In this New York Times story about energy drinks and their relation to risky behavior behavior among adolescents, one commenter says something rather interesting about "gateway candy." In his opinion, the kids who like the crazy, ultra-hot, ultra-sour candy grow up to be the risk takers and drug addicts, while the sedate chocolate and caramel lovers become the solid citizens. He's kind of joking, but it's kind of true.

In fourth grade, my friend Alex and I would make pilgrimages to the Toot Sweets in Northgate Mall, where I discovered the painful pleasures of holding an Atomic Fireball in my mouth as long as I could, the cinnamon heat filling my sinus cavity and making my eyes water. Not long after I got heavy into Warheads, eating so many the inside of my mouth would peel and I wouldn't be able to eat for days. Then I'd do it all again a few months later. In middle school, my friends and I would actually snort Pixy Stix and Kool Aid powder at parties to get a "sugar high" (incredibly gross, doesn't work).

And yeah, I grew up to be a rock climbing, speeding ticket-getting, "oh, I'm not really worried about malaria" kind of risk taker.

So what about you - what were your favorite candies as kids, and do you think your choices predicted your adult personalities?

Remember when students took apples to their teachers?

Yeah, me neither.

Whatever that whole thing was about, there's a new way for students to bribe their way to an A -- cookies, and not just a nice batch of chocolate chip cookies, but cookies laced with marijuana.

Apparently, a high school senior in Wilmington, North Carolina baked cookies made from dough that had been mixed with marijuana. The student's Spanish teacher ate one of the cookies, and claims to have hallucinated, experienced an increased heart rate, and higher blood pressure. The teacher might have been mistaken except that the student actually referred to the cookies as "weed cookies."

The student has been expelled from school.

So much for bribing the teacher for grades.

In old movies and cartoons, it was common to see someone use a cake to smuggle a file, which they could use to break themselves out, into an inmate at the local prison. At the cartoon end, the file could be replaced with anything from dynamite to a jackhammer, as the characters didn't have to be particularly subtle to get themselves out of the slammer. Things have to be done more subtle for those who want to smuggle things into prisons in real life, but food can still play a roll. A prison guard at Leflore County jail in Mississippi was arrested after he was caught smuggling in money and marijuana in a large pile of mashed potatoes (That green stuff? Those are just chives...) in at lunch time, when an unidentified woman dropped them off for him. His undoing was a food preference issue, not being careless with the contraband itself. The thing that made investigators suspicious was that the officer said that he didn't eat potatoes and couldn't explain why he was getting such a large portion of them delivered to him at work.

When it comes to chocolate, there are two types of people: cravers and noncravers. It is interesting to note this because, unlike the vast majority of foodstuffs, people feel very strongly about their love of chocolate and often seem to find it to be "incredible" that not everyone loves the stuff.

Those who crave it experience an unusual reaction just from looking at it. A new study shows that simply looking at chocolate can activate the pleasure centers in a brain of a chocolate-lover. In fact, the part of the brain that is involved in drug addiction, the ventral striatum, turned on in response to the images, though noncravers did not have any activity in this part of the brain. Not surprisingly, when the viewing was combined with a taste of chocolate, their reaction (within the pleasure centers of the brain) was very strong. Noncravers also did not report that tasting the chocolate was as pleasant as the cravers did.

No on yet seems to have any idea as to why some crave chocolate and others don't, but some scientists say that the results of this study, indicating a clear desire-reward reaction to chocolate, could help "people change their diets or control cravings" for chocolate and possibly other foods. But when it comes to chocolate, who would want to?

As a general rule, when participating in some sort of illicit activity, it is best to do it in secret. This is why binge eaters keep boxes of cookies stashed in their cars and bedside tables, and drug users don't usually walk down the street offing to share with passers-by. Similarly, it is not a good idea to, say, put those drugs into burgers at the restaurant where you work - especially not if you are going to serve those burgers to police officers.

This was the lapse in judgment suffered by three Burger King employees in New Mexico. The officers noticed that something was amiss after a few bites of burger and used a field testing kit to determine the source of the problem. The trio was arrested for aggravated battery on an officer (a felony) and possession of marijuana.

There is also a video available that corresponds with the story, if you want to see more.

Pounding that six-pack of Diet Coke do nothing but bloat you? Does it feel like someone replaced your usual brew with decaf? You could try any number of energy drinks out there, but those don't seem to do much except make your stomach turn over. You need more! More caffeine! More energy! More attitude!

More of a drug-like effect?

Apparently, the latest energy drink to hit the fast and furious market already filled with the likes of Monster, Red Bull, and Rockstar boasts the ultimate high -- one that feels like a cocaine high. Cocaine Energy Drink doesn't contain any cocaine, but with 280 mg of caffeine, it promises the "highest energy content of ANY energy drink on the market today! 350 percent greater than The Bull!"

As you would expect, drug experts, nutritionists, and parents are alarmed. However, James Kirby, the inventor of the drink, says that it does not glamorize nor promote drugs. He said, "Maybe this can help by making parents and kids not afraid to talk about drugs."

Uh, excuse me, Mr. Kirby? He must have been on something when he said something as stupid as that.

It's no secret that certain prescription drugs definitely result in unwanted weight gain -- I put on 60 pounds in six weeks once. It came off easily once I demanded that my physician address the issue and take it seriously. Why treat a serious disease in such a way that one doesn't care about nutrition or longevity?

While we at Slashfood aren't here to give medical advice, we can speak from our own experiences. Based on the link above, the best ways to combat weight gain that is a side effect of a prescription medication are to: 1) drink lots of water, 2) try, try, try to avoid bad fats, and 3) go easy on carbohydrates that provide little nutritional value. As always, you are in charge of your body and what goes into it.

A public toilet in Deepdale, Lancashire in the UK is probably not the best choice of buildings for a restaurant to be located, even if the building (described as "crumbling") has not been actively used as a restroom for a decade. And yet the city has just ruled that the building can be converted into a Japanese-pagoda styled takeaway restaurant.

The reason that they want to turn the space into a restaurant - two different people have tried before - is that it is just outside the Deepdale stadium and such a location could do very good business from sports fans. Both previous attempts failed because residents have been opposed to the change on the grounds that a restaurant would create litter and attract vermin. This is particularly ironic considering that the eyesore has been a haven for prostitutes and drug addicts in the past.

I think I'd rather have a takeaway restaurant but, hey - that's just me.

The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service is seeking to increase the number of substances that could be used on cows that are to be deemed organic. CattleNetwork.com has a list of all eight substances, most of which are used to combat maladies common to feedlot cattle. The list includes bismuth subsalicylate, the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol, which would be used for stomach ulcer relief, as well as poloxalene, used to keep cattle from getting bloated. Both bloating and ulcers are often the result of a corn-heavy diet that grass-eating cows aren't used to. NewsTarget.com also reports on the proposed changes, but with a bit more of a slant than CattleNetwork.

Researchers have recently identified a group of chemicals believed to be responsible for grapefruit's meddling effects on some medications. For a long time, flavonoids were thought to be the culprit, but new research from UNC at Chapel Hill suggests that substances called furanocoumarins may be to blame. Furanocoumarins seem to make certain medications enter the bloodstream faster, which can make dosages unpredictable and cause unwanted side effects. Researchers say that furanocoumarin-free grapefruit juice produced none of these effects in test subjects. Aside from the possibility of marketing such juice, furanocoumarins, once studied further, might be of some use in moderating how fast drugs are absorbed by the body.

[Photo: Nick Vagnoni]

At the end of last year, Nick posted about Coca Sek, a soft drink that was being produced by the Nasa community, indigenous people to southern Colombia. The carbonated, citrus-flavored soft drink is made from coca leaves, the same coca leaves that are processed with solvents and other chemicals to produce cocaine. However, the narcotic form, cocaine, is foreign to the Nasa people, for whom the coca leaf is sacred. Nasa people consume coca leaves by simply chewing them and in the form of food and tea.

Despite controversy with respect to indigenous peoples' rights, drugs, economies, Coca Sek sales are gaining ground. What was initially a production volume of 3,000 bottles a week has almost tripled. Governments are backing off the Nasa people who are claiming sovereignty, the Nasa people are trying to "mainstream" coca leaves by promoting their pain-killing, nutritive, and spiritual benefits. Additionally, the producers of Coca-Sek are paying a higher price for coca leaves - about $15/bag of leaves - which is higher than what drug traffickers offer. That makes Coca-Sek an effective weapon in the war on drugs because "each leaf that goes to making the drink is one leaf less for the narcos."

Still, I highly doubt that Coca Sek will ever make it to the US.

British supermarket chains, such as Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Waitrose, are rethinking their pork supplier. The Polish pig farms that produced much of the supermarket pork products have been condemned for "'appalling' animal welfare practices."

The farms in question are in Poland and have been run by Animex, a subsidiary of the American company Smithfield Foods, since 2002. An undercover investigation revealed industrial factory farms, conditions where hundreds of pigs were crammed into light-less barns with dead companions rotting underfoot. The investigation also found that "powerful cocktails of drugs," including a cocktail of antibiotics that is banned or considered to be a growth-promoter in other countries. One such drug is Tylbian 20%, a form of the growth promoting drug Tylosin, which was banned by the European Union in 1999. Local residents showed investigators large open-air cesspits of pig waste and farm detritus that included syringes and needles.

Waitrose has already pulled the products supplied by this producer. No wrong-doing has been shown on the part of Smithfield Foods and a Smithfield representative denied knowledge of such conditions, assuring the public that it would investigate thoroughly.

In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers discovered that grapefruit juice increased the potency of a blood pressure drug they were testing. The pairing came about after they tried to use the juice to mask the taste of the alcohol; the trial was held to uncover potential side effects when the alcohol was combined with the drug. The scientists were startled, but had difficulty proving why the grapefruit juice had such an effect. According to the New York Times, studies done on grapefruit juice have concluded that it sometimes interferes with an enzyme, CYP 3A4, which can reduce the potency of many drugs or help them pass out of the body faster. This means that the body might receive more of an impact from a given drug if it is taken with grapefruit juice.

Grapefruit juice does not always produce this effect, however. It interacts with CYP 3A4 in the intestines, so it does not effect injected drugs, only those taken orally. It also is very unpredictable. Different people have different amounts of CYP 3A4 in their intestines and different glasses of grapefruit juice will react differently. It is most likely to produce potentially harmful effects with cholesterol-lowering drugs and SSRIs, like Prozac, which is used to treat depression. The best thing to do is to avoid grapefruit juice if your doctor recommends it.

I finally finished reading the last half of the last chapter of Ruth Reichl's memoir of being the restaurant critic for the New York Times, Garlic and Sapphires. Let's not get into why, despite the book being very light, fast, and easy to read, it took me a good six months from the time I started to finish it. I have moved on to my next late-night read, The Devil's Picnic by Taras Grescoe, which couldn't be a more drastic 180 degrees in style than a book could be.

The book is basically a one year trip with the author in search of "forbidden fruit" - those fruits that are highly sought after but difficult to obtain, and oftentimes deadly either because they are physically harmful, or they're illegal in the countries where they are found. Grescoe tries everything from 186-proof Norwegian moonshine, to poppy-seed crackers that are banned as "narcotics" in Singapore, to bull's testicles stewed in garlic and gravy. Basically, this guy is like a coked-up Tony Bourdain.

I've just started the book and so far, love it. I hope I make it out alive.