that I was forced to renounce drink for a month. I may have had a brush with death but I have never looked more youthful. My skin positively bloomed. The moment I was back on the mother's ruin, the panda eyes and the bloating returned, as others have found in the wake of their January detoxes ('detox' being that great middle-class euphemism for abstinence from functional alcoholism).

We all know the British Booze Face when we see it. Indeed, many of us see it in the mirror. The complexion is grey, dulled, parched, yet prone to spottiness. Skin may be hollowed and shrunken about the eyes and cheekbones, but bloated and overblown as a whole (not least where some women renounce food to stay slender while carousing).

Many drinkers develop a red and thread-veined nose. Jowls sag and under-eyes blacken, to which I would add: cavernous pores in the wake of sleeping in slap.

The good doctor can help to rectify this ravaged appearance with various treatments. He gives his clients Botox to firm up the drinker's drooping jawline, hyaluronic acid-based dermal fillers to pad out caverns around the cheeks and eyes (guided by the lacerating images produced by his 3D camera) and lasers to zap those broken little veins.

He also claims puffiness and dark circles respond well to radio frequency (the application of superficial micro waves into the dermis to stimulate collagen). But the treatment the (drinking) beauty editors want is his new Illuminator Facial: a combination of a mild peel, electrical pulses and mask. And he urges us not to forget skincare and make-up. (As if we boozers ever could.) However, to achieve lasting - subsequently unsabotaged - results, one must also renounce or, at least, severely limit, the bottle; something that we Brits prove extremely reluctant to do. As with radical changes in diet and the renunciation of smoking, one will see a difference. "Look at rock stars," Prager says. "Many of them look better than they did 25 years ago. They either died of their excesses, or went to AA and macrobiotic to rectify the damage."

Vicki Edgson, the nutritionist behind the celebrity world's new Bible, Honestly Healthy, concurs: "Alcohol consumption in women is higher than it ever has been and, whilst we are prepared to spend huge sums on other fixes, it seems strange that many choose to ignore the abundant research that links alcohol with premature ageing."

This is inevitable, as the liver becomes overworked in its attempts to break alcohol down, leading to dehydration, hormone disruption and cross-linkage in the skin itself, due to the sugars that alcohol contains. Broken veins, excessive wrinkles and general dryness are all attributable, whilst nutrient absorption is inhibited.

You wouldn't catch Gwyneth Paltrow with a glass of wine in her hand - more like a supercharged green smoothie - and just look at her skin. Vodka is cleaner, and far lower in sugar, while white wine and champagne are the worst.

Edgson advocates a regime rich in avocados, chia seeds, pomegranate, cucumber, olives, oats, sprouted beans and seeds, coconut water, blueberries and salmon. Ultimately, however, if we aim to turn our backs on the symptoms, we must address our relationship with the cause.

While we may lament our addled looks, are we ready to wean ourselves off our collective dependency? To lose the face, are we ready to renounce the prop and the pleasure that is the habit?

"People, women, seem to feel they need alcohol in a way that makes it worth the sacrifice," Prager says. "Most patients would panic and refuse treatment if they didn't think they could have that evening's glass of wine. Only it never is one glass."

Design

You'd know a can of Budweiser anywhere. Like many other major brands, whether it's Coca-Cola, M&Ms, or BMW, Bud's red and white packaging is instantly recognizable. It's familiar, it's safe, and it's universally likeable. But recently Budweiser, along with several other ubiquitous beer makers including Miller Lite, Heineken, and Sam Adams, have made major changes to their iconic packaging. Here's why.

Over the past few years, the shelves of your local liquor store have become crowded with craft beer and artisanal ingredients. But Bud's brand is all about being a comforting, unwavering staple. So why is it - along with a crowd of other major beer companies - changing?

Turns out there are lots of reasons. But before we get into the why, let's take a look at the how. Because the next time you order your favorite cold brew, the bottle it comes in could be downright unrecognizable.

For the first time since 1973, MillerCoors has totally revamped the classic longneck. The torso of the bottle, so to speak, has been elongated, and the neck is slightly shorter. Miller design folks say that's to make it easier to drink. It looks a little more streamlined - and loses the swirled neck that was added a few years back - but holds onto key elements like brown glass. The profile is similar, and the diameter is the same, but there's also a new raised portion on the glass. Ever find yourself peeling off the label of a bottle? According MillerCoors' packaging and design lead Charles Ho Fung, that's called the "the fiddle factor," the bottle's proverbial comfort blanket towards which your fingers naturally gravitate. This new bit gives you something to fiddle with long after the label's been torn to shreds.

Budweiser, of course, has a number of different beers on the shelf, whether it's good old Bud Light or Bud Light Lime or even Black Crown. The latest addition to that line is the same Bud classic that you know and love, but in a bow tie-shaped can that echoes the classic flared logo the company has used since the 50s. The result is a can that's puckered in the middle. It's the same dimensions as other 12-ounce cans, but because its waistline is slimmer, you get 0.7 ounces less beer. Budweiser's VP of Innovation, Pat McGauley, told us the bow tie cans are here to stay, they'll be sold in an incremental 8-can pack that'll fit on the shelves between existing sixers and 12-packs.

Heineken is ditching the squatty look of its old bottles for the first time in two decades. The new packaging for 12- and 22-ounce Heineken and Heineken Light is called the Star Bottle. Its has stronger shoulders and a taller, slimmer neck. It also has a curved embossed star with the Heineken logo on one side. This is similar to the revamped Miller Lite bottle, in that it's there for you to tinker with.

Sam Adams has a new can that's supposed to more closely match the experience of drinking from a glass. This is the one redesign where flavor actually seems to be a major factor. Called the "Sam Can," it has a flared lip and a wider top, opening up the air flow so you actually smell what you're drinking. The differences are slight, but noticeable. The ridge where the can becomes the rim is also shaped differently. While most cans have a fairly straight profile, the Sam Can has a slight hourglass curve to it, bowing out at the top to accomodate the wider mouth.

Now the why. Beer companies are fighting a war of attrition. They want to stay at the forefront of our booze-addled brains (and wallets) in a market that offers plenty of options with funky names like Dogfish and Magic Hat. Artisanal culture has introduced us to ingredients like apricot and chocolate, along with psychedelic new label and bottle designs - all of which scream hey! I'm not signing up for what the man is trying to serve me. The microbrew you're drinking might have a lot to do with taste - but it also has everything to do with style.

"You hold a beer in your hand and it says something about you," says Craig Dubitsky, founder of design-conscious household products company, Hello. "So how do you do that? You change how it looks. It needs to be sexier, it needs to be shinier, and it needs to be shapelier. The can says that you're different and if you're not different, your beer can be."

Technological innovations through the years have been pretty limited as far as beer is concerned. In the beginning, cans were made from steel, then there was a move to aluminum. Then came the pull tabs, followed by the tab that stays on the packaging as you know it today. Brewing technology may have changed incrementally, but ultimately, beer is pretty basic stuff: alcohol, water, and hops. So instead, companies innovate on the aesthetic. On top of that, added Ho Fung, people just care about design more these days. "The new Miller Lite bottle came about because of the sensitivity of design with our consumers is going up - companies like Target, Apple, and Ikea increased accessibility to good design," he said.

But in the end, it all comes back to staying relevant, being hip, and getting you to buy, buy, buy. Though you might not think about it when you're running into the grocery store to buy drinks for a tailgate, but companies spend millions of dollars on strategies that play on your emotions. "When we can tie relevant iconic elements like Clydesdales, or like the bow tie into our core branding messaging, it drives a greater connection and creates an emotional bond," Budweiser's VP of innovation Pat McGauley said to Giz.

Ho Fung told us that the team at Miller Lite "identified that there's a lot behind emotion and purchase intent. If we could elicit a positive emotional reaction from the consumer, we'll drive purchase intent." So, just like your average relationship, beer brands are trying to keep things interesting. To put it in romantic terms, sure, your longneck is wearing a fancy new party dress. But it's not just intended to seduce you - it's meant to keep you engaged in the relationship and coming back for more.

That explains why Sam Adams spent two years in ergonomics research and testing, and over a million dollars on its can. And why Budweiser spent three years and millions of dollars creating an entirely new machine and materials strong enough to mold the can into a bow tie shape. Look at it this way: Budweiser is the mainstream straight-laced boy next door your dad likes. He's joined a band and gotten a tattoo and a $90 haircut in hopes you'll date him. He's still the same guy - he just has a new look.

Legal Highs

(As of May 2013) More than 280 'legal highs' are being monitored by European drugs experts in what they say is a fundamental change in the illegal drugs market.

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), an EU drugs agency, said in a report published yesterday that the explosion in the number of legal highs is being driven by a thriving business in their sale on the internet and in specialised shops in cities.

It said the growing legal highs business represents a fundamental shift in the EU drug market. A total of 73 psycho-active substances were notified for the first time last year, compared with 49 in the previous year and just 24 in 2009.

They are often sold openly as 'legal high' or 'plant food' and are offered under names such as Black Mamba. The report says the substances are synthesised in China and India before being imported into Europe, where they are processed, packaged and sold.

Online shops selling the drugs more than doubled from 314 to 693 in the year to 2012, the agency said.

Wolfgang Gotz, the director of EMCDDA, said Europe needed to adjust current practices to ensure it remains on top of emerging trends and patterns of use in new drugs and old. "The new EU drugs strategy will need to address a drugs problem in a state of flux and a dynamic and rapidly evolving drugs market," he said.

The report said there had been some positive developments relating to established drugs, with fewer new users of heroin, less injecting and a fall in the use of cannabis and cocaine in some countries. Britain has the highest level of cocaine use in Europe and, at 177,000, the highest number of heroin users in substitution treatment. The report said that while just under 33 per cent of adults in Britain said they had used cannabis at some point in their lives, barely 10 per cent had smoked the drug in the last year.

Cocaine use in Britain has declined but remains the highest in Europe, with 4.2 per cent of adults aged 15-34 using it in the previous 12 months.

The report said 85 million adult Europeans admit to having used an illegal drug - a quarter of the adult population. About 77 million have taken cannabis, with 14.5 million trying cocaine and 11.4 million Ecstasy.

The report said 3 million people use cannabis on 20 days or more a month. In 2011 it was the primary drug mentioned by people entering drug treatment for the first time.

Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, said she was encouraged that heroin, cocaine and cannabis use is falling in some countries. But she added: "We face an ever more complex stimulant market and a supply of new drugs which are increasingly diverse. The fact that more than 70 new drugs have been detected in the past year is proof that drug policies need to adapt to changing drug markets."

Band Beers

There was a time when the only interest rock bands had in beer was how many pints they could neck before, during and after a gig. Now it is becoming de rigueur for groups to have their own brews.

Hot on the heels of Iron Maiden's real ale, called Trooper, Madness last night turned up at The Walrus & The Carpenter pub in the City of London to pour the first pints of their new ale, Gladness.

The beer, a lager-style ale with an ABV strength of 4.2 per cent, will for the first three months be sold only in the Nicholson's pub chain, but deals with Punch Taverns and JD Wetherspoon have also been signed and a bottled version will soon be available in supermarkets.

Gladness, which takes its name from a line in the band's eponymous hit Madness, stems from a collaboration with the Growler Brewery, in Essex.Rob Flanagan, its owner, said: "It's a joint venture. We will brew it and sell it, we will market it together and they will get a royalty."

He said that the beer had been conceived, appropriately, at the North London pub and music venue where Madness made their name in the 1970s, the Dublin Castle in Camden Town, which they still frequent.

"When they came in they would often talk about beer and how it would be nice to have their own beer," he said. About 18 months ago the pub's owner suggested they contact the brewery.

Mr Flanagan said that after a tasting of 30 beers - 'only a mouthful, not pints' - and the brewing of five different versions, agreement was reached on a golden ale made from German Pilsner hops commonly used in brewing lager. "They are passionate about beer and were very serious about the process," he said. "They did their homework on us and were quite particular about what they wanted to achieve. They didn't want to develop a beer only for fans, but one that was a good beer in its own right."

Suggs, the lead singer, who played a key role in the development of Gladness, said: "After many, many years spent in a pub discussing our ideal beer, we're very proud of our first attempt - and we've got a great excuse to spend a bit more time in the pub."

Iron Maiden teamed up with the Cheshire brewer Robinsons to launch their beer. Two years ago, Robinsons teamed up with the Manchester band Elbow to launch a golden ale called Build a Rocket Boys! after the album of the same name.

There is even a company that specialises in developing beers for bands and singers to sell - Signature Brew has worked with artists including Professor Green.

Beer is not the only drink to attract rock bands and singers. The celebrity rapper P Diddy is the face of Ciroc vodka, while those to have their own wines include the heavy metal veterans AC/DC, Sir Cliff Richard, Bob Dylan and Olivia Newton-John.

Mick Hucknall also has his own range of wines, but resisted the temptation to call them Simply Red.

Alcoholic Writers

JOHN Cheever used to drink in the old Menemsha Bar on New York's 57th Street: his young daughter Susan patiently chewed Maraschino cherries while her old man smoked Camels and downed Gilbey's.

Hemingway's favourite bars stretch from the Museo Chicote in Madrid to Paris, Cuba and Key West. And the poet John Berryman eventually decided that drinking alone in his room was best, allowing him to carry on writing while he downed crates of red wine.

Alcohol is often a strong current in the writing life, not just for the six writers discussed in this engrossing book but also for the doomed Dylan Thomas and many of the writers of the Scottish Renaissance. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay 'Alcohol And Poetry' that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholic.

In The Trip To Echo Spring, Olivia Laing explores this territory with rare sensitivity and literary insight, discussing the writing and drinking careers of Hemingway, Berryman, F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Cheever and Raymond Carver. As anyone who eavesdrops on an AA meeting will recognise, their stories have remarkable similarities. Most believed, at least some of the time, that alcohol was their friend. Hemingway described it as something natural, nurturing; 'food'. All saw it as intricately entwined with their creativity, and its capacity to disable the writer's internal critic as a welcome aid to actually getting the words down.

But, of course, there was always a price to pay. Fitzgerald anatomised it in The Crack-Up, his famous three essays which recounted the cost of living on one's talent, nerves and prodigious quantities of booze. (Even more powerful is his autobiographical Babylon Revisited in which an alcoholic father returns to take custody of his daughter.)

If there was a kind of doomed glamour to Fitzgerald's Jazz Age excesses, there was little in the drinking career of Berryman, whose self-destructive boozing would end in his suicide, to make one feel good about drink.

Berryman's account of his drinking life, written for a treatment group at the Intensive Alcohol Treatment Centre in Minneapolis, describes lectures delivered while drunk, intoxicated passes made at men and women, fist fights, wet beds, involuntary public defecation, a litany of mortification. A week after being discharged from hospital he was back on the booze.

But Berryman's list also starts with an excuse: "Social drinking until 1947 during long & terrible love affair." Denial and projection are key weapons in the alcoholic's armoury of self-defence. Events, other people, circumstances, make the alcoholic drink. The common thread, the alcohol itself, is never the cause of the problem: it is lubricant, release, the refuge, solace, consolation or cure for external problems.

Why do writers drink? The answer might be for the same reasons as everyone else. The evidence from Alcoholics Anonymous is that writers do drink, but then so do cobblers, surgeons and street sweepers. Alcoholics are not all creative, sensitive and intelligent, though there is often a self-pitying grandiosity which persuades the boozer that he is uniquely blessed, or cursed, by thin skin.

But if writers are no more likely to be alcoholics, they will more commonly write about it. And the justifications, evasions and fabulations of the serious drinker find a parallel in the creative act of the writer, whose livelihood depends on the creative reshaping of reality, the juggling of dreams and the generation of alternative realities.

The challenge for the writer who tries to write while drunk, rather than simply rewarding himself with a drink when the day's work is done, is that the same chemical relaxation afforded by alcohol quickly destroys any sense of the rhythm of a sentence.

Laing's account brings in some of the newest research about alcohol addiction, and explores the idea that alcohol's effect literally inscribes itself on the brain, forever changing the way the alcoholic processes anxiety and emotions. She also skilfully introduces her own story of how growing up in an alcoholic household disrupted her childhood.

This book is a triumphant exercise in creative reading in which diary entries, letters, poems, stories and plays are woven together to explore deep, interconnected themes of dependence, denial and self-destructiveness. It is a testimony to this book's compelling power that having finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again.

Drug Laws Made Us All Rebels

Forty years ago Britain's drug laws turned today's pillars of the Establishment into criminals and rebels.

The news from Uruguay could have knocked you down with a Rizla. Its House of Representatives has passed a bill which, if approved by its Senate, will make it the first country in the world to declare cannabis wholly legal. If you're over 18 you will be able to buy it from state-licensed premises or grow it yourself - placing it pretty much on a par with buying or brewing a pint of best in this country.

Such enlightenment did not come without the tediously familiar political tussle: the need to wrench control from dealers and to divert users from hard drugs versus the potential harm by ingestion and, of course, the ubiquitous sending of 'the wrong message'.

What escaped the Uruguayan debate, however, is what has always escaped it here - what matters is less the unfortunate consequences of taking the drug than the unfortunate consequences of outlawing it.

When cannabis use rocketed in the 1970s it was met with vigorous enforcement of pre-existing but little-used prohibitions; in those days police even dragged you before m'Lud if you had merely 'allowed your premises to be used' (I married a man who framed and displayed such a charge sheet). But pride in their arrest quota - it really was fish-in-a-barrel easy for them - would come back to bite the police. Because what they were actually achieving was the creation of millions of criminals from a social class that had never before contributed greatly to swelling the criminal fraternity.

Those of us who perfected the admired art of rolling a joint with one hand, supported only by a Leonard Cohen album on the knee, came from the educated student body; within very few years we were climbing career ladders. By the early 1980s conservative estimates had three million of us, largely young professionals, ushering in our nascent dinner-party years by passing the joint around the route once taken by the port.

That is three million people born mainly to families that for centuries had prided themselves on their propriety - and here we were, our collective bum on the naughty step. No longer were we instinctively on the side of the police; we called them 'pigs' and 'fuzz' and the local copper to whom my father would routinely tip his hat was faced, one short generation later, by my sullen antipathy. The sound of a police siren was not the reassurance afforded to my mother that her wellbeing was being audibly protected; for me and mine, it could be 'the filth' coming for us.

The only contemporaries I have who I know never did try the stuff were those from blue-collar backgrounds; they stuck to booze on the basis that cannabis was, as one friend from the harder end of Glasgow still puts it, 'for poncy southerners'. So although he probably spent as many youthful hours off his face as I did, buying - and seeing - doubles all night, he was not made criminal as I and my companions were.

It must be said, mind, that we grabbed our newly conferred semi-criminal status with gusto; the view was swiftly taken that we might as well be busted for a sheep as a lamb, so let's have some fun. Mustering all the indignation of the self-righteous oppressed, we decided that if we were not on the side of the police and the law they fought us to uphold, it reasonably followed that we mistrusted all other laws, other restrictions or other authority. A counter-culture of defiance evolved and although it was also informed by politics, arts and a heightened awareness of issues made public by increasingly sophisticated communications, it was evident at the time that far fewer people would have embraced it had they not already been defined by their felony. And all for the sake of a waccy baccy that, truth be told, most of us came to find as dull as it made us.

The story, however, does not end there. Because no matter how virulent the selective amnesia of many of the powerful might be when media inquisition turns to past drug use, the fact is that the people with whom I sat at those early dinner parties are now in positions of influence. And time and again they prove that the enduring effect of those years has nothing to do with ancient spliffs and everything to do with the severing of a historically presumed connection between the professional classes and forces of law, order and authority.

Most among my circle still speak of police officers as figures of fun or idiocy (which, no doubt, becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy; those who yearn for our respect will hardly be lining up to join). We are sceptical of our legislators and their Bills and, speaking strictly for myself, I still unrepentantly adhere only to laws that happen to suit my purpose.

There are, in short, millions of educated Britons who are less governable than their class has traditionally been - and while many of us may delight in that knowledge, it is doubtful that this is enjoyed by those who criminalised and, thus, alienated us in the first place.

Uruguay has taken the first step towards ensuring that alienation is not repeated upon another generation and the immediate reward, no doubt, will be a placidity directly attributable to celebratory exercise of the new freedom. Oh, wow, man . . !

I suspect, however, that in the longer term there will come a more profound placidity, as otherwise law-abiding citizens hear a distant siren and know that, this time, it's not heading their way.

Drugs and Cheese

The War on Drugs has been a disaster - and it takes the plight of two British women in Peru to remind us why Imagine if two generations ago they'd criminalised cheese, but millions still wanted it.

I mean, they wouldn't, obviously, because it's only cheese. But still, imagine. To buy it you'd have to go to some dodgy flat behind a minicab office and you'd never quite know what you were getting. Or for the middle classes, perhaps, people would swap a mobile number and the cheese man would come around on his scooter. Out there in the estates, you'd know, people were getting shot over cheese but here, you'd tell yourself, it was all pretty civilised.

This, though, would only be the half of it. The great cheese-producing regions of the world would be in constant turmoil. Guerrillas would roam the departements of France and the cantons of Switzerland, preying on farmers who knew that an illicit creamery was the pathway to riches. Sometimes, perhaps, their own tottering, cheese-corrupted governments would firebomb them, with the support of the UN and US. Perhaps Pink Floyd would have spent a summer in the valley of Wensleydale; hippies would flock there to this day.

The Dutch town of Edam, meanwhile, would have it bad, not only producing its own cheese but being a perfect transit point for everybody else's. Imagine a battleground of cartels, hosting thousands of violent, bloody deaths a year. And, in a spartan jail cell, perhaps in Fontainebleau, two frightened British girls would sit waiting for their lawyer, having been arrested with a rucksack full of Brie.

This is to be a column about drugs. (What, you got that? It wasn't too subtle?) And, of course, drugs aren't much like cheese. "This doesn't work," you might be thinking, "because unlike drugs, cheese isn't even that bad for you." But have another look at that paragraph above, and ask yourself something. For that to be an acceptable state of affairs, just how bad would cheese have to be?

Decades too late - maybe a generation too late - the world is finally waking up to the fact that the war on drugs has been a disaster. By which, please note, I don't simply mean that it has been lost. Rather, our whole framing of this social problem - as a war, with governments on one side and drugs on the other - has been catastrophic. Wars, quite aside from anything else, end with somebody winning and somebody losing. And so our governments find that anything that isn't a crushing victory looks like a surrender.

In fact for a while now the de facto position of most Western governments has indeed been surrender. Decriminalisation, whether it happens by a change in law (as in the Netherlands) or by incremental changes in custom (here), is exactly that. At the weekend, when England's chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, described drug use as 'a public health problem [which] our society is choosing to treat ... as a criminal justice issue' she was not only right but also giving a fair summation of existing Home Office policy. The trend in Britain runs against prosecuting people for the possession of small amounts of anything. Rather, the focus is on harm prevention; doing what can be done, one way or another to prevent the ruin of young British lives.

From the point of view of people who use drugs, this is sensible, humane and altogether wise. What it also does, though, is create a tacitly accepted market for a thoroughly criminalised enterprise. This is bad for our estates and jails, and on a global level it is outright blood-drenched selfishness. We tell ourselves we're enlightened and mature on drugs, then we end up looking at eight years in a Peruvian jail and we realise we don't know we're born. We talk still as if the biggest costs of drug use are addicts and overdoses. But they aren't. They are the 60,000 people killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006. They are the impoverished narco statelets of South America and southern Asia, where farming crops makes you poor, farming drugs makes you rich, and the risk of getting jailed or shot is a risk you can't afford not to take.

Don't take it from me, take it from Jose Mujica, President of Uruguay. "We had 80 deaths from drug-related violence last year, and only three or four deaths from drug overdoses," he said this month. "So what is worse: drug trafficking or drug consumption?"

How, though, do you fight drug trafficking? A decade ago Colombia was the world's biggest producer of cocaine. These days anybody finding a stuffed Peruvian bear in Paddington's left luggage office would be well advised to hand it over to Customs. Squash one country's industry, and another's goes into boom.

Uruguay might have the answer. Two weeks ago, its parliament voted to legalise production, commercialisation, distribution and possession of marijuana. Not decriminalise, please note, but legalise. The former would just mean that criminals suddenly had a quasi-legal market. Done right, though, the latter means they ought to have no market at all.

To understand how, look to California where, under the guise of 'medical marijuana', legalising production stripped a whole industry out of criminality, partly by making it so cheap that criminals weren't inclined to bother. Other US states are trying similar routes but Uruguay would be the first country. And perhaps more significantly, the first South American country. Tabare Vasquez, Mr Mujica's predecessor, has suggested doing something much the same with cocaine.

In New Zealand, meanwhile, they're being even bolder. Cultivated drugs are apparently rare there, on account of it being too far away from anywhere else to make smuggling worth the bother. Those brewed up in labs - Ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD and the like - fill the breach. In recent years, this has led to a boom in legal highs. New ones appear, are banned, are tweaked and then appear again.

Last month the Government there legislated for the creation of a Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority that will test new substances for harm (not efficacy) and perhaps license them. Why not? Legal highs are drugs without the criminal baggage. With a different history, all drugs could be like this. With the history we've got, all it takes is nerve.

Rumblings in the Americas could lead to a tipping point. Not this year probably. But in five? Ten? What's the impetus to stick with the status quo when it so clearly doesn't work? What's in it for anybody? Really, worldwide, this is a problem with only one solution. You'd see it with cheese. Cheese is easy.

A Stomach Brewery

This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase "beer gut."

A 61-year-old man - with a history of home-brewing - stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue - on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut. That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch - a bagel, pasta or even a soda - the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

When we first read the case study, we were more than a little skeptical. It sounded crazy, a phenomenon akin to spontaneous combustion. I mean, come on: Could a person's gut really generate that much ethanol?

Brewer's yeast is in a whole host of foods, including breads, wine and, of course, beer (hence, the name). The critters usually don't do any harm. They just flow right through us. Some people even take Saccharomyces as a probiotic supplement.

But it turns out that in rare cases, the yeasty beasts can indeed take up long-term residency in the gut and possibly cause problems, says Dr. Joseph Heitman, a microbiologist at Duke University.

"Researchers have shown unequivocally that Saccharomyces can grow in the intestinal tract," Heitman tells The Salt. "But it's still unclear whether it's associated with any disease" - or whether it could make someone drunk from the gut up.

We dug around the scant literature on auto-brewery syndrome and uncovered a handful of cases similar to the one in Texas. Some reports in Japan date back to the 1970s. In most instances, the infections occurred after a person took antibiotics - which can wipe out the bacteria in the gut, making room for fungi like yeast to flourish - or had another illness that suppresses their immune system.

Still, such case reports remain extremely rare.

Drugs - Diversion Therapy

To advance the cause of science and for the good of society, Carl Hart has sought out hardened drug addicts and offered them high grade crack cocaine, methamphetamine or a shot of vodka with cranberry juice.

His results were as surprising as his methods: Dr Hart, an associate professor at Columbia University, duly concluded that crack cocaine is not all that it is cracked up to be, and meth is not as more-ish as we have been led to believe. "The data tells us that these drugs are not addictive to 80-90 per cent of the public," he said. He placed adverts in The Village Voice, promising to pay addicts $950 to spend a few weeks on a ward at New York-Presbyterian Hospital getting high. Each morning they would be escorted to a private room where a nurse would hand them a crack pipe. Over the course of the day, with Dr Hart watching through a two-way mirror, the addicts would be offered the option of more crack, or a $5 gift voucher, or sometimes $5 in cash, which they could collect weeks later when the study had concluded.

"People are in shock about what we do," he said. Addicts who were given larger cocaine doses first thing in the morning usually wanted more of the drug, but those on a smaller first dose typically chose cash or the voucher. When the value of the latter was raised to $20, his subjects always said no to drugs.

Crack and meth addicts are often compared with the lab rats who forgo food and water to press a lever that triggers another shot of cocaine. However, when Dr Hart was working with rats, he found that "you can disrupt this behavior simply by manipulating the environment".

Rats that were offered sweets or allowed to play with other rats were able to kick their coke habit. Humans given other options seemed similarly capable of just saying no.

Initially there were fears that Dr Hart would escalate his subjects' drug habits, yet "more often it would decrease afterwards", he said. "Some of them were able to save money and do something different with their lives." Nor were they violent or disorderly. "They were very professional," he said. "They knew that this was a job; they behaved accordingly."

For some time, these conclusions have lain hidden in plain sight in peer-reviewed journals, but now Dr Hart feels obliged to speak out to a wider audience. "We make a lot of assumptions about drugs and we base laws on these assumptions," he said. "But when these assumptions are based on anecdotal evidence, that seems less than responsible."

He has written a book, High Price, detailing his studies and urging America to follow the example of Portugal and decriminalise drugs.

These data-laced arguments are cut together with his own life story, growing up in a tough area of Miami and then attempting to make it in academia, where the "fight for status was worse than what I'd seen on the street or on the basketball court ... where at least it was clear what territory was in dispute".

Occasionally as a teenager he had sold drugs: as an associate professor at the department of psychology and psychiatry at Columbia University, he has supplied hundreds of addicts with crack cocaine, meth and marijuana.

Taste

If you want a good whisky, you could choose an expensive single malt aged for 25 years in sherry barrels. Or, you could just drink any old hooch in a wood-panelled room.

An experiment by scientists from the University of Oxford found that the ambience in which whisky was drunk had a big effect on the taste. More than 400 adults were given the spirit in three different environments, designed to correspond with three of the major notes of a whisky: grassiness, sweetness and woodiness.

The grassy room had turf on the floor, plants on the walls and the sound of a sheep in the background. The sweet room had fruits on display, red lights and the sound of tinkling bells. The wood room had wooden furniture, panelling and creaking timbers.

Despite tasting the same whisky throughout, the research, sponsored by Singleton whisky and published in the journal Flavour, found that people preferred the whisky in the woody room.

'This has significant implications for anyone looking to enhance their whisky experience in a bar, restaurant or even from the comfort of their own homes,' Professor Charles Spence said.

Past research found that wine from a black glass was rated as sweeter, and wine drunk while listening to powerful music was considered 'heavier'.

Beer and Civilization

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol - in beer and, later, wine - which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Pot Saves Your Liver

You know those buzzkills who say you shouldn't drink and smoke weed at the same time? It turns out their advice might give you liver disease. A recent study from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive compound found in marijuana, blocks the development of fat around your liver that can build up from binge drinking, which leads to conditions like cirrhosis. The study, which was performed on mice that were dosed with CBD before being injected with ethanol, showed significant evidence that the compound functioned as a shield that protected the liver from what is called alcohol-generated oxidative stress-induced steatosis, which is science-y jargon for "bad stuff." Researchers are hopeful that this could be used to develop medicine that would prevent liver disease, medicine that might be easier than, you know, inhaling bong-loads of pot. Of course, the goal of the study is more about finding a treatment for individuals at high risk for liver disease than handing out carte blanche to consistently get sloshed. But it is sort of poetic, in a frat bro-y kind of way, to know that one mind-altering recreational chemical can be used to cancel out another. Especially when the only other option for avoiding such ill effects is just to not binge drink—which we all know is crazy talk.

Dry Out Your Liver

"DRY January", for many a welcome period of abstinence after the excesses of the holiday season, could be more than a rest for body and soul. New Scientist staff have generated the first evidence that giving up alcohol for a month might actually be good for you, at least in the short term.

Many people who drink alcohol choose to give up for short periods, but there is no scientific evidence that this has any health benefits. So we teamed up with Rajiv Jalan at the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at University College London Medical School (UCLMS) to investigate.

The liver plays a role in over 500 processes vital for functions as diverse as digesting food, detoxification and hormone balance. In 2009, of the 11,575 people who died of liver disease in the UK, more than a third were attributed to alcohol consumption. Most of what we know about liver health comes from studies of people with chronic disease, many of whom are alcoholics. Very few studies have focused on liver function in apparently healthy people.

Our project was on a small scale, but Jalan felt it could yield clues as to the effects of short-term abstinence. On 5 October, 14 members of the New Scientist staff – all of whom consider themselves to be "normal" drinkers – went to the Royal Free Hospital in London. We answered questionnaires about our health and drinking habits, then had ultrasound scans to measure the amount of fat on the liver. Finally, we gave blood samples, used to analyse levels of metabolic chemicals linked with the liver and overall health.

For the next five weeks, 10 of us drank no alcohol while four continued as normal. On 9 November, we returned to the hospital to repeat the tests.

"You're going to be very excited," said Jalan, when the results were in.

First off, he revealed that there had been no significant changes in any of the parameters measured for the four people who didn't give up alcohol.

But the changes were dramatic and consistent across all 10 abstainers.

Liver fat fell on average by 15 per cent, and by almost 20 per cent in some individuals. Jalan says this is highly significant, because fat accumulation on the liver is a known prelude to liver damage. It can cause inflammation, resulting in liver disease. "This transition is the harbinger first for temporary scarring called fibrosis and ultimately a non-reversible type of scarring that destroys liver structure, called cirrhosis," says Jalan. Although our livers were all judged to be generally healthy, the fat reductions would almost certainly help to retard liver deterioration, he says.

Then came another surprise. The blood glucose levels of the abstainers dropped by 16 per cent on average, from 5.1 to 4.3 millimoles per litre. The normal range for blood glucose is between 3.9 and 5.6 mmol/l. "I was staggered," says Kevin Moore, consultant in liver health services at UCLMS. "I don't think anyone has ever observed that before."

Glucose was measured using a fasting blood glucose test taken after participants had refrained from eating or drinking anything but water for 8 hours. This stimulates production of the hormone glucagon, which releases glucose from body stores into the blood. In a healthy person, a rise in glucose triggers the production of insulin, which tells certain cells to take up glucose from the blood to maintain a safe blood sugar level.

Type 2 diabetes results when cells no longer respond to insulin, leading to high blood sugar. A drop in circulating glucose in our tests could mean that our bodies had become more sensitive to insulin, removing more glucose from the blood – a sign of improved blood sugar control. We also lost weight, by 1.5 kilograms on average.

Total blood cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease, dropped by almost 5 per cent, from 4.6 to 4.4 mmol/l. A healthy amount is considered anything below 5.2 mmol/l. "Basically, you're getting improved glucose and cholesterol management," says Moore.

The benefits weren't just physical. Ratings of sleep quality on a scale from 1 to 5 rose by just over 10 per cent, improving from 3.9 to 4.3. Ratings of how well we could concentrate soared 18 per cent from 3.8 to 4.5. "It represents a significant effect on quality of life and work performance," says Jalan, although he acknowledges that self-reported experiences are open to bias.

The only negative was that people reported less social contact.

Our experiment gives no indication of how long the improvements persist. "Whether it's 15 days or six months, we don't know," says Jalan. However, it lays the ground for larger studies, he says.

"What you have is a pretty average group of British people who would not consider themselves heavy drinkers, yet stopping drinking for a month alters liver fat, cholesterol and blood sugar, and helps them lose weight," says Moore. "If someone had a health product that did all that in one month, they would be raking it in."

Still, that doesn't mean it is OK to indulge for the other 11 months. "That's absolutely the wrong message to give out," says liver specialist Scott Friedman of the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "What's surprising is how quickly the benefits were evident, but think about how much you could gain from more prolonged abstinence."

"These results show that even a relatively short period of abstinence impacts on the liver," says Nick Sheron at the University of Southampton, UK. He says that liver disease can develop over the course of 30 years, so a short period of abstinence needs to translate into long-term behaviour change. "But what a hugely encouraging start this is," he says. "And if you can persuade a bunch of journalists to have a month off the booze there is really no excuse for anyone not to be able to do the same thing, is there?"

Drink Without Getting Drunk

"You wanna know my secret? How I can drink beer all night long and never get drunk?"

In fact, I had always wondered that. Though this was the first time I’d ever formally met Koch, I’d “met” him in the past at a few beer festivals. Those sorts of events are always kind of Bacchanalian shit shows, with people imbibing dozens of beer samples in a short period and soon stumbling around large convention halls drunk of their asses. Brewers included. But not Koch, who I’d long noticed was always lucid, always able to hold court, and hold his own with those much younger than him. This billionaire brewing raconteur was doing likewise with me at 4 PM on a Thursday afternoon despite the fact we were both now several beers deep. So what was the secret?

“Yeast!”

“Yeast?”

“Active yeast. Like you get at the grocery store.”

Koch told me that for years he has swallowed your standard Fleischmann’s dry yeast before he drinks, stirring the white powdery substance in with some yogurt to make it more palatable.

“One teaspoon per beer, right before you start drinking.”

He’d learned the trick from his good friend “Dr. Joe,” a craft beer legend in his own right. Educated at Harvard with a troika of degrees (a BA, a JD, and an MBA), Koch is no slouch, but the late-Joseph Owades was a flat-out genius. With a PhD in biochemistry from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and an early job in the fermentation sciences department at Fleischmann’s, Owades probably knew more about fermentation and alcohol metabolism than perhaps any man who has ever lived. Koch calls him, in fact, “The best brewer who’s ever lived.” He used that immense knowledge to eventually become a consultant for most of the progenitors of America’s early craft brewing movement such as Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, New Amsterdam Brewing in New York, and, yes, the Boston Beer Company. There he became good friends with Koch, helped perfect Boston Lager, and passed on to Koch his little yeast secret.

You see, what Owades knew was that active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.

“And it will mitigate – not eliminate – but mitigate the effects of alcohol!” Koch told me.

In his final years Owades even patented a product called Prequel, an all-natural pill similarly designed to limit drunkenness. No companies wanted to deal with the potential liabilities of the product, and Owades died in 2005 at the age of 86.

Of course, I had to honor my longtime hero Koch, and a new beer hero I’d just learned about in Owades, and try this trick myself. So the next day I grabbed a six-pack of beer and a packet of Fleischmann’s and went to work. The older I get, the more of a lightweight I surely become, but after shoveling down six teaspoons and tilting back six bottles I felt nothing more than a little buzzed. Koch told me he keeps a breathalyzer around at all times just to assure he’s never too drunk. He never is. And, though I had no tangible “proof,” besides the fact I was still awake, I was pretty sure I wasn’t all that drunk either. Forever more I’d be yet another guy discreetly carrying a white powder around at bars. I’d advise you do likewise.

(Koch told me he does one teaspoon before EACH beer, as did I, but I see no reason multiple spoonfuls beforehand wouldn't also work. The yeast just has to be in your stomach right before the alcohol hits. But again...I'm not a scientist.)

Wine Forgeries

In 2006, Atlanta wine collector Julian LeCraw Jr. paid $91,400 for a single bottle of 1787 Château d’Yquem, at the time the most ever for a white wine. That purchase, while stunning, was dwarfed in both size and renown by that of one Christopher Forbes, who bid £105,000 (some $157,000) in 1985 for a 1787 Château Lafite etched with the initials “Th.J.,” and advertised as formerly belonging to Thomas Jefferson. The landmark sale inspired other ambitious collectors, including billionaire business tycoon Bill Koch, to seek out their own Jeffersonian wine. In late 1988, Koch spent about half a million dollars to add four of the famed bottles to his personal cellar.

The world of elite wine collecting, as such purchases demonstrate, is an expensive and high-stakes hunting game. Connoisseurs such as Koch, for whom the money is no object, will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rarities that promise to enhance their collections. But as prices for these bottles have soared, so has another risk—one that LeCraw and Koch both discovered the hard way. The most esteemed and alluring of bottles just might turn out to be fake.

While experts agree that it’s hard to size up the impact of forgery on the wine industry, a recent spate of busts has shone a spotlight on how pervasive the problem might be. This past October, European police arrested seven people in connection with an international counterfeiting ring that sold 400 bottles of fake Romanée-Conti wine, among the world’s most expensive, for more than 2 million euros ($2.7 million). A few months earlier, police in China arrested more than 10 suspects linked to millions of dollars in fake wine sales after uncovering counterfeiting equipment in a raid. LeCraw is suing the seller of his bogus bottle, Antique Wine Co., for $25 million. And in December, a federal jury convicted famed rare wines dealer Rudy Kurniawan of peddling tens of millions of dollars of homebrewed mixes with sham labels.

“Making forgeries of wine bottles, unfortunately, is really not all that difficult and time-consuming, especially since one could assume that making a ‘spot-on’ counterfeit watch would be much more difficult and time-consuming,” says Mark Solomon, the wine director at Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales and CEO of TrueBottle.com, an online database for wine collectors.

Some forgers will print their own labels to alter cheap bottles; others will buy empties of the best years and makes, then refill them with other wines. That means the glass bottles themselves can also fetch substantial sums. The empty bottle of a prized 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild might alone fetch $1,500. “But if you go to 1983 or 1981,” Solomon says, “the price of the bottle is a fraction of what an ’82 goes for.” A clever forger might therefore alter the last digit of the date, refill the bottle, and sell it for several multiples of what the empty cost.

Wine forgeries are as easy to pull off as they are hard to weed out. The bottles are rarely sold directly to auction houses, instead winding their way into collectors’ cellars through a series of sales, where they can hide among dozens of authentic bottles. And while the easiest way to check whether or not your 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild is the real deal might be to taste what’s inside, you can hardly pop the cork off a rare vintage before it goes up for bidding.

Charles Curtis, a Master of Wine and former head of wine for Christie’s in both Asia and the Americas, explains that authenticating wine begins with contacting the owner to request any documentation (receipts and so on). Next comes a physical inspection of the bottle. Experts check the capsule, cork, label, and glass to see if the materials are consistent with the stated time and place of production, if the branding is consistent, and if any of the pieces show signs of tampering. An examiner can also use a high-powered flashlight to examine the cork through the bottle and see if the wine itself is the correct color and contains the proper amount of sediment for its age.

“It is seldom possible to establish authenticity with 100 percent accuracy,” Curtis tells me, “but these methods normally give enough evidence to form a credible opinion of authenticity.”

So how to get at the problem of checking the wine itself? One method has been to enlist carbon dating to approximate the age of the liquid in a bottle, but this can prove imprecise. Instead of looking for carbon, a variation on this approach searches for the isotope cesium-137, an artificial form of radioactivity that was created through nuclear testing and is therefore not present in wines bottled before the advent of such technology. The isotope is absorbed from the soil by the roots of grapevines, and gets locked into the bottle during the winemaking process. Bill Koch’s camp famously sought out Philippe Hubert, a French physicist who had experimented with cesium-137 testing, to have one of his alleged Jeffersonian bottles tested in a lab beneath the Alps on the French-Italian border.

Another answer, which doesn’t require traveling to a remote section of the Alps, may have been found in a device that’s emerged in just the last year. It’s called the Coravin System, and it uses science to do magic—namely, to extract wine from a bottle without removing or even damaging the cork. Coravin is the fanciest corkscrew you’ve ever seen, with a sleek upright design that lets it sit in its holder like a tiny rocket waiting to launch. The creation of medical device inventor Greg Lambrecht, it works by passing a fine, hollow needle through the cork. The bottle is pressurized with argon, an inert gas, that pushes the wine into tiny holes on the side of the needle and out through the device, into your glass.

“The cork is elastic - it’s actually one of the most elastic solids we’ve ever discovered in nature,” Lambrecht says. “I’d made medical needles that did very little damage to the things they went through, so the insight was, ‘Hey, I could use this to get through the cork.’”

Coravin retails for $299 and, for the moment, has two main markets: home consumers and people who sell wine for business (restaurants, distributors, etc.). Coravin allows them to pour or sell a single glass without setting off a ticking oxidation clock that can turn the best of wine into something resembling vinegar. Lambrecht’s initial idea for the device came about because he wanted to keep drinking good wine a glass at a time while his wife was pregnant, and needed a way to preserve the remainder of the bottle.

In a market besieged by fraud and chicanery, could Coravin be the solution? Maybe. Using Coravin to sample a wine prior to a sale would have to be disclosed at auction and could potentially devalue the bottle. But far more problematic is this simple fact: Lots of people don’t know what old wine is supposed to taste like. “People may taste a bottle of genuine old wine that’s matured and may not like the flavors,” Curtis says. “There are some tasters who are superb judges of such matters, and there are others who are not.” Wine tasting, after all, is subjective. For all but the most refined of palates, it has to do as much with what we think of a bottle as what we know. If we think a wine is expensive—and forgers think they know we think that - chances are it will taste that way, too.

Pot - The Lessons From Colorado

In January, Colorado defied the federal government and stepped with both feet into the world of legal recreational marijuana, where no state had gone before.

For seven months Coloradans have been lawfully smoking joints and inhaling cannabis vapors, chewing marijuana-laced candies and chocolates, drinking, cooking and lotioning with products infused with cannabis oil. They are growing their own weed, making their own hash oil and stocking up at dispensaries marked with green crosses and words like “health,” “wellness” and “natural remedies.” Tourists are joining in — gawking, sampling and tripping in hotel rooms. Business is growing, taxes are flowing, cannabis entrepreneurs are building, investing and cashing in.

Cannabis sales from January through May brought the state about $23.6 million in revenue from taxes, licenses and fees. That is not a huge amount in a $24 billion budget, but it’s a lot more than zero, and it’s money that was not pocketed by the black market.

The criminal justice system is righting itself. Marijuana prosecutions are way down across the state — The Denver Post found a 77 percent drop in January from the year before. Given the immense waste, in dollars and young lives, of unjust marijuana enforcement that far too often targets black men, this may be the most hopeful trend of all.

The striking thing to a visitor is how quickly the marijuana industry has receded into normality — cannabis storefronts are plentiful in Denver, but not obtrusive, certainly not in the way liquor stores often are. Marijuana-growing operations are in unmarked warehouses on the city’s industrial edges.

The ominously predicted harms from legalization — like blight, violence, soaring addiction rates and other ills — remain imaginary worries. Burglaries and robberies in Denver, in fact, are down from a year ago. The surge of investment and of jobs in construction, tourism and other industries, on the other hand, is real.

Legal, Safe and Taxed

This is what the people of Colorado voted for overwhelmingly in amending the State Constitution in 2012 “to regulate marijuana like alcohol,” a shrewd frame that placed a major social shift firmly in the no-brainer category. The promise of Amendment 64 is a flood of tax revenue for education, drug abuse prevention and research — with as much as $40 million for school construction every year, and $10 million for studying marijuana’s therapeutic and medical benefits. In a state where medical marijuana has been legal since 2000, doing little evident harm, the move to legalize recreational use was seen by most voters as a sensible next step.

Though Gov. John Hickenlooper opposed Amendment 64, he admits that the debate is over — that this is a good-government issue now, and his administration is trying to making legalization work. The state government began the year well prepared, swiftly erecting a system to regulate the new business and to enforce the web of laws that strictly limit where you can use cannabis, who can buy it and how products are made, marketed and sold. A digital inventory system tracks every plant “from seed to sale.” The law forbids public consumption and selling to those under 21. (Stings by state regulators recently found 100 percent of targeted shops in Denver and Pueblo complying with the underage law.) Police are cracking down on nuisance public-smoking violations but aren’t wasting time chasing otherwise-law-abiding users.

Continue reading the main story To keep stoned drivers off the roads, the state is expanding to 300 the number of law-enforcement officers trained as “drug-recognition experts.” Combating drugged driving is complicated, because there are no instant roadside tests for marijuana and results might be meaningless anyway; regular users can have blood concentration levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, well over Colorado’s legal limit of five nanograms per milliliter and drive perfectly well, and marijuana can be detectable weeks after a high has worn off. Research on the dangers of mixing marijuana and driving is scant, but so is evidence that legal cannabis makes the highways more dangerous. The Colorado State Patrol reported in April that fatal crashes in the first quarter of 2014 were down 25.5 percent from the year before. The Problem of Edibles

Cannabis advocates were caught off guard in the first months after legalization by complaints about the risks of overdosing on cannabis-infused food and drinks. Thanks to high-potency oils, a single chocolate bar or bottle of soda can contain enough THC to get several people high. An unwitting user may not realize this until an hour or two after eating or drinking too much.

A handful of emergency-room visits by children sickened by edibles prompted the state in May to tighten the labeling laws, requiring products to be clearly marked as marijuana. Last Thursday, it enacted an emergency rule requiring edibles to be divided — or easily dividable — into single servings containing no more than 10 milligrams of THC. But how to label single pieces of candy or keep tempting sweets away from children are lingering questions.

Legalization opponents have seized on two highly publicized deaths in Colorado possibly linked to edibles — a visiting student ate some cannabis cookies and jumped off a balcony; a man is accused of fatally shooting his wife after ingesting marijuana candy and possibly painkillers. But these anecdotes fall short of a persuasive argument for renewed prohibition, and there is still no evidence that THC, even in large amounts, is even close to being as lethal as alcohol or tobacco.

To discourage minors from using marijuana, the state is spending $17 million on youth prevention and education. An ad campaign aimed at 12- to 15-year-olds, who are seen as more open to persuasion than older teenagers, is being unveiled this month. It will focus on marijuana’s potential risk to growing brains, using props like giant rat cages and the slogan: “Don’t be a lab rat.” The state says its deterrence campaign is honest and scientifically sound. Still, some critics are skeptical, citing a long history of ineffective antidrug campaigns and a century of hysteria and shaky evidence about marijuana’s dangers.

Lessons Beyond the Rockies

“The Colorado model of medicalization and legalization is a model that is designed around continuous input and continuous adjustments,” said Christian Sederberg, a lawyer at a Denver firm dedicated to marijuana law and advocacy. Other states will be keeping a close eye on those adjustments.

Washington State, which approved legalization by a ballot initiative in 2012, got its first recreational dispensaries in July. It is following a different model, with far stricter controls on advertising and public displays, and a tight licensing process that, so far, has allowed relatively few marijuana stores to open, with limited supplies at very high prices. How well legalization will drive out illegal operations in Washington is not yet clear. Seattle has such abundant and cheap black-market weed, pot shops may end up being only a tourist novelty.

Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing some form of medical marijuana. Alaska and Oregon will put full legalization before the voters this fall. Industry lobbyists are hoping to have legalization initiatives on ballots in up to six states in 2016.

Advocates are trying to make California one of them. It was the first state to legalize medical marijuana, in 1996, and thus has the longest history with an open cannabis culture. Many call it de facto legalization, because medical marijuana ID cards are laughably easy to get. While California’s experience shows the downsides of ineffectual laws and lax enforcement, it has not turned the state into a story of rampant addiction, crime or community upheaval. Support for full legalization there has grown as dire predictions of disaster, made over two decades, have not been borne out.

A similar dissonance exists in the Netherlands, which for years has tolerated — though never legalized — recreational marijuana, in order to separate users of soft drugs from users of hard-core opiates. Its system is an awkward mix of tolerance and criminality. The country’s cannabis cafes have to rely on black-market weed, and as cities have grown weary of pot tourism they have tried, in the face of great resistance, to restrict use to residents.

Uruguay, meanwhile, recently became the first country to regulate marijuana growing and selling nationwide through a system in which the price is state-controlled and everyone involved — sellers, distributors, buyers — must be a citizen and licensed by the government. The goal is to end the narco-traffickers’ monopoly and drug violence. The success of this approach, and applicability to the United States, has yet to be shown.

NY Times Editorial - Repeal Prohibition Again

It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.

The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana.

We reached that conclusion after a great deal of discussion among the members of The Times’s Editorial Board, inspired by a rapidly growing movement among the states to reform marijuana laws.

There are no perfect answers to people’s legitimate concerns about marijuana use. But neither are there such answers about tobacco or alcohol, and we believe that on every level — health effects, the impact on society and law-and-order issues — the balance falls squarely on the side of national legalization. That will put decisions on whether to allow recreational or medicinal production and use where it belongs — at the state level.

We considered whether it would be best for Washington to hold back while the states continued experimenting with legalizing medicinal uses of marijuana, reducing penalties, or even simply legalizing all use. Nearly three-quarters of the states have done one of these.

But that would leave their citizens vulnerable to the whims of whoever happens to be in the White House and chooses to enforce or not enforce the federal law.

The social costs of the marijuana laws are vast. There were 658,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2012, according to F.B.I. figures, compared with 256,000 for cocaine, heroin and their derivatives. Even worse, the result is racist, falling disproportionately on young black men, ruining their lives and creating new generations of career criminals.

There is honest debate among scientists about the health effects of marijuana, but we believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco. Moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults. Claims that marijuana is a gateway to more dangerous drugs are as fanciful as the “Reefer Madness” images of murder, rape and suicide.

There are legitimate concerns about marijuana on the development of adolescent brains. For that reason, we advocate the prohibition of sales to people under 21.

Creating systems for regulating manufacture, sale and marketing will be complex. But those problems are solvable, and would have long been dealt with had we as a nation not clung to the decision to make marijuana production and use a federal crime.

In coming days, we will publish articles by members of the Editorial Board and supplementary material that will examine these questions. We invite readers to offer their ideas, and we will report back on their responses, pro and con. We recognize that this Congress is as unlikely to take action on marijuana as it has been on other big issues. But it is long past time to repeal this version of Prohibition.

A Costly, Futile Strategy

America’s four-decade war on drugs is responsible for many casualties, but the criminalization of marijuana has been perhaps the most destructive part of that war. The toll can be measured in dollars — billions of which are thrown away each year in the aggressive enforcement of pointless laws. It can be measured in years — whether wasted behind bars or stolen from a child who grows up fatherless. And it can be measured in lives — those damaged if not destroyed by the shockingly harsh consequences that can follow even the most minor offenses.

The Racial Imbalance in Arrests

Blacks and whites use marijuana at comparable rates. Yet in all states but Hawaii, blacks are more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana offenses.

For example, blacks in Iowa are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested.

Outrageously long sentences are only part of the story. The hundreds of thousands of people who are arrested each year but do not go to jail also suffer; their arrests stay on their records for years, crippling their prospects for jobs, loans, housing and benefits. These are disproportionately people of color, with marijuana criminalization hitting black communities the hardest.

Meanwhile, police departments that presumably have far more important things to do waste an enormous amount of time and taxpayer money chasing a drug that two states have already legalized and that a majority of Americans believe should be legal everywhere.

A Costly, Futile Strategy

The absurdity starts on the street, with a cop and a pair of handcuffs. As the war on drugs escalated through the 1980s and 1990s, so did the focus on common, low-level offenses — what became known as “broken windows” policing. In New York City, where the strategy was introduced and remains popular today, the police made fewer than 800 marijuana arrests in 1991. In 2010, they made more than 59,000.

Nationwide, the numbers are hardly better. From 2001 to 2010, the police made more than 8.2 million marijuana arrests; almost nine in 10 were for possession alone. In 2011, there were more arrests for marijuana possession than for all violent crimes put together.

The costs of this national obsession, in both money and time, are astonishing. Each year, enforcing laws on possession costs more than $3.6 billion, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. It can take a police officer many hours to arrest and book a suspect. That person will often spend a night or more in the local jail, and be in court multiple times to resolve the case. The public-safety payoff for all this effort is meager at best: According to a 2012 Human Rights Watch report that tracked 30,000 New Yorkers with no prior convictions when they were arrested for marijuana possession, 90 percent had no subsequent felony convictions. Only 3.1 percent committed a violent offense.

The strategy is also largely futile. After three decades, criminalization has not affected general usage; about 30 million Americans use marijuana every year. Meanwhile, police forces across the country are strapped for cash, and the more resources they devote to enforcing marijuana laws, the less they have to go after serious, violent crime. According to F.B.I. data, more than half of all violent crimes nationwide, and four in five property crimes, went unsolved in 2012.

The Racial Disparity

The sheer volume of law enforcement resources devoted to marijuana is bad enough. What makes the situation far worse is racial disparity. Whites and blacks use marijuana at roughly the same rates; on average, however, blacks are 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for possession, according to a comprehensive 2013 report by the A.C.L.U.

In Iowa, blacks are 8.3 times more likely to be arrested, and in the worst-offending counties in the country, they are up to 30 times more likely to be arrested. The war on drugs aims its firepower overwhelmingly at African-Americans on the street, while white users smoke safely behind closed doors.

Only about 6 percent of marijuana cases lead to a felony conviction; the rest are often treated as misdemeanors resulting in fines or probation, if the charges aren’t dismissed completely. Even so, every arrest ends up on a person’s record, whether or not it leads to prosecution and conviction. Particularly in poorer minority neighborhoods, where young men are more likely to be outside and repeatedly targeted by law enforcement, these arrests accumulate. Before long a person can have an extensive “criminal history” that consists only of marijuana misdemeanors and dismissed cases. That criminal history can then influence the severity of punishment for a future offense, however insignificant.

While the number of people behind bars solely for possessing or selling marijuana seems relatively small — 20,000 to 30,000 by the most recent estimates, or roughly 1 percent of America’s 2.4 million inmates — that means nothing to people, like Jeff Mizanskey, who are serving breathtakingly long terms because their records contained minor previous offenses. Nor does it mean anything to the vast majority of these inmates who have no history of violence (about nine in 10, according to a 2006 study). And as with arrests, the racial disparity is vast: Blacks are more than 10 times as likely as whites to go to prison for drug offenses. For those on probation or parole for any offense, a failed drug test on its own can lead to prison time — which means, again, that people can be put behind bars for smoking marijuana.

Even if a person never goes to prison, the conviction itself is the tip of the iceberg. In a majority of states, marijuana convictions — including those resulting from guilty pleas — can have lifelong consequences for employment, education, immigration status and family life.

A misdemeanor conviction can lead to, among many other things, the revocation of a professional license; the suspension of a driver’s license; the inability to get insurance, a mortgage or other bank loans; the denial of access to public housing; and the loss of student financial aid.

In some states, a felony conviction can result in a lifetime ban on voting, jury service, or eligibility for public benefits like food stamps. People can be fired from their jobs because of a marijuana arrest. Even if a judge eventually throws the case out, the arrest record is often available online for a year, free for any employer to look up.

Correcting an Old Inequity

As recently as the mid-1970s, politicians and the public generally agreed that marijuana abuse was handled better by treatment than by prosecution and incarceration. Jimmy Carter ran for president and won while supporting decriminalization. But that view lost out as the war on drugs broadened and intensified, sweeping marijuana along with it.

In recent years, public acceptance of marijuana has grown significantly. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia now permit some form of medical marijuana, and Colorado and Washington fully legalized it for recreational use in 2012. And yet even as “ganjapreneurs” scramble to take economic advantage, thousands of people remain behind bars, or burdened by countless collateral punishments that prevent them from full and active membership in society.

In a March interview, Michelle Alexander, a law professor whose book, “The New Jim Crow,” articulated the drug war’s deeper costs to black men in particular, noted the cruel paradox at play in Colorado and Washington. She pointed to “40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed,” and said, “Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?”

As pioneers in legalization, those two states should set a further example by providing relief to people convicted of crimes that are no longer crimes, including overturning convictions. A recent ruling by a Colorado appeals court overturned two 2011 convictions because of the changed law, and the state’s Legislature has enacted laws in the last two years to give courts more power to seal records of drug convictions and to make it easier for defendants to get jobs and housing after a conviction. These are both important steps into an uncharted future.

Beer Drinkers Can't Tell Difference Either

A blind taste test reveals that if you're loyal to a beer brand because of the taste, you just might be fooling yourself.

A new study from the American Association of Wine Economists explores the world of beer rather than wine, and the findings indicate that you could be buying a favorite brand of brew for no good reason whatsoever. While the experiments conducted were limited, the results show that when labels are removed from beer bottles, drinkers can’t tell different brands apart—sometimes even when one of those brands is the taster’s go-to drink of choice.

In the paper, the researchers first point to a classic 1964 study, in which a few hundred volunteer beer testers (probably wasn’t too hard to find folks willing to participate) were sent five different kinds of popular lager brands, each with noticeable taste differences according to the experts. But people who rated their preferred beer brands higher when the labels were on bottles “showed virtually no preferences for certain beers over others” when the labels were removed during tastings:

In the blind tasting condition, no beer was judged by its regular drinkers to be significantly better than the other samples. In fact, regular drinkers of two of the five beers scored other beers significantly higher than the brand that they stated was their favorite. The new study takes a different, simpler path to judging the quality of beer drinkers’ taste buds. Researchers didn’t even bother with ratings data. Instead, the experiments consisted of blind taste tests with three European lagers—Czechvar (Czech Republic), Heineken (Netherlands), and Stella Artois (Belgium)—in order simply to find out if beer drinkers could tell them apart. The experiments involved a series of “triangle tests,” in which drinkers were given a trio of beers to taste, two of which were the same beer. Tasters were asked to name the “singleton” of the bunch, and generally speaking, they could not do so with any reliable degree of accuracy:

In two of three tastings, participants are no better than random at telling the lagers apart, and in the third tasting, they are only marginally better than random.

What these results tell researchers, then, is that beer drinkers who stick with a certain brand label may be buying the beer for just that reason—the label. As opposed to the taste and quality, which are the reasons that consumers would probably give for why they are brand loyalists.

As the researchers put it in the new study, “marketing and packaging cues may be generating brand loyalty and experiential differences between brands.” In other words, we buy not for taste but because of the beer’s image and reputation that’s been developed via advertising, logos, and other marketing efforts. Similar conclusions have been reached in studies about wine; one, for instance, found that wine drinkers will pay more for bottles with hard-to-pronounce names—because apparently we assume that a fancy name is a sign of better quality. We also buy beer, wine, and a wide range of other products due to force of habit, of course.

Drinkers who are loyal to a particular beer brand may hate to hear this—heck, so are consumers who are loyal to almost any product brand - but the research indicates we are heavily influenced by factors other than those we really should care about, such as quality and superior taste.

All that said, we must point out the study’s shortcomings. The beer tastings were very limited in scope. It’s not like tasters were asked to compare Bud Light and a hoppy craft IPA, and then failed to tell the difference. And just because some volunteers couldn’t differentiate between beers doesn’t mean that you, with your superior palate, would be just as clueless. You may very well buy your favorite beer brand because, to quote an old beer ad, it “tastes great.”

Just to be sure, though, it might be time to take the labels off and do some blind taste testing. Could make for a fun Saturday night.

Wine Myths

From when to serve reds to how to stack bottles and letting wine breathe, the oenophile’s life is full of error.

What’s the biggest wine myth ever? For me, the one that refuses to die is the idea that red wine should always be served at room temperature. Now that we live in centrally heated homes the concept is next to meaningless. Besides, all reds are not the same. Burgundy enjoys 16C, which is surprisingly cool, while red bordeaux is warmer-blooded and thrives at 18C. Either way, serve a red too warm, as many are in this holiday month, and you will be rewarded with a horrid, soupy, mawkish mouthful. The solution is either to give your bottle a half-hour blast in the fridge or, if you are out and about, to add a handful of ice to your glass and wait until it has reached the level that the French call frais, or fresh, about 12C, before scooping the ice out. It’s not just lighter reds such as beaujolais or the Loire’s chinon or saumur that enjoy this refreshing dip in sunny weather, but gamay from further south perks up mightily too.

Whites, on the other hand, should often be served less chilled than you imagine. The finest white burgundies are best savoured at around 15C. Some like their champagne and other fizz served at that level but, for me, a cooler 10C is more like it.

Storage myths also abound, so let’s get this straight: pretty much all wines should be stored horizontally, somewhere dark and cool, preferably without vibration and with good humidity, so that corks remain springy, airtight and in contact with the wine. The only exception is screwcapped bottles that can be stored vertically or horizontally without harm. If you have to store bottles in a hot kitchen, and I do, stick to everyday drinking wines for this room and make certain those at the back of the rack don’t get forgotten.

Remember that champagne, followed by fragile rosés and then cheap, young whites, are the most heat and light sensitive of all wines and need lots of TLC. The latter, such as Waitrose’s light but lively celery, herb and lemon zest-spiked, 11.5 per cent, Gascon, 2013 Cuvée Pêcheur, Vin de France, £4.99, needs to be knocked back before the next vintage is harvested in a month or so.

Surprisingly, good, ordinary champagne benefits from a year in the cellar. I tasted recently an 18-month-old bottle of the sparky, lemon brioche-scented 2007 Heidsieck Monopole Gold Top Champagne, and it had matured into a brilliant, golden, toasted-almond-styled bubbly (Majestic, £30, or wait until Tuesday and buy 2 for £19.99 each).

Forget the myth of dangling a silver teaspoon in the neck of an open bottle of champagne to preserve the bubbles: it won’t. The only way to keep the fizz in fizzy wine is to invest in one of those sturdy champagne stoppers that clamps over the neck of the bottle and keeps the bubbles lively and the wine fresh for a day or so.

Much more wine is drunk too late than too early, so if you have splashed out on a fancy case, crack open a bottle from time to time to check on its progress. Ignore the decanting myth about opening a wine early to let it “breathe”. Wine does not have lungs. Once you pull the cork, wine starts to oxidise and deteriorate. Very old fine wines can fade in minutes.

Above all, ignore yesteryear’s myth when cheapskate hosts were encouraged to open Argentinian reds 24 hours in advance so as to pass them off as venerable French reds to unsuspecting guests.

Why Beer Smells Good

Scientists have discovered why beer smells so good -- and it has nothing to do with us. Beer, that living, breathing elixir, smells the way it smells to appeal to a totally different species.

A pair of Belgian researchers (where else could they be from, right?) has accidentally stumbled on the answer to a question that’s puzzled drunkards for generations: why does this beer smell so good? Like so many scientific advances, this one came when the researchers left some beer out overnight.

The most important ingredient in beer, in the actual creation of the beverage, isn’t hops or malt: it’s yeast, the single-celled fungus that also gives us bread. The yeast eats sugars and farts out both carbon dioxide (to make the beer fizzy) and alcohol (we all know what this does, right?). And it turns out, the yeast is also responsible for that special sweet, almost fruity scent of beer. But why?

The fact that beer smells fruity isn’t an accident. The smell is comprised of chemical compounds that smell intentionally like overripe fruit, so as to attract not humans but the real target: fruit flies. When fruit flies come flocking to beer, they feed on the sugars left behind by the yeast, but also pick up some of the yeast in the hairs on their teeny little legs. That enables the yeast to fly where the flies fly, and spread its wonderful yeastiness more widely than it could otherwise.

But the researchers weren’t trying to figure this out; in the course of experimenting on how yeast contributes to flavor, the researchers had left some improperly sealed specimens of beer sitting out in the lab. One of these included some yeast that had been modified to remove a certain gene that’s responsible for letting loose with those lovely scented chemicals. The researchers weren’t surprised to find that fruit flies had discovered their stock of beer, but they were surprised that the flies seemed to ignore the mutant scent-free yeast beer. Further experiments revealed why: the yeasts release scents specifically for fruit flies.

ST on Drug Laws

The Liberal Democrat Home Office minister Norman Baker is the sort of person who often sounds like he’s on drugs, even though he probably isn’t. Before he was in government, for example, he kept asking the Ministry of Defence about UFOs, which is certainly what some people think politics is for, but normally only bearded men you meet around beach fires at 4am, who are called Warlock.

This week, however, he was loudly agreeing with the Warlocks of the world in a manner not mad at all. Which is to say, he was suggesting that Britain should review its entire approach to illegal drugs, then rip it up and start again.

\ “Sounds mad,” you might think. If so, however, this is a madness that has been shared by a long list of not-mad people. They include a former drugs minister and defence secretary (Bob Ainsworth), a former head of MI5 (Eliza Manningham-Buller), a former assistant chief of MI6 (Nigel Inkster), a former chancellor, health secretary and justice secretary (Ken Clarke), a former head of the Royal College of Physicians (Ian Gilmore), a former chief inspector of prisons (David Ramsbottom), a former secretary of state for Northern Ireland (the late Mo Mowlam) and a former ambassador to Afghanistan (William Patey). All people more likely to be found passing the port than the dutchie. Whatever that is. And whichever way it goes.

They are also, you might have noticed, all “former”. So what is it, do you suppose, that makes people who have been in positions of power, and then aren’t, suddenly open-minded about drugs reform? Time on their hands, maybe? Finally taking that overdue gap year? Is it a bit like Robbie Williams, perhaps, when he left Take That, and turned up five days later at Glastonbury, with red eyes and a missing tooth? Or could it be, just possibly, that they thought this stuff while in office, too, but didn’t quite like to say it?

David Cameron is an interesting case study in this respect. As a new MP, still relatively fresh from that “normal university experience” of his, he declared it “baffling” that Labour wouldn’t consider the decriminalisation of cannabis and even concede the logic of arguments in favour of one day legalising heroin. And, once he’s gone, I bet he’ll talk like this again. Not now, though. To talk of drug reform from Downing Street, he clearly believes, would be weak, Lib Dem-ish and the public would call him a hippy.

Except, would we? This week The Sun — not a notoriously tie-dyed publication — carried a YouGov poll showing that two thirds of people believe in reviewing the law. This seems to be typical of attitudes across the developed world, but the difference between here and almost everywhere else is that their politicians seem to care. America, Uruguay, Switzerland, Portugal; drug laws almost everywhere are being radically overhauled. So what’s holding us back?

“Our strategy is working!” bleats the government, noting that drug use in the UK is falling. It’s rubbish. For one thing, drug use has been falling pretty much everywhere across the western world, whether laws have been liberalised or not. For another, the whole thrust of the report that Baker has been trumpeting is that tough penalties simply don’t make a difference. For a third, there’s decent evidence that quite a lot of illegal drug activity is shifting over to “legal highs”, which are often worse for you, but are considered a health problem rather than a criminal one. And for a fourth, look to the badlands of Afghanistan, or the blood-drenched streets of Mexico where the drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in 2013 alone. How well did our strategy work out for them?

“Decriminalisation”, at any rate, is a namby-pamby, half-arsed concept. Often, I think policymakers use the word in much the same way that Hyacinth Bucket talks about her “smallest room”, and without ever really thinking about what it means. Because, what it does not mean is “legalisation”, which is in fact a far better idea. For, in this “war on drugs” of ours, decriminalisation is very much a surrender. Sure, it allows treatment of addicts and prevents casual users from spiralling into criminality. With the iceberg of drugs, though, users are only the visible tip. Below the surface, dealers keep dealing and traffickers keep trafficking. Mexico stays as Mexico is.

Legalisation is something else. It doesn’t roll over for the criminal world that already exists. Instead, it shoves it to one side to wither, and builds everything again, more nicely. Simply reversing every British drug law tomorrow would be bad, which is probably why almost nobody has ever suggested it. Instead, you do what Uruguay and much of America are doing, which is start slowly with the drugs you can manage, and where the whole chain of supply is clear. By all means discourage use at the same time — “SMOKING THIS WILL MAKE YOU BORING,” sort of thing — but don’t ever fall into the trap of presuming it all ends with your kids buying heroin in Boots. Because maybe we don’t ever legalise heroin. Maybe we don’t need to.

The drug economy, today, is the worst of all possible worlds. The drugs themselves are often a product of this. Crack cocaine from coca, heroin from opium, skunk from the stuff that middle-aged politicians always pretend they didn’t quite smoke at university; all are the result of perverted criminal market forces. Take crystal meth, for example, the drug at the heart of the TV hit Breaking Bad. Or rather, and for God’s sake, don’t. Online, you can find sequential photographs of people who do, and quite what it does to them over time. Start as Harry Styles and you’re Norman Tebbit within a year. Horrendous. In a sane, regulated market, who would ever have sold this? And who would buy it, when they could freely and legally buy something else?

Sure, this latest fuss is probably confected. They like their little spats, our deputy and actual prime minister, because it gives them a risk-free way to stand apart. Clear blue water on the one hand, if you like, and cloudy bong water on the other. It is a strange ritual, nonetheless, that leaves a prime minister so clearly pretending to think something that he doesn’t, to impress voters who no longer even agree with the pose. And one day, like I said, I bet he’ll say the opposite. Again.

Shitfaced Shakespeare

The man behind the latest production of Macbeth does not like to take all the credit for his show. “Once it starts, you never know what’s going to happen,” said Scott Griffin, 34, standing backstage at a theatre near Times Square.

This is partly thanks to the magic of the stage. But it is also because his actors are drunk. This is the Drunk Shakespeare Society, a company that hopes to make the Bard more accessible to New Yorkers with the aid of alcohol.

Beside the stage, a barman was preparing drinks and a waitress flitted across the boards and through the crowd, serving both the audience and the actors.

Whit Leyenberger, 28, from Pennsylvania, who was MacBeth, was only slightly merry when Lady MacBeth suggested regicide. After the bloody deed was done, however, he had a double whisky. He was still reeling when Banquo’s ghost arrived at his dinner table: it was not clear which spirit had left him more disturbed.

He had moved on to beer when Macduff strode into view on the battlefield at Dunsinane. “Hold that,” he said, passing the bottle to a woman in the audience. “Don’t drink it!” he shouted, aghast, for she had taken a sip.

According to the rules of the society, only one member of the cast is actually required to be drunk each night, and on this evening it was the turn of Elissa Klie, 25, from New Jersey, who was playing Macduff. She had been made to down five shots during the course of the play as well as the witches’ brew, which was supposed to contain an eye of a frog and a lizard’s leg, but seemed to be mostly white wine.

“Your face is red,” said MacBeth, as they fought.

“I’m pissed,” she gasped back.

She had become steadily more loquacious and often felt moved to break from the script and address the audience. Mr Griffin, the producer, said this initially took him by surprise.

“The drunk person is dealing with the complexity of the plot and they start using contemporary English to explain it to themselves,” he said. “A lot of drama teachers come to see this and say: ‘I wish I could show this to my kids’.”

At times the show resembles an elaborate Jacobean drinking game. For the sake of his actors’ livers, he has two casts of five performing on alternate nights.

A great many actors applied for the job. “We had 1,300 people audition for ten positions,” he said. “Some brought their own alcohol to the audition.

“They would slam a beer and then launch into a monologue.”

Initially they performed in bars. He recalled a handful of shows early on where the drinking got out of hand and “it’s gone beyond the point of people having fun”. This month they transferred to a theatre.

James Nord, 30, the founder of a fashion company, who was in the crowd, (and had drunk “four shots of whisky and then beers”), said he had seen Shakespeare performed in the Bard’s home town.

“This sucks a lot less than Stratford upon Avon,” he said. “You stop focusing on the language and start focusing on the themes, right?”

He said the drinking fostered a spirit of camaraderie. “You think: ‘We are going to try to get through this complex thing together,” he said.

Skeptoid On Thinking Clearly About Medical Marijuana

Medical cannabis (aka medical marijuana) is currently being used as a medical treatment. It has many concerning similarities to many types of alternative medicine. Unlike most alternative medicine good research does show promise as a reliable medical treatment. This is a fascinating dichotomy to me as a medical professional and the use of medical cannabis is an interesting thought exercise for the critical thinker. There is good evidence for some uses and myriad of poorly supported treatment modalities. Advocates both for and against demonstrate a disdain of scientific exploration. As a skeptic I think this is fertile ground for flexing our critical-thinking muscles.

Recently, David Noonan at Scientific American wrote a relatively uncritical essay about medical marijuana, called “How Medical Marijuana’s Chemicals May Protect Cells.” The title is accurate but the operative word for this research is may, yet that is not how he presents the findings. Like most of the positive puff pieces on this drug it lacks a sound scientific critique of the research. Additionally, he expounds medical marijuana’s innumerable purported treatments and benefits. He fails to be critical of the research and instead he substitutes a lot of generalized marijuana promotion—a common failing for both sides of the medical cannabis issue. Both the opponents and the advocates rush to judgment and both sides tend to cling to individual research rather than an overall assessment. The liberal application of isolated research and ideologic rhetoric produces a muddy picture. As a skeptic it is always good to take a critical look at controversial medical topics even if you lack the training and the expertise to analyse all the details. Good critical thinking can help you parse the facts from the rhetoric.

Medical marijuana is not like homeopathy or Reiki; it has reasonable plausibility and reasonable evidence to back up some claims. Like those two useless treatments there are reams of in-vitro, unreplicated, or poorly structured research. There is, in my opinion, a “quick-to-judge factor” that surrounds interpretation of all marijuana research by both the pro and con camps. Overall, the research surrounding cannabis is interesting: some promising and some so obviously biased it should be thrown out. But a tiny fraction of the research conducted on the drug has been well structured and replicated. Marijuana as a medical treatment is interesting, complicated, and promising. Let’s take a close look and apply our critical thinking skills.

Medical marijuana and the course it has taken on its way to being a medical treatment is to say the least, unusual. Its complicated history, as both an illegal recreational drug and multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, has tarnished its name. Historically this has thrown up barriers for experimentation and research. Compounding the problems with making this a medical treatment is its advocates’ disdain for the current medical system. Many in the pro-medical-marijuana group have a strong leaning towards anti-medical/anti-scientific thinking. And in my opinion this is partly due to medical establishment eschewing them and partly due to purposeful blindness about the drug’s shortcomings.

Medical marijuana originated from folk remedies and anecdotes shared among recreational users. After a lot of outcry the medical community finally added its voice to push experimentation and research forward. Proposed applications for this drug seem to have far surpassed available research. That’s always problematic for a medical treatment. Although it’s true that the illegal recreational use saved a possibly effective drug from the wastebasket, it is also true that the same recreational use has been an impediment for adopting and researching it as a drug.

Historically there was little advocacy in the medical community due to marijuana’s negative social connotations. There has long been almost unwavering political and moral opposition to the drug. Those opponents have likewise refused to consider evidence scientifically. They usually oppose the drug due to a social concerns: wide acceptance of an intoxicant, concerns about gateway drug use, or vaguely supported concerns about the consequences of regular use. There are many examples of socially accepted drugs both in medical use (opiates) and recreational use (alcohol) that have identical histories and similar shortcomings. The social and safety issues surrounding this drug aren’t significantly different from those drugs.

Both advocates and opponents seem to want to champion research that supports their position and dismiss research that doesn’t. That should be a big red flag: the safety and efficacy of a drug needs to be based on science rather than cultural bias, research rather than supposition.

Medical evaluation to quantify and extract usable elements from cannabis have been blunted by both sides. Proponents often advocate that only the whole plant is beneficial, typically describing it as the so-called entourage effect. They claim that isolated compounds are insufficient because there are supposedly undetectable elements to marijuana that cannot be quantified or measured, that the active ingredients are too synergistic, numerous, or complex to separate and use. However, there are no well-controlled studies for inhaled cannabis. This organism varies species to species and plant to plant. There is no way that you are getting a consistent product from the straight plant—no way that something that is so content-arbitrary then requires a very specific combination to achieve efficacy. You can’t have it both ways and expect predictable, safe results. Consequently, the weak whole-plant argument has become the fall back special pleading whenever the plant or its products individually fails in research.

Opponents reject plant use because of the perception that it is a foot in the door for an intoxicant. Opponents also point out that its products don’t provide any new treatment options, and we already have effective drugs that do what this drug does. Although this is a reasonable criticism, if you look at this objectively you will see a paucity of direct evidence in comparative studies. The answer is that we don’t really know if it is superior, equivalent, or worse than existing drugs. Individual elements have been dosed and researched, such as nabiximols in Canada and the United Kingdom. Like most good evidence supporting medical cannabis, the nabiximols study shows modest results on relatively subjective complaints like pain. Combination drugs are being explored, but there are no solid findings yet. To many critical thinkers this is not a strong showing. For any other drug this would be evidence far too weak to promote one treatment over another already proven to be effective.

Medical marijuana offers other pseudoscientific red flags. One typical of many other useless alternative/complementary medicine paradigms is the medical panacea fallacy. Like many other sham treatments, you can name a medical problem and someone will claim that cannabis supposedly treats it. The list of proposed benefits for medical marijuana is ridiculously long, and includes reported maladies such uses as:

all cancers
glaucoma
Asperger’s syndrome
Crohn’s disease
multiple sclerosis
post traumatic stress disorder
trigeminal neuralgia
epilepsy
nightmares
reflex sympathetic dystrophy
bipolar disorder
anxiety
headaches
depression
meningitis
attention deficit disorder
vomiting
lupus
Hashimoto’s encephalopathy
Post-polio paralysis
heroin addiction
Tourette’s syndrome
spastic paraplegia
irritable bowel syndrome
hiccups
etc.

Yes: that list includes both cancer and hiccups. When it comes to medical treatments there are no cure-alls. Frankly, it is impossible for any drug to be a panacea. It is totally implausible that medical marijuana could treat even a tiny fraction of these diseases. Good critical thinking has repeatedly shown us that if something is a treatment for everything, then it probably treats nothing. I think medical marijuana is an exception to that rule insofar as it definitely has potential medical applications. But there is no way that it treats that many different medical problems. Anecdotally it may work, possibly as a dissociative, which is just hiding problems not treating them.

Critically the most concerning thing about medical cannabis is the push to treatment. Forcing research is difficult but you can gin public support for it. Yet advocates seem to have jumped over research using an obtuse backwards kind of tautology: proponents argue that the drug’s illegality is preventing research, so it must be made legal for the sake of research and the best way to achieve that is to call it a medicine, so that we can legalize it and find out if it’s an effective medicine. This basically makes the public a phase II human trial for medical marijuana under the banner of compassionate medical care. That is not a scientific progression for a solid medical treatment. I recognize that it is possible that there is an undercurrent of legalizing recreational marijuana. Or this philosophy may be a result of previous dismissal of marijuana by the medical community. No matter the origin, promoting medical marijuana as a treatment has become almost a belief system.

If we approach this medication critically what do we know?

There is evidence that medical cannabis may help with psychiatric complaints and with subjective complaints like insomnia, pain.

There is a mountain of poor-quality evidence claiming support for other uses for cannabis, but without good data to back up those assertions.

Both proponents and opponents lack a good scientific methodology; they propose ideological, unsupported, and implausible claims.

The actual efficacy and safety of medical cannabis is very murky.

Its benefit as a medical treatment is unclear.

In my opinion, widespread adoption of medical marijuana is premature. Marijuana needs to be removed from US Schedule I so that research is possible. More research is needed. It may be an effective, safe pain medication. Currently the jury is out on that. Finding out the answer to that question is only possible if both the proponents and the opponents of medical marijuana can find some common ground around scientific inquiry.

I cannot in all good conscience recommend medical cannabis except in palliative terminal cases. It just has too many unknowns. Given the evidence I am just as likely to be prescribing a big fat placebo with a dissociative element as an effective medical treatment. It needs more research… period, the end. Currently it is not a treatment—it is a guess. It needs well-controlled duplicated studies; it needs the active ingredients and their interactions to be identified. We need to know what is an effective dose and what’s a toxic one. It needs all of this before you can call this a treatment. I demand that level of knowledge before I give anything to patients. You can’t cut corners because you believe something is effective. You can’t base success of a treatment on patient satisfaction when you are dealing with medications that have recreational uses. Getting drunk may help you deal with pain, but it won’t fix anything. I won’t offer my patients a bottle of Jack Daniels anymore than I will offer them a bag of cannabis. It is just not a medical treatment. I demand more of my medical treatments and so should you.

From Brian Dunning's Skeptoid

Where The Best Tea In The World Comes From - Scotland

Dalreoch Estate smoked white tea, grown in Amulree, Perthshire, has won the Gold Award of Salon du Thé in Paris, an achievement as impressive as it is improbable.

Fending off famous names from China, India and Sri Lanka, the Wee Tea Company triumphed only four years after the plantation put down roots. Its high-end product — available from Fortnum & Mason at £35 for 15g — has been a commercial proposition for only a year.

Tam O’Braan, who founded the business, said that Scotland was on the cusp of an agricultural revolution, with a total of 13 tea gardens coming into bloom across the country.

Mr O’Braan, 45, said: “If you were to say this is on a par with the foundation of the whisky industry, people would say you were unhinged.

“But, to be clear, what we are doing here is on a par with the foundation of the whisky industry.”

Known to locals as “Tetley Tam”, Mr O’Braan financed his plantation with money he raised from the sale of an international agronomy business he operated with his wife, Grace, 29.

“We were doing re-afforestation work in the Amazon basin when we got an offer to buy the business. They offered three times what we had valued it at,” he said. His first sight of the estate at Amulree was on Google Earth. The failure of the tea business had been unthinkable.

“I would never have been able to face my wife’s family again — or my neighbours.”

The award ceremony takes place this afternoon, but Mr and Mrs O’Braan are unable to attend because she is due to give birth to twin girls. Instead Jamie Russell, the estate’s “tea master”, or taster, will collect the prize. If you wanted the finest cup of tea, where would you go? The craggy peaks of Yunnan, China? Not any more. Improbable as it may sound, the world’s most celebrated tea is grown in the hills of Perthshire.

Today in Paris, Dalreoch Estate Smoked White Tea will be presented with the Salon du Thé Gold Award, officially the best in the world. For Tam O’Braan, the founder of the Wee Tea Plantation, above, it is the vindication of a dream, one he celebrated yesterday with a cup of Smoked White in an Edinburgh hotel.

By the end of this year 13 tea gardens will have been established in Scotland, all owing some debt to Mr O’Braan.

In 2011, with his wife, Grace, Mr O’Braan, right, from Northern Ireland, decided to turn a struggling upland sheep farm into a place of pilgrimage in the billion-dollar world of tea. They began with three plants from China, convinced that Scotland had the climate and conditions to build a business. Their hunch seemed correct when they quickly propogated 2,000 cuttings.

Then came the snows of 2012. Mr O’Braan said: “It was the worst winter for 200 years. Every leaf fell off, and I thought, I am going to turn out to be the most stupid person since Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.”

Then on Valentine’s Day last year the plants produced shoots. “We knew right then that we were going to produce a Darjeeling-standard flavour,” Mr O’Braan said. “It wasn’t till the following year that we found the bravery to tell people what we were doing.”

At Christmas, by mail order, the plantation was selling its tea at £2,300 per kilo, or £230 for 100g. He sold out, all of it going abroad, most to China, to feed the appetite of the burgeoning middle class.

Talk about coals to Newcastle.

The Trillion Dollar War On Drugs

If humans have been consuming substances to alter consciousness for thousands of years, then why in the 20th century did we vow to rid the world of drugs? And who started the war on drugs anyway? Hari reckons he has it nailed down to one man. Harry Jacob Anslinger was the head of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics for a staggering 33 years, beginning in 1930. Before that he was the assistant commissioner for prohibition. Hari lays out the story of a man who, seeing the battle for alcohol prohibition was lost, fights to keep his tenuous bureaucracy alive. He finds an ally in the press, eager for sensational stories that now seem comic. “Mexican Family Go Insane,” the New York Times headlines a story about a widow and her four children who ate a marijuana plant. The story explains that there is no hope for the children and the mother “will be insane for the rest of her life”.

After a search of Anslinger’s papers held at Penn State University, Hari paints him as a hardline conservative who warned that marijuana “turns man into a wild beast” and makes black men forget their place and lust after white women. For Anslinger, the epicentre of this depravity was the jazz clubs, which were “like the jungles in the dead of night”. He and his agents went after the jazz greats, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. But most of all, they pursued Billie Holiday, a heroin addict who was effectively harassed to death, to the extent she was arrested in a raid on her room as she fought for her life in hospital.

Hari says that all through this time, Anslinger was waging a PR war as part of his war on drugs and that tapping into racial prejudice was a big part of that. “He’s very good at taking those kind of electrical sparks that are in the air and building a lightning conductor over his department and saying, ‘Look, the solution to these fears and anxieties is to ban these chemicals and these drugs.’” Hari also believes that Anslinger’s prescience about the growing power of the mafia in the US gave him a dangerous level of confidence. “It’s hard for us to get our heads around now, but in the early 20th century … the mafia was seen as a conspiracy theory the way we would see crazy bullshit like 9/11 Truthers or something. The tragedy of it is that he believes he is fighting the mafia but he is actually transferring a massive industry to them.”

Which leads to another great question: who was the first drug dealer? Hari reckons it was American gangster Arnold Rothstein. Anslinger unwittingly handed him a lucrative black market and he cashed in, buying off police and politicians along the way until he was shot and killed in 1928 by an unknown assassin.

“This was the bullet at the birth of drug prohibition and nobody knows where it came from even now,” Hari writes. “It is like the bullet that claimed the Archduke Ferdinand at the start of the First World War: the first shot in a global massacre.” So, yes, the book seems overwritten in places. Hari compares the war on drugs with World War I again in the book’s conclusion, saying both began in 1914. “The First World War lasted four years ... miles of men killing and dying to seize a few more meters of mud. The drug war has lasted … for almost one hundred years. I am trying now to imagine its victims laid out like the dead of that more famous war, consecrated in one vast graveyard.”

But don’t let the passages of purple prose put you off, because Hari makes some compelling arguments in this book. Having introduced us to Anslinger and Rothstein, he says they are forever being replaced by harder versions of themselves. “The key players in the war continue to be either Anslingers or Rothsteins – the prohibitionist and the gangster locked together in a tango unto the far horizon.”

Hari is complimentary about New Zealand’s pioneering approach to legal highs but then deflated to learn that the Government backtracked after a media storm and the accompanying moral panic and has effectively banned synthetic drugs. Having raised the bar so high as to prevent the products coming onto a regulated open market, stories are already emerging about gangs selling synthetic cannabis on the black market.

“I find that really dismaying,” says Hari, who argues that one of the benefits of a regulated market is that drugs are less likely to be sold to under-18s. “We don’t have a choice about whether people are going to use drugs. We have a choice about whether that market is controlled by armed criminal gangs, who cause horrific violence and mayhem and massively endanger the users, or whether it is controlled by doctors and pharmacists.” And indeed that is what used to happen. Hari writes that until cocaine and heroin were banned in the US in 1914, they were sold as remedies or “little helpers’, including Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which contained 65mg of pure morphine in every ounce. He says the drug war waged by Anslinger saw more than 20,000 doctors arrested in the US for prescribing opiates to patients, despite the 1914 law providing an exemption for doctors to do so. “The fact that they had to arrest 20,000 doctors because they insisted on carrying on prescribing to addicts astonished me and it’s amazing that this history was successfully erased from popular consciousness.”

THE NATURE OF ADDICTION

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Hari’s book for many readers will be his handling of addiction. Essentially he claims that it is not exposure to powerful drugs that leads to addiction, rather that people who are damaged, isolated and vulnerable before they start drugs are the ones who become addicted. This will be challenged by some health professionals and probably by many who say their loved ones have had their lives ruined by drugs.

Hari lays out the common belief. “If you and I and the next 20 people who walk past your office all use heroin together for 20 days, on day 21, because there are chemical hooks in the heroin, our bodies would physically need the heroin, we would be physically craving it and we’d all be addicts.”

But, he asks, if opiates are so addictive, then why doesn’t your grandmother become a junkie when prescribed diamorphine for her hip operation? “There are people being given heroin at a hospital near you for quite a long period of time. What is striking is that if what we think about addiction is right, those people should leave hospital as addicts. That almost never happens. You will have noticed that your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip operation.”

Why do a relatively small number of people who use drugs get addicted to them? He cites one study claiming that 20% of US soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin but that 95% of them “simply stopped” within a year of returning home, many without assistance. No war, misery and loneliness – no need to take hard drugs, or so goes his argument.

Hari says that the messages lapped up in drug education mostly come from a single source, because 90% of the global research into illegal drugs is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, founded by Robert Dupont.

REHABILITATION OF A DIFFERENT KIND

Near the end our discussion, Hari tells me he doesn’t want to consume the drugs he argues should be legal for adults. Nowadays he limits himself to the occasional glass of wine. He did come to his subject matter with personal experience though: a family history of drug addiction and his own period of abusing narcolepsy drugs to fuel marathon writing binges. Hari opens his book with one of his earliest memories, that of trying in vain to wake a relative from a drugged stupor. He writes that ever since, he’s been “oddly drawn to addicts and recovering addicts – they feel like my tribe”.

One senses the book is also about rehabilitation of a different kind. Hari is trying to rescue his reputation as a writer. He has won a string of journalism prizes but was forced to hand back his Orwell Prize in 2011 after he was found to have committing plagiarism. “What I did was, I sometimes, where I interviewed people, used things that they had said in their books, or in a small number of cases said to other journalists, as if they had been said directly to me, which was obviously completely wrong and a terrible thing to do.

“When you f— up you should pay a big price, which I did, rightly, and you should very methodically show that you’ve not done the same thing again.” Hence this book is meticulously footnoted and the website, chasingthescream.com, contains full audio copies of the interviews that quotes are drawn from and has a section for corrections and clarifications.

THE END OF WAR

It’s time to wind up our call but Hari has a final sales pitch, a parting shot: he wants people who despise drug use to join the fight. “Ending the drug war is not about liking or approving of drugs. You can be militantly anti-drugs and against this crazy policy that makes addiction worse, empowers criminal gangs and wastes billions upon billions of dollars that we can spend on better things.”

But he is optimistic the drug war is coming to an end – in some cases where it started, with several American states legalising marijuana.

He ends the book describing sitting in a late night meeting in Colorado listening to a soccer mum agonise about the appropriate labelling and licensing regime for hash cookies. Maybe the drug war will end with a whimper rather than a bang.

Booze and Violence

Call them the liquor wars. They have been raging in New Zealand since the 19th century and the battle lines are clearly defined: the liquor industry and supporters of a more liberal regulatory regime on one side, advocates of tight controls (for example, on opening hours, liquor advertising and the legal drinking age) on the other. Put more crudely, it’s booze barons versus wowsers. The arguments both ways are wearisomely familiar and have been recited for as long as anyone can remember. But a new front has opened in hostilities. A recently published paper looks at alcohol and its associated social problems through an anthropological lens and concludes we’ve got it all wrong. It’s not booze that’s to blame for violence and antisocial behaviour – it’s us.

“Understanding Behaviour in the Australian and New Zealand Night-Time Economies” is a paper by British anthropologist Anne Fox, who has studied drinking cultures for 20 years and worked as a consultant on substance misuse for the British Army.

The paper was commissioned by the big Sydney-based liquor conglomerate Lion, which will inevitably result in questions about Fox’s independence. But she avoids overt polemics, instead using evidence from a year’s research in New Zealand and Australia, plus volumes of supporting evidence, to reframe the debate over alcohol and move it in a new direction.

A key finding is that despite a tightly regulated drinking environment, we accept a level of drunken behaviour that would not be tolerated in many other Western countries.

The paper was written as controversy raged on both sides of the Tasman over binge drinking and “alcohol-fuelled” violence (a phrase Fox rejects as misleading), but her central thesis is that alcohol doesn’t have to be associated with antisocial behaviour. Scapegoating alcohol as the sole cause of violence, she argues, merely diverts attention from “maladaptive cultural norms” that allow New Zealand and Australian men to be violent and aggressive.

As evidence, she cites heavy-drinking societies that manage to remain peaceable. Iceland, for example, has high rates of per capita alcohol consumption, along with a culture of preloading (drinking before going out) and all-night bar opening, “and yet violent crime [there] is almost non-existent”. The Danes are big drinkers too, Fox writes, yet remain “famously harmonious and peaceful”.

New Zealanders and Australians, by international standards, are only moderate per capita consumers of alcohol, yet many of us seem incapable of drinking without risking harm to ourselves or others. So what’s the difference?

A BAD ATTITUDE

\ Fox’s conclusion is that although alcohol gets the blame, the real problems are rooted in our cultural attitudes. We treat liquor as if it exerts some mystical power over us, thus allowing us to exempt ourselves from personal responsibility when we behave badly.

As Fox puts it,“most people [in New Zealand and Australia] still believe that alcohol has the power to hijack their better natures, control their thinking and make them do crazy and stupid things.” But she says there is conclusive evidence to the contrary.

She points to Japan as an example of a culture where heavy drinking is widely tolerated, but overtly drunken or antisocial behaviour is not. Japanese drinkers seem quite capable of conforming to these social norms,according to Fox. In Cuba, too, men generally pride themselves on self-control when drinking, and risk being stigmatised if they behave badly.

She also cites the British enclave of Gibraltar, “a unique Anglo-Mediterranean hybrid” where she researched drinking and drug use among British soldiers. The drinking culture there is essentially Mediterranean and revolves around wine, food and good-natured sociability. Displays of inebriated extroversion, such as staggering about drunk or urinating in the streets, attract harsh penalties and social disapproval.

Fox says arriving soldiers are briefed on how to behave and are able to modify their usual drunken comportment to comply with Gibraltar’s social rules. Despite still drinking “vast” quantities of alcohol, they manage to remain self-controlled and well mannered.

An army wife from Glasgow told Fox she loved taking her children into Gibraltar pubs because it enabled them to see grown-ups drinking and enjoying themselves all afternoon and then walking home sober – something they never saw at home.

The lesson Fox took from Gibraltar was that “ultimately, to make any fundamental change in the culture of behaviour, we need to focus on the behaviour, not the drinking.”

Experiments show that even highly intoxicated people can control their behaviour and exercise good judgment, she says. She also points out that whereas we tend to excuse people who get aggressive or obnoxious when drinking, we don’t apply the same tolerance to other types of behaviour.

“Most people would not excuse theft because the person was drunk. Neither is it acceptable to insult or injure vulnerable members of society such as the elderly, handicapped or children. But taking off one’s clothes, urinating – but not defecating – shouting, fighting, singing, flirting and even going home with the ‘wrong’ person are all blamed on the drink.”

Drunken behaviour is largely culturally determined, she says, and can be heavily influenced by situational cues. It can also be engaged or disengaged at will. “As long as we continue to promulgate the myth that alcohol can radically transform a person’s behaviour, we can expect to see undesirable conduct in and around drinking venues. We must take the genie out of the bottle and return the responsibility for conduct to the individual.”

INCENTIVISING SOBRIETY

According to Fox, even New Zealanders have some power to control how they act when they’ve been drinking, as long as it suits them to do so. In focus groups, for example, it emerged that young people who preloaded at home were perfectly capable of appearing sober if they wanted to get into a club.

“All the scientific literature suggests that as long as they have an incentive to control their behaviour, 98% of people can remain perfectly controlled even though heavily inebriated.”

Conversely, Fox tells of experiments in which some participants were given wine while others unknowingly drank an alcohol-free placebo. Those given the alcohol-free drink became just as disinhibited as the ones drinking the real thing – confirming, she argues, that we are culturally programmed to respond a certain way in drinking situations.

To put it another way, how we behave when we’ve been drinking is determined culturally and socially rather than chemically, Fox argues.

While alcohol acts as a depressant, slowing down the messages sent by the brain to the body, Fox says its chemical effect is not independent of our “neural scaffolding of thought, belief and expectation”. Behaviours associated with alcohol are ingrained in us early in life and can be acted out by children as young as six. She makes the radical assertion that the brain state that enables the relaxation of inhibitions and “freeing” of behavioural expression is voluntary and reversible.

But she doesn’t just blame antisocial behaviour on the self-fulfilling belief that drinking causes us to lose self-control. Where violence is concerned, Fox says, there are other, uglier forces at work. We like to think of ourselves as an easy-going society, but as Fox puts it, “the flip side of the New Zealand national character reveals darker features of hyper-masculinity with its attendant norms of male entitlement, pride, honour, competition, fighting, racism and misogyny”.

Aggressive masculinity, she says, is evident everywhere, from schoolyards to sports fields, politics and pubs, movies and media. Violent sports, a culture of male domination and strong codes of male honour are all violence-reinforcing factors in society, as is conspicuous income inequality.

“Drinking culture doesn’t exist on its own. As one anthropologist has put it, drinking is a window on culture. So you see other aspects of culture, such as the macho culture in New Zealand, being expressed through drinking.”

She doesn’t buy the notion that drunk men are powerless to control their violent impulses. As evidence, she tells of British army wives who blamed alcohol when their husbands assaulted them. “It’s not him, it’s the alcohol,” they would tell her. “He only does it when he’s drunk.” At which point the conversation would typically proceed along the following lines:

Fox: “Does he only drink when he’s with you?”
Army wife: “No, he drinks with his mates.”
Fox: “So does he beat his mates up when he’s drunk?” Awkward silence.

Fox also refuses to accept that alcohol somehow triggers violence in people who otherwise display no violent impulses. “There is no evidence that for most normal, healthy individuals, the presence of alcohol in the brain results in, encourages or unleashes violence. Alcohol can, in certain cultures and situations, be a facilitator of aggression if aggression is there to begin with, both in the individual and in the cultural environment. But it does not produce it where it doesn’t already exist.”

Violence in the New Zealand and Australian entertainment precincts she studied was not caused by normal people who suddenly turned savage or aggressive, but by violent people, she says. “Violent people drink.”

She quotes a policewoman with long experience of weekend patrols in a large Australian city as saying: “I’ve never met a violent drunk who was not also violent when sober.”

Alcohol doesn’t increase anger, Fox argues. If anything, the reverse is truer: angry men drink.

She goes on to conclude (and critics will probably claim that here she’s pushing a liquor industry line) that if alcohol really does cause aggression, government supply-side controls and prohibitive measures would be justified. But if alcohol is merely used as an excuse for violent behaviour, government efforts would be better concentrated on social education, health promotion and sanctions on violent individuals.

BINGEING VS EVERYDAY

Fox draws an interesting distinction between our drinking patterns and those of some European countries. New Zealanders and Australians are classified as episodic, celebratory drinkers who drink on occasions that are delineated by custom and law, typically at parties or in pubs and clubs. Such occasions signify a special time separated from ordinary, everyday life.

It’s a pattern conducive to binge drinking, in contrast with cultures where moderate alcohol consumption is woven into the daily rhythm of life. In Germany, for example, she says it’s common to see working men enjoying a small glass of beer with breakfast. In rural France, some men still have a “coup de rouge” – a shot-sized glass of red wine – before beginning the day’s work. She describes these as “integrated” drinking cultures where alcohol is not generally associated with antisocial behaviour, even though per capita consumption may be higher than ours.

Fox, whose father founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, spent part of her childhood in France and recalls that on saints’ days at school, a jug of wine would be put on the table for older pupils. “And the interesting thing was pretty much nobody touched it. It wasn’t anything special. Instead we’d cut school and go to cafes, where we’d try to look incredibly grown-up so the barman would serve us coffee.”

That was an example of what might be called the forbidden fruit syndrome. “Whatever is forbidden is going to be attractive,” says Fox. In this instance it was coffee, which was off limits to children.

She calls New Zealanders out on careless and inaccurate use of language that absolves people of responsibility for the consequences of their drinking. The commonly heard phrase “alcohol-fuelled violence”, for instance, suggests it’s all the alcohol’s fault, when Fox says the responsibility should be placed squarely on the perpetrator of the violence.

“If 100,000 people go out drinking and one person behaves badly or violently, we say it’s alcohol-fuelled. But what about the other 99,999? As long as you talk about alcohol-fuelled violence, you’re helping to perpetuate the belief that alcohol causes violence.”

She also objects to the unhelpfully loose use of the phrase “binge drinking”, pointing out that a binge used to be defined as a period of drunkenness lasting two days or more. It was associated with neglect of self, job, children and other responsibilities. Now, however, the term is used to describe any alcohol consumption above the safe recommended guidelines. Fox says this blurs the boundaries between high-risk consumption and low to moderately risky drinking.

“In some surveys, you need only to have consumed more than four drinks in one sitting once in the past 12 months to be classified as a risky drinker. “There’s absolutely no argument that the medical and health implications of drinking too much alcohol need to be well publicised and well understood by the general public, which currently isn’t the case. But to brand as pathological the amount most normal people drink at a dinner party or wedding or on a night out turns the entire population into risky drinkers. So then how do you identify those who really are risky drinkers?”

FACING THE CONSEQUENCES

Okay, so we use alcohol as an excuse for behaving badly. But what should we do to change things? Fox’s paper includes a raft of recommendations. The first is that we should stop focusing on “alcohol-fuelled violence” and address what she calls cultural reinforcers of violence, such as aggressive masculinity.

A cultural shift can be achieved, she says, by recognising that individuals are in control of their own behaviour and should face consequences, such as social stigma and heavy penalties, for transgressions.

Fox also suggests we should de-emphasise consumption of alcohol for its own sake and refocus on entertainment and group conviviality. She urges better drinking environments, with higher ratios of females (both staff and patrons), a wider range of ages (violence is less likely in mixed-age groups) and a clear message that bad behaviour will not be tolerated. She was alarmed at the number of bars and clubs in New Zealand and Australia that served people who were clearly drunk.

She is also an advocate of consistent, visible policing (she found that police are more effective on foot than in patrol cars) and clear penalties for bad behaviour. In the New South Wales city of Newcastle, Fox notes, police show little tolerance for bad behaviour and young people are well aware that infringements, such as sexual harassment or urinating in public, will earn them a heavy and immediate fine.

Safe, well-managed 24-hour food outlets are important too, she says, as is adequate transport out of the entertainment districts of large cities. Fox suggests that even language can be used to change harmful concepts of masculinity and to indicate social disapproval of violent behaviour. In Australia the term “king hit”, meaning a powerful blow delivered without warning, has been rebranded in the media as the “coward’s punch” following a series of highly publicised king hit-related deaths and injuries. The long-term effectiveness of this change in terminology has yet to be measured but Fox calls it a step in the right direction.

She is especially emphatic about the need for better alcohol education. Young New Zealanders and Australians appear to know very little of the basic facts about alcohol, she says. Effective programmes should offer a balanced portrayal of both the negative and positive aspects of consumption and provide unbiased information about alcohol’s real effects.

Scare tactics don’t work and can even be counter-productive, she insists. “The element of risk is, for many young people, an added attraction to drug-taking or binge drinking.”

THE CULT OF MALE MATESHIP

Some of Fox’s findings will please the liquor lobby. She argues, for example, that alcohol-related violence will not be deterred by raising the price of liquor, closing bars earlier or banning advertising. “Efforts at alcohol control will be ineffective if not related to changes in the macho culture of violence.”

But she doesn’t entirely let the liquor industry off the hook. She suggests, for example, that beer advertisements that stress the cult of male mateship – as some undoubtedly do – risk reinforcing the less desirable aspects of macho culture, such as brutal competitiveness and misogyny. Advertising, she warns, can reinforce or glamorise “maladaptive cultural norms” around drinking.

Similarly, Fox makes no attempt to play down the negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption, especially among the young. “Your brain doesn’t finish developing until you’re in your early twenties, in many cases, and the effect of binge drinking on a developing brain is very damaging. But this has been misinterpreted and translated into a fear of children having any access to alcohol at all.”

As for the likely reaction to her paper, Fox expects to be dismissed by some as a propagandist for the liquor industry, but insists that her contract with Lion stipulated no interference in her research, analysis or writing. “In fact, it was quite brave of Lion because it didn’t know what I was going to say or what the results would be.

“I am not a mouthpiece for the alcohol industry but I do believe that every stakeholder in the drinking culture has a right to be heard.”

Heroin Epidemic

FATAL heroin overdoses in America have almost tripled in three years. More than 8,250 people a year now die from heroin. At the same time, roughly double that number are dying from prescription opioid painkillers, which are molecularly similar. Heroin has become the fallback dope when an addict can’t afford, or find, pills. Total overdose deaths, most often from pills and heroin, now surpass traffic fatalities.

If these deaths are the measure, we are arguably in the middle of our worst drug plague ever, apart from cigarettes and alcohol.

And yet this is also our quietest drug plague. Strikingly little public violence accompanies it. This has muted public outrage. Meanwhile, the victims — mostly white, well-off and often young — are mourned in silence, because their parents are loath to talk publicly about how a cheerleader daughter hooked for dope, or their once-star athlete son overdosed in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.

The problem “is worse than it’s ever been, and young people are dying,” an addiction doctor in Columbus, Ohio — one of our many new heroin hot spots — wrote me last month. “This past Friday I saw 23 patients, all heroin addicts recently diagnosed.”

So we are at a strange new place. We enjoy blissfully low crime rates, yet every year the drug-overdose toll grows. People from the most privileged groups in one of the wealthiest countries in the world have been getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to numb pain. Street crime is no longer the clearest barometer of our drug problem; corpses are.

Most of our heroin now comes not from Asia, but from Latin America, particularly Mexico, where poppies grow well in the mountains along the Pacific Coast. Mexican traffickers have focused on a rudimentary, less-processed form of heroin that can be smoked or injected. It is called black tar, which accurately describes its appearance. Cheaper to produce and ship than the stuff of decades past from Asia, heroin has fallen in price, and so more people have become addicted.

The most important traffickers in this story hail from Xalisco, a county of 49,000 people near the Pacific Coast. They have devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery.

Dealers circulate a number around town. An addict calls, and an operator directs him to an intersection or a parking lot. The operator dispatches a driver, who tools around town, his mouth full of tiny balloons of heroin, with a bottle of water nearby to swig them down with if cops stop him. (“It’s amazing how many balloons you can learn to carry in your mouth,” said one dealer, who told me he could fit more than 30.)

The driver meets the addict, spits out the required balloons, takes the money and that’s that. It happens every day — from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., because these guys keep business hours.

The Xalisco Boys, as one cop I know has nicknamed them, are far from our only heroin traffickers. But they may be our most prolific. As relentless as Amway salesmen, they embody our new drug-plague paradigm.

Xalisco dealers are low profile — the anti-Scarface. Back home they are bakers, butchers and farm workers, part of a vast labor pool in Xalisco and surrounding towns, who hire on as heroin drivers for $300 to $500 a week. The drug trade offers them a shot at their own business, or simply a chance to make some money to show off back home — kings until the cash goes. Meanwhile, in the United States, they drive old cars with their cheeks packed like chipmunks’, and dress like the day workers in front of your Home Depot.

The heroin delivery system appeals to them mainly because there is no cartel kingpin, no jefe máximo. It is meritocratic — so unlike Mexico. They are “people acting as individuals who are doing it on their own: micro-entrepreneurs,” said one phone operator for a crew who I interviewed while he was in prison. They are “looking for places where there’s no people, no competition,” he said. “Anyone can be boss of a network.” Thus the system distills what appeals to immigrants generally about America: It is a way to translate wits and hard work into real economic gain.

The money, meanwhile, helps paper over the Mexican small-town animus against drugs, and the guilt many feel at watching their product reduce kids just like them to quivering slaves.

They are decidedly nonviolent — terrified, in fact, of battles for street corners with armed gangs. They don’t carry guns. They also have rules against selling to African-Americans because, as one dealer put it, “they’ll steal from you, and beat you.”

The Boys started out on the fringes of the drug world in West Coast cities. In the late 1990s, they moved east in search of virgin territory. They avoided New York City, the country’s traditional center of heroin, because the market was already run by entrenched gangs. The city still has enormous supplies of dope coming through it, mostly imported now by traffickers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and by Dominicans who buy it from Colombians. But New York is no longer the country’s sole heroin hub. They also skipped cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, where black gangs control distribution.

The Xalisco Boys migrated instead to prosperous midsize cities. These cities were predominantly white, but had large Mexican populations where the Boys could blend in. They were the first to open these markets to cheap, potent black-tar heroin in a sustained way. The map of their outposts amounts to a tour through our new heroin hubs: Nashville, Columbus and Charlotte, as well as Salt Lake City, Portland and Denver.

THEY arrived in the Midwest just as a revolution in American medicine was underway, and an epidemic of pain-pill abuse was spreading over that region.

In the ’90s, some doctors came to believe that opioid painkillers were virtually nonaddictive when used for pain, and they prescribed them freely — not just for terminal cancer patients, but for chronic pain sufferers, too. Many patients were in pain. But instead of pursuing more complicated pain solutions, which might include eating better, exercising more and, thus, feeling better, too many saw doctors as car mechanics endowed with powers to fix everything quickly.

Too often, opioid painkillers were prescribed to excess; after I had my appendix removed a few years back, I received 60 Vicodin, when four might have been enough.

A result has been a rising sea level of prescription painkillers that continues today, of opioids such as Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin. Sales of these drugs quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. Addiction followed. And this has given new life to heroin, which had been declining in popularity since the early 1980s.

In places like Columbus, the Xalisco Boys stumbled onto multitudes of new addicts, many of whom were already hooked on opioid pills that doctors had prescribed. Their heroin was cheaper than the pills, yet provided a similar high. And their delivery system made heroin conveniently available to suburban white kids who possessed the trinity of American prosperity, essential to the Xalisco system: their own cellphones (to call the dealer), cars (in which to meet the dealer) and private bedrooms (in which to shoot up and hide the dope).

Prescription pain pills have created a new home for heroin in rural and suburban Middle America. Thanks to them, the Xalisco Boys built what the justice department called the first coast-to-coast distribution networks, which also included Hawaii and, for a time, Alaska.

They have kept their edge by betting not on guns but on marketing. Just as pharmaceutical companies promoted prescription pills to doctors as the solution to demanding chronic-pain patients, the Xalisco Boys promoted their system as the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency. The everyday solution for white suburban addicts afraid of rummaging around Skid Row for dope. Only a phone call away; operators standing by.

Today, they are our quietest traffickers. And our most aggressive. Other heroin dealers wait for customers to come to them. The Xalisco Boys drive after new ones. They hang out at methadone clinics offering patients free samples. They offer price breaks and occasionally make customer survey calls: Was the dope good? Was the driver polite? Any customers showing signs of quitting get a visit from a driver plying them with free hits.

They are the only network of Mexican traffickers I know of that manufactures its own product, exports it wholesale into the United States and then retails it on the street in tenth-of-a-gram doses, thus controlling product quality, price and customer service.

The police try to combat them, but they are like the Internet of dope — a crew can shut down as quickly as a website. One strategy is to arrest drivers, confiscate their cars and apartments. That raises the business costs of the crew owners back in Xalisco, who continue to oversee drug production and recruit new drivers from Mexico. Arresting these owners would be more effective, but we’d have to depend on Mexican law enforcement — which is hobbled by corruption, and stretched thin by far more violent drug networks — for that.

What we can do is improve our rehabilitation options for those trapped in addiction. Some argue that we should also legalize heroin. But we already have a legal opioid for addiction maintenance. Methadone, when administered properly, is cheap, safe, crime- and needle-free and, unlike heroin, requires one daily dose, thus allowing addicts to live relatively normal lives. Of course, methadone can also keep an addict tethered to dependence. Besides, both of these responses address only the symptoms of the epidemic.

The tale of the Xalisco Boys, indeed the spread of heroin across America, really gets back to prescriptions for pills to kill our pain.

Traveling the country to write a book chronicling this story, I was struck by how much agony we create in pursuit of numbed pain. It also occurred to me how un-American this is. America’s greatest idea is self-reliance. That we can take charge of our lives and not have them determined for us. This idea inspires immigrants who come here. It is, in essence, what the Xalisco Boys are about, despite their diabolical behavior. But opiate addiction is the opposite of that American idea. Opiate addicts relinquish free will, enslaved to the pursuit of painlessness.

Some places have gained ground on the epidemic. Portsmouth, Ohio, was among the first to see a generation addicted, and pill mills — pain clinics where doctors prescribed pills for cash and without a proper diagnosis — were virtually invented there. Portsmouth, like a junkie who has hit rock bottom, has found within it a spirit of self-reliance that has helped kindle a culture of recovery. The town shuttered the pill mills. Narcotics Anonymous meetings are now everywhere; recovering addicts are studying to be counselors. And after years of watching jobs go abroad, in 2009 townspeople stepped in to save one of Portsmouth’s last factories — a shoelace manufacturer, which now exports shoelaces to China, Mexico and Taiwan.

Like Portsmouth, we need to take accountability for our own wellness. There is a time and a place for pain pills, of course. But we need to question the drugs marketed to us, depend less on pills as solutions and stop demanding that doctors magically fix us.

It will then matter less what new product a drug company — or the drug underworld — devises.

Pot Edibles

After nearly 20 years on the job, Jim Jeffries, the police chief in LaFollette, Tenn., has seen his share of marijuana seizures — dry green buds stashed in trunks or beneath seats, often double-bagged to smother the distinctive scent.

But these days, Chief Jeffries is on the lookout for something unexpected: lollipops and marshmallows.

Recently his officers pulled over a Chevy Blazer driven by a couple with three children in tow. Inside, the officers discovered 24 pounds of marijuana-laced cookies and small hard candies shaped like gingerbread men, plus a tub of pungent marijuana butter perfect for making more.

The bags of Kraft marshmallows looked innocent enough. But a meat injector was also found in the car. After searching the Internet, Chief Jeffries realized that the marshmallows probably had been infused with the marijuana butter and heat-sealed into their bags.

“This is the first time that we have ever seen marijuana butter or any of this candy containing marijuana in the county,” Chief Jeffries said. “We hope it’s the last time.”

That seems increasingly unlikely. Across the country, law enforcement agencies long accustomed to seizures of bagged, smokable marijuana are now wrestling with a surge in marijuana-infused snacks and confections transported illegally across state lines for resale.

Pot edibles, as they are called, can be much easier to smuggle than marijuana buds: They may resemble candy or home-baked goodies, and often have no telltale smell. And few police officers are trained to think of gummy bears, mints or neon-colored drinks as potential dope.

Some experts worry that smuggled pot edibles will appeal to many consumers, particularly adolescents, who are ill prepared for the deceptively slow high. Impatient novices can easily eat too much too fast, suffering anxiety attacks and symptoms resembling psychosis. Already, young children have eaten laced sweets left within reach.

Many live in states where there has been no public education about responsible consumption of marijuana.

“Citizens in nonlegalization states are far less likely to be receiving those messages, so their risks are probably greater,” said Robert J. MacCoun, a professor of law at Stanford who recently co-wrote an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine urging stronger regulation of pot edibles.

There are no hard numbers for the amount of pot edibles being trafficked interstate, but police departments in a variety of jurisdictions without legal sales report seizing increasing amounts in the past year. The quantities suggest the products are intended to supply a growing demand, law enforcement officials say.

In February, Missouri troopers confiscated 400 pounds of commercially made marijuana chocolate, including Liquid Gold bars, hidden in boxes in an Infiniti QX60. The driver was arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance.

In New Jersey, which has medical dispensaries where pot edibles cannot be sold, the state police last month seized 80 pounds of homemade marijuana sweets from the car of a Brooklyn man. In July, the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs confiscated roughly 40 pounds of commercial marijuana products in one seizure, including taffylike Cheeba Chews and bottles of cannabis lemonade.

“There’s no doubt there’s a growing market for edible marijuana products,” said Mark Woodward, a spokesman for the Oklahoma bureau.

In states where marijuana remains illegal, some entrepreneurs have begun cooking large batches of pot edibles for sale. In February, an illegal bakery making marijuana brownies and cookies in an industrial-size oven was shut down in Warren County, Ohio.

The popularity of confections laced with marijuana has caught many health officials by surprise. Pot edibles took off in 2014, the first year of recreational sales in Colorado, when nearly five million individual items were sold to patients and adult users.

Demand in Colorado and Washington State has spawned a stunning assortment of snacks and sweets, from Mondo’s sugar-free vegan bars to Dixie Edibles’ white chocolate peppermint squares.

Today consumers 21 and older can legally buy pot edibles in those two states; soon adults in Oregon and Alaska will join them. Pot edibles are available to medical users in at least a half dozen of the 23 states with medical marijuana programs.

Edibles make sense for marijuana entrepreneurs. In the past, marijuana buds were sold, and the rest of the plant was usually discarded. But with an extraction machine, makers of edible products can use the entire plant.

“In a world where THC becomes inexpensive, you would like to differentiate your product from other people’s products in ways that allow you to maintain a higher profit margin,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a co-author of “Marijuana Legalization,” who has studied black markets for cocaine and marijuana. “Edibles offer some opportunities for that.”

Buyers may not realize that the psychoactive effects of eating marijuana, which are largely due to a chemical called tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, are much more unpredictable than smoking it. An edible can take one to three hours to produce its maximal high, while smoking takes minutes. Inexperienced consumers easily eat too much, winding up severely impaired.

Moreover, the effects of consumption can vary dramatically for each person from day to day, depending on what else is in the stomach, said Kari L. Franson, an associate professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Colorado. “Compare that to smoking — within minutes you have a maximum effect,” she said. “It’s much easier to control.”

Law enforcement officials say it is not yet clear how smugglers are laying hands on large quantities of prepackaged pot edibles. Some may obtain them from medical dispensaries. The Illinois state police charged a man in Kane County, Ill., with cannabis trafficking last year after discovering that 42 pounds of marijuana-infused chocolate had been sent to his home.

The chocolate was traced to a medical dispensary in California. Officers declined to pursue charges against the dispensary, saying its staff had done nothing wrong.

The manufacturers themselves say they receive constant requests for out-of-state shipments.

James Howler, the chief executive of Cheeba Chews, based in Denver, said his team fields emails from people nationwide — from epilepsy patients in Iowa to a retired mechanic in Florida, all of whom would rather snack on marijuana than smoke it.

“The needs and curiosity from around the country can be overwhelming,” he said. Still, Mr. Howler said, he declines them all. “It is highly illegal, and stupid to think we would risk everything,” he said.

Until last year, Sgt. Jerry King, who works for a drug task force in Alabama, had never seen pot edibles in the mail. In February, postal inspectors flagged a package, and the task force seized roughly 87 pounds of smokable marijuana and 50 packages of marijuana candies.

“It’s just now gaining in popularity,” he said of pot edibles in North Alabama. “We’ll try to stay on top of it.”

GM Heroin and Morphine From Yeast

SCIENTISTS have designed a yeast capable of turning sugar into powerful opiate drugs including morphine and, potentially, heroin — without the need to cultivate poppies.

The genetically modified yeast is similar to those used in making wine and beer but instead it can produce class A narcotics.

The researchers say the aim is to make medicinal drugs more efficiently and cheaply than farming poppies — but they acknowledge the discovery could also be used to produce drugs such as heroin via homebrew kits.

Such a discovery could potentially transform the global narcotics trade, moving production of opiates from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, currently producing most of the 440 tons of heroin consumed globally each year, to the back streets of any city.

“We show the functional expression of all known opium poppy genes leading to codeine and morphine synthesis in yeast and demonstrate for the first time that thebaine can be synthesized in S. cerevisiae [yeast],” said the researchers in a paper in PLOS, a journal.

“Thebaine and morphine are the two main opiates extracted from opium poppy latex, meaning that they are the starting precursors for the synthesis of other opioids.” The research, led by Vincent Martin of Concordia University in Canada, says the key aim was the production of benzylisoquinoline alkaloids, a family of 2,500 molecules with a range of medicinal uses including muscle relaxants, tumour suppressants and painkillers. They include opiates such as codeine and morphine — important painkillers that can also be used to make heroin. At the moment poppies are the only commercial source.

Martin and his colleagues wrote: “Efficient production of opiates using microbial platforms could reduce the cost of opiate production.”

Other scientists are also working to make opium poppies redundant.

In a separate paper, in Nature Chemical Biology, Christina Smolke and colleagues at Stanford University, California, said: “Engineered microbial synthesis of plant-derived therapeutic molecules is positioned to supplement or replace drug crop cultivation.

“We demonstrated S. cerevisiae as a host for transforming thebaine to valuable opioids including codeine and morphine.”

Smolke warns that biologists must develop “genetically encoded” safety measures to “secure yeast strains for the legitimate production of drugs with the potential for misuse”.

Is Drug-Taking A Human Right?

Drug takers have a human right to feed their habit as long as it harms no one else, MPs and peers declare in a crossparty report released today.

The right to a private and family life could be used to back decriminalising possession or the purchase of small quantities of drugs, the report says. The European Convention of Human Rights could also deployed to argue that cultivating drugs such as cannabis should no longer be a criminal offence, it adds. The claims sparked astonishment from other senior MPs and opponents of a softer approach to drug use.

The report calls for UN drug conventions to be revised, warning that without doing so they will be increasingly ignored by states, such as the US and Uruguay, that are experimenting with the legalisation of cannabis.

Members of the all-party parliamentary group for drug policy reform call in the report for an overhaul in global drug policy, adding that the “war on drugs” and “blanket prohibition” approach had failed.

The report said that human rights laws, and in particular provisions covering the right to respect for private and family life, could be used to say that those who possess or buy drugs should not be treated as criminals.

Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, expressed surprise that the committee linked human rights laws to decriminalising drugs for personal use. He said that using human rights laws in favour of decriminalisation was the wrong approach to the issue. “This is a novel approach as far as decriminalisation is concerned. One exemption, even though minor, could open the floodgates. Human rights legislation is not designed to be used in this way.”

Drinkers Subsidise The Rest

English drinkers subsidise nondrinkers by £6.5 billion a year because alcohol taxes are so lucrative, a report claims. The direct costs to the government of alcohol use in England — including NHS, police, criminal justice and welfare costs — amount to £3.9 billion each year, while alcohol taxes earn the Treasury £10.4 billion.

Christopher Snowdon, the director of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, used recent health, crime and drinking data to produce a report that suggests that contrary to popular belief, drinkers are not a burden to the taxpayer.

He claims that even if the government halved all forms of alcohol duty, it would still receive more money in tax than it spends dealing with alcohol-related problems. He said: “Drinkers are taxpayers and they pay billions of pounds more than they cost the NHS, police service and welfare system combined.”

Mr Snowden reached his conclusions by using figures from 2003 and adjusting for inflation for all expenses which are costs to the taxpayer, but not social costs. He used some more up-to-date statistics, such as A&E attendance figures from this year, where available.

New Lager Yeast

Lagers are boring. When you pop a can of lager beer, you taste the product of closely related strains of Saccharomyces pastorianus. Their genetic variety pales in comparison to the small but diverse group of yeasts used for making ale and wine, which pump out vastly different metabolic by-products and a wide range of flavors.

In fact, lagers have looked and tasted much the same for hundreds of years because breeding strains with new brewing characteristics and flavors has proved difficult; the hybrids were effectively sterile. But that is about to change.

This good news harks back to the 15th-century origins of lagers. S. pastorianus appears to have been bred after an accidental cross of two other yeasts in a cool, dark cave in Bavaria when monks began “lagering,” or storing beer.

In the 1980s scientists determined the identity of one original parent: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is the mother of all yeasts used in baking and brewing. The other remained unknown until 2011, when Diego Libkind, an Argentine microbiologist, identified Saccharomyces eubayanus in the forests of Patagonia as the missing link. Wild S. eubayanus was not well adapted for industrial brewing, but its discovery opened up the possibility of developing new yeast crosses. “Once eubayanus was discovered, things suddenly became very interesting,” says Brian Gibson, who studies brewing yeasts at the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland in Espoo.

Colorado After One Year of Legal Marijuana

A year of legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado has brought the Rocky Mountain state significant savings, reduced crime rates and tax revenue gains from the sale of the plant and its byproducts, according to a study published Tuesday by a drug policy reform group.

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) examined state statistics and found Colorado saved millions of dollars because it was no longer locking up as many people for marijuana violations. Police arrested only 1,464 people for marijuana-related offenses, compared to 9,011 in 2010 before legalization, according to the study.

"Given that arrests such as these cost roughly $300 to adjudicate, it is reasonable to infer that the state is saving millions in adjudicatory costs" for marijuana-related arrests and prosecutions, the study said.

Additionally, tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales brought in at least $40.9 million into the state’s coffers.

“We’ve had great experience in Colorado and we hope the rest of the country can learn from that,” Rep. Jared Polis, D-CO, said Tuesday during a teleconference. “I’m encouraged by the general direction.”

The Colorado law, approved by voters in a 2012 referendum, legalizes the possession, sale and cultivation of marijuana plants for adults 21 and over.

Crime rates have dipped since Colorado enacted the law, according to the report. It found a 9.5 percent drop in burglaries in Denver and an 8.9 percent decline in overall property crime in the city.

“The doomsday vision of those who support continued prohibition has not come to fruition,” said Art Way, the DPA’s Colorado director.

Way, who called marijuana a “gateway” into the criminal justice system elsewhere, said the Colorado law had made the system less unfair. Black people are up to eight times more likely to face arrest for marijuana offenses than white people, according to an ACLU study.

Andrew Freeman, director of marijuana coordination for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, said legalization had paid for itself but was not an answer to all of the state’s funding needs.

He said marijuana tax revenue had been able to pay for the costs of regulating the drug, and had funded programs intended to keep youth away from abusing substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

The report also noted that fears of a spike in traffic fatalities, voiced by the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, did not materialize. Deaths dipped a bit in the first 11 months of 2014, down to 436 from 449 the year before.

Legalize All Drugs

A group of 22 medical experts convened by Johns Hopkins University and The Lancet have called today for the decriminalization of all nonviolent drug use and possession. Citing a growing scientific consensus on the failures of the global war on drugs, the experts further encourage countries and U.S. states to "move gradually toward regulated drug markets and apply the scientific method to their assessment."

Their report comes ahead of a special UN General Assembly Session on drugs to be held next month, where the world's countries will re-evaluate the past half-century of drug policy and, in the hope of many experts, chart a more public health-centered approach going forward.

In a lengthy review of the state of global drug policy, the Hopkins-Lancet experts conclude that the prohibitionist anti-drug policies of the past 50 years "directly and indirectly contribute to lethal violence, disease, discrimination, forced displacement, injustice and the undermining of people’s right to health." They cite, among other things:

A "striking increase" in homicide in Mexico since the government decided to militarize its response to the drug trade in 2006. The increase has been so great that experts have had to revise life expectancy downward in that country;

The "excessive use" of incarceration as a drug control measure, which the experts identify as the "biggest contribution" to higher rates of HIV and Hepatitis C infection among drug users;

Stark racial disparities in drug law enforcement, particularly in the United States;

And human rights violations arising from excessively punitive drug control measures, including an increase in the torture and abuse of drug prisoners in places like Mexico.

"The goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production and trafficking of illicit drugs is the basis of many of our national drug laws, but these policies are based on ideas about drug use and drug dependence that are not scientifically grounded," said Commissioner Dr. Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in a statement.

For instance, the last time the UN held a special session on drugs, in 1998, it set itself the goal of a "drug-free world" by 2008. The Hopkins-Lancet commissioners also fault UN drug regulators for failing to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse. "The idea that all drug use is dangerous and evil has led to enforcement-heavy policies and has made it difficult to see potentially dangerous drugs in the same light as potentially dangerous foods, tobacco and alcohol, for which the goal of social policy is to reduce potential harms," they write.

The commissioners cite research showing that "of an estimated 246 million people who used an illicit drug in the past year, 27 million (around 11%) experienced problem drug use, which was defined as drug dependence or drug-use disorders."

"The idea that all drug use is necessarily 'abuse' means that immediate and complete abstinence has been seen as the only acceptable approach," commissioner Adeeba Kamarulzaman, a professor at the University of Malaya, said in a statement. But, she added, "continued criminalization of drug use fuels HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis transmission within prisons and the community at large. There is another way. Programmes and policies aimed at reducing harm should be central to future drug policies."

The commissioners point to successes in drug decriminalization experiments in places like Portugal, where drug use rates have fallen, overdose deaths are rare and new HIV infections among drug users have plummeted. They recommend that other countries adopt a similar approach.

And beyond decriminalization, the commissioners recommend experimenting with the full legalization and regulation of certain types of drug use, as several U.S. states have done with marijuana.

"Although regulated legal drug markets are not politically possible in the short term in some places, the harms of criminal markets and other consequences of prohibition catalogued in this Commission will probably lead more countries (and more U.S. states) to move gradually in that direction—a direction we endorse," they write.

Other countries, particularly in Latin America, are already looking toward U.S. marijuana legalization experiments as a blueprint for how they might move away from overly punitive drug laws. But one challenge toward adopting a less stringent drug policy has always been the massive UN drug control treaties, which are now decades-old and which experts say reflect outdated and even harmful ways of thinking about drug use.

Reformers are hoping that the upcoming General Assembly Special Session on drugs will mark a turning point in the drug war. But getting nearly 200 countries to agree on any change in direction will be a challenge. And early indications appear to be that negotiators are setting their sights low.

A draft document of the resolution to be discussed at the special session reaffirms the UN's "commitment to the goals and objectives of the three international drug control conventions" -- the same conventions criticized in the Hopkins-Lancet report. And it calls on countries to "actively promote a society free of drug abuse," echoing the language of the failed drug control goals of the 1990s.

Synthetic Wine

Welcome to the wine lab

A Californian start-up wants to bring the taste of fine vintages to the masses, by chemically mimicking classic wines – no grapes necessary.

“I saw this iconic bottle of wine that I could never afford or enjoy. It got me thinking” “WE can turn water into wine in 15 minutes.” So claims the Ava Winery, a San Francisco start-up that is making synthetic wine without grapes – simply by combining flavour compounds, water and ethanol.

Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee came up with the idea while visiting a winery in California’s Napa Valley in 2015. There, they were shown the bottle of an iconic wine, Chateau Montelena, which is famous for being the first Californian Chardonnay to beat French contenders at the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976. “I was transfixed by this bottle displayed on the wall,” says Chua. “I could never afford a bottle like this, I could never enjoy it. That got me thinking.” Traditionally, wine is made by fermenting grapes – yeast turns sugars in the grape juice into ethanol. The process also develops many hundreds of flavour compounds, but takes time and produces variable results. Could there be a simpler way? Within days, Chua began combining ethanol with fruity flavour compounds like ethyl hexanoate, which has a pineapple-like aroma. The initial concoction was monstrous, he says.

But six months later, Chua and Lee think they have produced an experimental synthetic wine that mimics the taste of the sparkling Italian white wine Moscato d’Asti. They are now turning their hands to producing an imitation Dom Pérignon champagne.

The race is on to develop synthetic food and drink. The first in vitro beefburger – grown from meat cells cultured in laboratories – was eaten in London in 2013, but it cost $325,000 to make. In vitro meat isn’t the only attempt to make ethical alternatives to our favourite foods. Hampton Creek, a food firm in California, is attempting to develop vegan eggs, made by mixing plant proteins.

We’ve been making synthetic lemonade for decades, and now a start-up in New York is turning its hand to luxury coffee. Highly prized kopi luwak is made from coffee beans found in the excrement of the Asian palm civet – Afineur is hoping it can copy the taste by fermenting carefully selected microbes instead.

But the Ava Winery is aiming to make artificial wines simply by mixing the right compounds together. For all the world’s love of wine, our understanding of which components are most important for the taste and finish of a wine is patchy at best. A bottle usually contains around 1000 different compounds, so identifying those that are fundamental for flavour is a significant challenge.

The team decided to combine chemistry with the expert taste buds of a qualified sommelier. Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and other tools, the team analysed the composition of wines including Chardonnay, champagne and Pinot Noir, identifying key flavour molecules – like the esters ethyl isobutyrate and ethyl hexanoate – and their concentrations (see “What’s in synthetic wine?”, left). They then mixed these molecules and tinkered with the proportions, and had their sommelier test the resulting concoctions.

$50 Dom Pérignon

Tony Milanowski, a winemaking expert at Plumpton College in East Sussex, UK, has his doubts. Some flavour compounds like fatty acids and esters may be difficult to dissolve straight into a synthetic batch. These are usually produced as microbes ferment the grapes, gradually releasing the chemicals in forms that are able to mix with the other compounds present.

But Chua and Lee are not deterred. “The big secret here is that most compounds in wine have no perceptible impact on the flavour or the aroma,” says Lee. “It’s absolutely going to be substantially cheaper,” Lee says of their method, which cuts out the need to grow grapes and then ferment them over long periods.

They plan to sell an initial batch of 499 bottles of their Dom Pérignon mimic. At $50 a pop, they will begin shipping this summer to customers keen to experience the taste of a classic champagne that could otherwise cost upwards of several hundred dollars. But the team is likely to meet with stiff resistance from classical winemakers and researchers.

“It’s nonsense, to be honest with you,” says Alain Deloire, director of the National Wine and Grape Industry Centre at Charles Sturt University, Australia, who has worked for champagne specialists Moët & Chandon. Deloire argues that the natural origins of wine – the landscape and culture where the grapes grow, for example – have an indispensable impact on the drink that is produced, and consumers look for this in what they buy.

One thing that might put consumers off is that any synthetic wine is unlikely to have the word “wine” on its label. There are strict rules governing which products may use this term – in the EU, for example, it must apply only to the fermented juice of grapes, whereas in other jurisdictions like the US other fruits can be used.

But although losing some of the trappings of traditional wine may make synthetic ones less attractive, French winemaker Julien Miquel can foresee an interest in trying recreations of classic vintages. “There would be some curiosity on how close they could get,” he says.

Phylloxera and Unexpected Consequences of Wine Shortages

THERE was no rot… but suddenly under the magnifying lens of the instrument appeared an insect, a plant louse of yellowish colour, tight on the wood, sucking the sap… it is not one, it is not ten, but hundreds, thousands… They are everywhere…”

In 1868, botanist Jules-Émile Planchon unmasked the culprit behind a national crisis. For five years, a blight had been stealing across France’s vineyards. Its cause was invisible, its spread inexorable. Always it followed the same pattern. First a single vine would wither, then a circle of plants. Entire vineyards were wiped out within years.

Panic grew and blame flew. Vineyards were watered with white wine and pruning cuts sealed with hot wax to halt the blight’s advance. One supposed cure involved burying live toads under the vines to draw out the mysterious poison.

Even Planchon’s revelation couldn’t halt the blight. Before it was finally stalled in the 1890s, it had laid waste to an estimated 40 per cent of French vineyards, and changed the face of European viticulture for ever.

With the vines, scores of rural communes also saw their livelihoods wither. And that’s where the story of the Great French Wine Blight has now earned a second telling. Its gradual spread and devastating effects illuminate the complex relationships between wine, poverty and crime.

The cause of the blight was the tiny aphid-like bug Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, often known as phylloxera. Its arrival in France was the bitter fruit of technological progress. It travelled across the Atlantic on vines imported from its native home in the Americas. Before the advent of steamships, the voyage was too long, and the insect would have died en route.

The bugs must have made landfall somewhere on France’s southern coast; the first documented case of blight occurred in the commune of Pujaut, near Avignon in the Rhone valley, in 1863. Once they arrived in a vineyard, the bugs would head underground, where they would literally suck the life out of the vines. They depleted the roots’ sap while secreting a fluid that stopped the plant healing, leaving the vines vulnerable to fungal and bacterial infections. Beyond the reach of pesticides and with no native predators below ground, the females reproduced asexually with abandon, each one laying up to 100 clone eggs in a month. With four or more generations annually, one bug could produce more than a billion descendants in one year.

The nature of the blight explains its peculiarly destructive course, but also its gradual geographical spread. Rather than ripping across France within weeks as a virus might, D. vitifoliae moved slowly, perhaps transferred from vineyard to vineyard on the mud of itinerant workers’ shoes, speculates Vincent Bignon, an economic historian at the Bank of France.

In the late 19th century, agriculture accounted for about 30 per cent of France’s economic output. Wine was the nation’s second most important product after wheat. Estimates have put the total income shock from the blight as high as 15 billion francs, which equates to 75 per cent of one year’s economic output at the time.

Those it hit had few other sources of income, either. “This event affected people who were already at the margin of the economy,” says Roberto Galbiati, who researches economics and the law at Sciences Po in Paris. “Peasants and workers on the vines. People who didn’t have any other support.”

That led Bignon and Galbiati, together with labour market expert Eve Caroli of Paris Dauphine University, to wonder what insight the blight might give into the social effects of economic dislocation. Standard economic models suggest that people choose between legal and criminal economic activities on their relative costs and benefits. When the income of low-skilled workers with poor job mobility falls, crime rates often rise, because it can be difficult to get a job that pays enough. “When you are poor, you have an incentive to steal because you have to eat,” says Bignon.

“While property crime ballooned during the Great French Wine Blight, violent crime slumped”

But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult.

The slow spread of the blight provided a natural experiment to test these interplays, thanks to information contained in archived yearbooks from the French Ministry of Justice that set out annual crime records from all French departments throughout the period. “Some areas were hit, some weren’t,” says Bignon. “This allows you to compare lots and lots of groups. The control groups are the areas with no disease.”

As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise couldn’t be explained by other factors such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration.

But there was a twist. While property crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average.

This doesn’t surprise Christian Traxler, an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a decreased supply of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says.

Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and Wales today, for instance, alcohol consumption is thought to contribute to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon.

“The idea of replacing the vines with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed”

It took a long time for the underlying cause of this economic dislocation to be overcome, even after Planchon had unmasked the malefactor, and it came at a significant price to French exceptionalism. American varieties of vine had always existed alongside phylloxera, and were able to survive the blight. The idea of replacing European vines, which include varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed. Instead, vine growers tried cross-breeding two varieties or grafting the stems of European vines onto the resistant roots of American plants to get the best of New and Old Worlds. That seemed to do the trick, producing excellent grapes on bug-resistant plants, finally halting the blight in the 1890s.

Some vineyards with pure European vines still exist in France, Spain and elsewhere. That’s mostly luck, says Alberto Acedo of Biome Makers, a biotech firm in San Francisco that develops sustainable methods to treat grapevine microbial diseases. These ancient vines, often producing feted and expensive wines, tend to grow in sandy soils, through which the phylloxera bug can’t disperse so easily, he says.

Phylloxera eventually overcomes cross-bred resistance. Most recently in California in the 1980s and 1990s, the bugs caused more than $1 billion of damage to cross-bred vines. Now most vines are grafted, transatlantic mergers that reduce the risk of an epidemic.

At least the world is better prepared now. Harvests are more integrated, so a shortage in one place can be compensated by imports from another. Welfare systems and increased access to credit also help to cushion the blows of economic dislocation. But the story of the Great Blight has eerie pre-echoes of the recent credit crunch, says Bignon. Through the blight’s ravages, thousands of local companies, including banks, went bust and the credit system partly collapsed, preventing farmers from borrowing. In a paper Bignon co-wrote for the European Central Bank earlier this year, he shows a parallel with the recent bank bailouts: when French companies had access to a nearby branch of the central bank, which would take on their debt, it helped smooth troubles locally.

Rural France may now have recovered from the effects of the blight, but it took a long time. Property crime levels remained high in wine-dependent regions for decades, and the blight lives on in the collective memory, in tales of families uprooted and livelihoods ruined. “There are many family stories of upheaval a few generations ago,” says Bignon. For good and ill, though, the wine returned.

Simple Solutions Fail

IN THE FRONT of the SUV, a man in a black T-shirt is unconscious, or nearly so, and slumped over the steering wheel. Next to him on the passenger side, a woman’s bra strap slides off her thin shoulder as her head lolls. In the back, a 4-year-old is strapped into his car seat, looking oddly placid. The image, published by a local Ohio police department in 2016, is the most striking of the steady drip of such photos and videos, disseminated by well-meaning authorities with the goal of scaring the pants off of Americans and discouraging abuse of heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids.

The opioid crisis—the sharp uptick in opioid-related deaths in recent years—provides endless human fodder for local newscasts. Newspapers and magazines publish story after story about the costs of addiction to families and communities. All of this creates a powerful feeling, even among those generally immune to drug panics, that this time things are different.

A narrative has formed: Many of the people whose lives have been ruined or ended by their drug use were perfectly ordinary until they got a prescription for pain pills. The first bottle might have been legit, offered by a doctor after a wisdom tooth extraction or a broken ankle. But lurking in each pill is a bottomless chasm of physical, financial, and social ruin.

In the face of very real suffering and dysfunction, it is a deeply human response to want to use whatever resources we have at our disposal to end the crisis. But there is another deeply human response as well: the desire for a simple solution.

Luckily, according to the dominant narrative, the solution is simple. Take away the drugs and punish the people who sell them. Ta-da! Depending on your particular blend of prior ideological commitments, the drugs you are most anxious to take away will be the pain pills or the street dope; the sellers to punish first will be Big Pharma or Mexican heroin cartels.

But as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains in his cover story (page 18), this powerful, compelling narrative is dangerously wrong. What started as a war on pain meds hasn’t come close to reducing drug- related deaths. Instead, the crackdown has escalated the problem, killing addicts and leaving patients in agony.

During the last election cycle, both campaigns treated this isssue as a dire crisis that demands decisive and immediate action. When Donald Trump won, he said he’d make the opioid epidemic a priority.

“My take,” President Trump declared in February, “is you have to get really, really tough, really mean with the drug pushers and the drug dealers. We can do all the blue ribbon committees we want [but] we have to get a lot tougher than we are.”

His disdain is confusing, since he created just such a committee less than a year ago—the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis—and staffed it with key members of his campaign inner circle, including Kellyanne Conway and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. That commission has mostly urged more drug enforcement and doubled down on the idea that a border wall will keep out illegal substances.

It’s not at all obvious that the best way to respond to the surge in drug fatalities is harsher interdiction or stricter regulation of prescriptions—so far those policies have driven the number of deaths up, not down. But when you’re holding a massive law enforcement hammer, everything looks like a nail.

THE OPIOID CRISIS is far from the first time seemingly simple solutions have created a new nest of complicated problems.

Go back exactly 200 years, and you’ll find that our unfortunate biomedical conservatism springs from an erroneous reaction to a scary story. As Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey explains (page 56), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was misinterpreted from its very beginnings as a call to put the brakes on scientific progress. Worried about runaway experimentation? Take away new tech and punish the people who sell it.

Cody Wilson’s Defense Distributed, a company that disseminates information allowing civilians to make their own unregistered firearms, is a direct response to the calls for gun control that follow every high-profile shooting (page 56). In moments of crisis, Wilson doesn’t trust politicians to hold strong against the simple solution, even when that solution is forbidden by our founding documents. Worried about violence? Take away the guns and punish the people who sell them.

Unemployment, lack of civic engagement, insufficient income mobility, and gender inequality are incredibly complex socio-political issues with deep historical roots and multiple causes. But oddly enough, they all apparently have the same simple fix: More college for everybody!

The biggest reason for the appeal of higher education is also the main reason to be skeptical that it is an appropriate answer to all those social ills. As with drug prohibition, it is a solution that has been tried already, at significant expense and trouble. The result has been dramatically inflated prices and unsustainable levels of educational debt. And as economist and provocateur Bryan Caplan describes (page 40), all those social costs have come without the promised social gains. The policies meant to solve deep systemic problems instead created new problems, including the rage that powered the Occupy Wall Street movement.

THERE ARE REAL solutions to the opioid crisis, many of them driven by new and better technologies for dealing with drug dependence and its side effects. Suboxone, a medication that reduces cravings and makes highs less appealing, has gained some ground, though it faces opposition in a rehab culture that seeks to penalize and moralize. Needle exchanges reduce overall risk and help users stay healthy. And Narcan, which can revive opioid poisoning victims, has seen more widespread adoption both by first responders and by the families of people at risk.

This laundry list of smarter responses to the crisis—elaborated upon in Sullum’s feature—doesn’t satisfy the craving for big blue-ribbon solutions. Piecemeal fixes do not offer the rush of satisfaction a silver bullet provides. They are the sort of remedy a thoughtful working group might recommend and a crusading politician will almost certainly ignore.

Our best hope is that commercial and cultural change will overcome the tendency to force top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions onto complicated, multifaceted problems. Taking away all the drugs and locking up the people who sell them won’t rescue that kid from his car seat—any more than taking away the guns will end violence or shoving everyone into college will eliminate inequality. Instead, the simple solution makes it more likely that he’ll grow up without parents at all.

ARI WALKER HAD been working in the wine business for a few months when the dreams started. He didn’t know much about wine; he’d left college and taken a job at a distributor because his wife was pregnant and they needed money. But the more he tasted and read, the more entranced he became. Soon she was shaking him in his sleep, telling him he was mumbling about food pairings. “You mentioned Nebbiolo,” she’d say, referencing an Italian grape variety. “And blood sausage.”

In 2001, after a few more jobs in the industry, Walker started an import and distribution company with a partner: Kevin Hicks, an entrepreneur who’d made a fortune with an online rating system for doctors and hospitals. By the time we met, at a wine event in Boulder a few years later, he had amassed an impressive portfolio and was living an enviable lifestyle. But his business was going broke.

Walker was spending much of his time tracking down unusual wines from viticultural regions around Italy. They had singular flavors and compelling stories. But the vast majority of American wine drinkers, he’d come to understand, have little interest in those stories. They want wine that tastes good and doesn’t cost much. So Walker and Hicks created a cheap brand that could be sold at volume to subsidize the imports, but that didn’t work, either. There were too many in the market already, all trying to solve the same problem with a mediocre product. “The question we tried to answer was, how do we make these generic wines better?” Walker says. “We looked at all sorts of stuff but had a hard time moving the needle.”

Integrated Beverage Group cofounder Ari Walker realized that the vast majority of American wine drinkers want wine that tastes good and doesn’t cost much.

The breakthrough started with baby food. In 2012, Hicks was about to become a father. He started wondering what, exactly, was in the organic, premium-priced products that he and his wife were planning to feed their newborn, so he sent samples off for laboratory analysis. “If you know Kevin,” Walker says, “you understand that that’s just totally something he would do.” When the bills—as much as $1,500 for a single sample—started to add up, Hicks created a lab of his own, which he dubbed Ellipse Analytics. He had a bigger plan. He invested several million dollars in equipment and hired a team of scientists and technicians and before long, Ellipse had enticed paying clients to commission chemical breakdowns of entire consumer categories, like protein powders and sunscreens. Walker saw the potential for wine, and he pushed Hicks to use his technology for their own business.

Integrated Beverage Group uses cheap surplus wines and blends in natural additives to make convincing copies of popular premium wines.

Like anything else, wine is a combination of chemicals. Ellipse can test for some 500 different attributes and measure the results at the parts-per-billion level. Hidden in that data, Walker realized, were the precise combinations of esters and acids and proteins and anthocyanins and other polyphenols that make a wine taste creamy or flinty, or give it aromas of blueberries or vanilla or old leather—the chemical compositions of America’s most popular wines. Walker also knew that most wine gets a boost from additives such as Mega Purple (for color), oak extract (for tannins and flavoring), and similar chemistry-set concoctions. Using cheap surplus wines readily available on the bulk market and blending in natural additives, he thought, it might be possible to make some pretty convincing copies of popular premium wines.

Techs at Integrated Beverage Group use chemical analysis to determine the precise combinations of esters and acids and proteins and anthocyanins and other polyphenols that make a wine taste creamy or flinty MORGAN RACHEL LEVY In 2015, Walker and Hicks started Integrated Beverage Group and set out to duplicate wines that they knew Americans already liked. They planned to do this in plain sight, naming their brand Replica and urging consumers to compare their products with well-known names that usually cost as much as double the price. It didn’t take long before they realized that, in most cases, even professional critics couldn’t distinguish their facsimiles from the originals.

IN A GRAY concrete building, part of a grim-looking industrial complex north of downtown Denver, four glasses of wine are lined up at each place around a conference table. It’s a Tuesday afternoon at the IBG offices. Walker sits across from me, wearing a trim beard and a sweater over a button-down shirt. Next to him is a scruffy man in his thirties who has the chemical structure of dopamine tattooed on his left arm. That’s Sean Callan, a PhD chemist who runs the Ellipse Lab.

Brett Zimmerman, one of fewer than 250 certified Master Sommeliers in the world, is at one end of the table to my right, typing notes into a laptop. To my left is IBG’s winemaker, Everett, who has just arrived from California. I’m calling him Everett and not his real name because he also works as an enologist for a large American wine producer, precisely the kind of industry giant that IBG is looking to undercut. “If they found out I was doing this,” he tells me, “it wouldn’t turn out well.”

Two years after IBG was started, Replica wines are sold in 49 states (everywhere but Iowa), in major retailers such as Publix in the south and Winco in the west. Because of the substantial investments needed to build the lab and start the brand, the company isn’t yet profitable. But by other metrics, its concept has been a remarkable success. Sitting in the conference room, I watch the process unfold.

The sample to the far left at everyone’s place is the one the IBG team is trying to match, a 2015 Far Niente Chardonnay. A highly respected name in California wine, Far Niente makes Chardonnays that sell for $60 in retail shops and $100 on wine lists. The wines have a singular style that places them somewhere between the robustness of most Napa Chardonnays and the nuanced flavors of white Burgundy. A West Coast retail chain has placed an order with IBG for a proprietary Napa Chardonnay with attributes that track Far Niente’s. The deadline to ship the wines, I’m surprised to learn, is only two weeks away. Yet the IBG team is still in the preliminary stages of tasting and blending. “We’ll get it done,” Walker assures me. He has already named the wine Per Sempre. That’s “forever” in Italian. More important, it sounds like Far Niente.

The previous week at his office in Sonoma, Everett had tasted through more than 70 lots of Chardonnay that are on offer from a Napa-based wine broker for purchase in varying volumes— some only a few hundred gallons, others several thousand. He chose two that seemed as though they might be a fit in a potential blend. One was from a boutique vintner in St. Helena. The other came from a massive producer, one of America’s most famous, that grows grapes all over California and makes millions of bottles of wine each year for its numerous brands. He bought as much of the first wine as he could, and about the same amount of the second wine.

Glasses of the two of them also sit before each of us now, beside the benchmark Far Niente. To the far right in the lineup is a preliminary blend of the two potential components in roughly equal proportions. To help the team understand where it should be aiming, a graph projected on a screen identifies more than a dozen aromatic attributes present in most California Chardonnays, and to what degree the half-dozen or so most popular brands contain each of them. The data is culled from an Ellipse analysis, and the results from the various brands match almost exactly.

What consumers want in the category, it turns out, is remarkably consistent. In several areas, though, Far Niente is an outlier: most notably in the presence of citrus and the absence of butter and coconut. The Far Niente also has a far higher level than the other wines of malic acid, which is found in lime juice, and there’s a reason for that. Unlike both lots of the purchased wines (and the vast majority of Napa Chardonnays), it hasn’t undergone the secondary fermentation that transforms malic acid into lactic acid and changes the taste of green apple into cream or butter. I don’t get how Everett will be able to combine two wines that have undergone malolactic fermentation into one that tastes like it hasn’t, but he’s not concerned. “We can add back malic acid in the blending,” he says.

The coconut is harder. All three wines have been fermented in barrels rather than steel tanks. But different kinds of oak have different characteristics. “The Far Niente shows clove and raw wood,” Everett says, “rather than the caramel, vanilla, and coconut I’m getting from the others.” Back home, Everett has a table covered with vials of wood flavoring that he might be able to use to nudge the profile of the wine closer to Far Niente’s by literally blending it into the wine. “But barrel fermented wines are hard,” Zimmerman points out. “That’s probably the hardest thing we do.”

With certain red wines, which are easier to replicate than whites, IBG has come within a few percentage points of matching the components at a parts-per-billion level. That includes a whole lot of attributes that a wine drinker will never detect. What’s more crucial is nailing the handful of attributes that define the wine for the casual drinker, those points of difference that deviate from the norm. It’s like Alec Baldwin playing Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. When you see him on the screen, scowling and doing that little turn of his wrist, you’re not fooled into thinking that’s really Trump. It obviously isn’t. But it’s equally obvious whom he’s imitating.

Walker and the IBG team try to do the same with wine. If they can hit the most blatant elements of a popular bottling using inexpensive bulk wine and a bunch of additives, they’ll be in business. Some perceive this as undermining those ineffable elements that make wine different from, say, toothpaste. In a full-page feature, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, a newspaper based in Sonoma County that is perceived as the voice of the California wine industry, characterized Replica’s products as “Frankenstein wines.” “While Replica wine doesn’t begin in a petri dish,” it said, “it is created, to a large degree, in a lab.” This doesn’t trouble Walker. “You could say it’s weird,” Walker says of IBG’s process. “Or you could say it’s our point of difference.”

The boutique Chardonnay matches many of the attributes of Far Niente. But adding too much of the other wine to it, all agree, pulls the blend in the wrong direction. We try a blend of three-quarters boutique and one-quarter mass producer, then one closer to 85 percent boutique. The result still doesn’t seem right. Eventually, Zimmerman, who has the best palate of the group, argues for not including any of the wine from the major producer. “Even in the small amount, it takes away the zippy tone that we’re getting from the Far Niente,” he says. That “zippy tone,” a palpable sense of energy coursing through the wine, is one of the most recognizable attributes of the Far Niente. If you’re imitating Trump, that’s the jut of his lower lip. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a match.

Everett admits that no combination of the wines matches the Far Niente better than the boutique wine by itself. But there just isn’t enough of it to make the number of bottles that the retailer has ordered. They need to blend that with something that’s less ideal, but not so much of it that it moves the wine noticeably away from the benchmark. “So the question becomes,” he says, “how much can you feather it up before you have a deal-breaker?”

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Callan walks me through the Ellipse facility, which consists of a single room in the same concrete building, down the hall from Walker’s office. As labs go, it isn’t a particularly large one. Along one wall, a woman in a ski hat is prepping samples of dietary supplements for one of Ellipse’s clients. In a storage nook off the main room, I spot a cart loaded with bottles of wine. “Those are California Pinot Noirs,” Callan says. “We’re doing that next.”

Over the past four years, Ellipse has analyzed thousands of wines, a formidable chunk of the American marketplace. More than anyone else, it is safe to say, the IBG team can scientifically define what the most popular wines taste like. “Only we, uniquely, have this data to say, ‘If you like Goldeneye, we know exactly why you like Goldeneye,’” Walker says about a California Pinot Noir that IBG will soon be trying to replicate. “And we know what else you’re likely to like. And what you won’t.”

IBG can’t replicate every wine. Those with singular attributes, like wines made from grapes grown in a specific vineyard or from a hard-to-find variety, are far more difficult, bordering on impossible, for the simple reason that all of IBG’s wines start with those surplus lots being sold on the bulk market. When I ask Zimmerman if they could replicate a small-batch Shiraz from a producer in Australia’s Adelaide Hills that is a particular favorite of mine, he rolls his eyes and says there’s no way.

But the world’s most popular wines—from Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay to Dom Perignon—are made hundreds of thousands of bottles at a time, enough volume that their grapes are sourced from a range of vineyards. “The reason K-J is so successful,” Hicks says about Kendall-Jackson, “is that it tastes consistent, year after year, bottling after bottling. You know what you’re going to get, like Coca-Cola or Campbell’s soup.” If Kendall-Jackson is using what seems like a fairly exact recipe to make each vintage of its wines, Hicks figures, there’s no reason that IBG, with its reams of scientific data, can’t match it.

Two weeks later, I get on a plane to California and visit Everett at the office he uses in downtown Healdsburg, in Sonoma County. The building happens to be an old winery where some of the earliest California Zinfandels were made in the late 1800s. Everett is still making wine there, in a sense, doing things like adding malic acid to the Per Sempre blend to simulate the energy of the original. He then overnights the results back to Colorado for Zimmerman to taste and Ellipse to analyze. That back-and-forth gets them closer and closer to their target. When I arrive, he pulls out a bottle of the finished Per Sempre, which is labeled and ready to be sold, and pours each of us a glass. “It’s much more Far Niente-ish, don’t you think?” he says. “See how the addition of the malic brought back a little of the flintiness?”

I do. Back at IBG, I’d submitted to a blind comparison test involving another of their wines, called Label Envy, which is meant to replicate La Crema Pinot Noir. Callan had poured two glasses of one wine and one glass of another and asked me to identify which two were similar. I thought I knew, but I was wrong. They’d hit their target precisely. The simulacrum Everett handed me seemed maybe a little clunkier, a little less graceful, than the actual Far Niente I had in Denver. But it definitely was closer. And without a glass of the original in front of me for comparison, or perhaps even with one, I could easily be convinced that it was the same wine.

If you’re an average drinker, you aren’t interested in parsing the flavors in your Napa Chardonnay or constructing a critical analysis. You just want to sip a glass of something nice with roast chicken. For that, the Per Sempre might serve the purpose just as well as the Far Niente. The packaging looks handsome enough that you wouldn’t hesitate to bring it to a dinner party, and it would cost $25 as opposed to the $50 you’d pay for the Far Niente “I’d drink it,” Everett pronounces.

After tasting the wine, we drive toward Everett’s house on the outskirts of Healdsburg. We cross a small bridge, then continue down a gentle hill. We rumble down a country lane, past small vineyards where the buds are just starting to break. Being here, you can’t help but feel the attraction of the tales people tell about wine, including how they explain the attributes in each bottle that make it a topic for contemplation and not just consumption.

That freshness? It’s from the difference in temperature between the warm nights and cool days in this particular valley. That resistance in the mouth, the little push-and-pull that can taste like a tea bag left too long in hot water but provides a framework to help offset the plush fruit? That comes from the ocean wind that toughens the skin of these grapes. “When you get out in the country, there’s a certain amount of romance,” Everett says. He’s quiet for a moment. “But there is also a chemical and scientific aspect to this, too,” he continues. “It’s the juxtaposition of those things that’s attractive to me.”

If you’re an average drinker, you aren’t interested in investigating the flavors in your rosé. You just want to sip a glass of something nice with roast chicken.

We step inside a cottage beside his house, which is where he does much of the tasting and blending for Replica. A table off the kitchen is covered with small bottles, samples of bulk lots of Pinot Noir available for purchase that will be used to help match Goldeneye. In the work he does for his day job, Everett starts with grapes as his raw material. He oversees the fermentation process, which lets him make decisions that will go a long way toward determining how a finished wine tastes. But he’s also at the mercy of what his employer’s vineyard holdings have given him. When he starts with wine that already has been made, he gets to taste dozens of possibilities from sites all over Napa, Sonoma, and beyond. And then he works with only those that he chooses.

“This is someone’s reject wine,” he says, pouring out a Pinot Noir sample for me to taste. “But why was it rejected? Was it great wine that just didn’t match stylistically with what they were trying to do? Was it second-best to the other lots that they had? Did they just have too much of it? And at the end of the day, does it matter? Not to me.” He holds the glass against a piece of white paper to get a better look at the color of the wine. He takes a sip. “Now, maybe this one is just a little too tart for whoever made it,” he admits. “That’s why they sold it off. But we can fix that, too.”

BEFORE LEAVING CALIFORNIA, I stop at Far Niente. I’ve visited before, and I never get tired of it. The setting is delightful, an 1885 winery building surrounded by gingko trees and plum blossoms. The late Gil Nickel, who renovated the disused winery and created Far Niente in the 1970s, started in Oklahoma as a horticulturist. He wanted to make Far Niente the gem of Napa Valley, as beautiful as any winery in the world.

That landscaping needs to be maintained, of course. So does the collection of classic sports cars in an adjacent barn. Far Niente employs several winemakers, and also a team of gardeners, and chefs who prepare the lunches it serves to wine club members in a clearing overlooking the vineyards. When you buy a bottle of Far Niente, you’re paying for the whole package: the wine itself, its reputation, and the enticing site that makes the narrative possible.

Yet, in a sense, the wines made at Far Niente are no more authentic than Replica’s. Even the finest wines exist as the sum of hundreds of decisions in the vineyard and the winery, each designed to help steer the wine—or manipulate it, if you want to use that word—in a desired direction. I have no idea whether Far Niente’s enologists typically acidify their wines to freshen them in warm vintages or add tannins to help balance soft fruit flavors, but plenty of wineries do—such additions are perfectly legal. It’s also within the rules in California to blend in as much as 15 percent of wine from a different vintage than the one on the label, and different grape varieties, and even grapes from somewhere else entirely.

And that doesn’t even get into other standard practices of winemaking, such as jump-starting fermentation with commercial yeasts and reducing alcohol levels by sending the wine through a contraption called a spinning cone column. None of these figure in the romantic narrative of letting nature make the wine. But if they make the wine we’re drinking tonight taste better, few of us would argue against them.

When I enter the old stone Far Niente winery, I’m offered a glass of Chardonnay off a silver tray. It’s the 2016, not the 2015 that Per Sempre is modeled on, but that same energy is on full display. I carry the glass out to a balcony off the main building and stand in the afternoon sunshine. The wine is delicious. There are vines below and olive trees and a view of Oakville and the hills beyond. I take a moment to notice that particular green-apple taste and the hint of cinnamon aroma that comes from the particular barrels used to ferment and age the wine. Did the Per Sempre I tasted with Everett have that too? Perhaps it did. The truth is, I can’t remember.

WILLIAMS & HUMBERT, THE CATHEDRAL-ESQUE sherry bodega located in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, brims with sepia-toned bullfighting posters, creaky Castilian furniture, and cobwebbed oak barrels. Sometimes, it even hosts Andalusian horse dancing set to the strums of flamenco guitar. But venture just beyond its stately main hall, and you could be in the Scottish Highlands: There, barrels branded with “The Macallan” stretch as far as the eye can see.

To most people who visit the Sherry Triangle—the wine region of southwest Spain bounded by Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and Puerto de Santamaría—such a sight can be disorienting. But for centuries, the scotch and sherry industries have had a deep-rooted symbiosis that has kept both afloat through the ages, despite consumer taste varying wildly.

This relationship has its roots in 1587, when English privateer Sir Francis Drake paraded into Britain with 2,900 casks of sherry. They* were the spoils of his assault on the city of Cádiz, known as “Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard.” The kidnapped wine was a sensation among the elite and sparked a sherry craze in Britain—and by affiliation, Scotland—that lasted centuries. Shakespeare, an avid sherry drinker, mentioned it at least 40 times in his works, and famously writes in Henry IV that a good sherry “makes the brain sharp, quick, and inventive; full of nimble, fiery, and beautiful ideas. The voice and tongue give birth to those ideas which, when they grow up, become excellent wit.”

Over time, this unslakable thirst for sherry left a surplus of empty barrels rolling around the British Isles. So it was only a matter of time before the Scots started storing their local moonshine, a clear distillate called uisge beatha (“water of life”), inside them. “Around 1800, distillers in Scotland realized that putting this clear spirit in a barrel not only made financial sense, but also made the liquid look and taste better,” says Mark Gillespie, founder of the WhiskyCast podcast.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this development. Stuart MacPherson, Master of Wood at The Macallan, calls wood the “singular most important factor in creating a whisky’s character, since up to 80 percent of its final flavor comes from the cask.” (As evidenced by his title, MacPherson’s work involves sourcing timber from forests on two continents, overseeing barrel production in Spain, and transporting the seasoned casks to Scotland.)

That, along with the 1831 invention of the column still (which allowed for continuous distillation), paired with a newfound demand from France in the 1880s (due to a phylloxera outbreak that had devastated French brandy production), cemented scotch whisky’s place in the European market. By 1900, the scotch industry was booming. Across Scotland, warehouses were stacked floor to ceiling, all of them with sherry barrels filled with whisky.

Apart from a hiccup in production during World War II, scotch continued to see rising popularity, especially in the United States following Prohibition. But by the 1950s and ‘60s, a period many consider to be the “Golden Age” of scotch, the industry was changing. Newly-enacted “Standards of Identity” laws in the U.S. mandated that all bourbon be aged in new oak, which created a sudden glut of American oak barrels that scotch whisky houses could buy up at a fraction of the price of sherry barrels. “Whatever was cheapest, that’s what the distilleries purchased,” says Gillespie.

The nail in the coffin for the sherry cask came in 1981, when the Spanish government began requiring that all sherry be bottled in Spain prior to export. Any sherry casks that were sold to whisky makers in Scotland had to be shipped dry, which made the wood more prone to taint and cracking. Worse, sherry was already in dire straits back in Spain: Downward-spiraling prices, a sector-wide drop in quality, and evolving consumer tastes meant people weren’t buying sherry like they used to. Hardly anybody—neither bodegas (wine cellars) nor the whisky makers—was investing in new sherry casks, and Jerez’s cooperages came to a virtual standstill.

The gradual switch from sherry to bourbon barrels would have profound, lasting effects on the profile of scotch. “The signature flavors in a sherry cask-matured scotch are golden raisins, prunes, incense, and clove, while American oak tends to impart vanilla, coconut, sweet spice, and caramel,” says Dave Broom, spirits writer and author of The World Atlas of Whisky. “They’re completely different styles.”

Many whisky makers embraced the trend. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as spirits such as vodka and white rum became more and more fashionable (especially in the U.S.), the scotch industry was keen to experiment with lighter styles. American oak-matured whisky fit that bill. “Because scotch is driven by blends, blenders were able to slowly and subtly shift the profile of their spirit to suit this new palate,” Broom says. Most scotch drinkers didn’t even notice.

Yet in the sea change away from old sherry barrels, a few manufacturers dug in their heels—in sometimes questionable ways—to preserve scotch’s time-honored sherry flavor. For instance, from the 1960s through the 1980s, there was widespread use of a syrupy, boiled-down sherry product known as paxarette. “In those days, if you had an old, tired cask, you’d slop in some pax, roll it around, and it’d taste like sherry again,” says Broom, adding that the substance was outlawed in scotch production in 1989.

Shrewd distilleries such as The Macallan foresaw sherry’s demise and started dabbling in the art of vertical integration. If the bodegas could no longer provide quality casks, then it was time to do direct business with the cooperages and bodegas in Jerez. As early as the 1950s, The Macallan began snapping up new barrels and paying wineries in the area to “season” them with sherry before shipping them (empty, of course) to Scotland.

It paid off: Today, the scale of The Macallan’s operation is almost unfathomable. “There are four cooperages in Jerez, and we work with three of them,” says MacPherson. “Eighty-five percent of their barrels go to Edrington,” Macallan’s parent company, “and most of those go to The Macallan.” Around 70,000 new sherry-filled casks bearing The Macallan’s logo are marinating in Jerez as we speak. (The coopering exhibit at The Macallan’s new $189 million visitor center sheds light on this little-known process.)

Jerez’s bodegas and cooperages are bustling again, thanks, in large part, to heavy investments by the scotch industry. Williams & Humbert, one of The Macallan’s partner bodegas, has seen an uptick in sales after years of decline, and they have the capital to experiment with new products again. Their organic fino, released in July, is a first in the industry. “Sherry is back in style,” says Rafael Medina Martínez, director of operations.

In the same vein, Lustau broadened its repertoire in 2017 to include a new sherry-based vermouth, and some Tío Pepe bottles just got a pop-art makeover inspired by Andy Warhol. These developments hint that the centuries-old sherry houses are nimble enough to capitalize on the worldwide sherry craze.

According to the Regulatory Council of Sherry Wines, offbeat sherry types such as amontillado, oloroso, and palo cortado saw a seven percent increase in sales in 2017, while premium sherries saw a two percent increase. (Considering that the sherry market was in virtual freefall until recently, these seemingly minor gains are significant).

Nearly a third of the 60,000 barrels at Williams & Humbert are dedicated solely to The Macallan. But with the price of a single seasoned sherry cask hovering around $1,300—astronomically more expensive than ex-Bourbon casks, according to MacPherson—it all begs the question: Is scotch aged in sherry-seasoned wood inherently better than the stuff matured in American whiskey barrels?

“It comes down to individual taste,” says Gillespie. “There are people who hate the heavy, tannic notes of sherry-cask whiskies and people who love them. Sometimes the best whiskies result when you blend both types.” Broom goes as far as to say that the use of sherry casks is “not a prerequisite for quality” in scotch, adding that many of the sherry-aged whiskies on the market are aged in wood so old that the influence of sherry is basically nil.

Psychedelic Mushrooms

Every winter and spring when conditions are just right, something magical begins to happen in California, Oregon, and Washington. After a few good rains, some cool nights, and a bit of sun, webs of white mycelium in countless beds of wood chips begin to produce mushrooms.

Strolling around any San Francisco neighborhood it’s not uncommon to see a dozen species of urban mushrooms growing in gardens and the landscaped areas of office buildings or apartment complexes. But for those in the know, three are of particular interest: the potently psychedelic Psilocybe cyanescens, Psilocybe allenii, and Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata.

P. cyanescens and P. allenii are two of the hundreds of psilocybe mushroom species that contain the hallucinogenic compound psilocybin. Research on these psychedelic fungi is still in its infancy, but most current work is focused on exploring their potential to treat mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. There is still much to learn about their biology, ecology, and evolutionary history.

For starters, where they grow in the wild is actually a bit of a mystery. “You can walk around the woods forever in California and you will not see them,” says Alan Rockefeller, chief mycologist at the international pharmaceutical company Mimosa Therapeutics. And yet they are by far the most commonly foraged psychedelic species in the U.S., in part because the Pacific Northwest has become the epicenter of these wood-loving magic mushrooms popping up in urban landscapes.

These mushrooms “feed on wood that's had a lot of the good stuff already taken out of it” explains Jason Slot, a biologist who studies fungal evolutionary genetics at Ohio State University. They don’t want the freshly fallen wood, but stuff that is a bit more broken down, he says. “The sugars are long gone, and other fungi have already had their chance at the simpler carbohydrates like cellulose.” Put simply, they love wood chips.

So like rats, pigeons, and cockroaches, these most potent of psychedelics not only survive but thrive in urban and suburban environments that are filled with mulch beds.

“Humans do extremely unnatural things—erecting large concrete jungles where we lay down copious amounts of wood chips,” says Jordan Jacobs, a fungi forager and chemist who runs a lab in Oregon that tests magic mushrooms. “It's fascinating that a psychoactive mushroom that has potential long-lasting effects on human consciousness has decided that this ecological niche suits it well.”

Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata stands tall next to the finger-like projections of fellow fungus, Xylaria, which cohabit a wood chip. Xylaria grows on rotting wood and is used commercially to add colors and patterns to wood—a process called spalting.

Exposed habitat and a psychedelic defense

P. cyanescens and P. allenii are both small—never growing more than two or three inches tall—and have chestnut brown caps, white stems, and dark purple spores. The only difference between the two is that the caps of P. cyanescens develop a characteristic wavy edge, which is why they’re commonly called wavy caps. P.ovoideocystidiata, also called ovoids, look similar but are a little bigger with thicker stems. Like most psilocybe species, these mushrooms turn a deep purplish blue when they are crushed or bruised.

Around the world, magic mushrooms are commonly found in herbivore dung, where the animal and other fungi have already taken a pass at the nutrients. Slot thinks it is this preference for exposed habitats, like wood chips and manure piles, that may have led to the evolution of psychedelic compounds.

“Fungi are really nutritious to eat,” says Slot, and because neither dung nor loose pieces of wood offer much protection, he believes mushrooms likely evolved the ability to produce psychoactive compounds as a defense against grazing animals. Research has shown that psilocybin binds to certain receptors in the brains of rats, so Slot hypothesizes that “high populations of small mammals could provide enough selection pressure on the mushroom to support the evolution of a neuroactive compound.”

Researchers have yet to seriously investigate whether animals experience any psychedelic reactions from eating psilocybin, but considering how humans respond to them, Slot points out with a chuckle that “it’s not necessarily a given that all animals don't like to get high.”

The geographic origins of these magic mushrooms are similarly mysterious. P. cyanescens was first described in a 1946 paper written by Elsie Wakefield, a mycologist and plant pathologist who found them in the Kew Gardens in Great Britain. Kew is a sprawling botanical garden with a collection of tens of thousands of living plant and fungal species collected from all over the world, in addition to millions of dried samples.

“That is certainly not where it evolved,” says Rockefeller, who is one of the most well-known mycologists studying psilocybe species. He can rattle off Latin names faster than most people can understand them and has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms on the West Coast of the U.S.

He says that genetic evidence points to either Australia or the Pacific Northwest as their ancestral home. But today, P. cyanescens is a global species whose natural history is fundamentally entwined with people. They have been documented in most of the U.S., throughout Europe, in South Africa, and in New Zealand and Australia.

The origin story of P. allenii is similarly shrouded. But in the 2012 paper that first described P. allenii, Rockefeller and his colleagues call it a synanthrope, an organism that thrives in places built by and for humans. Though P. ovoideocystidiata’s origin is less mysterious—it grows wild in the Ohio River Valley – today all three fungal species are in lockstep with human expansion.

“They exist because of the environments that we make. Wherever they came from, who knows if we’ll ever know,” Slot says. “The cyanescens are just following where we mulch.”

Wood chips, moisture, mushrooms

In relatively cold and wet areas like Washington and Oregon, P. cyanescens and ovoids can be found growing in more natural environments, including coastal dune grasses and along creeks, but what they really love is regularly watered wood chips. And once you move farther south into California, all three species become exclusively urban fungi.

Rockefeller has spent more time than most searching for magic mushrooms, and he brings the unique perspective of a naturalist to his foraging. “They really like it if the wood chips are irrigated,” he says. “I definitely see them in the wood chip beds of Golden Gate Park. Office parks are also a really good habitat.” Apartment complexes in the Bay Area are much the same. And in a wonderful twist, according to Rockefeller, “you will see them at the police station and city hall.”

Jacobs, the recreational mushroom forager who runs a testing lab, found his first magic mushrooms on the Humboldt State University campus where he was an undergraduate. “I was coming out of an exam on a Friday, walking home to my apartment, and on the way found Psilocybe allenii. And well, that's cheaper and better than beer.”

According to Rockefeller, urban magic mushrooms aren’t exactly rare, but they aren’t going to be sprouting from every bit of mulch. “If you only have a few square feet of wood chips, you have way less than a one-percent [chance] of finding them there. But if you can find some sort of office park with a square mile of wood chips, then you can just walk around all afternoon and there will be several patches.”

P. cyanescens, P. allenii, and P.ovoideocystidiata likely originated in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, respectively. But they now grow across most of the U.S., in Europe, and in a few other shockingly distant parts of the globe. This begs an obvious question: How are they getting around?

The most straightforward answer is the natural one, explains Jessie Uehling, a fungal biologist at Oregon State University: The spores get carried by wind. “Spores are like the seeds of a mushroom,” she says. “Air comes in and physically swirls underneath the cap, collects spores, and then goes on its way.” Those spores then land on an uncolonized patch of wood chips and, if conditions are right, begin to grow. “They’re poised to colonize a resource as soon as it becomes available.”

There is another theory in the mushroom community—part legend, part science—about how P. cyanescens manages to appear in so many places. In 2001 two British mycologists published a study looking at how wood chip-loving mushrooms, including P. cyanescens, were spreading around England. In it, they write that these species may have infested the wood chip supply chain.

Essentially, the thinking is this: Mycelium, the webby, root-like structure that decomposes material and from which individual mushrooms fruit, is living and spreading in the large piles at wood chip production or distribution centers. Anytime those wood chips are shipped somewhere new, the mushrooms tag along.

There is only anecdotal evidence of this happening in the U.S., and without a comprehensive genetic study, it is impossible to make any strong claims one way or the other. But as Uehling puts it, “anytime wood chips become available, you're going to see wood-decay fungi, including psilocybe.”

Jacobs says he has no doubt that magic mushrooms are in the wood chip supply chain. He’s heard stories about P. cyanescens growing alongside a road near a mulch factory where freshly chipped wood would fall off trucks. He also says he knows people who have bought plants from big box stores and nurseries only to have a psilocybe pop up.

While the wood chip supply chain question remains unanswered, every expert interviewed for this story agreed on one way magic mushrooms surely spread: humans. Rockefeller and Jacobs are themselves fungal Johnny Appleseeds.

“When I find them, I'll pull off the stem base and plant it in some fresh wood chips nearby,” Rockefeller says. It only takes a small piece of the stem and mycelium to start an entirely new patch. “These mushrooms are really effective at turning wood chips into dirt, so I'll come back a year or two later and the original spot won’t have any mushrooms. But all the ones that I planted in the areas nearby, they'll be fruiting.”

Every winter, the reported range of these mushrooms expands, to the delight of mushroom foragers. As legalization movements gain steam and the evidence grows ever stronger for magic mushrooms as powerful mental health interventions, it will be interesting to see where foraging in mulch beds fits into the evolving cultural and medical landscape.

“People are realizing how cool mushroom hunting is,” Rockefeller says, “and the driver for that is certainly psychedelic.”

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