"The department did not specify where the hikers obtained the mushrooms, which contain psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound that can cause people to see, hear or feel things that do not exist."

From "Hikers on Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Rescued From New York Wilderness/The hikers, who were in the Catskill Mountains, told officials that they had consumed the hallucinogen and one was experiencing a 'debilitating high.' It was the second such episode in recent months" (NYT).

The men were lost on the Giant Ledge Trail, a popular hiking destination in the Catskills, about 80 miles southwest of Albany. The trail ranges from 1,100 to 2,600 feet in elevation with “several sheer cliffs and drops”... Still, the three-mile loop is well-marked and wildly popular, making it difficult to get lost.... The hikers left the trail after deciding they wanted to walk in a straight line toward their car, through an area with boulders and steep terrain....

I'm imagining them embracing the revelation that you could just walk straight to the car, while all these other people deludedly believe they are required to adhere to the official path. Proceed directly to the car and drive away into your enlightened new life. 

"The U.S. has entered a new era in which narcotraffickers are classified as terrorists — and Trump is claiming the right to kill them before they or their drugs reach this country."

From "'We've never seen this before': Trump's drug war looks like a real war" (Axios).

The attack marked the first time a suspected "go-fast" drug-running boat was destroyed by a military missile, according to officials and drug-war experts. "There's more where that came from," Trump said in announcing the strike. All other details of the shocking, caught-on-video missile attack are classified, officials said....

What happened Tuesday was "a murder anywhere in the world," Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, wrote on X. "We have been capturing civilians who transport drugs for decades without killing them. Those who transport drugs are not the big narcos, but the very poor, young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific."...

ADDED: "Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers/The move to treat criminals as if they were wartime combatants escalated an administration pattern of using military force for law enforcement tasks at home and abroad" (NYT). 

"This kind of violence is very recent. It's a new thing in human history. There was no time in the past when people would walk into a church or a classroom and start shooting people."

"It is not happening in other countries. It's happening here and we need to look at all of the potential culprits that might be contributing to that."

Said RFK Jr. on "Fox & Friends" yesterday, when he was asked about whether "drugs" used in transgender treatment might have had a effect on the Minneapolis shooter. RFK Jr.'s answer broadened the topic to "SSRI drugs and other psychiatric drugs," some of which come with warnings about homicidal and suicidal ideation.

"President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels...."

"The decision to bring the American military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels.... The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.... [D]irecting the military to crack down on the illicit trade also raises legal issues, including whether it would count as 'murder' if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians — even criminal suspects — who pose no imminent threat...."

The NYT reports.

"President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods...."

"The order... instructs agencies to prioritize funding for mental health and drug courts — and to not fund 'harm reduction' programs that the administration said facilitate illegal drug use. It also called for agencies to prioritize funding states and cities that to the 'maximum extent' enforce laws on open-air drug use, prohibitions on urban camping, loitering and squatting.... Dozens of states have added to or expanded involuntary commitment laws during the past decade. That includes states controlled by Democrats, an illustration that political momentum has shifted toward a more aggressive approach to dealing with the inextricably intertwined crises of mental health and addiction...."

I'm reading "Trump order pushes forcible hospitalization of homeless people/Trump’s executive order could increase hospitalization of homeless individuals with mental health and substance use disorders" (WaPo).

Looking for an existing tag that will fit this issue, I stumbled on "Trump's urban renewal." That could work for this... but what was it that led me to create it?

The oldest post with that tag was "Asking for the black vote" back in August 2016.

More relevant to today's post is this from July 2019: "'We have to take the people... And we have to do something... We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.' Said Trump, about the homelessness in San Francisco and L.A." 

"Meth causes the brain to release exorbitant amounts of dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter. On a ho-hum day..."

"... [Dr. Kristen B. Silvia tells meth addicts], an individual’s dopamine levels could rise to, say, 50. 'If you have the best meal ever, the best sex ever, the best day of your life, you can get your levels up to 100.' When someone uses crack... within seconds their levels rise to 300, she continues, 'or three times the best day of your life. 'But on meth, dopamine levels skyrocket to 1,000 and can remain there for hours: 'No medication can safely compete with that.'..."

From "Upended by Meth, Some Communities Are Paying Users to Quit/Unlike with opioids, there is no medication to suppress cravings for meth and other stimulants. As use soars, hundreds of clinics are trying a radically different approach" (NYT).

"[A]ddiction experts worry that under the Trump administration, CM programs will be difficult to sustain, much less expand to meet the need. Many believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who overcame his heroin addiction with a 12-step program and has praised approaches that threaten to jail people who refuse treatment, would be unlikely to endorse a financial rewards-based strategy...."

It's hard for me to imagine feeling 10 times as good as I have ever felt. I might have 10 times as much of what you're calling "the feel-good neurotransmitter," but that doesn't mean the goodness of the feeling will be multiplied by 10. I don't think feeling good works like that! I once heard someone describe the experience of parachuting from a plane as like having 1,000 orgasms all at once. She was quite enthused, and I immediately said that sounds horrible.

"Then, given that I have no appetite, I don’t find cooking interesting any more. Food has become completely dull..."

"... and I have begun to wonder why I’d liked it in the first place. It’s extraordinary. I used to spend all day thinking about what to buy and what to cook and how much everyone would love it and how much I would love it, and now I can’t even get a flatbread down me. If I were living on my own, that would be fine. I would have virtually nothing in my fridge except a bit of smoked salmon and some vegetables and fruit. But I’m still living with three out of my four children and there has always been this coming together as a family to eat delicious food prepared by me — it has always felt very bonding. So they were rather taken aback when it got to the first Sunday of my weight-loss journey and no roast appeared. 'Oh, are we having a roast today?' my daughter asked, because she loves a Sunday roast...."

Writes Lucy Cavendish, in "Mounjaro transformed me — but it had a huge effect on my family’s life/When Lucy Cavendish started taking a weight-loss drug, she resigned as the family cook. It’s had a profound impact on her relationship with her children" (London Times).

"[Musk] told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use."

"He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it. It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview."

From "On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama/As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous and his drug use was more intense than previously known."

In March 2024, Musk that the ketamine was prescribed — for depression — and that he only took a small amount. The FDA "has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures," but "doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders." But: "The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control."

The NYT article reveals a text message he wrote last May: "There are at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down.... The Biden administration views me as the #2 threat after Trump. I can’t be president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will."

After he bounced around on stage at a Trump rally on October 5, he texted: "I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight.... Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.... This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised... 'Lasers' from space."

"The fact that he was bitten by an alligator significantly and continued on his rampage was shocking...."

Said Grady Judd, sheriff of Polk County, Florida, quoted in "Bitten by Alligator, Man Is Killed After Charging at Deputies, Sheriff Says/The authorities say that Timothy Schulz, 42, of Mulberry, Fla., swam across an alligator-filled lake before a violent encounter with deputies in the neighborhood" (NYT).

"Sheriff Judd also said that Mr. Schulz had a lengthy criminal history, which he described as 'meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest, meth arrest.'... At 7:43 a.m., a resident in a Polk County neighborhood called the sheriff’s office to say that a man was in a lake known to have alligators in it, and that the man was treading water near one of the broad-snouted reptiles.... 'It’s a long swim,' Sheriff Judd said. 'And he was gator-bitten along the way.'"

I note the phrase "one of the broad-snouted reptiles," which I believe is an example of the "second mention" problem in writing. The writer feels a need to avoid repetition of a word — here, "alligator" — and comes up with a variation. The example I gave in the old post at that link was of a woman who'd written "small house" and, on second mention, wrote "petite edifice."

The writer of that alligator article — had it gone on longer and required further struggle to escape the terrible (word) "alligator" — could have told us more about how the drug-addled man — the substance-impaired individual — tangled with the jawsome beast, the toothy predator, the swamp monster.

Sadly, the man is dead, an individual fatally shot by officers, a person deceased in a police encounter, a male victim of law enforcement action, a citizen killed in officer-involved incident....

"I’m surprised by it, it turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it.... It’s nonsense...."

"[T]here are people who have watched the videos and believe that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a 'mano a mano' with a Turkish president and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife. None of this is true.... So everyone needs to calm down and focus on the real news...."

Said Emmanuel Macron, quoted in "'It’s Nonsense': Macron Plays Down Video of Shove From Wife/The French president, Emmanuel Macron, was pushed in the face as he left a plane in Vietnam. The bigger issue, he said, was the reaction, part of a string of disinformation by 'crazy people'" (NYT).

How can so many things NOT be true? Such wacky things — all involving hands — and all caught on camera?

1. Here's the hand thing with Erdogan. Come on. That's not nothing!

2. Here's the hide-the-cocaine sleight of hand.

3. And here's the hand of his wife pushing him in the face.

How do all these things happen to one man?

Big shot takes fat shot.

Trump: "A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very very very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug." pic.twitter.com/pFFyXT6pHF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2025

"Salmon given antianxiety drugs take more risks, study finds."

Says the headline at The Washington Post — free-access link. Your first thought might be: Scientists, leave those fish alone! But they're not just getting the drugs from scientists:

We’re turning our rivers, lakes and oceans into soups of pharmaceutical pollution.... Nearly 1,000 pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the world.... 

"The failure to find a clear biomarker doesn’t mean that there is no biological basis for A.D.H.D.; most scientists I spoke to..."

"... agreed that the condition is produced by some combination of biological and environmental forces, though there is little consensus about the relative importance of each. But it does have certain implications for the field, including for the question of medication. If we’re no longer confident that A.D.H.D. has a purely biological basis, does it make sense that our go-to treatment is still rooted in biology?... Adderall, now the leading treatment for the disorder, is a type of amphetamine.... A significant part of the A.D.H.D. establishment does, in fact, promote the message that children and adolescents who resist medication don’t know what’s good for them...."

I'm reading "Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? With diagnoses at a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it" (NYT)(free-access link).

"Whether he was high as a kite or hungry as a hippo, he didn’t deserve to be crushed."

Said Darlene Chaney, cousin of Cornelius Taylor, quoted in "In Cities’ Rush to Clear Homeless Camps, People Have Been Crushed to Death/Atlanta’s mayor began a drive to clear homeless encampments. But when heavy equipment came to raze one, nobody noticed that Cornelius Taylor was still inside his tent" (NYT).

In the modest home where they shared a childhood with Mr. Taylor, Ms. Chaney and her brother Derek, both truck drivers, described him as a bright, kind man wounded by a dark teenage episode they did not fully understand. He dropped out of high school and resisted their efforts to help, while complaining that many people view the homeless with disdain. His baptism in a prison chapel raised hopes for change that went unmet.... On good days, friends found him protective and kind. Bad days evoked his street name, Psycho. “If he didn’t get his way, all hell would break lose,” [his girlfriend Lolita] Griffeth said.

"I'm thrilled to announce that we're ending pharmaceutical ads in television. America is corrupted by Big Pharma."

"For years, they’ve pushed drugs like candy, silenced critics, lobbied the Congress and the White House, and cashed in on manufactured fear. Big Pharma, through drug advertisements, are also a huge source of income for mainstream media, effectively controlling the media outlets. Soros and USAID aren't the only ones who use the mainstream media to perpetuate propaganda. ALL THESE WILL END NOW."

Writes RFK Jr., on X.... in A PARODY ACCOUNT.

ADDED: Why isn't this what RFK Jr. would say and do?

"When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back."

"It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back."

Said Sara Ziff, who leads a "models’ rights" organization. She's quoted in "Why Ultrathin Is In/When it comes to fashion models, the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end" (NYT).

Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”

Political???

"The civilian searchers found the graves by inserting simple metal rods into the earth and smelling their tips to detect the stench of decomposing bodies."

I'm reading "Inside a Mexican cartel ‘extermination’ camp: Ovens, shoes and teeth/A civilian search group found a gruesome site near Guadalajara, sparking outrage as authorities had raided the area months earlier but did not uncover the graves" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Mexico has grappled for years with a crisis of disappearances, with more than 110,000 people reported missing.... [A civilian search group] arrived on March 5 at an abandoned ranch outside La Estanzuela and started poking around. They dug up three underground ovens. They found hundreds and hundreds of singed bone shards — from skulls, fingers, teeth.... 

"Late last year, Arthur Juliani, a 32-year-old research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, was decidedly not taking ibogaine..."

"... but was ingesting something similar. He had obtained tabernanthalog, a research molecule designed to mimic ibogaine’s chemical structure and potential effects on neuroplasticity, but not cause any hallucinations. About 45 minutes after he swallowed his dose, Juliani started to feel a kind of 'spacious attention,' he told me. On a walk outside, he found that anywhere he looked appeared like a 'perfectly framed photograph, distinct and standing on its own.' When he went home for lunch, he ate a bell pepper 'in the slowest and most intentional manner I had ever eaten a vegetable in my life.'... If novel psychedelics and 'pseudo-delics' tickle brain receptors in a way that changes people’s subjective experience... can one confidently say that the people who take them aren’t tripping? As the pursuit of non-hallucinogenic psychedelics advances, the definition of a trip as something induced by a discrete set of substances is set to evolve alongside them. These days, the hottest new psychedelic drugs might be the ones that feel as close to nothing as possible...."

From "Tripping on Nothing New, non-hallucinogenic versions of psychedelics are blurring the boundaries of the drug trip" (The Atlantic).

My first reaction: We're just talking about paying attention. Why can't you find a way to pay attention on your own, using the natural resources of your magnificent human body? Why add drugs? Americans and their pills. Just stop!

My second reaction: This is the diet drug we've been waiting for! It will make you eat a vegetable — one vegetable! — slowly and with pleasure. This too, one might do without drugs — recall Fletcherism — but these are people who are already resorting to worse drugs, and — who knows? — at some point maybe you could internalize the capacity to call any vegetable and respond with cosmic joy.

My third reaction: This is how "they" turn us into the bleak, insignificant half-humans of the future: You will do nothing and you will be happy. (See "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better")

Tim Dillon — the comedian who says Trump is a great comedian — does not appreciate Elon Musk as a prop comic in sunglasses.

From the new episode of his podcast (transcript): "So we have Elon Musk, who is up at CPAC, bombing with a chainsaw and doing weird bits.... Americans, by and large do not love Elon Musk.... He is not Donald Trump. Donald Trump kills. Elon Musk does not. Donald Trump's jabs land. Hard. He's a political genius.... You might think he's an idiot. You might hate him.... He's great at what he does. Elon — it doesn't land all the time. It looks like you have sort of... like a weird billionaire talent show.... Where is Trump? Where is the one who got elected, who communicates effectively?...So here is Elon Musk with a prop. He's so high. I do respect how high he is. I do miss and love drugs. I really do miss and love drugs. Oh man, he's high.... 'Chainsaw for bureaucracy.'... "

"Can you play the meme thing where he goes, 'I've become meme' and it just doesn't land... I don't think this is good. This is not good.... I know that he's having fun with it, but there's gotta be a way to present this that where... he seems less high.... I'm just saying walking out on stage with sunglasses and a chainsaw is a little bit of a tell.... Whether they're high on ideas or actual drugs, I don't know. But we need sobriety in this country.... We need a dad... to just go, Hey man, here's the reality. You are outta control right now. You are absolutely out of control.... But this, this is a dad who himself is a little out of control, I think. I think you come home and you see dad with sunglasses and a chainsaw, and you go, my dad's going through something...."

"During Trump's 2017-2021 presidency, he considered terrorism designations for cartels but ultimately shelved the plans."

But now: "US declares Tren de Aragua, other cartels are global terrorist organizations" (Reuters)

Some top U.S. officials at the time had privately expressed misgivings that the measure could damage relations with Mexico.... Another concern was that the designations could make it easier for migrants to win U.S. asylum by claiming they were fleeing terrorism. Some analysts have said the terrorism designations could expose asylum seekers who pay cartels to be smuggled to the possibility of prosecution or being barred from the U.S....