Vice editor Rocco Castoro interviewed the 85-year-old Magus of American cinema, Kenneth Anger at the ritzy Cicada restaurant in downtown Los Angeles:

VICE: Looking back at the films of the silent era, the way they were shot and cut make it seem like everyone was snorting massive lines right up until the director yelled, “Action!”

I find film style reflects it, particularly the Mack Sennett [the director largely responsible for the popularity of slapstick] comedies. And my research proves that they were taking cocaine. You can see a sort of hyper-influence there.

VICE: There are lots of tales that make reference to “joy powder” in Hollywood Babylon, which makes it seem as innocent as taking one of those 5-hour Energy shots. Another phrase you use in the book, in the first few pages, is the “Purple Epoch.” What is that? It sounds nice.

That was when there were very talented people who also had extravagant tastes and money. It was the 1920s, a reflection of the Jazz Age. And the Hollywood version of that was pretty wild.

VICE: Another topic you cover early on in the book is the circumstances surrounding the death of Olive Thomas, which is perhaps the first instance of “Hollywood scandal” as we know it. You write, and it’s long been rumored, that she was very fond of cocaine, which was apparently a fatal flaw when combined with alcohol and ingesting her husband Jack Pickford’s topical syphilis medication.

She was one of the earliest beautiful stars to die in grim circumstances. And so her name became associated with lurid [behavior]. Things going on in Hollywood.

VICE: Her death also seemed to pull the wool from everyone’s eyes. Olive Thomas’s image was so sweet and pure. It caused Hollywood’s reputation to snowball into something far darker than how it was previously perceived. People must have thought, “If Olive’s doing it, everyone else must be too.”

There were other ones too, like Mary Miles Minter [who was accused of murdering her lover, director William Desmond Taylor, at the height of her success]. She was a kind of version of Mary Pickford [Jack Pickford’s sister], but the great stars like Pickford were never touched. These scandals swirled around, but there were certain stars that weren’t implicated in any way by this sort of thing.

 
Charlie toots at least a half gram but still has an appetite. It must’ve been that low-grade prison blow.

Charlie, you’re not supposed to put the spoon in your ear.
 

 
Via Biblioklept

 
Because no one likes a narc… A commercial for Tattle: When To Tell On A Friend, an ABC Afterschool Special about a teenage coke-fiend from the 1980s.
 

 
Via Sperm Sperms

 
Meet Greg P. Ciarlante, busted by Portland police on 1/02/2011 for possession of cocaine and dealing methamphetamine. Mr. Ciarlante’s lurve for cocaine must come from Robin Williams’ side.

(via Fark and TDW)

 
There is a fascinating 3-part series in The Stranger, by investigative reporter Brendan Kiley, that goes in-depth examining how a dangerous new cutting element is being added to the world’s cocaine supply. Levamisole is a medicine used to de-worm livestock, the DEA has reported that nearly 75% of the coke seized in this country during 2009 was cut with levamisole. (In 2005 only 1.9% of the seized cocaine had been cut with levamisole). Levamisole can cause an immune system failure know as “agranulocytosis” leaving users vulnerable to infections and causing skin lesions due to tissue swelling it can cause.

Yuck. If ever there was a time to “just say no” to cocaine (admittedly a drug I’ve never had much of a taste for) now might be the time…

Levamisole is an unusual—and unprecedented—cutting agent because it’s more expensive than other cuts, it makes some customers sick, and it’s being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States. Smugglers typically prefer to move pure product, which is less bulky and results in less chance of detection. “The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine” offered a few theories about why South American drug manufacturers (mostly Colombian) are cutting their cocaine with levamisole.

A quick review of those theories:

1. Levamisole might produce a cocainelike stimulant effect either on its own or in conjunction with cocaine (in 2004, racehorses treated with levamisole were found to metabolize the deworming drug into an amphetamine-like stimulant called aminorex), meaning the product could produce a more substantial high with less pure cocaine.

2. Levamisole, unlike other cutting agents, retains the iridescent, fish-scale sheen of pure cocaine, making it easier to visually pass off levamisole-tainted cocaine as pure.

3. Levamisole passes the “bleach test,” a quick street test that reveals cuts like sugar or lidocaine (but, because of a chemical anomaly, not levamisole).

4. Levamisole is a bulking agent for crack. Making crack involves purifying cocaine and washing out the cutting agents, but levamisole molecules slip through this process—meaning a dealer can produce more volume of crack with less pure cocaine.

5. All of the above.

If levamisole can do several of these things, it becomes (in evolutionary terms) an advantageous genetic mutation, a cut that may have started as an accident but showed beneficial properties, so was passed on from one batch of cocaine to the next, from one generation to another, like a new gene.

The evolutionary, all-of-the-above theory is especially compelling because Colombia’s cocaine-production market is so fractured and decentralized, it’s unlikely that one mind is calling all the shots about cocaine’s manufacture and distribution. After the breakup of the Medellín and Cali cartels in the mid-1990s, hundreds (maybe even thousands) of independent cocaine producers leaped into the void. While FARC and the paramilitaries control much of the cocaine trade—such as the camps where Diego worked—they don’t control and centralize production technology to the degree that the Medellín and Cali cartels did.

Meaning: Those hundreds (and maybe thousands) of independent producers must have independently decided to use the same cutting agent. And even if levamisole looks like cocaine, behaves in bleach tests like cocaine, and can bulk up crack in a way that other cutting agents can’t, why not wait to cut it once it has crossed the border?

That’s still a mystery.

As the article also points out, by the time the cocaine reaches the northern city of Seattle, it’s not only been stepped on before it even leaves its south of the border country of origin, but it’s also probably gotten stepped on again and again from stops between San Diego and Sacramento! By the time it gets to Seattle (or London, for that matter) is there even any cocaine left at all in it anymore?

Read more of The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine by Brendan Kiley (The Stranger)
 

 
“Line of cattle dewormer, anyone? Help yourself!”

 
Too bad these nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, Ecstasy, alcohol and cocaine porcelain plates are sold from Etsy seller, Trixiedelicious. I’m sure if enough people write in, Trixiedelicious would make more. There’s no harm in asking, eh?

Seven Deadly Hits: A Drug Assemblage

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
What bears ♥ .

(via Super Punch)

 
Make of this what you will. It certainly seems plausible enough to me, but the article doesn’t really quote any pharmacological experts so that always raises my eyebrow. Valid information or merely anecdotal evidence that probably shouldn’t be a major newspaper until it’s a bit more solid? You decide:

“I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.

While few outside the world of pharmacology have heard of the chemical, fewer still are aware of its life-threatening properties. Now, however, its side-effects, discovered in 1979, are threatening to become tragically familiar as they take their toll on users in their 30s and 40s.

Drug addiction clinics say they are becoming increasingly concerned by the health risks associated with the chemical ?