Blow on the Job

Poor guy...

A man who took a Snapchat video of himself snorting cocaine, while wearing a T-shirt from the Dublin restaurant in which he worked, has lost his unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal.

...

In August 2014, Mr Boyle sent a Snapchat, a 25-second video made using a mobile phone which disappears once played, to friends and work colleagues.

 ...

It showed him taking cocaine in a bathroom and wearing his T- shirt with the Wagamama logo on it, the case heard. The tribunal said it was to his credit that he had accepted he sent the Snapchat, although there was disagreement about whether it was taken in the restaurant.

Link.

The Ghost Made Him Do It...

...or the drugs. I dunno, but he was high as shit.

A teenager said he was high on drugs when a ghost living in a barn told him to burn it down, according to Northampton County Court records.

 ...

A few weeks after the fire, police were contacted by Scott Milham, fire marshal for Hanover Township. Milham said he was contacted by the Bethlehem Area School District because Strohl was overheard on a bus bragging about burning down the barn.
Several students told police about Strohl's statements, including that he was high on drugs and with his 17-year-old girlfriend in the barn at the time of the blaze. Strohl told his fellow students that a ghost told him to light the fire, police said.

On March 14, police interviewed Strohl's girlfriend with her parents present. She told police that she and Strohl believed the barn was haunted because three people had died there.

The girl told police they believed if they set fire to the barn, it would free the ghosts. They returned to her home and got a propane torch they used to set a crate of papers ablaze.

Fistula Slay

16

I don't think I'll ever get enough of this band.

An Old Fashioned Kneecapping

A man was shot in both knees and thrown down an embankment near a supermarket in East Kilbride in Scotland. He was kidnapped and held captive for two days before he was shot and dumped. Police in the area believe the incident is linked to the dumping of two abductees in Partick a week later.

The Evening Times

Bingo Hall Coke Heads

The Express breathlessly sounds the alarm after a recent investigation by the Sun found traces of cocaine on bingo hall toilets.

When toilet seats and cistern tops - typically used to prepare lines for snorting cocaine - were swab tested, HALF of 17 bingo venues across the UK showed traces of the Class A drug. 

And worryingly, out of the 17 halls tested, one toilet tested positive for dangerous crack cocaine. 

Even more scarifying....

 The startling discovery comes as Public Health England figures revealed 634 pensioners aged 65 and over required treatment for drug addiction in the past year. 

That is a 20 per cent rise from the previous year and double the amount from 2009.

Considering the UK has upwards of 10 million people aged 65 or older, I'd say this wildfire has some room to grow.

Farewell, Mark Greening. We hardly knew ye...

The new Electric Wizard album is available to stream at NPR right now. I'm about two-thirds in to it right now and it's easily their best record in a long time. The return of Mark Greening behind the drums is so fucking welcome, it's a damn shame he's already gone.

Mobile Meth Lab

Police stopped a man in Yardley, PA for an expired registration sticker and stumbled on a mini meth lab. The suspect, Michael Sember, allegedly left drugs and paraphrenalia in plain view of the officers conducting the stop. A subsequent search of the trunk turned up chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine and Sember reportedly copped to trying to manufacture meth in his car.

Opium Smoking in the Chinese Tradition

A recent viewing of From Hell led me down a black hole of opium-related internet searches, whereupon I discovered an interview from two years ago in Collector's Weekly. The interview is with Steven Martin, a collector of antique opium paraphrenalia who ended up becoming addicted to the drug. Martin shares a number of fascinating details about the traditional Chinese method of smoking opium..

The traditional Chinese method of smoking opium is actually a form of vaporization. If you're lucky enough to find good quality opium in the States or Europe and you throw it in a bowl or bong and put a torch to it, you're doing it wrong. The method devised by the Chinese prevents certain alkaloids in the opium from being burned and makes the effects more enjoyable than simply smoking or eating it.

Furthermore, scenes depicting opium smoking in London during the opium heyday are bullshit. As far as Martin can tell, opium smoking didn't exist in England. Contemporary depictions by writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde are so bad he considers them "laughable". Inauthentic depictions extend to other media as well, and Martin calls out From Hell and Once Upon a Time in the West in particular as being inaccurate.

Though Martin is obviously well versed in opium smoking and antiquities, he seems less knowledgeable about addiction itself. He believes that a prodigious opium smoking friend was killed by her withdrawal symptoms and says "[a]ccording to the old books, [withdrawal] used to kill people pretty violently." Opiate withdrawal, though incredibly painful and uncomfortable, is not considered deadly by any modern measure.

The full interview is quite lengthy and well worth a read. I'll definitely be picking up his two books in the future.