http://www.thebachelorguy.com/7-drugs-that-you-can-legally-grow-right-in-your-home.html
7 Drugs That You Can Legally Grow Right In Your Home
06/24/2010
DISCLAIMER: I am not advocating, advising, endorsing, recommending, celebrating, or glamorizing drug use. That's the job of the music industry.
I am merely providing interesting and educational information on several plants that, while perfectly legal to grow, provide some added "recreational" effects when used for purposes other than decorating your home. (And if you want to read about three bonus plants, head over to our friends at GrowingPlantsIndoors.com, the green thumbs that provided this info.) I'm starting to rethink my No Living Houseplants rule.
1. Salvia
Saliva is unique because it isn’t habit forming, is hallucinogenic... and is legal to grow. The plant is usually dried and smoked (similar to marijuana), and when taken makes the user momentarily lose touch with reality. In the states, growing the plant (which is legal) is different than using the plant as a drug (which is illegal). As of this writing Florida, Illinois, Delaware, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Virginia, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas, Ohio, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi and North Dakota have laws against its usage.
2. Calea zacatechichi- Dream Herb
The dream herb gets its name from of the incredibly vivid dreams that users experience. The Chontal Indians of Mexico are known to smoke the plant’s leaves just before bedtime as a way of becoming conscious of dreaming while still in the dream. In typical US fashion, the plant is legal to grow AND to sell... but illegal to use.
3. Hawaiian Baby Woodrose
Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, also known as Elephant Creeper, is a vine that produces hallucinogenic seeds. With preparation , the active ingredient (LSA) can be extracted and has the same effect as LSD when consumed. However, consumption is illegal in the US, while growing the vine itself is not.
4. Kratom
Kratom is addictive, yet it remains legal to grow and to use. In appearance it resembles a small tree, usually growing up to 15 feet tall. The leaves contain the active ingredient and, unlike many other hallucinagenics, the leaves are constantly replaced on the same tree.
5. Wormwood
Wormwood emits a poison and can kill if too much is consumed. It’s also the primary herb used in absinthe. The leaves can also be smoked, usually in conjunction with marijuana. And, to this date, wormwood is legal to grow virtually anywhere in the world.
6. Betel Nut
As a whole, Betel Nut is relatively "soft." It induces a mild feeling of well being, reduces one’s appetite and isn’t physically addictive. The plant is legal to grow and to use, but it only grows in tropical or subtropical ecosystems. A variety of indoor growing systems can be used to succesfully grow this plant in your home.
7. Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca, or "vine of the dead," grows freely in the South American Amazon and is used by Shamans in healing/cleansing rituals. The vine, which contains DMT as an active ingredient, is brewed with a secondary plant which contains MAOI and is drank for effect. Growing the vine is legal in the US, but extracting the DMT (active ingredient) is against the law.
For three more drugs that are legal to grow in your home, go to GrowingPlantsIndoors.com.
Showing posts with label Absinthe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Absinthe. Show all posts
Friday, July 30, 2010
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Pernod Absinthe Returns After 93 Years
http://www.luxist.com/2008/10/20/pernod-absinthe-returns-after-93-years/Pernod Absinthe Returns After 93 Years
Oct 20th 2008
Jared Paul Stern
Filed under: Spirits
Back in March my colleague Deidre Woollard wrote about the absinthe craze ushered in by the end of a longstanding ban against the supposedly dangerous spirit. The hype has died down somewhat, and while faddists move on to other obsessions leaving true enthusiasts to enjoy themselves, the original absinthe maker, Pernod, has finally re-introduced their famous original.
Pernod Absinthe is a revival of Pernod Fils, arguably the most authentic absinthe ever produced with a recipe that's over 200 years old. The company stopped making it in 1915 when the French government banned absinthe, later coming out with a wormwood-free version. The original is a high-proof sprit distilled from Grand Wormwood, fennel and anise - exactly the same as consumed by the likes of Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, and now, us.
Tags: Absinthe, France, Monet, Pernod, Picasso
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved
http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080429-absinthe-effects.html
Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
29 April 2008
An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe — the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity — may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects .
The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.
In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.
The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.
Prior studies suggested that absinthe had only trace levels of thujone. But critics claimed that absinthe made before it got banned in France in 1915 had much higher levels of thujone than modern absinthe produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted the ban on making absinthe.
"Today it seems a substantial minority of consumers want these myths to be true, even if there is no empirical evidence that they are," said researcher Dirk Lachenmeier, a chemist with the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany.
Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties.
Laboratory tests found no other compound that could explain absinthe's effects. "All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism," Lachenmeier said. (Ethanol is a word for common drinking alcohol.)
The scientists are set to detail their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
29 April 2008
An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe — the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity — may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects .
The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.
In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.
The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.
Prior studies suggested that absinthe had only trace levels of thujone. But critics claimed that absinthe made before it got banned in France in 1915 had much higher levels of thujone than modern absinthe produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted the ban on making absinthe.
"Today it seems a substantial minority of consumers want these myths to be true, even if there is no empirical evidence that they are," said researcher Dirk Lachenmeier, a chemist with the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany.
Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties.
Laboratory tests found no other compound that could explain absinthe's effects. "All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism," Lachenmeier said. (Ethanol is a word for common drinking alcohol.)
The scientists are set to detail their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/dining/05absi.html
December 5, 2007
A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
By PETE WELLS
EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?
Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.
The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.
“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.
“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”
His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.
Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?
To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.
Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.
“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?
“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”
Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”
After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.
Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.
“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”
That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.
I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.
The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.
With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.
St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.
While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.
One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.
Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.
“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”
Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”
December 5, 2007
A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback
By PETE WELLS
EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?
Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.
The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.
“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.
“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”
His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.
Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?
To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.
Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.
“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?
“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”
Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”
After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.
Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.
“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”
That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.
I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.
The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.
With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.
St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.
While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.
One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.
Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.
“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”
Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”
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