Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Saturday, April 21, 2012

HCR -- Psychedelic Drugs at the End of Life

By John Ballard


Anybody who ever got stoned knew this, but science is finally catching up.



22psychedelics-articleLarge[1]...Sakuda learned of a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin � an active component of magic mushrooms � to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob�s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 � (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) � the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects� anxiety and depression about their impending deaths.



The article is nearly four thousand words long. Go read it and make up your own commentary. 



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1 comment:

  1. RaySApril 21, 2012 at 8:02 AM

    The banning of even experimental use of LSD has cost society a lot. It's not only beneficial for folks with terminal illnesses, it can be used in treating alcoholism. I suspect it might also be useful for other psychological problems. With with the current federal policy, we may never know. Hopefully, some Europeans may be a little more rational. It seems like scientists are able to research with psilocybin, so there is some hope for sanity.

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