Ganja Vibes Blog

Essentials to courtship, the Importance of an Orgasm & Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants

Impact of Sexual Side Effects

DO SEXUAL SIDE EFFECTS OF MOST ANTIDEPRESSANTS JEOPARDIZE ROMANTIC LOVE AND MARRIAGE?, PRESENTED BY HELEN E. FISHER, PHD

Do the sexual side effects of most antidepressants jeopardize romantic love and marriage? Dr. Thompson and I would like to say yes, most likely under some circumstances, but not always. Please don't leave this room thinking that we are opposed to the use of serotonin-enhancing medications. People are different; situations are different. The drugs have been proven to be effective under many circumstances. I'm an anthropologist, not a psychiatrist. What we're trying to do is to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the table to heighten awareness and add to the dialogue so that we can all learn how to effectively heal our patients better.  
Since the release of Prozac (fluoxetine) in 1989, many similar serotonin-enhancing antidepressants have emerged. In fact, the use of these has increased dramatically. In 2002, in the United States alone, 213 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written and indeed most of them were for serotonin-enhancing medications. It's well established that these drugs can cause sexual dysfunction, diminished sexual desire, delayed sexual arousal, and muted or absent orgasm. In fact, some reports say that as many as 73% of patients on some of these medications can suffer from 1 or more of these side effects.  
We theorized that these sexual side effects can potentially -- not all the time, but potentially -- have some serious consequences due to the effects that they can have on several evolved, adaptive, unconscious neural mechanisms. These include the ability to attract a mate, to choose a mate, to fall in love, to stay in love, and to sustain a marriage.  
In short, it's all connected and when you knock out the sex system, you can jeopardize many other Darwinian mechanisms that evolved millions of years ago to direct courtship, mating, reproduction, and parenting.  

Distinct Brain Networks

In 1998, I proposed that Homo sapiens -- indeed, all of the mammalian and avian species -- evolved 3 distinctly different but related brain systems for courtship, mate selecting, reproduction, and parenting. The 3 brain systems I proposed are lust, attraction, and attachment.  
Lust is the libido, the sex drive; it's basically the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden once called it an "intolerable neural itch"; Pablo Neruda called it an "eternal thirst" and an "infinite ache." It's simply the craving for sexual gratification; it often has no object. You can feel it when you're sitting in the subway, reading a book, or driving alone in your car; you can feel it really at any time.  
The second brain system is attraction or romantic love, also known as being in love, passionate love, obsessive love, or infatuation. This is the one that I've studied myself. My colleagues and I, and several others have now put 40 people who are madly in love into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner, and we've begun to see some of the brain circuitry of romantic love. I'm going to talk a little bit about that.From an anthropological point of view, this is regarded as a universal human phenomenon. In a study of over 150 societies, evidence of it was found in every single one; there was no evidence to the contrary. Everywhere in the world where you look for evidence of romantic love, you find it. Love magic, love poems, love songs, myths, legends, suicide, homicide, and reports from people themselves testify to it. Indeed, the hard data go back almost 4000 years to Sumerian poetry.There are several main traits of romantic love. I've canvassed the psychological literature of the last 25 years, and have, in fact, done a study of my own in Japan and in the United States. Of course we all know it, but here's what happens when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is that a person takes on what we call "special meaning." Indeed, George Bernard Shaw once said, "Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another." Indeed! Then you focus your attention on this person. Most people who are in love can list what they don't like about their sweetheart, but then they sweep that aside and just focus on what they do like. As Chaucer said, "Love is blind." Also involved is intensely heightened energy, elation when things are going well, terrible mood swings when things are going poorly, and an intense motivation to win this preferred individual. There also is something that I call the frustration attraction: when there are real barriers to the relationship, like the person dumps you or they don't call or send you an e-mail or something, you just love them harder. In fact, in Roman times, people knew that phenomenon of frustration attraction.  
The most powerful characteristic of romantic love, however, is obsessive thinking. When we put these 40 people into the fMRI machine, the very first question that I asked my subjects was: what percentage of the day and night do you actually think about your partner? The response was 95%: I can't stop thinking about her or him, etc. So you have obsessive thinking, along with a deep dependency on this relationship, and more than any one other characteristic, a craving for emotional union with this individual.  
The third of these 3 brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction is male/female attachment, associated with feelings of calm and contentment and a real sense of emotional union with this long-term partner. In people, as well as in other animals, you have nest building, or home building. Mate guarding is a term we use in anthropology -- I think in psychiatry you would call it jealousy. Finally, you have cooperative parenting, the main point of attachment.  

Primary Neurochemicals of Each System

Each of these systems is associated with different primary neurochemicals. Lust is well known to be associated with the androgens in human beings and certainly also with the estrogens in other species.  
From our study of the brain, we have some nice evidence that elevated activity of dopamine is involved in that intense sense of passion and arousal of romantic love. I also maintain in my book, Why We Love, that we're going to find out sometime that norepinephrine is also involved, largely because heightened activity of norepinephrine is also associated with focused attention, elevated energy, motivation to win a reward, elation, and 2 characteristics of romantic love -- obsessional following and object imprinting.I also maintain, although we don't have all the evidence for it, that low activity levels of serotonin are going to be involved, largely because the obsessiveness -- the obsessive thinking of romantic love -- is so striking. Indeed, low levels of serotonin are associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder. So that's part of the fingerprint of attraction or romantic love.  
Other scientists have done some very elegant work associating basic feelings of attachment with elevated activity of oxytocin and vasopressin.  

Distinct Neural Systems

I believe that each one of these 3 systems is a distinct neural system. In the last 3 years, 4 MRI studies of lust were conducted. Men and women were hooked up to a machine and shown erotic pictures followed by pictures of scenery, etc. In 3 out of those 4 MRI studies, researchers showed that the hypothalamus is involved, which you would expect, and 3 out of 4 have shown that the amygdala is involved. Two of the most convincing ones, I think, indicate that the insula cortex is involved, along with many other regions.  
Regarding attraction, or romantic love, what we found in our data is that the right ventral tegmental area is involved, along with the right caudate nucleus (dorsal). In fact, we showed a lot of deactivations, as one does prior to the brain turning off, while others turned on. We also found deactivation in the amygdala.  
On the left, the ventral tegmental area is shown becoming active when a person attached to the MRI machine looks at a picture of his or her sweetheart. This happens to be the anteromedial portion of the caudate. Several aspects of the dorsal caudate became active, which -- because the ventral tegmental area is involved, as well as dopamine and the caudate -- led us to believe that romantic love is not an emotion; it's basically a motivation system. I believe it's a basic mating drive that evolved millions of years ago. Indeed, I think that this drive is more powerful than the sex drive. You don't kill yourself when you don't get sex. People kill themselves when they don't get the lover that they are looking for, or they kill somebody else. slide018
Attachment, the third brain system, is not well mapped out yet; certainly the hypothalamic-pituitary axis would be involved because there's so much oxytocin and vasopressin in parts of the hypothalamus. The substantia nigra has a high density of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, so that's likely to be involved. In a new study of mother/infant attachment -- not male/female attachment, but mother/infant attachment -- researchers found activity in the medial insular, the anterior cingulate, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. So as a matter of fact, many parts of the frontal cortex are going to be involved in all 3 of these systems because we think as we feel.  
The point is that each system is distinct; they have different feelings, they have different behavior patterns, and I think they each have a different role in human reproduction. I think the sex drive evolved to get us out there looking for really basically anything at all, anything that was remotely appropriate. Romantic love enabled us to focus our mating energy on just 1 mate at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. Attachment evolved to enable us to tolerate this individual, really, at least long enough to raise our children as a team.  
But I believe they are all primary mating drives; I think they vary from one species to another. A rat seems to show attraction for a very brief period of time; human beings can be in love for months or years. These systems certainly vary from one individual to another. Some people have a much higher sex drive than others. Some people fall in love all the time; others do not. Indeed they vary over the life course.  

Interaction of These Systems

The point here is that these 3 brain systems interact and there are many ways in which they interact, but I'm going to stick to just the positive relationship between the sex drive and attraction. You know the feeling, if you've fallen in love -- and everybody I would guess has been in love probably more than once. Suddenly the person that you're in love with becomes intensely sexually attractive to you. Three weeks ago, you didn't notice anything. He or she was a nice person; you liked this person very much. Suddenly, the way he or she moves or smiles at you is intensely sexually attractive. I think that this is at least in part because an elevated activity of dopamine and norepinephrine can stimulate testosterone, the hormone of desire. In short, the biology of romantic love can stimulate lust.Can the reverse be true? Can you be copulating with somebody who's just a friend and then suddenly fall in love with him or her? Not always. Most adults in the Western world have copulated with just a friend and have never fallen in love with him or her. I've got 4 middle-aged friends who either inject testosterone or use testosterone patches; they don't fall in love 36 hours after they've used them. But I do actually have 3 cases of friends who have told me that they have suddenly fallen madly in love with somebody that they were just copulating with as a friend. I don't understand the physiology of this, but I can report that, indeed, an elevated activity of testosterone does stimulate dopamine and norepinephrine. As a matter of fact, it not only stimulates dopamine and norepinephrine, but it suppresses the activity of serotonin, in short creating the ratio of monoamines associated with romantic love. This is one of the reasons that I say to my students: now don't copulate withpeople you don't want to fall in love with because it may just happen to you!  
The bottom line is that serotonin-enhancing antidepressants that negatively affect this sex drive can quite logically also negatively affect the brain circuits for romantic love.  
Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants cannot only potentially inhibit dopamine and norepinephrine, they can also blunt the emotions. This is why people take them; I'm certainly for that. If you're suffering terribly, it's the time to try to blunt the emotions. Nevertheless, they are going to have an effect on the elation of romantic love. Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants also suppress obsessive thinking, which is a very central component of romantic love. There are many examples of how these things are affected by each other. In 1 case collected by Thompson, a 20-year-old single white woman had an eating disorder. She was suffering from recurrent depression, she had attention deficit disorder, and she was taking high doses of serotonin-enhancing medication. When she was asked about the side effects of this, she said, "No, no, I don't have any." Then she said reluctantly to the doctor, "But I find myself wanting more space; there just isn't that much attraction." Romantic love is acentral aspect of human reproductive planning. It enables the human animal to focus courtship energy on avidly pursuing a particular partner and beginning the breeding process. When you inhibit this brain system, you can potentially -- not always -- inhibit the patient's psychologic well being and I think his or her genetic future.  

Evolutionary Inhibitions

Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can inhibit other evolutionarily adaptive mechanisms for mate selection.  
One of them is orgasm; it inhibits orgasm and clitoral stimulation, but let's focus on orgasm. With orgasm, one of the main things that happens is that levels of oxytocin and vasopressin go up enormously in the brain. These are feel-good chemicals. They're associated with social bonding, pair formation, and pair maintenance. So when men and women take serotonin-enhancing medications and fail to achieve orgasm, they can fail to stimulate not only themselves, but their partners as well. This neural mechanism, associated with partner attachment, becomes a failed trigger.From a Darwinian perspective, orgasm also is a primary mechanism by which women unconsciously assess a mating partner. For a long time, anthropologists have thought that this is a bad design; women just don't have an orgasm every time. More recently, we came to realize that. We call it the 'fickle female orgasm' and we regard it now as a very serious adaptive mechanism that enables women to distinguish between those partners who are willing to spend time and energy on them -- those we call Mr. Right -- and those who are impatient or lack empathy and who might not be a good husband and father -- Mr. Wrong. When women take serotonin-enhancing antidepressants that inhibit the orgasmic response, among some of these women you're jeopardizing the ability to assess the commitment level of a partner. Women also use orgasm to assess existing partnerships; women tend to orgasm more regularly with a long-term partner. With the onset of anorgasmia, this can destabilize a match.A good example of this is once again a case study collected by Thompson, involving a 35-year-old married woman. She had recurrent depression and anxiety disorder. She was taking a serotonin-enhancing medication, which diminished her libido, and she had absent orgasm. She once apparently said, "I think I no longer love my husband." Then she switched to an antidepressant that had no side effects; her normal sex drive and normal orgasmic response returned and indeed she decided not to divorce her husband. She was thinking of divorcing him and now they have a small child. In this way, drugs can affect your biologic future. These systems are very old. Orgasm and clitoral stimulation are very primitive ways in which women measure men. Like drugs that blur your vision, serotonin-enhancing medications can potentially blur a woman's ability to evaluate mating partners, to fall in love, and to sustain an enduring partnership.  
These medications also inhibit penile erection in some men. We regard the penis as an internal courtship device; actually we call it an entertainment system, in my business. It is designed to attract and keep women. With no penile erection, a man has less of a chance of doing that. The penis also is regarded as a fitness indicator -- an anthropology term -- because the penis advertises medical health, psychologic health, and physical fitness. When men take serotonin-enhancing medications that produce impotence, the medications can cripple these vital courtship-signaling functions. Penile erection also has antidepressant qualities; this work comes from a friend of mine and his colleagues from 2002.  
The researchers looked at the contents of seminal fluid and, as it turns out, it contains dopamine and norepinephrine, associated with romantic love; oxytocin and vasopressin, associated with attachment; testosterone and estrogen, associated with lust; and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), associated with regular cycling. Without orgasm, men are deprived of these courtship mechanisms. In fact, the same researchers also did a study of seminal fluid and found out that it actually does have regular antidepressant qualities. Those women who were directly exposed to it were less depressed than those who used condoms. I'm not recommending it; I'm simply reporting the data. But when men fail to ejaculate due to antidepressant drugs, they jeopardize their ability to adjust a woman's mood as well as to send important courtship signals. All male animals have evolved a host of courtship devices in order to capture females. Indeed, some of those most importantones can be jeopardized by taking antidepressant drugs.  

Psychologic Inhibitions

Serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can also inhibit psychologic mechanisms for mate choice.  
Motivation, discrimination -- deciding which person walking through a room is just more attractive to talk to -- and one's self-esteem all are important aspects of one's psychologic well being. The most interesting, I think, are the first 2. In the case of motivation, in one study, a 25-year-old man had had some long-term intimate successful relationships with women. He recounted having a panic disorder and taking serotonin-enhancing medications, and reported that he "just stopped dating."  
In another very interesting study, Fisher reported that she was interested in knowing whether serotonin-enhancing medications could actually make a change in unconscious psychologic mechanisms that we use to look at a room of people and decide who is or is not attractive to us. She asked 20 women who were on serotonin-enhancing medications and 20 women who were on no medications to sit in front of a computer and rate the faces of men. Those women who were on the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) rated the male faces as more unattractive and also looked at and appraised the faces for a shorter period of time. I don't know if it's her term or not, but she called it 'courtship blunting.' There seemed to be any number of examples of this. In one case, a 54-year-old man in the healthcare business reported, after using serotonin-enhancing antidepressants, "It's like the lens I use to look at the world has been changed." A 45-year-old married woman said, "It's like being handicapped; like being blind."  
This reads, "Brad, talk to me -- animal to animal." We are animals. As one psychiatrist once wrote: one of the relics of early man is modern man. The brain is built in many ways to aid reproduction and I think we might find many ways in which serotonin-enhancing antidepressants and perhaps many other drugs subtly affect the way men and women discriminate between mates, choose mates, feel romantic love, and feel marital attachment.  

Adaptive Mechanism of Depression and Conclusion

I want to conclude with one more very subtle effect. It's the effect that serotonin-enhancing medications can have on depression. If a patient were going to commit suicide, I'd be the first person to say, "For God's sake, take some medication." I want to repeat again: we are not in the business of saying who should use or who should not use these medications. We're only trying to add to the dialogue some interdisciplinary understanding.  
Evolutionists have now come to begin to think that depression actually has some adaptive features. When you think about it, it's very expensive metabolically and socially to be extremely depressed. Various scientists have offered explanations of why this brain system could suddenly have evolved. Of all of them, the one I want to mention -- because it impressed me most -- was that of an anthropologist, 2 biologists, and a psychiatrist. These researchers noted that depression is very socially and metabolically costly. They reasoned that the costs of depression are probably its benefits, that depression in itself is a clear, honest signal that something is really wrong. In fact, it's an extortionary mechanism by which one sends out the signals of real need to get social support. It also gives insight, as one of my psychologist friends says: it's a failure of denial when you're totally depressed. Indeed, mildly depressed people often make clearer assessments of themselves and others.To paraphrase Aeschylus, with this pain comes wisdom.I believe that masking depression can, at times, and under some circumstances, have serious social and genetic consequences. The classic example is that of the woman who says, "I've been on this medication for several years and I feel much better, but I'm still married to the same abusive alcoholic man." The SSRIs may chemically confine patients to bad relationships as well as hinder the ability to attract and fall in love with a better mate.  
I'm going to say it again: we are not recommending that patients who are seriously psychologically ill refrain from taking serotonin-enhancing antidepressants. Indeed, we're learning more and more about them. Sometimes people say they can contribute to suicide and clearly they can also save lives.  
What we're trying to say is that these medications affect the threshold of other biologic mechanisms and at times can jeopardize unconscious evolutionary mechanisms for mate selection, for romantic love, and for attachment.  
This creates the potential for jeopardizing a patient's personal, social, and genetic future.  
Source: http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/482059

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GANJA VIBES BLOG!

Today marks the 2 year anniversary of the day I registered 'Ganja Vibes" on Wordpress.

happy-2nd-birthday

Terrible 2s?

It's been an amazing ride thus far and we haven't even begun.

I originally started this blog to test the name "Ganja Vibes" for the Cannabis themed adult novelty line I am developing and manufacturing, for your pleasure! Luckily, everyone has loved it and what a driving force it has been.

The long road of education + action while I navigate towards success in manufacturing has been amazing. I've met the most inspiring, intelligent, fun and colorful people through this first part of my journey. I'm so grateful to everyone for every experience. Some of my best friends today are the badasses I've met through travel and Canna culture. I LOVE MY PEOPLE!

Thank you for enjoying Ganja Vibes as a community. I always say I feel like a church right now. Selling a dream of breaking down barriers in people's psyche to help create a more excepting environment.

Sex and weed have changed the world as we know it. Positively, in countless ways...

Would we have so much equality now? Would we have the musical history? Would we have the fashion? Would we have the masses that gather for the sake of peace and love? Would we have the unimaginable art?

There's a bigger picture. Through touching everyone by helping them touch themselves and each other, I'm hoping, we will find so much more of all the wonder and intrigue in the world. Legalization, acceptance, more progress for more peace.

Chits about to get weird- er.

Thank you for staying tuned in!

ez

~HeatherB

Baking Bad: A Potted History of ‘High Times’

The editors of the nation’s most popular pot magazine on its four decades-long fight to end cannabis prohibition.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
October 30, 2013   |    This article appeared in the November 18, 2013 edition of The Nation.
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The High Times staff, circa 2005 (Steven Sunshine)
High Times was conceived in classic outlaw fashion. Founded by a successful pot smuggler and radical ’60s activist named Thomas King Forçade, it was intended as a one-time parody of Playboy, complete with centerfolds of exotic, voluptuous cannabis plants. But that first issue was a runaway hit, selling more than half a million copies and paving the way for what has become a stoner-American institution. In addition to the requisite grow-scene surveys, pot-price appraisals and joint-rolling tips, High Times has published writers like Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg and Truman Capote. It also advocated an end to pot prohibiton at a time when marijuana users were being sentenced to years, even decades, in jail.Forty years later, the magazine has much to celebrate. It has survived the untimely death of its founder, the graying of the counterculture and the dawn of the Internet age, and even some of the laws that created the need for a pro-pot magazine in the first place. It has weathered various government investigations and attacks; founded its annual Cannabis Cup competition in Amsterdam and, more recently, additional Cups in a number of US states, which rank among the biggest marijuana festivals in the world; and published a series of books on everything from cooking with weed to cannabis spirituality. Most importantly, its vision of a day when pot is accepted, even legal, is now proving to be much more than a pipe dream.
We caught up with some of the current and former editors of the self-styled “most dangerous magazine in America” to talk about their role in the long, hard fight for legalization—and their hopes for a cannabis-infused future. Rick Cusick (associate publisher): High Times was founded by Thomas King Forçade, the number-one East Coast marijuana smuggler in the late ’60s–early ’70s. He was a true revolutionary. He came up with the idea of High Times in 1974. Michael Kennedy (general counsel): At the time, I was practicing at an office in a town house that a lawyer and I owned together on East 78th Street. Tom would come in virtually daily and talk about one adventure or another. Tom’s primary activity was flying pot from Jamaica into South Florida, sometimes into Georgia or Alabama. And he was successful at it. It’s why one of the original High Times logos is an airplane—it’s a mock-up of a DC-3, because that’s what he would fly, loaded to the gills with marijuana. When he founded High Times, he founded it with that cash—because at the time, you could take cash to the bank and open up a bank account. So Tom started this magazine with dope money. Rick Cusick: Tom died in 1978. He killed himself, and the memorial was attended by lawyers, pot dealers, rock stars and more lawyers. They wanted to have a special memorial, so they rented the top floor of the World Trade Center so they could be as high as they possibly could. They went to the top of the World Trade Center, and the editors of High Times and Keith Stroup from NORML approached the family and got a small amount of Tom’s ashes. And they took the ashes from the founder of High Times and mixed it in with an ounce of marijuana, and they smoked it on the roof of the World Trade Center. And they took a little bit and tossed it off. So I work for a company that smoked its founder. That’s culture. Michael Kennedy: We were trying to decide how best to subvert the anti-marijuana laws. And one of the ways Tom came up with—and it’s really the seed of genius of High Times—is teaching people how to grow marijuana. Because if, in fact, you can teach people how to grow, and there’s a First Amendment right to teach, they can start growing under any imaginable circumstances—from your aunt’s sewing basket to a drawer in your college dorm. All you need is a paper towel and a little bit of water, and nature will take care of the rest. If everybody who wants to grow can learn how to grow, then there’s no way the government can possibly withstand that subversion. Steve Hager (former editor in chief): After Tom died, Michael Kennedy stepped in and saved the company. I came in several years later.… You can imagine that the magazine, for years, had just been people doing drugs all day long. People would come in for photographs, and the art director would do lines of coke in the art room, and people would be smoking in every corner. It was nitrous balloons; it was… talk about fog. It just couldn’t run like that. I wanted it to be a magazine that changed the perspective people had on pot, because at that time, people thought it was the same as cocaine. And I wanted to draw a line and say, “No, no, no—coke is on this line.” It immediately took off and went from teetering on the verge of collapse to selling the best it ever sold. Michael Kennedy: We started the Cannabis Cup in 1987. Steve Hager went to a half-dozen growers in the Netherlands—we called them “the Dutch Masters”—and said, “We’ll sponsor a Cup here in Amsterdam. Why don’t you bring your very best seeds, your very best buds?” We weren’t too interested in hash or oils back then. Certainly, there were no real edibles or lotions at the time. Steve Hager: At first, we were just sending little skeleton crews of three people, and the company didn’t want to invest money in it, so I didn’t turn it into a public event until the fifth year. And I had this concept that we were going to base all of our ceremonies around 420, which is something nobody had ever heard of. What had happened was, I’d been sitting outside the office in the stairwell—the only place we could smoke a joint at that time; now we probably can’t smoke at all—and my news editor, Steve Bloom, was carrying a flier he’d picked up at a Grateful Dead show in Oakland. It said, “Come to Mount Tamalpais on April 20th at 4:20.” So I’m looking at this paper, and it says that people are going to meet at 4:20 on April 20 at the top of Mount Tamalpais to smoke pot together. And I think this was anemanation, a manifestation of the spiritual powers of cannabis. Calling its tribe to its Passover, to its Sermon on the Mount—it’s our baby infant religion, and it’s forming before our eyes. Michael Kennedy: Today the Cannabis Cup is good branding, quite simply. It allows us to meet the new generation, the young growers. They’re really young and vibrant, God bless ’em. And there’s an entirely new breed of growers who studied agronomy, and studied botany and chemistry, and they are true, scientific twenty-first-century farmers. And they’re developing some of the finest weed imaginable. Steve Hager: It’s a different event now. It’s a corporate event, and it’s not like what I was trying to do. I was trying to do a real spiritual thing, and when you bought your ticket, you were buying into something that charged your spiritual battery, if you were into that. Most people didn’t ever connect to it on that level—but the ones that did, we connected. We had a fun time, and we manifested a lot of incredible magic through that. Michael Kennedy: In the 1990s, we also developed, for a time, a [quarterly] magazine calledHemp Times. We were quite successful with that in terms of selling the magazine, and we even opened a store called Planet Hemp near the East Village. Our problem was that we were too early, because it was almost impossible to get hemp products then.
Dan Skye (executive editor): We were there trying to push this hemp thing alongWe did Hemp Times for four years; we did eighteen issues total. All of us back then thought hemp was really going to open the door and make weed legal, and everything would fall like dominoes. Unfortunately, it didn’t—and what really has done it is medical marijuana. Michael Kennedy: Tom and I talked a lot before he died about what we imagined the future of marijuana would be, but neither one of us caught on early to the real inroad—that would be the medical properties of marijuana. The research had not been done. So what we knew was that it had a high recreational value, and that we loved it and that many people loved it—but we never imagined anything beyond that. So if today, Tom came back from a desert island and saw the Sanjay Gupta show, he’d say, “Wow… that’s my dream.” David Bienenstock (feature writer): For about three years, starting in 2010, we had a stand-alone publication about medical marijuana. Legalization is a huge story, but what we’re finding out about the true medical potential of cannabis is a huge, huge story. Dan Skye: We used to be the bible of marijuana news. You came to High Times to find out about drug war news. And now we have a very successful website. We’ve got a new website director; we got 1 million unique web clicks last month alone. And people want to come to a marijuana festival. The fact that it’s legal for medical use in California, that it’s legal for recreational use in Colorado and Washington—we’ve had these tremendously successful events, the Cannabis Cups. There are Medical Cannabis Cups in places like California and Michigan, and US Cannabis Cups in Colorado and Washington. And I don’t think there’s a trade-off at all. Our magazine’s getting stronger—we’re adding pages. That’s unheard of in this time. Mary McEvoy (publisher): I was just talking to our printer about the next issue. We got an additional sixteen pages. And after that one, we have our bong special, and we’re thinking about going up in pages for that. So I talked to him, and he said, “You’re the only publisher that I’ve talked to in years that is looking for additional paper to put in the magazine.” We’re not hurting advertisement-wise at this point. The whole media world out there is crying in their booze right now, but we’ve been very lucky. Our readers are very loyal, and our advertisers sure get a response from them. Danny Danko (senior cultivation editor): Tons of companies are coming in to advertise. A lot of the vapor-pen companies, a lot of the hydroponics companies that sort of shied away from us years ago because they didn’t want that connection to marijuana, have come around because they’re just not afraid of the stigma anymore. That’s one of the things I think High Times has done a good job of—just removing the stigma of the “lazy stoner.” Instead, we try to show that whether it’s in the entertainment business or sports or wherever, we are everywhere. We are doctors and lawyers; we are throughout society and in every part of it. And I think High Times is one of the things that have reinforced the truth rather than the cliché. Michael Kennedy: The key to High Times’s survival is that I’ve never let High Times break the law. Our clients have broken the law, and our business partners have broken the law, I suppose, and even our advertising people. High Times has survived a lot of grand juries and a lot of inquiries and a lot of attacks from the IRS and what-have-you, but the thing that almost brought us to our knees was in 1989, when the DEA advanced Operation Green Merchant to go after the hydroponics people. All of those advertisers, they were our advertising base. [Federal law enforcement agencies] also kept subpoenaing our subscriber list, and we refused to give it to them. We were threatened with contempt several times. But when they attacked our advertisers and took them out of business—that was the nadir of our existence. And it was really hard to come back. Around that time, the joke around here was that law enforcement was keeping us in business. Every sheriff in the South had a subscription to High Times. The DEA had I don’t know how many hundreds, the FBI… so there were all these subscriptions. Chris Simunek (editor in chief): Are they still spying on us? Well, if you’ve read the headlines recently, they are probably spying on all of us. I tell you, when those headlines broke recently and everyone was so shocked that the government was reading our e-mails, I looked at the whole thing and was like, “I always believed that they were doing this.” So I have always gone forward as if the government is reading everything. Jen Bernstein (managing editor): Are we scared? I think there is always a fear. We went to Detroit and followed every rule in the book. We were at Bert’s Warehouse, which is in downtown Detroit. We were holding a Medical Cannabis Cup, in which we have vendors, and an expo, and seminars, and we provide an open-air smoking area for medical patients in the state of Michigan to come and medicate. The cops came and essentially shut down the smoking area outside. Allowed the expo to continue—they just didn’t want people openly smoking marijuana. And these are legit patients. So, yes, there is a fear, and it’s a fear of us not being able to protect the patients of Michigan. Michigan is not a legal state, so until we have complete legalization, there’s always a risk—because, federally, we are not protected. Chris Simunek: At the beginning, I was working basically with criminals, trying to get them to do pieces for us. Now that’s gotten easier as the laws have changed. But we’re still dependent on a criminal element to get the job done. We don’t consider them criminals—the laws of America make them criminals. So we work hand in hand. And I would say that’s a pretty big difference between us and Forbes, although I guess Forbes probably works with a lot of criminals, too. Dan Skye: You’ll see a lot of hypocrisy in the media world. We don’t get access, even though we’re members of the press like anyone else…. Publicists like to get their clients into High Times, but they don’t want their clients to be seen with marijuana, or don’t want them to talk about marijuana. Especially celebrities—we have to deal with that all the time. I’ve interviewed countless celebrities: Bryan Cranston, Alanis Morissette... I did Oliver Stone a few years back. And very seldom will you get somebody to pose with pot. Woody Harrelson wouldn’t even pose with pot! Alanis Morissette was the first really mainstream person who posed in a pot garden. So that’s a real problem—getting people into our ballpark. We like celebrities, but unless they’re on the cover with pot, like Oliver Stone was, we don’t do it. Chris Simunek: There are some great stars out there that are very pro-pot who have yet to be on the cover. I mean, Rihanna is always Instagramming herself smoking a joint. Zach Galifianakis is pretty cool and forward about it. Those are two I would be interested in…. And I guess you know that Snoop Dogg is still pretty much on top as far as pot-smoking celebrities are concerned. He has managed to maintain his profile for so long and diversify everything he does—products, reality show, pornography, everything from movies to music. His business model, whatever it is, is pretty astounding. He’s a guy that even my dad has heard of, and my dad also knows that he smokes pot. Bobby Black (senior editor): It used to be, back in the day, it was always rock—psychedelic rock in the ’60s and ’70s—that was the music associated with pot. Then hip-hop came out—well, and reggae, of course, because of the Rasta culture—and they embraced pot in a big way. The thing that’s changed now is that I’m noticing pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber really embracing pot. And it’s not that pop stars never smoked weed before; it’s just that now they’re out about it and don’t really care. It’s become so accepted that the new generation is just like, “So what?” Dan Skye: Jennifer Aniston! I think she would sell, because we know that she smokes pot—we’ve heard about it for years. We tried; we got no response. And Miley Cyrus is great. We did a poll a few months back: “What celebrity would you most like to smoke with?” And she scored higher than Bill Maher, which we thought was really kind of funny. Bobby Black: When the magazine started, all throughout the ’70s, sex was an integral part of it. We had beautiful women on the cover. We walk a fine line with it, because we don’t want to be exploiting women. On the other hand, those covers were sexy—and there is nothing wrong with sex. I’ve always stressed this: High Times is about hedonism. But it isn’t about irresponsible, over-the-top hedonism—it’s about enjoying everything life has to offer, and sex is part of that. But the reason we don’t put [former porn star] Jenna Jameson in her bathing suit on the cover anymore is because the sales just weren’t there. Our readers would rather stare at centerfolds of plants—and that’s just the facts we have learned over the years. David Bienenstock: We’ve never promised a cover to anyone, but if a currently pot-smoking prominent politician is interested in the cover, they should definitely get in touch and talk to us about an exclusive. Chris Simunek: What I’ve really wanted for High Times is to have more journalism in general. It could be hard-hitting journalism; it could be gonzo journalism. I just want the magazine to have a good read in every single issue—because, if left unchecked, it will by nature fill up with pot pictures and grow stories and stuff like that. It’s almost like I’m the mom at the head of the table saying, “Everybody’s got to eat their vegetables!” I want to maintain the tradition that we’ve always had of having quality journalism in the magazine. Steve Hager: Have you looked at any of the issues I put out? Because they’re filled with conspiracy stories of deep political events, and incredible forays in counterculture history… and now the magazine just promotes marijuana: “Grow it and smoke it and, now, dab it! And wake up at 7:10 and do some bong hits.” It’s a balls-to-the-wall, marijuana-everythingmagazine. And that’s just making money off marijuana—I don’t think anybody would argue with that statement…. But make money—go, go, go. I’m not anti-capitalist and I’m not anti–big business. That’s not where I’m going to go, but I’m not going to try and stop you. I’m happy with my little magic show here. Chris Simunek: We do have the High Times haters up there. We just did a cover on dabs. “Dabs” is concentrated hash oil, which is created by a volatile chemical process, similar to the way you would create perfume or rosemary oil. It’s controversial because a lot of kids—I don’t know if they are kids—a lot of idiots who don’t know what they’re doing are renting hotel rooms and cooking this stuff up and blowing themselves up the way meth labs used to blow up. It’s a highly controversial new element to the marijuana world. We are covering it, and we’ve told people how to make dabs safely, but there’s an element that thinks we should be the morality police of the marijuana world. And there’s also this whole crunchy-granola aspect of the marijuana subculture which doesn’t want anything to do with that, and so they’re like: “How dare you? Dabs is like hard drugs! Dabs is this, dabs is that.” Then there’s another element that says we should not tell anybody what to do. So we’re never gonna please everybody at the same time, and I think that’s fine. Steve Hager: My generation just smoked joints. The next generation went to bong hits. If you grow up smoking bong hits, you can’t smoke joints, because you need that power. And now it’s dabs. Dabbing’s perfectly cool—dab away. But when the sirens are calling, are you going to be able to pull back, or are you going to crash on the rocks? Because if you crash on the rocks… just be advised. Do I wish my cannabis rituals and other things were still going on? Yeah, but you know what? They are going on. I passed these things down, and people picked up on them, and you see little elements of my rituals all over the cannabis movement. At 4/20, people will be lighting the seven candles of peace. All magic is the same. It doesn’t matter—you can call it religion or whatever you want, but it’s all based on bell, book and candle. These are the elements that are used to manifest prayer and meditation. David Bienenstock: The biggest change in the ten years I’ve been with High Times—not that long ago in political years—is that, back then, people would say, “Why are you working on pot legalization? That’s never going to happen.” And now people say, “Oh, you’re working on pot legalization? That’s inevitable.” So that’s been the huge change. And I think what’s exciting is that the world is coming around to where High Times was at its founding—long before I was involved, or even alive. Chris Simunek: We used to change people’s identities a lot. Back then, when you’re talking to a guy breaking a federal law which is going to land him in jail for quite a few years, I didn’t have any journalistic qualms about saying he came from Alabama when he came from Ohio, you know? I remember being blindfolded in the back of a car and being brought to some growroom in the basement of a guy’s house… that’s how paranoid he was. Now I get people e-mailing me with their full name and address saying, “I want you to come to my 5,000-square-foot house in Colorado—and bring your photographers.” I just think the access has changed, and people aren’t afraid anymore. Jen Bernstein: When I took my job at High Times, I spoke with my parents and explained to them what I was joining. My dad knew what it was and my mom didn’t. But they feel like if it’s meant to be, it will be. And now my dad came with me to the Cannabis Cup and was a worker and got a High Times hoodie. My dad is in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he wears this hoodie that says “Cannabis Cup,” and people stop him and are like, “Oh, did you go to the Cup?” And he’s like, “Yeah, I did. I worked there.” So I think they’re proud of me now, and all their friends know what it is even though they may not smoke pot themselves…. How would your parents take it? Danny Danko: When I started off in the cultivation department, I had to ride in the trunk of a car to go and see some of these growrooms. People were so scared to show me regular-size—well, what I would consider fairly average-size—grows. Now you go and see thesemassive operations in California, Colorado—all over, really—and I never thought I would see the day that people would be walking me on tours of huge, indoor pot-growing facilities that are perfectly legal under state law. It is kind of mind-blowing… but once the dominoes start to fall, they fall so fast it’s hard to keep up. Elise McDonough (West Coast design and production director): After the medical marijuana laws started to pass, especially on the West Coast, more and more people got into making edibles and distributing them through collectives and dispensaries. We’re in an era where people go way beyond the pot brownie. Now you see cannabis in savory sauces, drink mixes, candy bars. You’re just getting better and better edibles, and the thing that’s advancing the industry is lab testing. Before, you couldn’t tell how much THC you’d get in a dose—but now you can test and know exactly how much you’re going to ingest. It’s especially helpful for people who are insomniacs or chronic-pain patients. The difference between smoking and eating pot is that you have a body effect that lasts longer, so if you have back pain, you can get relief for six to eight hours. The first story in High Times about edibles was called “Eat It,” in 1978. That was a story written by a guy who worked as a sailor and traveled around the world and tried edible marijuana in Turkey and Greece. He had a hash candy called majoun, which is hash sautéed in butter with mixed dates and nuts and spices rolled into a ball. It’s like a baklava without filo dough. We also had Chef Ra’s “Psychedelic Kitchen” column, which started in the ’80s. Chef Ra, sadly, passed away several years ago, but we’ve continued the recipe column with different contributing chefs along the way. We do recipes online, and there’s also a recipe in the magazine every month. Bobby Black: I wouldn’t say I consider us “the most dangerous magazine in America.” The most notorious, maybe, but not dangerous. We’ve represented an outlaw and counterculture ethos for so long that, like you say, it’s becoming mainstream now. But what I would also like to say is that we haven’t come to the mainstream; the mainstream has come to us. The same thing is true with civil rights, the revolution in the ’60s, the sexual revolution. Danny Danko: I think that with the Internet, the distinction between mainstream culture and the counterculture is fading. I don’t think there is any one counterculture. That’s always sort of been associated with the hippie movement, which is a part of our culture—but it’s not all of our culture. We reach out to all. Marijuana users are everybody, and we try to reach out to all of them. Rick Cusick: Every year, I go to the Boston Freedom Rally and give a speech. We’re sponsors of the rally. It’s been going on for twenty-four years, and there were over 30,000 people there last year. I was there in 2007 with Keith Stroup from NORML. It was kind of rainy, and Keith said, “You want to smoke a joint?” And I said sure. Then this kid came up to us. We thought he wanted a hit, but he was an undercover cop. He had no idea who we were. So he took us to a tent where they arraigned people. They said, “Step up—what’s your name?” I said, “Rick Cusick.” They said, “Where do you live?” Told ’em. “What’s your Social Security number?” Told ’em. “What do you do?” I said—this was at the time—“I’m the co-editor ofHigh Times magazine.” And the cop looked up and said, “You’re kidding.” I said, “Wait, it gets better!” I slapped Keith on the back and said, “This is Keith Stroup, the founder of NORML and my attorney. And everything we say is on the record.” And they said, “You’re going to write about this?” And I said, “Oh, yeah!” So we got arrested for a joint, and they arrested sixty people that day. Every year, they arrested a quota of about sixty kids under 25—except this year they got a couple of old guys, and it was early in the game. So we went in there, and of the sixty they arrested, fifty-eight settled and paid their fine. We said no. And so what happened was, we got a NORML lawyer, and Dr. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard University—Keith’s friend; I didn’t known him at that point—got involved in what we were doing and started a defense fund that contributed a very good amount of money for us to travel back and forth. And then he got Dr. Charles Nesson of the Harvard Law School, who worked on the Pentagon Papers case, to be our defense counsel. After that happened, we had the dream team of American jurisprudence going after a third of a joint. And it took two and a half years. First, the jury found us guilty, because we were. Then we appealed it. The appeal went all the way to the Appeals Court, which was an incredible experience—very high-flown legal stuff. Everybody came in; it was covered in the papers a bit. Then the Appeals Court upheld the lower court, so we went to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and they refused to hear the case and sent it back down for sentencing. But in the meantime, Massachusetts had decriminalized marijuana—so Keith and I were the last two people sentenced under the old law. And they tried to throw the book at us. The prosecutor said, “I want a six-month suspended sentence, two years’ probation, a $500 fine and fifty hours of community service cleaning up the Boston Common.” And I swear to God, he also asked the judge to prohibit us from entering the Boston Common for two years—“which should keep them from making speeches.” That’s an exact quote. And we looked at each other and said, “Did this guy go to law school?” That’s the First Amendment; it’s the Boston Common! They bled there for the First Amendment, and you’re asking that we be excluded from the fucking Boston Common? And the judge said, “Normally, this is where I go back to my chamber and think about this, but I don’t have to think about this. Everybody stand up. You’re sentenced to jail for one day—equal to the amount of time you were in the custody of the Boston police.” And then it was all over. Michael Kennedy: Things have changed dramatically since we started the magazine. But I, personally, can never feel a sense of vindication, primarily because I am so steeped in the laws inflicted on people. I know that Tom would be buoyant and feel vindicated immediately. But then he would say, “Our job isn’t finished until we get every person who’s in prison under any form of marijuana conviction out.” It’s one of the reasons that High Times hired me. I’m their lawyer, and now I ended up being one of the principals. I’m still basically their lawyer. I’ve done marijuana cases for as long as I can remember, and there are still people who have done twenty years in prison or have life sentences for no violence—just pot. They got life in prison with no possibility of parole. Now that’s very hard to believe. David Bienenstock: I feel great about the changes in the pot world, provided we learn the right lessons. You look at the mainstream and the corporate press, there’s this idea and this rash of stories that now that Wall Street is getting involved, marijuana is legitimate. The idea that the marijuana industry needs to take its ethics lessons from Wall Street is ridiculous. And second of all, it’s really offensive to people who have not just spent their time and energy making this happen, but in many, many cases risked their freedom quite literally. So to see the issue hitting the mainstream is fantastic, but I think we need to learn the right lesson—which is that the counterculture was right about this. Not that Wall Street and big business are going to legitimize it. I think that’s exactly the wrong lesson.

It's International Bacon Day

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San Diego, CA is going hard in the grease for this one...

http://youtu.be/FPTmEvTZzl8

http://www.sdbaconfest.com/

penelope-pig-noseimages-15-redskins-fan-wig-pig-nose-army-hat-creepy-nfl-fans

So celebrate and revel in bacon ecstasy ya'll!

~HeatherB

 

LET FREEDOM RING...

freedom-road-sign The Federal Government is making their place clear (er). We are happy to read the following document released just today: http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/3052013829132756857467.pdf Our favorite line: photo-4 YEAH, YOU LIKELY MISUSED FEDERAL RESOURCES....just like we've yelled for decades now. END PROHIBITION. norml_remember_prohibition_ Our heart goes out to all of our family members, friends and all beings who have been adversely effected by the misuse of the powers that be. Think of all the patients who needed this medicine, would've been cured, found comfort in the worst of times and appetite when going through the thick of it. So many states have legalized....yet there are many more that need to get with the program. Ahem, Texas. (the place of Ganja Vibe's inception) This fight will continue and if the truth shall set you free, then as GOD as my witness.....We Will Win! Skeptics take note. To the commercial public,  the freedom fighters in our nation, who are ballsy enough to come out of the underground, are walking on water. We need you to WAKE UP. Other related links: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-will-not-preempt-state-marijuana-laws--for-now/2013/08/29/b725bfd8-10bd-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPN http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/29/justice-medical-marijuana-laws/2727605/ ~ HeatherB

Marijuana: REM Sleep Cycles And PSTD

How is it that marijuana affects dreams – and can this somehow benefit post-traumatic stress disorder patients? Chances are if you to ask the nearest Stoner… if they are aware of dreaming, the answer will come back a resounding no. Yet if that same marijuana smoker were asked to stop smoking pot for 7 to 14 days, they would again find their slumber state rich with vivid dreams… sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Its one thing for the average pot head to make that observation after years of smoking, it’s another to try and find any psychological research based on scientific studies.

As sure as there is day and night… the human condition has grown dependent on a good restful night’s sleep. Unfortunatelywhen that sleep, and its four stages are interrupted for any reason, the outcomes can be less than desirable. The normal daily ebb and flow of sleep and slumber is called a circadian sleep rhythm. Many species aside from humans bow before the circadian sleep rhythm master: dogs, cats, rats and bats all must succumb to the powers of a restful night’s sleep, should they hope for a productive tomorrow.

While sleep appears to be a rather reflexive activity, at least to us, the mind utilizes this time to processes the day’s activities. In studies, sleep volunteers have been shown through the use of an electroencephalogram [EEG] — the different cycles of sleep which occurs on a nightly basis and how the depth of your sleep affects your next day’s productivity. As scientists have noted, each stage of sleep becomes increasingly deeper and sounder, and is repeated several times within an evening’s rest. When the sleeping volunteers were awoken during the REM section of their sleep cycle, all test subjects reported having vivid dreams.

So the obvious question becomes… If dreams only occur during REM sleep — and REM sleep is adversely affected by marijuana smoke, can smoking marijuana cure post-traumatic stress disorder?

There are many scientific research papers which point to use of marijuana’s cannabinoids as a potential memory suppressant in the treatment of PTSD, specifically with the THC cannabinoid. As scientist gaze into the future of PTSD and the THC compound found in cannabis. It is believed that THC may have the curing properties so desperately sought by those that suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is the report of an open label clinical trial to evaluate the effects of  Nabilone (a synthetic cannabinoid) , used on treatment-resistant nightmares in patients diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methods: Charts of 47 patients diagnosed with PTSD and having continuing nightmares in spite of conventional antidepressants and hypnotics were reviewed after adjunctive treatment with nabilone was initiated. These patients had been referred to a psychiatric specialist outpatient clinic between 2004 and 2006. The majority of patients (72%) receiving nabilone experienced either cessation of nightmares or a significant reduction in nightmare intensity. Subjective improvement in sleep time, the quality of sleep, and the reduction of daytime flashbacks and nightsweats were also noted by some patients. The results of this study indicate the potential benefits of nabilone, a synthetic cannabinoid, in patients with PTSD experiencing poor control of nightmares with standard pharmacotherapy.

With the mounting proof showing support for medical marijuana as a treatment for PTSD continues to grow, the Department of Veterans Affairs finally decided that the scientific evidence was too strong to ignore. And back in July, 2010, finally gave in to common sense and scientific evidence. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs then made clear that it would permit certain war veterans the use of medicinal pot so long as they lived in a medical marijuana state, had received a doctors recommendation to smoke medical marijuana and were currently enrolled in a state approved program.

While marijuana continues to be classified as a schedule 1 narcotic under federal law, the newly adopted guidelines will potentially allow for doctors at hospitals and clinics to utilize medicinal cannabis; bringing marijuana back into the pharmacopeia of – ‘pain treatment plans’ offered to the vets which suffer from PTSD and the nightmarish dreams which accompany them.

Source: Marijuana.com

Marijuana: REM Sleep Cycles And PSTD | Marijuana.com.

Return to innocence

426770_10151096787147488_796553968_n People always gripe and complain about getting older. It's true getting older can be something of an arduous task. With the proper diet/ nutrition, exercise and fervor for life, getting older doesn't have to look like it used to in the days of cigarettes and booze at every turn, even in the office place. At times libido has been known to suffer from old age or even just mature age. Again, with proper bodily care what's left to overcome is mental blockades which are generally gained over time from negative experiences. Just like a daily skin regimen involving...PRODUCTS...a sexual refinement regimen can be utilized to revamp or RESEX anyones life. The current state of our world, when is comes to sex, has become a wide open playing field. You can fuck who you want, virtually when you want, how you want....if you want?. Enter into any "sex shop" or peruse any online adult novelty store and it's all at your finger tips. Even the leading condom brand, Trojan, has joined the ranks of sex toy manufacturers abound. Right now I can look over to my nightstand and find an amazing array of pleasure products. Yes, I am a sex toy designer and yes I do "research" to find what I think the world needs to spice up their lives and regain that youthful innocence which we all long for once past the age of, now a days roughly 28. It all began with a healthy love of human connection and a wild curiosity of what our bodies are capable of when it comes to pushing the boundaries of winning pleasure. Thanks Charlie Sheen, an orgasm is a grand moment of WINNING! Returning to innocence is something to me that sounds like we would be able and allowed to explore, without judgement or shame, what ever boundaries we think we have with regard to where the human body, the human spirit and the kundalini meet. Since we love to attach products to any action or intent, as we humans do, pleasure products are here and readily available to anyone excited to reawaken that innocence. Think of them as the board games of the bedroom, the princess tiaras and boas of the seduction wonderlust, the racquets and balls of our courts ie where ever you like to "get down". Dusts, gels, lubes, finger paints, pasties, ropes, swings, spankers, powders in all flavors, temperatures, colors and beyond.....it's a wonderland of sensual fun! These are not limited to partner play alone....take your time when breaking down your barriers and returning to your innocence. Play with your products alone to get acquainted. Most insecurity occurs because of discomfort or distrust of self for one reason or another. Be caring and considerate to yourself and your partner. Laugh in the bedroom WITH each other or alone, it's the best way to break the ice. So often I've had partners that never want to separate because I am "in the moment", unafraid and candid. No matter whether there's a slip up.....no, not up the butt!....we aren't talking about that right now...or what would seem to be a mishap while exploring, it's all in fun and for the sake/ in the name of pleasure. So go ahead and HAVE FUN! Don't even hold back if you have the slightest curiosity, go with it and see where your real boundaries lie beyond the pretense. (so many puns I can barely stand it!) Think about it, when you were young and beginning to learn about everything...ANYTHING...NOTHING...it was all OK, because, "you are young". As time and all the media has shown us, no one really grows up. We are all just big ass children roaming around with lots of allowances and responsibilities getting by and making the most of the lives we're given. Use some of that money to invest in your pleasure chest, expand your repertoire while ultimately gaining more satisfaction! http://youtu.be/xsR2-Tpsqqc
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