So, a few years ago, I was in LA to lead a workshop.  My colleague and I came in a couple of days early to make sure everything was ready….it was, and we were getting bored.  What better way to spend the afternoon than to walk down Venice Beach. As we were trying to decide what to do that night, some guy shoved some pamphlets in our hands.  We took a look — free tickets to the taping of Comedy Central’s The Man Show (Starring Jimmy Kimmel & Adam Corolla).  As if we needed any more incentive, the tickets included FREE BEER!

So, we went and it was mostly entertaining.  It was pretty interesting to see how the show was made…and we got a couple of beers too.  When we left, there was a group of pretty obnoxious people doing obnoxious things, obviously drunk.  Only one problem…the FREE BEER was non-alcoholic!  Yeah, so these idiots got drunk on N/A beer…definitely not from Wisconsin!

So, what is the point of this story?

Did you hear?  Teenagers can get high on the Internet for free.

The web was bombarded today with stories about teenagers finding a new way to get high….with “music.”  It is called I-Dosing and it is all the rage (well, at least in Oklahoma).

At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.

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“Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places,” Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told News 9.

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Oklahoma’s Mustang Public School district isn’t taking the threat lightly, and sent out a letter to parents warning them of the new craze. The educators have gone so far as to ban iPods at school, in hopes of preventing honor students from becoming cyber-drug fiends, News 9 reports.

Here is the report:

Better be careful, or your kids might end up like this:

If it sounds too crazy too be true…because it is.  It didn’t take much digging to find that I-dosing is a bunk. It is just a new way to separate teenagers from disposable income…while letting them feel like they are getting away with something.

From Psychology Today

In 1839, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that two constant tones, played at slightly different frequencies in each ear, cause the listener to perceive the sound of a fast-paced beat. Calling this phenomenon “binaural beats,” Dove helped launch two centuries of legitimate research and, as is almost always followed by exciting empirical study, money-grabbing pseudoscience.

First, the facts: Binaural beat therapy has been used in clinical settings to research hearing and sleep cycles, to induce various brain wave states, and treat anxiety.

But there are more controversial (dare I say dubious?) claims associated with binaural beats: Increased dopamine and beta-endorphin production, faster learning rates, improved sleep cycles, and yes, if you dig around less scientific communities like, oh, MySpace, you’ll find kids telling each other that “dude, those beats get you like totally high.”

If you’ve wandered through a Brookstone or Sharper Image store in your local shopping mall and noticed sleep therapy or “brain-controller” devices for sale, that’s just an upper middle class, “I need to stop thinking about my 401(k)” version of the same digital drug that the new crop of seedy i-dosing websites are offering to teens.

And from LiveScience…

However, the parents shouldn’t worry, as the music almost certainly does not cause a high, or encourage future drug use, said Harriet de Wit, the principle investigator of the University of Chicago’s human behavioral pharmacology lab.

Although experiments show that the expectation of getting high can enhance the symptoms associated with drugs, even when someone takes a placebo instead, no sound or music could trigger the exact pathways activated by specific drugs like PCP or Quaaludes, de Wit said.

Yeah, so just like those folks getting drunk on N/A beer, these kids are getting stoned on music.  It isn’t happening…not even on Venice Beach.