Erowid Monthly Announcement : Feb 2012

Erowid Monthly

Erowid Monthly Index Feb 2012

WHO DO YOU KNOW?
WHO WANTS TO HELP CHANGE THE WORLD?

Erowid Center is entering a critical period of seeking major new funders to make up a $60,000 budget shortfall, at a time when our site requires considerable infrastructure upgrades in order to continue providing top quality information about psychoactive drugs. We're excited to have received one new $5,000 grant, and we've had discussions with other possible funders. But we continue to need your help in locating potential donors or foundations that support cutting-edge efforts to break through the educational and harm reduction gridlock created by prohibitionist regulations.

With 40% of Erowid's members outside of the USA and 30% of our traffic coming from non-U.S. addresses, our small non-profit has global impact, influencing information accessibility and public policy from the United States to Australia, Europe and beyond.

Erowid's primary mission is educational, providing information about recreational drugs in order to improve health and build the groundwork necessary for societal reform. We work with you, our visitors and contributors, as part of a global community, exploring new information while preserving and archiving existing resources. We are not an advocacy organization. Erowid acts directly--this year, this month, today--to foster the cultural changes that are necessary, given the increasing availability of psychoactive substances and technologies.

Erowid has over a decade-and-a-half of success in bringing together doctors, lawyers, parents, and young people, allowing them to share a reviewed, refereed, high-quality source of information. This global community of Erowid users now has the opportunity to build on that success and help ensure that a balanced, non-judgmental, visionary voice continues to be heard within the dialog regarding shifts in policy, research, education, and recreational drug use.

We need to locate previously untapped sources of non-advertising funding, especially in the $5,000 to $50,000 per year range. Please bear with us as we search for these crucial new funders over the next few months. We appreciate any assistance that you can provide in our quest. Contact us at donations@erowid.org with leads or suggestions.

Earth & Fire,
Co-founders, Erowid Center

Drug Geek Factlet

Big changes may be coming in psychoactive drug research in the USA. The National Institutes of Health are considering combining the "National Institute on Drug Abuse" and the "National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism" into a new "National Institute of Substance Use and Addiction Disorders". Entrenched interests will make this a complex fight, but we're excited that the government's psychoactive research funding apparatus might recognize that there is "use" that isn't "abuse". NIH invites feedback:

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-12-045.html

Events

International Students for Sensible Drug Policy Conference
(Mar 23-25, 2012) in Denver, Colorado

http://ssdp.org/events/2012-national-ssdp-conference

Latest Additions

The Entheogen Law Reporter

Published in the 1990s, The Entheogen Law Reporter provides information and commentary on the various legal issues surrounding visionary plants and drugs during that decade. Erowid has scanned and published PDFs of all twenty-two issues of TELR.

New Character Vaults

We've recently added vaults for cognitive liberty attorney Richard Glen Boire and counter-culture heroine Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, as well as the psychedelic drug war prisoner and purported LSD chemist William Leonard Pickard.

Drugs in the Comics

David Goldstein, Curator of the PHD (Papers from the History of Drugs) Archival Library and Database, assembled this comics collection from 1971 through 1994, featuring assorted newspaper strips that touch on psychoactive drugs.

Inner Space #1

This early zine billed itself as "The Magazine of the Psychedelic Community" in the late 1960s. Issue #1 (1966) included a manifesto lamenting the lack of "positive useful data" available to the millions of users, as well as articles by Peter Stafford, Timothy Leary, and Lisa Bieberman.

Crew Notes

Erowid is helping researchers with a new survey looking at the use of psychedelics (and other psychoactive substances) and synaesthesia. To participate in the survey, which usually takes 10-30 minutes to complete, see:

https://erowid.org/survey_2012_greenwich_university

From the Vaults

Perilous Play, by Louisa May Alcott (1869)

In this short story that appeared in the family paper Leslie's Chimney Corner, Alcott describes the effects of eating hashish bonbons on a group of young upper-class Southerners. Alcott's book Little Women was published around the same time.