Nitrous oxide

• The jury sent a message loud and clear to United Brands and the entire nitrous oxide distribution industry:  Stop targeting children and young adults.
• The Simon Law firm in St. Louis, recognized as one of the "winningest firms in the United States" by The National Law Journal.
• The Simon Law Firm has earned over $1 billion in verdicts and settlements nationwide since its founding in 2000.
• View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jury-holds-nitrous-oxide-distri...
  SOURCE The Simon Law Firm, P.C.

• Its links and interactions with climate change are underestimated, and any policy to address either in isolation will miss the mark.
• It’s impossible to take effective action against global warming without addressing our impact on the rest of the living world, and vice versa.

Fossil carbon, living carbon

• This requires that we adopt a two-pronged plan, aimed both at cutting down our reliance on both fossil and living carbon.
• There is no way to achieve carbon neutrality without a profound transformation in the use of living resources, to ensure the reflux of agricultural emissions and better protection of carbon sinks.
• For living carbon, we need to reinvest in the diversity of ecosystems to reduce agricultural emissions and protect carbon sinks as part of a bioeconomy.

From adding to subtracting

• They have all involved adding new energy sources to a system initially based on the use of biomass.
• Lowering emissions is not a matter of adding decarbonised sources to the energy system.
• Pricing carbon from fossil fuel use is a key way to reflect the increasing scarcity of the atmospheric capacity to store carbon.
• As the “gilets jaunes” protests in France showed, fossil carbon taxation without redistribution to the most vulnerable poses more problems than it solves.
• While fossil carbon taxation accelerates the energy transition, negative carbon taxes – in other words, fossil fuel subsidies – delay it.

Investing in the diversity of living beings

• Everything depends on what has been achieved on the second front of the transition, that of living carbon, the source of a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
• Agro-climatic transformation means finding ways to reinvest in biological diversity, in other words, in the abundance of living things.
• But the price of CO2 does not reflect the value of this diversity.
• In France, for example, the CO2 storage capacity of forests has been divided by three since 2005, mainly due to climatic factors.

The key issues of agriculture and food

• Depending on the techniques used, farming systems may themselves release carbon into the atmosphere (deep ploughing, draining of wet soils, etc.)
• or, on the contrary, store it in living soils (conservation agriculture, agroforestry, etc.).
• As in the case of energy, the agroclimatic transition implies, on the demand side, that we consume smarter and less.
• The use of food rations might be one way of achieving this, according to the recommendations of the world’s health authorities.

Remembering the ocean

• are altering marine biodiversity, a crucial component in the storage of CO2 by the oceans.
• Protecting the ocean sink is vital to stabilise tomorrow’s climate: it is estimated that the continental biosphere contains four times more carbon than the atmosphere.

• "Too often the result is neglected dental," says Dr. Douglas Ng, with Nipomo Family Dentistry , "however, there are several ways to overcome anxiety about visiting the dentist."
• Dental anxiety can be a significant obstacle for many people, but it doesn't have to prevent getting the necessary dental care.
• "Two very important tips are to practice good oral hygiene habits and to work with a dentist you trust," says the Nipomo family dentist .
• Finding a dentist you trust and feel comfortable with can make all the difference when it comes to overcoming dental anxiety.

• Whether seeing the world through the eyes of a toad is an experience worth having is an open question.
• Toad juice (or bufotenine, its active ingredient) is currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit usually in smokable form.
• Mike Tyson, Hunter Biden and Joe Rogan credit it with life-changing insights that years of amphibian-free therapy could not provide.
• Review: Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind – Mike Jay (Yale University Press) Psychedelics are back in the news.

The early psychonauts

• Jay excavates a much deeper and more interesting history of early chemical adventurers.
• In the 1880s, for example, Sigmund Freud self-administered cocaine to test whether it could induce euphoria and recharge the cerebral battery as earlier psychonauts had suggested.
• Chastened by his colleague’s descent into a vortex of abuse, he set cocaine aside and airbrushed it from his life story.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: peyotes in suburbia – the secret world of Sydney's psychoactive cacti growers

Substances and society

• Much of Jay’s book lays out an absorbing history of psychoactive substances, but it is also rich with insights on the broader societal implications of substance use.
• Once an expansive category, it contracted when “medications” escaped into therapeutic legitimacy, leaving the remaining substances stigmatised and criminalised.
• More recently, psychedelics have attempted the same manoeuvre, trying to shed the taint of abused drugs to become seen as morally impeccable.
• Psychedelics have been stereotypically whiter than the substances against which the American war on drugs has primarily been fought, disproportionately targeting minority communities as a result.

Psychonautics and psychology

• Many early psychonauts were artists, writers and philosophers, but influential psychologists and neurologists were also well represented, notably Freud, James and, decades later, Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary, a buttoned-down academic researcher before he turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
• These three writers all found inspiration in their experiences of intoxication, although Freud backed away from his own.
• Their explorations were supported by approaches to psychology that centred the study of subjectivity.
• William James worked at a time when subjective experience was central to the nascent field of academic psychology.
• New psychoactive substances – such as amphetamines, ecstasy and LSD – were synthesised during this period, but the tradition of self-experimentation had died within psychology.