My guide started this business over eleven years ago in a bedroom closet using one grow light and, gradually over those years, it has expanded to this large-scale professional facility which is filled with state-of-the-art security measures. In this particular building, several commercial growers operate business in order to sell buds and consumables to several medical cannabis dispensary clubs in the area. Some of the cannabis strains produced at this facility, (and I couldn’t make these names up), include: Blackberry Kush, Blue Dream, Chem 4, God’s Gift, Kush Berry, and LA Confidential.

I have included some of the images here on Laughing Squid but the entire online gallery of images from my tour has additional descriptive notes about some of the specifics of the operation.

Interesting note: The facility’s electricity bill is over $4,000/month and that is partially due to the many bright lights necessary to grow all the plants efficiently (I wore my sunglasses in some rooms because it was so blindingly bright).

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff

A special thank you to my tour guide!

Mobius is a gripping short film by Vincent Laforet about “a photojournalist who stumbles upon a cartel execution and supernatural events in the the ‘Zone of Silence’ in Mexico”. Here’s a 1080p HQ version and behind-the-scenes footage.

Canon commissioned Vincent to shoot the the film to promote their new C300 Cinema EOS Camera.

via PetaPixel

This awesomely surreal vintage short is comprised of snippets of a longer 1957 pharmaceutical film titled The Relaxed Wife which promoted a tranquilizer under the brand name Atarax. In 1957, Atarax (hydroxyzine hydrochloride) was manufactured by Pfizer Company (it no longer is) and it was named after the Greek word for tranquility, “ataraxia”.

The entire film is available from the Prelinger Archives at Internet Archive.

via The Art of Bleeding

Two young people create a giant LEGO structure and chat about illicit drugs in the odd 1960s anti-drug educational film, Drugs Are Like That. We learn that habits like twisting braids can be hard to break and that spinning around on a swing can make you feel ‘funny’, like drugs.

As if it wasn’t a strange mix already, singer and anti-gay spokesperson Anita Bryant narrates the film.

…this film that tries to simplify its drug abuse message with an analogy of kids putting together a contraption out of Lego blocks. Although the metaphors often don’t make sense, the visual impact of the film is stunning and could easily be quite popular with individuals consuming illicit drugs. Also, like most anti-drug films, this could be a tempting introduction to drugs for some youths yearning to escape their “boring” lives or to rebel against their parents.

via Brain Pickings

footage via A/V Geeks and Internet Archive

If it’s an odd celebrity mosaic portrait, it must be the work of artist Jason Mecier. This time he’s really outdone himself with his dope Snoop Dogg portrait made entirely of marijuana and hash. The work will be on display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery from November 4 to 27, 2011 but alas collectors, it’s already been sold.

We recently posted about Jason’s other mosaic portraits made out of interesting things in Licorice Flix: Edible Movie Mosaics by Jason Mecier and Celebrity JunkDrawers, Mosaic Celebrity Portraits Made From Their Junk.

via Boing Boing

image via Jason Mecier

This silicone pot holder, aptly named Pot Holder designed by GAMA-GO, is punningly made in the shape of a marijuana leaf and is available from our friends at Fooddiggity.

The pot jokes could easily last for 3-4 minutes, but this 100% silicone, dishwasher safe Pot Holder could last a lifetime. Perfect for whatever type of hot food you need to hold — whether it’s some late night mac and cheese, or your special brownies.

image via Fooddiggity

Pleated-Jeans presents a supercut of Marijuana in Movies.

Mewlists has created a compilation of 50 of the trippiest drug hallucinations in films.

via Viral Viral Videos

It took four talented students over five months (and “about a bajillion peanut butter sandwiches”) to create the amped up animation short, Mac ‘n’ Cheese. The Dutch animation team, Tom Hankins, Gijs van Kooten, Guido Puijk, Roy Nieterau, created this piece as fourth year students at Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands. The team was inspired by action game Team Fortress 2 and another great animated short, Meet Buck.

When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there’s only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken. Enjoy the ride!

Even a bit of the Grateful Dead’s classic rock song, Casey Jones is thrown in for good measure.

via Short of the Week

images via Mac ‘n’ Cheese

Well before Nancy Reagan was pushing the “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign in the 1980s to the nation’s youth, a company named Winston Products for Education was creating Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Identification Kits for schools, scouting organizations and law enforcement agencies to get the word out back in the late 1960s.

There is little information to be found on this identification kit but the Wiley Online Library points to the following description of New Instructional Materials from the June 1969 Journal of School Health:

The Dangerous Drugs—Identification Kit contains harmless facsimiles of the more commonly abused dangerous drugs. The Kit was designed to be used primarily as an instructional aid in educational and training programs directed toward combating the existing narcotics and dangerous drugs problem. It consists of a plastic container which is transparent and durable. Plainly visible within the container are facsimiles of amphetamines and barbituates, reproduced with exacting fidelity in terms of color, size, shape, and other distinguising characteristics.

This particular kit is part of my personal collection and I have been told, though I cannot prove conclusively, that Winston Products for Education was backed by R.J. Reynolds’ Winston cigarettes brand.

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff and Ken Dashner

William Breathes of Denver’s Westword alt weekly is America’s first marijuana critic. Maintaining his anonymity in the manner of many restaurant critics, Breathes has been reviewing Denver medical marijuana dispensaries and their products since 2009 (see today’s article and video about Breathes by Justin Rocket Silverman of The Daily).

In 2002, artist Scott Blake of Barcode Art created his digital self-portrait using images of hundreds of ecstasy pills. He gathered these images from DanceSafe, a nonprofit organization that promotes safety in the rave community. Ecstasy is MDMA, a mood-elevating drug that is often taken recreationally. Blake, a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, is probably best known for his Op art using barcodes.

via if it’s hip, it’s here

photos via Barcode Art

Garfunkel and Oates provide some handy tips on how to obtain medical marijuana in California in their new music video “Weed Card”, directed by Raul B Fernandez with a special guest appearance by David Koechner.

Dangerous Minds recently blogged the above film, one of the more balanced investigations of the history of LSD that I’ve seen. So starting there, I thought I’d compile a review of acid histories, anti-LSD psych-outs, and other psychedelic docs you can easily find online. A debate that comes up repeatedly in these films is hallucinogens’ potential positive therapeutic applications versus the very real risks especially from irresponsible abuse of the drugs. Setting aside the more general benefits of “mind expansion”, openness to both sides of that debate tends to indicate a more fairly presented documentary. The most negative drug films are produced by agencies of the US Government; ironically, prior to trying to frighten people about hallucinogens, they were aggressively investigating how drugs could be used for military purposes like interrogation and conducting some of the most irresponsible drug experiments that have ever been done. Details of those experiments, which inadvertently accelerated the mass use of LSD in the 1960′s, also feature prominently in these documentaries.

The film above is called The Beyond Within (there’s a 1972 book of the same name, now out of print). A review from a few years ago states that it was released in 1986 as part of the BBC Documentary series “Everyman”, but I haven’t been able to verify that. It’s an 80-minute well-produced, comprehensive history which includes extensive interviews with Albert Hofmann who discovered LSD in 1938, footage of Aldous Huxley (author of The Doors of Perception), excerpts of a suppressed film of a British MP taking mescaline, details of The CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA surreptitiously dosing people in the 1950′s, going Furthur with Ken Kesey (who participated in the MK-ULTRA tests), turning on with Tim Leary, and a controlled experiment for a Harvard theological masters thesis testing the legitimacy of religious feelings that divinity students experienced while on acid. Both an honest assessment of the potential benefits and a clear-eyed take on the dangers mark this film as the best of the bunch. Very informative. I’m just not sure why there’s a string quartet playing throughout, not a great match for the psychedelic subject matter, but oh well.

Now it’s time to get scared, if you can stop giggling long enough. Trying to portray the subjective effects of a drug experience to a broad audience is a difficult task. And especially when the goal of the film is to scare people away from drugs the results are often melodramatic and unintentionally hilarious (especially at the distance of a decade or four). In LSD-25, the drug itself talks to us, in the first person, about it’s “cool chemical name” and a whole lot more. The little chemical devil whispers conspiratorially throughout, with just a tinge of reverb cuz if acid has a voice, it’s definitely spacey.

From Dangerous Minds:

LSD-25 is a goofier than average drug scare flick produced in 1967 for the San Mateo Union High School District in San Mateo, California. The entire film is narrated by a tab of LSD – a device that Bunuel would have admired.

It’s full of tripping dramatizations, mutton-chopped groovy drop-out parties that turn into bad trip central. Pale nerds who wander into sparkling lights, oops, no, that’s traffic. Bummer. And this freaked out kid, trying to avoid a syringe of sobriety.

“It dissolves in your mind as well as your mouth”, like some kind of M&M’s from hell. But while it wants to be scary, LSD-25 comes off instead as an entertaining journey through a vintage acid un-fun-house that’s pretty hard to take seriously.

Next up is the Canadian documentary Hofmann’s Potion which focuses on serious and especially scientific efforts to use LSD for the general good. It features Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer who were pioneering psychiatrists working in Canada using LSD to treat alcoholics and schizophrenics. Osmond is notable for turning on Huxley to mescaline and inspiring his advocacy for psychedelics. Also featured is Al Hubbard, “The Johnny Appleseed of LSD”, a fascinating character, but it’s notable that there’s no mention here of the controversies regarding his government intelligence connections and the possibility he was involved with MK-ULTRA. Leary appear in a somewhat negative light for advocating acid as a Utopian concept while glossing over the downsides. His former Harvard colleague Ram Dass comes off much better, focused on the benefits of personal use rather than ambitions for mass societal change. Overall a good documentary, featuring a more extended look at the positive potential of LSD.

The Internet Archive has a whole section of videos called FedFlix, old US government films. And as you might expect, there are several about drugs. They include not only government-produced films, but also archived news programs about the government and even raw press conference footage. The 1970 film The Mind-Benders: LSD and the Hallucinogens by the US Food & Drug Administration is a bit surprising, in that it’s not quite the scare flick that it at first appears. While mostly presenting drugs in a negative light, there’s also coverage of government clinical tests which highlight the positive uses for hallucinogens. It also gets high (heh) marks for trippy montages, an echoey drumming soundtrack, and great black & white interviews of ‘users’. Plus extra points for the primitive sculpture holding a bong.

The best moment though is at 22 minutes, a pretty remarkable monologue by a government scientist who thinks “rebellion is a healthy thing” but thinks that taking LSD is “not like swallowing goldfish”–it’s part of an honest, genuine statement in which he admits that “adults have screwed a lot of things up”. Ultimately, despite some melodramatic tendencies, the message that comes out from this film is “we don’t know everything” and “let’s be careful out there”.

Also from FedFlix is this 1970′s ABC news show called Mission: Mind Control, an expose on the US government (including The CIA & Army Chemical Corps) various experiments with drugs and even hypnosis in their search for a mental weapon for interrogation, brainwashing, and to even artificially induce schizophrenia to immobilize large groups of people.

The TV program includes interviews with agents involved with these activities which included safe-houses in New York and San Francisco where prostitutes and others were dosed and observed without their knowledge. This video comes with the extra bonus of Michelob Light, GrapeNuts, and Bufferin commercials from the era built-in. It’s a bit sensational at times, but the reporting seems to be accurate. Unfortunately it highlights some very unsavory activities that the American government has engaged in over the years. Some of the Army research, even appears in a 1960 article in Popular Science called Can “Loony Gas” Win Wars Without Bloodshed (it focuses on animal research, and doesn’t mention the tests on people).

The published evidence indicates that Project MKULTRA involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse.

Less nefarious, and much more boring, is this 1955 film which is a proto-infomercial for MER 17, a drug purported to disrupt the effects of an LSD trip. While it seems to work well in the film, apparently MER 17 was ultimately not very effective in clinical tests. The film features an incredibly insightful experiment in which a young man is given LSD and asked repeatedly how he’s feeling by a dude who looks like the love child of Alfred Hitchcock and Allen Funt. This proves without a doubt that someone who is tripping gets really bummed out by being constantly interrogated by old dudes in suits in front of a fake paper clock.

Finally if hanging out in a 1970′s emergency room getting a 35-minute tour of people overdosing on various drugs sounds like your cup of tea, then What Did You Take? by The Department of Justice will be your new favorite film.

via Dangerous Minds

Owsley Stanley (born Augustus Owsley Stanley III), 1960′s LSD chemist and the original Grateful Dead sound engineer (he helped kick start the live recording of their shows), died at age 76 on Sunday in a car accident in Queensland, Australia. The super pure acid that Owsley produced was a staple of the Bay Area scene in the mid to late 60′s, showing up at Grateful Dead shows and Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests.

Owsley’s nickname is “The Bear”, which comes from the bear illustration created by Bob Thomas, an image that later became the familiar “dancing marching bear” icon of The Grateful Dead. Speaking of Grateful Dead art, Owsley, along with Bob Thomas, designed the famous “Steal Your Face” logo.

In 2007 San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin arranged to met up with Owsley for a rare interview: “For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area”

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.

Less well known are Bear’s contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.

“Abilify / Xanax / Ativan”
drawing by Bryan Lewis Saunders

“10mg Adderall”
drawing by Bryan Lewis Saunders

Bryan Lewis Saunders, a poet and performance artist, created a series of self-portraits while under the influence of various drugs. The resulting drawings are often impressive and sometimes insightful in how particular drugs can affect one’s mind.

Saunders explains further on his website:

After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self. So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence. Within weeks I became lethargic and suffered mild brain damage. I am still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time. I only take drugs that are given to me.

Even more impressive, is that Saunders has been doing a self-portrait of himself every day since March 30th, 1995.

At present I have over 7,900 of them. Like fingerprints, snowflakes and DNA they are all different, no two are the same. For hundreds of years, artists have been putting themselves into representations of the world around them. I am doing the exact opposite. I put the world around me into representations of myself as I find this more true to my Central Nervous System. All Self-Portraits are size 8 1/2″ x 11″ and in hardbound books.

Dinosaurcity interviewed Saunders about his project earlier this week and asked him how he started doing self-portraits while on drugs.

While Brandon and I were hiking one day he asked me, “Whatever happened with that documentary you were going to make with the veterans and the loonies?”

And I told him how everything had happened so fast with the tragedies and how I thought the people would be really interesting to document, but in fact they were all on drugs, suffering in solitude, some too obese to physically leave their apartment, and for many it was all they could do to get out of their recliners 3 times a day. And I told him how when I first moved in, a paraplegic in a wheelchair showed me an encyclopedia of pills and said he could find at least one of every kind of pill in that book in the building and that book was huge!

When Brandon and I got to NY, I unknowingly became very dehydrated and started hallucinating and had a psychotic break and ditched him at a monastery because I thought he was trying to poison me. I took the greyhound straight back to Tennessee where I had an epiphany. I thought not only am I going to draw myself everyday, I’m going to do a different drug everyday, after all there was one of everything in the building…

And that was when I officially started the project.

The entire interview is a pretty fascinating read and an interesting look into the mind of great artist.

via The Daily Dish

Dr. Sidney Cohen interviews a “normal person” who was given LSD in 1956 at the Los Angeles VA Hospital.

via The Huffington Post

“Too Much Catnip”, a new Shirt.Woot t-shirt by Spiritgreen. Happy first Caturday of 2011!

Ron English imagines what some of the products that might be produced if CA Proposition 19 passes tomorrow.

Showing his support of CA Prop 19, Zach Galifianakis smoked a joint on Real Time with Bill Maher.

[via reddit]

If Prop 19 passes and marijuana becomes legal(ish) in California, what might that mean for pot’s future as a consumer product?

This being California, some will inevitably be positioned as an artisanal item — like locally produced wine or gourmet food. That, in turn, means some weed will probably be offered in designer packaging that seeks to accentuate the product’s higher-value appeal.

The photos above show a prototype created by a Bay Area packaging manufacturer. This stylish glass jar is a far cry from a dime bag, so it provides an intriguing window on what the future of normalized pot sales might look like — right down to the UPC bar code.

The New Leaf is an animated video produced by I Shot Him that helps explain the benefits of passing California Proposition 19, which if passed would legalize and tax cannabis.

[via The Daily Dish]

Just Dude It, a pro Prop 19 t-shirt by Blackbeard on Rogue Monk.

[via The World's Best Ever]

Cat Crack

via BuzzFeed

Dixie Elixirs is a variety of marijuana infused sodas created in Colorado for medical marijuana patients.

Home grown in Colorado, Dixie Elixirs refreshing carbonated beverage provides an organic alternative for patients seeking a refreshing but equally potent alternative to smoke and tinctures, or carb and calorie loaded edibles.

Here’s a video review of Dixie Elixirs by tokinGLX.

via Time NewsFeed & BuzzFeed