Digital cannabis shock horror

OK, it’s the silly session – the time of year when “real” news stories are a bit thin on the ground and so all sorts of things get reported which would normally be dismissed. So perhaps it’s no surprise to hear of a new craze sweeping teenage kids in America – where else? – which parents need to be worried about: Digital drugs.

Take this report from American TV channel “NEWS9 Oklahoma City”

It’s not the only such report either, the for example Hindustan Times reported

The latest ‘drugs’ that keep kids on a high are digital. MP3s and Wired reports are keeping the young generation on a high, called “i-dosing.” In fact, just by putting on headphones and listening to music or rather “a droning noise,” it is said that the user can experience effects similar to those of cocaine, marijuana, peyote and opium.

This report concerns the officials that i-dosing may act as a gateway drug to actual drugs. The most agitating issue is how can one know if the user is simply i-dosing or just listening to a cool track.

All this has come about because a company has been set up to sell these downloads as a legal way to experience prohibited drugs. The company is called “I-doser” and its website is quite blatant about what the product is claimed to do and just what the sub-culture it’s aimed at is. The site not only sells the digital drugs, but also drug use paraphernalia and “legal high” alternatives to the real thing, it’s aimed straight at the stupid druggie market, which of course can only happen because of the huge demand and interest that exists in this sort of thing:

Yes, you too can become an I-doser dealer. No wonder the drug warriors are panicking! Actually, this is beginning to look just a little bit like a con, and that’s certainly what the UK’s Telegraph’s Tom Chivers thought of it:

There have been some hilarious reports going around on the internet about a new drug scare in American schools, and – because we lack any form of originality in our mass hysteria on this side of the pond – I’d bet the Northern Rock bailout to a euro that we’ll soon see it over here. It’s called i-dosing, the “digital drug”.

The “new craze” of digital drugs is seen as a threat to teens because it might introduce them to the idea of getting high – as if they needed something to put the idea into their heads – and thus to taking real drugs. Worse, all you need to do this is the sort of technology every teenager has these days, things like  ipods, computers, internet connections or mobile phones. Of course, along with hoodies such technology scares older people anyway, so there is lots of scope for a shock horror news story here.

So first, what actually are “digital drugs” and more importantly do they work?

Tom Chivers gets it wrong in his blog when he claims

The idea, as I understand it, is the rather timeless one of sensory deprivation.

It’s not anything of the sort, indeed there is a very interesting psychology behind it. The technology isn’t new, it’s been around for a long time, actually having been discovered in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove according to wikipedia. Nothing was done with the discovery for a long time however until it became used as a meditation aid. One of the most established concerns offering the treatment is The Monroe Institute (TMI) which offers courses which promise:

Your first highly experiential trek, the The Gateway Voyage, takes you on an incredible six-day intensive adventure with like-minded explorers. Participate in the evolution of human consciousness  and realize your own true destiny!

Which sounds a bit like a drug experience to be honest – a “trek” is, after all, a sort of trip.

What it actually consists of is known as “Binaural sound”  – “binaural” means “two sounds”, the sounds consists of a of tones. Tones are pure musical notes consisting of a single frequency with no harmonic content, on an oscilloscope they look like this:

The important thing about sine waves (which is what this type of tone is called) is that it is impossible to tell where it’s coming from if you hear it because the sound contains no clues as to it’s point of origin and will seem to fill the room. It’s the sort of sound a tuning fork makes if you’re familiar with that.

What the Binaural recordings do is to present two different tones, one to each ear. The tones sent to each ear are close, but not quite the the same frequency and they vary, which means they go in and out of phase at various rates. This trace shows the left ear signal at the top, the right at the bottom.

Click for a bigger image.

These tones merge in and out of a background sea of white noise – hiss – gradually changing as they do so. So what you do is to put headphones on, go somewhere you won’t be disturbed and just listen to the recording at a comfortable sound level.The changing sounds make the brain think things are happening and it does things as a result. This is tricking the brain into instinctive reactions which it does in response to outside events. Because in the real world these sound wave patterns can only exist given certain environmental conditions you will experience things in the sound that aren’t actually happening.

Different patterns of tone variations are claimed to produce effects that mimic different drugs or as TMI would have it, allow you to Participate in the evolution of human consciousness and realize your own true destiny!

The Wikipedia article linked to above has an interesting description of how all this works and the effects it has on the brain.

Binaural beats may influence functions of the brain besides those related to hearing. This phenomenon is called frequency following response. The concept is that if one receives a stimulus with a frequency in the range of brain waves, the predominant brain wave frequency is said to be likely to move towards the frequency of the stimulus (a process called entrainment).  In addition, binaural beats have been credibly documented to relate to both spatial perception & stereo auditory recognition, and, according to the frequency following response, activation of various sites in the brain.

This is sounding even more like drug-type effects, after all what drugs do is to change the flow of brain messenger chemicals which affect perception. By influencing the brains perception then it’s reasonable to assume the natural balance of these messenger chemicals will be altered, so we’ve achieved a drug induced state without actually taking any drugs. A whole can of worms has opened up here, if it’s possible to achieve a form of consciousness changing through this method, is it indeed akin to taking a drug? If so, is it a bad thing? The ethos of abstinence based drugs policies would seem to dictate it is of course, intoxication is, in and of itself, supposed to be “bad”. In which case perhaps they now need to start banning such things as i-pods in case teens are sitting there listening to binaural tones instead of commercial pop pap.

The big question is “does it work”? Well, the internet being the internet of course these virtual drug “doses” are very easy to find so in the interests of investigative reporting this blog writer sat down, cat on lap, to self administer a low dose of MP3 digital cannabis. The result was interesting indeed and – in my experience – it certainly sort of worked. The resulting effect I would class as more than a slight level of “stonedness” and, whilst it’s been a few years since I last tried the real thing, it did remind me of it in many ways. My experience is that this does indeed work and in the same way as instant coffee is a bit like the freshly ground stuff, the claims are true.

It’s only fair to balance that report with the experience of someone else who mailed me to report

I did this stuff 15 years ago – I did not have any significant experience

So there’s only one way to find out really, to see if you can get digitally stoned right click this link and download yourself 60Mb of MP3 binaural sound, plug yourself in and listen to the whole thing without interruption and decide for yourself and do let us know what happens by positing a comment below. It is fair to warn that it’s not a good idea to drive after listening to this download.