The European ban on kava is at its end.

After six years, an agreement between south Pacific ambassadors and representatives and European delegates to lift the ban on kava. This long overdue move reopens the south Pacific kava market to European buyers. While always legal in the US, the kava market sharply declined in 2002, as Germany imposed a ban on kava products. Many other European nations followed suit.

At the time of the kava kava ban, kava, as an argricultural commodity, helped boost the economies of several south Pacific nations. Since then, the competition has been fierce and a regular supply of high quality kava, is difficult to locate.

With kava banned in Europe, there has been a hit to the economy in the south pacific. As Europe lifts its ban on kava, important markets will have the opportunity to grow and provide these south Pacific nations a highly sought after raw material. Germany was the first to discover kava's medicinal potential. Pharmacutical grade kava (highly concentrated kavalactones) were produced by French and German pharmacutical companies.

Not an Article, but just some thoughts about Halloween

With Halloween being just less than 8 days away, I can already sense the excitement building up from just about everywhere and just about everyone. I was trying to think far back enough of when Halloween became such a big deal, maybe it has always been, but I feel like it is almost just recently (like in the last 10 years) that the spirit of Halloween has not only become more commercialized, but also “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”-Cady from the movie Mean Girls. Haha. I’m not saying I disagree or object to any of the new changes, my costume last year was called “Hot Flash” when it was simply a nurse costume that if you happened to not zip up all the way, it was cleavage galore.

And like I said, maybe this is how it has always been, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until they came out with the show “Girls Next Door” that they started selling Playboy costumes. (that are super expensive because duh, its playboy) And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have come out with the show “Girls Next Door” until reality television/celeb-reality television made it’s debut (thanks to Survivor circa year 2000) but THAT’S a whole other story. Anyway, I was looking at all the costumes at Party City and the majority of the adult female costumes were “slutty” or blatantly provocative. The models wearing the costumes have perfect bodies and fake boobs, or non-fake boobs and just really lucky, and about 50% (HUGE guess) of females out there wish we could look half as good as they do wearing these costumes. But in the end, we buy them anyway and look damn good.

KAVA & THE "ALMIGHTY" U.S. DOLLAR