The recent shooting on Harvard's campus stinks like a drug deal gone bad, and there are text messages to prove it. A recent article in the Crimson, who have actually been kind of awesome in covering the scoop, details how text messages recovered from victim Justin Cosby's phone threw up some High Times red (green?) flags. A Harvard student, likely the asshole who landed Justin at the scene of the crime confirmed the suspicions.

The May 5 message appears to be directed specifically to students. “Happy cinco de mayo too all my peoples &congrats on another skool year behind,” it begins. “got some crazy jak herrer bud n some caliMIST best of the best and still those 50s.”

Yes, you non-Brown students. "jak herrer bud" and "caliMIST" refer to strains of marijuana. The text from April 20 provides more hints:

“This text goes too all my peoples happy 420,” it reads. “Im gud allday today just hit me up asap stuffs gunna b goin fast.”

An IvyGate executive meeting hours before these findings speculated that the shooting was clearly a drug deal gone bad. Justin Cosby was not a Harvard student and had no apparent connections with the Harvard community. The Kirkland House basement—read "ask no questions land"—also makes for a perfect swap spot. And the shooting? No brainer.

It should be noted that Justin Cosby, a graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, succumbed to his injuries after the shooting Monday. His death is not funny. In fact, it's fairly terrifying.

So how 'bout those budget cuts for security, Harvard? After the jump, Harvard's response to IvyGate's pinpointing the effing irony.

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In this week's issue of the New Yorker, staff writer Margaret Talbot penned a lengthy piece about the "underground world of 'neuroenhancing' drugs". (Whether or not the use of cognitive stimulants - especially on college campuses - is "underground" is up for debate; I'd say from my own experience it was hardly hush-hush, but I digress.)

Stories on students using drugs like Adderall and Ritalin have been the yawn-inducing fodder of rags both on and off-campus for years now, and yet none have given the issues at play as much consideration as Talbot has in "Brain Drain."

While the piece does not focus solely on "neuroenhancers" and their use by students, the story opens and ends on a recently graduated Harvard student under the alias of "Alex". According to Talbot, Alex - who is "skinny and bearded...[and who] looked like the lead singer in an indie band" (and yet apparently has not relocated to Brooklyn) - took drugs in college in order to balance his school and extracurricular commitments with an apparently ravishing weekend social life.

More after the jump.

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Economics professor Jeffrey Miron wants to buy black tar heroin, legally. Now. In a powerfully argued CNN editorial, Dr. Miron breaks down how making drugs--all drugs--legal and regulated would solve war, cancer, taxes, government corruption, racial profiling, AIDS and, presumably, difficult-to-open jars.

The last time we checked in with Crimson druglust it was just blow for the good of science. This time, the good Harvard prof is reading the blood on the wall, and he does not mince words: legalization is "the only way to reduce violence." Miron's hook is the horrifying Mexican drug wars--our thank-you gift for taking the bad jobs we need back now, please--but his real target is the U.S. government's "puritanical policies" and "draconian [...] enforcement."

Miron may be gilding your stoner ex-roommate's opinions with vocabulary and rhetoric, but he's still completely right, right? If we'd lost the war on drugs any more emphatically we'd call it Vietnam Cubed, but Congress is dedicated to bogarting our chemical fun. That said, considerable evidence suggests that, eventually, all the lame Americans who vote for lame Americans who hate weed will die (and even now, there may be hope).

After all, drugs are a personal, almost philosophical choice, and they feel totally great at the time--like cutting. The professor calls it the "victimless nature of this so-called crime." Who's worse off if The Man condones methadone Mondays, other than everyone who cares about you?

Dr. Miron says it best: "Obeying the law is for suckers."

In the annals of the Ivy League there are countless tales of bright men and women who went astray. There was Harvard MBA graduate Jeffrey Skilling, who helped bring the Enron Corporation down to its knees. And then there was former Penn Professor Rafael Robb, who bludgeoned his wife to death in 2006.

So every once in awhile it's refreshing to hear about reversals of fortune that cut the opposite way. Meet one-time drug dealer Andres Idarraga. At the age of twenty Idarraga was given a felony and a 14-year prison sentence.  Ostensibly because jail sucked and there was little to do, Idarraga

began reading books — voraciously.  As he read, he began to dream, not about pimped-up cars and drug money, but about going to college, about doing something that he and his parents could be proud of.

After attaining his GED and receiving an early parole, Idarraga - whose parents emigrated to Rhode Island from Colombia - applied to Brown. He was rejected, so he excelled at another school, reapplied a year later, and got in. Now thirty, Idarraga is currently a 1L at Yale Law.

The question now is where's Idarraga's Lifetime movie deal?

A Brown correspondent writes in with news from the spaciest Ivy:

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; give a stoner a "sticktastic," Hobbit-like, organically ambient tree sculpture and he trips out for weeks. Following the completion of artist Patrick Dougherty's sapling sculpture on Brown University's Front Campus, people young and old have stopped to take in the impressive creation that seems to grow out of the ground itself. For some subclasses of the Brown cultural lexicon, this pull is particularly enveloping.

"They're like bubbles of wood ... It is a special place. It seems to have its own gravity and logic. Smoking there is like communing with plants in nature's womb," said a Brown first-year who wished to be known as "Scuba Steve." His friend quickly added, "It's a portal to an alien world."

Not to misrepresent the Brown community or its fragrant denizens. This was hardly a "sculpture goes up, stoners move in" sort of situation. Most, if not a high majority of the people enjoying the sculpture, are not doing it under the influence of marijuana, opium, or any of the other assorted psychedelics that even seeing this artwork subconsciously demands.

Nevertheless, the sculpture has been a popular destination for students. The very look and feel of the sculpture fits the eco-friendly aesthetic of any college's pot-smoking population. Thousands of locally harvested saplings (i.e "sticks") beget a roughly textured woodland creation. Its not that everyone's on drugs -- its just better when you're high. Wait ... did I say that? Or only think it?

UPDATE 2:51 p.m.: Cornell stoners nod knowingly.