The World Wide War on Drugs #8 - Demonstraties in Mexico

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Iran Criticized for Executing Drug Offenders

Six international human rights groups have petitioned the United Nations to freeze its counternarcotics aid to Iran until that country abolishes the death penalty for drug offenses.

In a jointly signed Dec. 12 letter released Wednesday by the groups, they argue that the freeze is justified because of “the widening gulf between Iran’s rhetoric and the realities of the justice system.”

Iran executes more prisoners than any other country except China, with 500 to 625 executed last year, according to United Nations estimates. At least half of the condemned were convicted of drug trafficking.

Yury Fedotov, chief executive of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a Vienna-based agency that has provided millions of dollars to Iran’s counternarcotics efforts, has been in discussions with Iranian officials about the executions, which are at odds with the agency’s human rights guidelines.

Under international law, Iran and other countries with the death penalty are required to impose it only for the “most serious crimes,” which do not include drug offenses.

Even though some senior Iranian officials have spoken out against capital punishment for drug crimes, there have been signs that the pace of executions has accelerated this year.

Iran, a conduit for opium trafficking from neighboring Afghanistan, has one of the world’s harshest drug laws. It imposes mandatory death sentences for making, trafficking and possessing specified quantities of opium, opiates and other drugs, like methamphetamines.

On Dec. 4, Mohammad Javad Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Human Rights Council, said in an interview with the France 24 news channel that “nobody is happy” about the number of executions and that he would like to see Iran’s drug punishment softened. “We are crusading to change this law,” he said.

Rights groups say in their letter, which is addressed to Mr. Fedotov, that a few days before Mr. Larijani’s interview, 18 convicted offenders had been hanged in Iran, and that this year at least 318 had been put to death, a pace that would surpass the 331 drug convicts executed in 2013.

“This increase in the execution rate belies Mr. Larijani’s reassuring rhetoric and U.N.O.D.C.’s lauding of ‘potentially favorable developments’ on this issue,” reads the letter by the groups.

The letter was signed by Human Rights Watch, Reprieve, Iran Human Rights, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Harm Reduction International and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, named after an Iranian lawyer who was assassinated in Paris in 1991.

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Fedotov’s office about the letter. Phone and email messages left with the agency’s spokeswoman, Preeta Bannerjee, were not immediately returned.

Iran has given mixed messages on capital punishment.

When the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, criticized Iran in March for what he called its failure to improve human rights — including the use of capital punishment — Mr. Larijani’s brother, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, the chief of the Iranian judiciary, chastised him for the remarks.

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Black truffles contain 'bliss molecules' not unlike those found in cannabis

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All animals, including humans, possess endocannabinoid systems responsible for feeding, energy expenditure, memory, and pain regulation. The production of endocannabinoids is one characteristic that distinguishes animals from plants. When someone smokes weed, phytocannabinoids produced by cannabis actually mimic the body’s endocannabinoids.

New research from Italy now shows that truffles, the highly prized and insanely expensive fungi, also produce endocannabinoids. Truffles grow underground near oak trees and can ultimately fetch $1500 per pound. That truffles produce endocannabinoids is just the latest evidence that fungi are more closely related to animals than plants. Plants, animals and fungi all share a common ancestor, and increasingly it appears that fungi are much more akin within the evolutionary tree to humans than say, lettuce. (I certainly feel more simpatico with truffles than turnips or kale, don’t you?)

The endocannabinoid content of truffles may be one of the reasons that humans prize them, since these compounds are active at incredibly small doses and the aroma of fresh truffles feels quite intoxicating.

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Mexican vigilante leaders give themselves up after gun battle

Two rival leaders and their followers from western state of Michoacán give themselves up after gun battle that left 11 dead

Two rival vigilante leaders and dozens of their followers from the western state of Michoacán have given themselves up to the authorities in the wake of a gun battle between their groups that left 11 people dead and fuelled fears that a major government operation was failing to control the drug war hotspot.

Luis Antonio Torres, nicknamed “Simón El Americano”, surrendered on Tuesday along with nine of his men at a prearranged pick up point. He was flown to jail in a navy helicopter to face judicial hearings. El Americano’s sworn rival, Hipólito Mora, gave himself up three days before along with 26 of his followers.

One of Mora’s sons was among those who died in the shootout on 16 December, which took place at a barricade set up by his group in his hometown of La Ruana, in the long-conflictive region of the Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Land.

Alfredo Castillo, the presidential envoy in charge of the federal security operation in the state, celebrated the voluntary incarceration of the vigilantes as evidence that Michoacán’s institutions have been immeasurably strengthened in recent months.

“We secured the surrender of these people to the courts without a shot being fired or any shootouts,” Castillo said after the detention of El Americano. “What has been achieved today would have been unthinkable a year ago.”

Castillo said he hoped a further 19 vigilantes involved in the shootout two weeks ago will also give themselves up in the coming days. He also sort to down play the shootout, saying it was not a public security issue but one of “social conflict”.

The armed vigilante groups emerged in the Tierra Caliente in 2013, claiming that government inaction in the face of a reign of terror imposed in the region by the Caballeros Templarios, or Knights Templar, drug cartel gave them no other option for protecting their communities.

With the situation threatening to degenerate into a regional civil war, the government flooded the area with federal forces in January this year. A subsequent uneasy alliance with the vigilantes lead to a series of important arrests and deaths of Caballeros leaders that left the cartel seriously weakened.

But violence in the state has continued as government efforts to institutionalise the vigilantes into a rural police force have struggled in the face of deep rivalries between some of the leaders. The new rural police has also been damaged by multiple accusations that a significant number of commanders and officers have links to the Caballeros or other gangs operating in the region.

Both El Americano and Mora joined the new rural police. Both have blamed each other for the gun battle in La Ruana. Mora has repeatedly accused El Americano of links to the traffickers.

Mora spent two months in jail earlier this year accused of killing two of El Americano’s associates, but the charges were dropped.

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Fourth man’s death linked to ‘Superman’ ecstasy batch

Police offer temporary amnesty to anyone who comes forward with pink or red tablets featuring ‘S’ emblem

A fourth man has died in less than two days from what police fear is a potentially fatal batch of ecstasy being sold on British streets.

A temporary drug amnesty has been offered to anyone who surrenders the red or pink tablets of ecstasy, inscribed with a Superman-style “S” in their centre, to a police station, accident and emergency department or fire station.

Police say they are not offering a general drug amnesty but the ecstasy tablets, thought to be to blame for the four deaths and one hospital admission, are “potentially so dangerous we need to remove them from the streets to prevent further deaths”.

Supt Louisa Pepper from Suffolk police said: “Please don’t be worried about any sort of prosecution because we genuinely just want the drugs off the streets. We view this particular drug as especially dangerous and want to prevent further deaths and save lives.”

The fourth death in Telford on Friday follows the deaths of two young men in Suffolk within hours of each other on Thursday morning, with another admitted to hospital in a serious condition.

Gediminas Kulokas, a Lithuanian labourer, died on New Year’s Day – his 24th birthday – after collapsing at his Ipswich home. Kulokas’s 22-year-old friend Donatas was admitted to hospital at the same time in a serious condition after taking the same drug.

Kulokas died less than three hours after another man, 20-year-old John Hocking, also a labourer, who died in nearby Rendlesham, near Woodbridge.

The first victim of the rogue batch of drugs is thought to be a Lithuanian factory worker Eustace Ropas, 22, who died on Christmas Eve at his home, also in Ipswich.

Natasha Mumby, Kulokas’s partner, has described how she desperately tried to resuscitate him after he stopped breathing.

“We were at the flat having a few quiet drinks to celebrate New Year’s Eve and his birthday in the early hours,” she said. “I went to bed at 2am and woke up a few times because he and his friend were making a bit of noise. I had no idea that they had been taking drugs.

“Every time I got up to tell them to keep quiet, they were looking the worse for wear. His friend popped out and when I checked on Gediminas, he was breathing in a funny way. I propped him up and went back to bed,” she said. “I then came back in the lounge because he was not making the breathing noise any more. He was just sitting there not breathing.”

Police believe the drug taken by all five men could have a similar chemical mix to dangerous ecstasy pills with a similar appearance that were in circulation in the Netherlands last month.

In December, the Dutch Trimbos drug addiction clinic issued a warning about the pills, which have a high concentration of a chemical known as PMMA instead of MDMA, which is the usual main drug component of ecstasy pills.

PMMA is dangerous because the chemical takes longer to work than MDMA. The delay can cause users who do not know they have taken a different variety of ecstasy to overdose because they think their first pills have not worked.

Dutch media reported on at least two PMMA-related deaths in the Netherlands in 2013.

Both drugs are stimulants, causing an energy boost and feelings of affection for other people, but PMMA is far more toxic, with an overdose of just 50mg having potentially fatal consequences.

Harry Shapiro, director of communications at Drugscope, said a possible explanation for the increased use of PMMA and the closely related chemical PMA in ecstasy was a crackdown in Cambodia on the production of safrole, a key ingredient in MDMA production, causing drug manufacturers to turn to other ingredients.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that there were no deaths from PMA or PMMA in 2009 or 2010, but that this jumped to 20 in 2012. By 2013, there were 29 deaths connected to the drugs.

The Irish drugs website Drugs.ie says that between December 2013 and May last year, six people in Ireland were found to have had PMMA in their systems when they died.

In 2011 the Scottish Drug and Crime Enforcement Agency released a warning about PMMA after a spate of deaths.

It was also believed to be the cause of a series of deaths across Europe at around the same time.

Speaking at the time, DI Tommy Crombie, drugs co-ordinator at the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, warned: “PMMA and other harmful substances could be present in many illicit drugs including powders, products sold as legal highs and ecstasy tablets in all sorts of colours and with all sorts of logos. Like all illicit drugs, there is no way to tell what’s in them until it’s too late.”

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Johann Hari: ‘I failed badly. When you harm people, you should shut up, go away and reflect on what happened'

He was the Independent’s star columnist whose lying and cheating destroyed his career. Now Johann Hari is back, with a book about drug-taking – including his own. But will anyone believe a word of it?

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When I heard that Johann Hari had written a book about the war on drugs, two immediate concerns sprang to mind. The first was whether anyone would trust a word he wrote.

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“I think that’s totally right,” Hari agrees. “I did not want to write a 400-page polemic about the drug war. I didn’t want to have an argument about it, I wanted to understand it.” For that matter, he admits, “It’s struck me that, actually, polemic very rarely changes people’s minds about anything.” He says so as a former columnist? “A recovering former columnist, yes.” He laughs. “It’s not just that polemic doesn’t change people’s minds. It says nothing about the texture of lived experience. People are complex and nuanced, they don’t live polemically.”

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Hari went to Vancouver to meet a psychology professor, Bruce Alexander, who had been similarly puzzled, so had replicated the original experiments. This time, instead of experimenting on solitary rats locked in empty cages, he offered the choice of clean or drugged water to rats kept in what he called Rat Park, a kind of rat heaven full of wheels and coloured balls and delicious food, and other rats to play and mate with. When these rats tried heroin, they weren’t very interested.

“They just didn’t like it. None of them overdosed. Even more strikingly, he then took rats that had become addicted in the isolated cages, and put them into Rat Park. And they almost immediately stopped using. What Alexander had found is that we’ve fundamentally misunderstood what addiction is. It isn’t a moral failing. It isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. It’s not you; it’s the cage you live in.”

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Superman ‘ecstasy’ pill deaths are result of ‘illogical and punitive drugs policy’

Former government adviser Dr David Nutt says ban on MDMA has resulted in more dangerous drugs coming on to market

The deaths of four men who had taken pills they thought were ecstasy are the result of the government’s “illogical and punitive drug policy”, a former drugs tsar has said.

Dr David Nutt, who advised the last government on drug policy until 2009, said the policy had targeted the production and sale of MDMA, only to see it substituted by a more toxic substance.

MDMA is the chemical name for ecstasy, but the pills bearing a Superman emblem that have been linked to four recent deaths – three in Suffolk and one in Telford – are believed to have been made with a high concentration of the chemical PMMA.

Suffolk police said on Monday that they had seized more than 400 pills matching the description of those believed to have been taken by two Ipswich men stashed in a public place in the city.

Writing for the Guardian, Nutt, who was sacked as the government’s senior drug adviser in 2009 after criticising its decision to toughen the law on cannabis, said PMMA and its close relative PMA have been responsible for most of the deaths – amounting to more than 100 – attributed to ecstasy by the media in recent years.

“Their re-emergence is directly due to the international community’s attempts, via UN conventions, to stop the use of MDMA by prohibiting its production and sale,” he wrote. “The emergence of the more toxic PMA following the so-called ‘success’ in reducing MDMA production is just one of many examples of how prohibition of one drug leads to greater harm from an alternative that is developed to overcome the block.”

Nutt, the Edmond J Safra professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, compared the situation to the rise in demand for more poisonous hooch after alcohol was prohibited in the US during the 1920s and the rise in production and injecting of heroin after smoking opium was banned.

He explained that the UN banned a number of precursor chemicals to MDMA, including safrole. As safrole supplies dropped, drug makers switched to chemically similar aniseed oil. “Unfortunately, the product that results from using the MDMA production process with aniseed oil is PMA or PMMA,” he wrote. “Hence, these substances only exist because of the blockade of MDMA production. That in itself wouldn’t particularly matter if they were not more toxic than MDMA.”

Nutt said there should be testing facilities for users, without fear of prosecution, like those in the Netherlands, or safe doses of pure MDMA should be available to registered users. “In the meantime, we should accelerate the testing of seized tablets and make public their contents and strengths on internet databases, so that all users can check what they might be taking,” he wrote.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “MDMA, PMA and PMMA are all illegal class A drugs. They destroy lives, cause misery to families and communities, and this government has no intention of decriminalising them. No drug-taking can be assumed to be safe.”

The chief superintendent of Suffolk police, Jon Brighton, said the seizure of 400 pills on Sunday night was a significant development in its investigation into the deaths of the two Ipswich men.

“If these prove to be the same as those linked to these cases, we will have gone a significant way towards reducing the risk of further serious injury or deaths linked to this particular ecstasy pill,” he added.

A man has been charged and two men have been bailed after arrests made as part of the investigation into the deaths.

A 19-year-old Ipswich man, Adrian Lubecki, has been charged with being concerned in the supply of ecstasy and possession with intent to supply a class B drug. He appeared at Ipswich magistrates court on Monday and was remanded in custody.

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The Superman pill deaths are the result of our illogical drugs policy

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Here’s why most people who use drugs don’t become addicts, according to science

Drug use is common, drug addiction is rare. About one adult in three will use an illegal drug in their lifetime and just under 3m people will do so this year in England and Wales alone. Most will suffer no long-term harm.

There are immediate risks from overdose and intoxication, and longer-term health risks associated with heavy or prolonged use; damage to lungs from smoking cannabis or the bladder from ketamine for example. However most people will either pass unscathed through a short period of experimentation or learn to accommodate their drug use into their lifestyle, adjusting patterns of use to their social and domestic circumstances, as they do with alcohol.

Compared to the 3m currently using illegal drugs there are around 300,000 heroin and/or crack addicts while around 30,000 were successfully treated for dependency on drugs in England in 2011-12, typically cannabis, or powder cocaine.

A powerful cultural narrative focusing on the power of illegal drugs to disrupt otherwise stable, happy lives dominates our media and political discourse, and shapes policy responses. Drug use is deemed to “spiral out of control”, destroying an individual’s ability to earn their living or care for their children, transforming honest productive citizens into welfare dependent, criminal “families from hell”.

This is a key component of the Broken Britain critique of welfare and social policy advanced by the Centre for Social Justice and pursued in government by the CSJ’s founder Iain Duncan Smith in his role as secretary of state for work and pensions. However, the narrative has resonance far beyond the political arena and underpins most media coverage of drug addiction and the drug storylines of popular culture.
Most drug users are ..?

In reality the likelihood of individuals without pre-existing vulnerabilities succumbing to long-term addiction is slim. Heroin and crack addicts are not a random sub set of England’s 3m current drug users.

Addiction, unlike use, is heavily concentrated in our poorest communities – and within those communities it is the individuals who struggle most with life who will succumb. Compared to the rest of the population, heroin and crack addicts are: male, working-class, offenders, have poor educational records, little or no history of employment, experience of the care system, a vulnerability to mental illness and increasingly are over 40 with declining physical health.

Problem cannabis use is less concentrated among the poor, but is closely associated with indicators of social stress and a vulnerability to developing mental health conditions.

Most drug users are intelligent resourceful people with good life skills, supportive networks and loving families. These assets enable them to manage the risks associated with their drug use, avoiding the most dangerous drugs and managing their frequency and scale of use to reduce harm and maximise pleasure. Crucially they will have access to support from family and friends should they begin to develop problems, and a realistic prospect of a job, a house and a stake in society to focus and sustain their motivation to get back on track.

In contrast the most vulnerable individuals in our poorest communities lack life skills and have networks that entrench their problems rather than offering solutions. Their decision making will tend to prioritise immediate benefit rather than long-term consequences. The multiplicity of overlapping challenges they face gives them little incentive to avoid high risk behaviours.

Together these factors make it more likely that, instead of carefully calibrating their drug use to minimise risk, they will be prepared to use the most dangerous drugs in the most dangerous ways. And once addicted, motivation to recover and the likelihood of success is weakened by an absence of family support, poor prospects of employment, insecure housing and social isolation.

In short what determines whether or not drug use escalates into addiction, and the prognosis once it has, is less to do with the power of the drug and more to do with the social, personal and economic circumstances of the user.
Heads in the sand

Unfortunately the strong relationship between social distress and addiction is ignored by politicians and media commentators in favour of an assumption that addiction is a random risk driven by the power of the drug.

It does happen. But the atypical experience of the relatively small number of drug users from stable backgrounds who stumble into addiction and can legitimately attribute the chaos of their subsequent lives to this one event drowns out the experience of the overwhelming majority of addicts for whom social isolation, economic exclusion, criminality and fragile mental health preceded their drug use rather than being caused by it.

Viewing addiction through the distorting lens of the minority causes policy makers to misunderstand the flow of causality and pushes them towards interventions focused on changing individual drug-using behaviour and away from addressing the structural inequality in which the vulnerabilities to addiction can flourish.

Until we re-frame our understanding of drug addiction as more often the consequence of social evils than their root cause, then we are doomed to misdirect our energy and resources towards blaming the outcasts and the vulnerable for their plight rather than recasting our economic and social structures to give them access to the sources of resilience that protect the rest of us.

The ConversationBy Paul Hayes, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

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Christie: The war on drugs has failed, treat NJ heroin addiction as an illness

To combat New Jersey’s growing heroin and opioid crisis, Gov. Chris Christie says the state needs to embrace a dramatically different approach to substance abuse, but cautioned that he will not write a blank check to get it there.

In his time as governor, heroin and opioid abuse have surged into the spotlight, claiming at least 740 lives in New Jersey alone last year, while tens of thousands of others sought treatment, many of their lives broken by addiction. Irrespective of how the state arrived at such an unenviable position, in Christie’s eyes, government has a role in making sure those shackled by addiction get the help they need.

In an interview with NJ Advance Media, Christie said that means changing course, to a system that values treatment over incarceration. The War on Drugs has failed, he says, and it’s time to move on.

“I think what we’ve seen over the last 30 years is it just hasn’t worked,” he said. “And there are some people who make one bad choice to try drugs one time and their particular chemistry leads them to be an addict from the minute they try it. So we need to treat it as a disease. And not having mandatory incarceration for non-violent offenders but having mandatory treatment is something that’s going to yield a much greater result for society in general and for those individuals in particular.“

According to federal data, treatment centers in the Garden State have been operating near or slightly above capacity for several years. While the number of available treatment slots has increased over the last decade, so has demand, one that is increasingly being driven by heroin and prescription opioids.

In 2010, the state estimated 37 percent of people seeking substance abuse treatment in New Jersey didn’t receive it. Since then, the number of heroin-related deaths has increased by 160 percent, while the number of people in treatment for heroin or opioids has only increased by 15 percent.

To that effect, Christie says New Jersey is falling short. There aren’t enough available residential treatment beds for adults battling substance abuse. Getting into what does exist can be a confounding maze of dead-ends and frustrating questions. If you do find a bed, odds are your insurance carrier won’t pay.

Christie says the state needs to step up to fix this, but just as importantly, the private sector does as well.

“I don’t want to build a bunch of new state facilities. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do from a fiscal perspective or for the long-term treatment of these folks,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to have local government agencies, the counties in particular do a better job…to say, ‘here’s where you go, here’s the options for detox that are available, here is non-residential that’s available, here’s residential that’s available,’ and help them connect those dots. I think we need to do a better job at that.”

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Law Championed by Joe Biden Leads to More Ecstasy Deaths

The quarterly social research magazine Contexts has an article by Tammy Anderson, author of Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene, in its Fall issue about the 2003 Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, championed by then-Sen. Joe Biden. The law was intended to reduce deaths due to the use of ecstasy, a pill that contains MDMA, usually cut with caffeine or some other drug. How deadly is ecstasy? Statistics are hard to come by. Sixty-three people were reported to have died from ecstasy used in 2000. Many more die from, say, alcohol poisoning every way—the ecstasy death rate might be as low as one per million users.

Nevertheless, the perceived exoticism and danger of the drug, exaggerated by media accounts of young people’s deaths, led Joe Biden to add penalties to venues that knowingly cater to drug users, a primary component of the RAVE Act, in a misguided and typical fashion for government. And, as typical for a government solution, the RAVE Act came with “unintended consequences” that did the opposite of what legislators hoped the bill would do. Instead of reducing vulnerability to ecstasy, the law increased that vulnerability by criminalizing the simple things that make ecstasy even safer, like dance floor patrols, cool down rooms, even free water. The responsibility to stay safe is on the drug user—to know before taking a drug that it may require rehydrating before feeling dehydratring, cooling down once in a while, and so. But that certainly doesn’t preclude venues from offering tools to make drug use even safer too. It’s being a good Samaritan and its good business too. When given the choice, drug users prefer to go to venues that cater to their use rather than venues that will toss them into an alley when they’re throwing up from a bad drug trip.

That happened to one drug user according to Anderson, because the club believed, not wrongly, that if they offered medical assistance they would be held liable for her drug use. That’s what Joe Biden has wrought on drug users that don’t happen to be his children because of his obsession with the war on drugs. Contexts reports:

. The 2003 RAVE Act places young ravers at great risk of harm. Because the act treats raves’ cultural traits as evidence that promoters are permitting drug use and sales, it places festival stakeholders in a bind over how to protect ravers without being shut down. For example, rave promoters are perceived to sanction drug use if they permit cultural props such as glow sticks, lollypops, and massage oils to be sold at their event, or if they provide chill rooms and free bottled water to ravers. Since MDMA use (in either its Ecstasy or Molly varieties) and dancing at raves can produce extreme dehydration, critics interpret the distribution of free bottled water as a sign that promoters are trying to hydrate, and therefore accommodate, ravers’ drug use. Promoters even told me that “rave” language on flyers or other promotional materials could serve as evidence of a legal violation.

. If they offer drug intervention services, such as drug testing and education, promoters may be at even greater legal risk. Rotondo died from MDMA toxicity; a MDMA/Methylone combination killed Russ. Had drug testing and education been offered at EZoo, Rotondo might have learned not to take so many hits of Molly and Russ would have learned that his Molly had been mixed with extremely dangerous methylone (“bath salts”).

From my first drug experience I’ve always been sure to research and talk with friends about every drug I thought about taking. Legalizing MDMA would make drug use even safer by allowing simple education to win over the anti-drug propaganda privileged in an environment where drugs are criminal.

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Mexican firebrands mount call for self-rule: 'It’s time for the people to take power'

Away from the spotlight of protests over the disappearance of 43 student teachers, Guerrero may prove a much more serious challenge to state authority

Milling around the front steps of the town hall, about 20 men with shotguns began the night watch sipping coffee from styrofoam cups and munching cakes.

The atmosphere was relaxed, but the message was one of revolution.

“It’s time for the people to take power,” said Jésus, one of the guards. “The government has not been able to fulfill its role – and the people are waking up.”

Over the past three months, dozens of town halls across Mexico’s southern state of Guerrero have been taken over by members of an amorphous movement calling for “popular government”. The protesters – some of whom are armed – have also called for the army to close its bases and leave the region.

Guerrero is a state steeped in a history of rebellion: it was the setting for some of the first uprisings of the Mexican revolution, and home to the country’s most famous rural guerrilla army of the 1970s.

But the current wave of unrest was triggered by the disappearance last September of 43 student teachers in the city of Iguala, after they were attacked by municipal police in league with a local drug cartel.

Anger over the case has prompted months of street protests against President Enrique Peña Nieto. But away from the spotlight, the growing calls for self-rule in Guerrero may prove a much more serious challenge to state authority.

“We took over the town hall as way of pressuring the government to do more to find the missing students, but this goes further now,” said Jésus, outside Tecoanapa’s town hall. “We are dismantling the old institutions.”

That kind of talk resonates particularly loudly in the region around Tecoanapa: 17 of the missing students grew up in towns and villages of the Costa Chica, a remote and poverty-stricken region which stretches from the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur down to the Pacific Ocean.

The victims include the two eldest sons of Doña Oli Parral who, like many parents of the disappeared, have grown tired of peaceful protest and polite calls for justice.

“We shout our slogans and it makes no difference. The government doesn’t listen to us,” she said, sitting in her spartan home in the village of Xalpatlahuac, just outside Teconapa. “If they want peace then give back the kids.”

In the Costa Chica, the occupations are led by a group of radical teachers’ unions and the Union of Organized Peoples of Guerrero (UPOEG), a network of vigilantes formed two years ago to combat the killings, kidnapping and extortion by drug gangs in the area.

“The narcos did with us what they wanted. People were intimidated, frightened, and desperate,” says Huricel Cruz, a teacher and former student at the radical Ayotzinapa training college where the 43 missing students were enrolled. “Then the people took control and things calmed down.”

The Guerrero militias emerged alongside other vigilante movement in the neighbouring state of Michoacán, although there are important differences.

The Michoacán groups are less ideological, revolve more clearly around local strong men, and are more regularly accused of ties to criminal gangs. Michoacán is also the stage for a high-profile government security operation which broke up one of the country’s most notorious crime syndicates – known as the Family – but has failed to consolidate peace.

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The Hunting of Billie Holiday

How Lady Day found herself in the middle of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ early fight for survival.

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Why animals eat psychoactive plants

Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, learns about drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose.

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After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

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Jamaica poised to relax cannabis laws

Several restrictions on ‘ganja’ use could go up in smoke as island’s politicians back bill to establish licensing authority

The Jamaican cabinet has approved a bill that would decriminalise possession of small amounts of cannabis and pave the way for a legal medical marijuana industry, the justice minister has said.

Mark Golding said he expected to introduce the legislation in the Senate this week. Debate could start this month in the country where the drug, known popularly as “ganja”, has long been culturally entrenched but illegal.

The bill would establish a cannabis licensing authority to deal with the regulations needed to cultivate, sell and distribute the herb for medical, scientific and therapeutic purposes. “We need to position ourselves to take advantage of the significant economic opportunities offered by this emerging industry,” he said.

It would make possession of 2 ounces (56g) or less an offence that would not result in a criminal record. Cultivation of five or fewer plants on any premises would be permitted. Rastafarians, who use marijuana as a sacrament, could also legally use it for religious purposes for the first time in Jamaica, where the spiritual movement was founded in the 1930s.

For decades, debate has raged on the Caribbean island over laws governing marijuana use. But now, with several countries and US states relaxing their laws on the herb, Jamaica is advancing reform plans.

Golding said the government would not soften its stance on drug trafficking and it intended to use a proportion of revenues from its licensing authority to support a public education campaign to discourage pot-smoking by young people and mitigate public health consequences.

The director of the national Cannabis Commercial and Medicinal Research Taskforce said he expected the bill to be passed soon in parliament, where Portia Simpson Miller’s governing party holds a 2-1 majority. “This development is long overdue,” Delano Seiveright said.