A Letter from Sylvia Thyssen & Carla Higdon in the MAPS Florida office

   We receive many letters from MAPS members, but we don't often let readers know what is going on here at our main office. You may have noticed that we moved our office from Charlotte, North Carolina to Sarasota, Florida right at the end of December 1998. Rick Doblin continues to work out of his home in Boston, Massachussetts. Now nearly six months after the move, we are beginning to feel settled. The new office is more spacious than the last one, so that we don't have to climb over and around boxes of Bulletins, books and envelopes anymore. New MAPS members have planted sacred plants in the garden by the MAPS office, including Daturas, Salvia divinorum, Psychotria viridis, and Banisteriopsis caapi.

Non-English language versions of MAPS articles
   We've received several letters and e-mails from people who have translated articles from the MAPS Bulletin into a foreign language. So far, we have been notified about three articles in Dutch (originally translated for the magazine Pan-Forum) and two in Spanish. We are inquiring about articles in German and Italian. If you have translated MAPS articles or information or are interested in doing so, please let us know. We would like to put translations on our webpage. Also, we recently found a website which translates from English to Spanish, German, French, and Italian (and vice versa). That site is babelfish.altavista.digital.com. It is adequate for general information, and falters a little with more scientific language (like a research protocol) but it's useful.

MAPS Website Redesigned
   The MAPS website has gotten a face-lift. Each page now has a navigation bar at the top and several new pages have been added. We are also trying to put more images from the Bulletin on-line. The portal page which comes up when you go to www.maps.org switches periodically between five different image-and-quotation combinations. The new pages are mainly in the area of Research, focused on a list of all current and recently completed projects, Psychedelic Research Around the World. Our aim is to make the ins and outs of research more understandable for visitors to the site. All of the Bulletin's color covers are also posted, and we've added a Best of MAPS page to go directly to some of the articles from the back issues. Since there are over 350 articles archived at the MAPS website some of them can easily get overlooked. We are deeply grateful to MAPS member Andrew Stone of Stone Design for creating the site's new look and for updating and revising it.

A word on nomenclature
   Bulletin? Journal? Newsletter? From its first one-page issue in 1988 until Volume 5 Number 2, 1994, the MAPS publication was called the Newsletter. Ever since then, we have called it the Bulletin since the average issue now is more like a magazine than a newsletter. We picked that name over "Journal" because journal implies "peer-reviewed," which the MAPS Bulletin is not (at least not formally).

2000 by 2000
   MAPS has 1825 members. Please help us make it to 2000 by the end of the year! Let us know if you want to get extra brochures to send to friends. Talk to people about MAPS. Point them to our website. Buy a gift membership. Join us in making this organization even stronger.

   If you receive an extra invitation to join MAPS it is because MAPS occasionally uses lists from other organizations or other organizations put MAPS flyers in their mailings. We regret any confusion this may cause and encourage you to pass the extra materials on to a friend, and contact our office if you have any questions regarding your membership status. If you move, please notify MAPS in advance.