Brainwaving » Latin America

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs

Brainwaving Admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:49:24 +0000

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored.

A soldier guards marijuana that is being incinerated in Tijuana, Mexico. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AP

On 10 April 2006, a DC-9 jet landed in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, on the Gulf of Mexico, as the sun was setting. Mexican soldiers, waiting to intercept it, found 128 cases packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100m. But something else – more important and far-reaching – was discovered in the paper trail behind the purchase of the plane by the Sinaloa narco-trafficking cartel.

From the Guardian by Ed Vulliamy

During a 22-month investigation by agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and others, it emerged that the cocaine smugglers had bought the plane with money they had laundered through one of the biggest banks in the United States: Wachovia, now part of the giant Wells Fargo.

The authorities uncovered billions of dollars in wire transfers, traveller’s cheques and cash shipments through Mexican exchanges into Wachovia accounts. Wachovia was put under immediate investigation for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Of special significance was that the period concerned began in 2004, which coincided with the first escalation of violence along the US-Mexico border that ignited the current drugs war.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year’s “deferred prosecution” has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” said Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor. Yet the total fine was less than 2% of the bank’s $12.3bn profit for 2009. On 24 March 2010, Wells Fargo stock traded at $30.86 – up 1% on the week of the court settlement.

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the “legal” banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to banks on the brink of collapse. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said. “There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”

Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo during the 2008 crash, just as Wells Fargo became a beneficiary of $25bn in taxpayers’ money. Wachovia’s prosecutors were clear, however, that there was no suggestion Wells Fargo had behaved improperly; it had co-operated fully with the investigation. Mexico is the US’s third largest international trading partner and Wachovia was understandably interested in this volume of legitimate trade.

José Luis Marmolejo, who prosecuted those running one of the casas de cambio at the Mexican end, said: “Wachovia handled all the transfers. They never reported any as suspicious.”

“As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk,” the bank admitted in the statement of settlement with the federal government, but, “despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business”. There is, of course, the legitimate use of CDCs as a way into the Hispanic market. In 2005 the World Bank said that Mexico was receiving $8.1bn in remittances.

During research into the Wachovia Mexican case, the Observer obtained documents previously provided to financial regulators. It emerged that the alarm that was ignored came from, among other places, London, as a result of the diligence of one of the most important whistleblowers of our time. A man who, in a series of interviews with the Observer, adds detail to the documents, laying bare the story of how Wachovia was at the centre of one of the world’s biggest money-laundering operations.

Martin Woods, a Liverpudlian in his mid-40s, joined the London office of Wachovia Bank in February 2005 as a senior anti-money laundering officer. He had previously served with the Metropolitan police drug squad. As a detective he joined the money-laundering investigation team of the National Crime Squad, where he worked on the British end of the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s.

Woods talks like a police officer – in the best sense of the word: punctilious, exact, with a roguish humour, but moral at the core. He was an ideal appointment for any bank eager to operate a diligent and effective risk management policy against the lucrative scourge of high finance: laundering, knowing or otherwise, the vast proceeds of criminality, tax-evasion, and dealing in arms and drugs.

Woods had a police officer’s eye and a police officer’s instincts – not those of a banker. And this influenced not only his methods, but his mentality. “I think that a lot of things matter more than money – and that marks you out in a culture which appears to prevail in many of the banks in the world,” he says.

Woods was set apart by his modus operandi. His speciality, he explains, was his application of a “know your client”, or KYC, policing strategy to identifying dirty money. “KYC is a fundamental approach to anti-money laundering, going after tax evasion or counter-terrorist financing. Who are your clients? Is the documentation right? Good, responsible banking involved always knowing your customer and it still does.”

When he looked at Wachovia, the first thing Woods noticed was a deficiency in KYC information. And among his first reports to his superiors at the bank’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, were observations on a shortfall in KYC at Wachovia’s operation in London, which he set about correcting, while at the same time implementing what was known as an enhanced transaction monitoring programme, gathering more information on clients whose money came through the bank’s offices in the City, in sterling or euros. By August 2006, Woods had identified a number of suspicious transactions relating to casas de cambio customers in Mexico.

Primarily, these involved deposits of traveller’s cheques in euros. They had sequential numbers and deposited larger amounts of money than any innocent travelling person would need, with inadequate or no KYC information on them and what seemed to a trained eye to be dubious signatures. “It was basic work,” he says. “They didn’t answer the obvious questions: ‘Is the transaction real, or does it look synthetic? Does the traveller’s cheque meet the protocols? Is it all there, and if not, why not?’”

Woods discussed the matter with Wachovia’s global head of anti-money laundering for correspondent banking, who believed the cheques could signify tax evasion. He then undertook what banks call a “look back” at previous transactions and saw fit to submit a series of SARs, or suspicious activity reports, to the authorities in the UK and his superiors in Charlotte, urging the blocking of named parties and large series of sequentially numbered traveller’s cheques from Mexico. He issued a number of SARs in 2006, of which 50 related to the casas de cambio in Mexico. To his amazement, the response from Wachovia’s Miami office, the centre for Latin American business, was anything but supportive – he felt it was quite the reverse.

As it turned out, however, Woods was on the right track. Wachovia’s business in Mexico was coming under closer and closer scrutiny by US federal law enforcement. Wachovia was issued with a number of subpoenas for information on its Mexican operation. Woods has subsequently been informed that Wachovia had six or seven thousand subpoenas. He says this was “An absurd number. So at what point does someone at the highest level not get the feeling that something is very, very wrong?”

In April and May 2007, Wachovia – as a result of increasing interest and pressure from the US attorney’s office – began to close its relationship with some of the casas de cambio. But rather than launch an internal investigation into Woods’s alerts over Mexico, Woods claims Wachovia hung its own money-laundering expert out to dry. The records show that during 2007 Woods “continued to submit more SARs related to the casas de cambio“.

In July 2007, all of Wachovia’s remaining 10 Mexican casa de cambio clients operating through London suddenly stopped doing so. Later in 2007, after the investigation of Wachovia was reported in the US financial media, the bank decided to end its remaining relationships with the Mexican casas de cambio globally. By this time, Woods says, he found his personal situation within the bank untenable; while the bank acted on one level to protect itself from the federal investigation into its shortcomings, on another, it rounded on the man who had been among the first to spot them.

On 16 June Woods was told by Wachovia’s head of compliance that his latest SAR need not have been filed, that he had no legal requirement to investigate an overseas case and no right of access to documents held overseas from Britain, even if they were held by Wachovia.

Woods’s life went into freefall. He went to hospital with a prolapsed disc, reported sick and was told by the bank that he not done so in the appropriate manner, as directed by the employees’ handbook. He was off work for three weeks, returning in August 2007 to find a letter from the bank’s compliance managing director, which was unrelenting in its tone and words of warning.

The letter addressed itself to what the manager called “specific examples of your failure to perform at an acceptable standard”. Woods, on the edge of a breakdown, was put on sick leave by his GP; he was later given psychiatric treatment, enrolled on a stress management course and put on medication.

Late in 2007, Woods attended a function at Scotland Yard where colleagues from the US were being entertained. There, he sought out a representative of the Drug Enforcement Administration and told him about the casas de cambio, the SARs and his employer’s reaction. The Federal Reserve and officials of the office of comptroller of currency in Washington DC then “spent a lot of time examining the SARs” that had been sent by Woods to Charlotte from London.

“They got back in touch with me a while afterwards and we began to put the pieces of the jigsaw together,” says Woods. What they found was – as Costa says – the tip of the iceberg of what was happening to drug money in the banking industry, but at least it was visible and it had a name: Wachovia.

In June 2005, the DEA, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service and the US attorney’s office in southern Florida began investigating wire transfers from Mexico to the US. They were traced back to correspondent bank accounts held by casas de cambio at Wachovia. The CDC accounts were supervised and managed by a business unit of Wachovia in the bank’s Miami offices.

“Through CDCs,” said the court document, “persons in Mexico can use hard currency and … wire transfer the value of that currency to US bank accounts to purchase items in the United States or other countries. The nature of the CDC business allows money launderers the opportunity to move drug dollars that are in Mexico into CDCs and ultimately into the US banking system.

“On numerous occasions,” say the court papers, “monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug-trafficking organisation. Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug-trafficking organisations.” The court settlement of 2010 would detail that “nearly $13m went through correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia for the purchase of aircraft to be used in the illegal narcotics trade. From these aircraft, more than 20,000kg of cocaine were seized.”

All this occurred despite the fact that Wachovia’s office was in Miami, designated by the US government as a “high-intensity money laundering and related financial crime area”, and a “high-intensity drug trafficking area”. Since the drug cartel war began in 2005, Mexico had been designated a high-risk source of money laundering.

“As early as 2004,” the court settlement would read, “Wachovia understood the risk that was associated with doing business with the Mexican CDCs. Wachovia was aware of the general industry warnings. As early as July 2005, Wachovia was aware that other large US banks were exiting the CDC business based on [anti-money laundering] concerns … despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in business.”

On 16 March 2010, Douglas Edwards, senior vice-president of Wachovia Bank, put his signature to page 10 of a 25-page settlement, in which the bank admitted its role as outlined by the prosecutors. On page 11, he signed again, as senior vice-president of Wells Fargo. The documents show Wachovia providing three services to 22 CDCs in Mexico: wire transfers, a “bulk cash service” and a “pouch deposit service”, to accept “deposit items drawn on US banks, eg cheques and traveller’s cheques”, as spotted by Woods.

“For the time period of 1 May 2004 through 31 May 2007, Wachovia processed at least $$373.6bn in CDCs, $4.7bn in bulk cash” – a total of more than $378.3bn, a sum that dwarfs the budgets debated by US state and UK local authorities to provide services to citizens.

The document gives a fascinating insight into how the laundering of drug money works. It details how investigators “found readily identifiable evidence of red flags of large-scale money laundering”. There were “structured wire transfers” whereby “it was commonplace in the CDC accounts for round-number wire transfers to be made on the same day or in close succession, by the same wire senders, for the … same account”.

Over two days, 10 wire transfers by four individuals “went though Wachovia for deposit into an aircraft broker’s account. All of the transfers were in round numbers. None of the individuals of business that wired money had any connection to the aircraft or the entity that allegedly owned the aircraft. The investigation has further revealed that the identities of the individuals who sent the money were false and that the business was a shell entity. That plane was subsequently seized with approximately 2,000kg of cocaine on board.”

Many of the sequentially numbered traveller’s cheques, of the kind dealt with by Woods, contained “unusual markings” or “lacked any legible signature”. Also, “many of the CDCs that used Wachovia’s bulk cash service sent significantly more cash to Wachovia than what Wachovia had expected. More specifically, many of the CDCs exceeded their monthly activity by at least 50%.”

Recognising these “red flags”, the US attorney’s office in Miami, the IRS and the DEA began investigating Wachovia, later joined by FinCEN, one of the US Treasury’s agencies to fight money laundering, while the office of the comptroller of the currency carried out a parallel investigation. The violations they found were, says the document, “serious and systemic and allowed certain Wachovia customers to launder millions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of illegal narcotics through Wachovia accounts over an extended time period. The investigation has identified that at least $110m in drug proceeds were funnelled through the CDC accounts held at Wachovia.”

The settlement concludes by discussing Wachovia’s “considerable co-operation and remedial actions” since the prosecution was initiated, after the bank was bought by Wells Fargo. “In consideration of Wachovia’s remedial actions,” concludes the prosecutor, “the United States shall recommend to the court … that prosecution of Wachovia on the information filed … be deferred for a period of 12 months.”

But while the federal prosecution proceeded, Woods had remained out in the cold. On Christmas Eve 2008, his lawyers filed tribunal proceedings against Wachovia for bullying and detrimental treatment of a whistleblower. The case was settled in May 2009, by which time Woods felt as though he was “the most toxic person in the bank”. Wachovia agreed to pay an undisclosed amount, in return for which Woods left the bank and said he would not make public the terms of the settlement.

After years of tribulation, Woods was finally formally vindicated, though not by Wachovia: a letter arrived from John Dugan, the comptroller of the currency in Washington DC, dated 19 March 2010 – three days after the settlement in Miami. Dugan said he was “writing to personally recognise and express my appreciation for the role you played in the actions brought against Wachovia Bank for violations of the bank secrecy act … Not only did the information that you provided facilitate our investigation, but you demonstrated great personal courage and integrity by speaking up. Without the efforts of individuals like you, actions such as the one taken against Wachovia would not be possible.”

The so-called “deferred prosecution” detailed in the Miami document is a form of probation whereby if the bank abides by the law for a year, charges are dropped. So this March the bank was in the clear. The week that the deferred prosecution expired, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said the parent bank had no comment to make on the documentation pertaining to Woods’s case, or his allegations. She added that there was no comment on Sloman’s remarks to the court; a provision in the settlement stipulated Wachovia was not allowed to issue public statements that contradicted it.

But the settlement leaves a sour taste in many mouths – and certainly in Woods’s. The deferred prosecution is part of this “cop-out all round”, he says. “The regulatory authorities do not have to spend any more time on it, and they don’t have to push it as far as a criminal trial. They just issue criminal proceedings, and settle. The law enforcement people do what they are supposed to do, but what’s the point? All those people dealing with all that money from drug-trafficking and murder, and no one goes to jail?”

One of the foremost figures in the training of anti-money laundering officers is Robert Mazur, lead infiltrator for US law enforcement of the Colombian Medellín cartel during the epic prosecution and collapse of the BCCI banking business in 1991 (his story was made famous by his memoir, The Infiltrator, which became a movie).

Mazur, whose firm Chase and Associates works closely with law enforcement agencies and trains officers for bank anti-money laundering, cast a keen eye over the case against Wachovia, and he says now that “the only thing that will make the banks properly vigilant to what is happening is when they hear the rattle of handcuffs in the boardroom”.

Mazur said that “a lot of the law enforcement people were disappointed to see a settlement” between the administration and Wachovia. “But I know there were external circumstances that worked to Wachovia’s benefit, not least that the US banking system was on the edge of collapse.”

What concerns Mazur is that what law enforcement agencies and politicians hope to achieve against the cartels is limited, and falls short of the obvious attack the US could make in its war on drugs: go after the money. “We’re thinking way too small,” Mazur says. “I train law enforcement officers, thousands of them every year, and they say to me that if they tried to do half of what I did, they’d be arrested. But I tell them: ‘You got to think big. The headlines you will be reading in seven years’ time will be the result of the work you begin now.’ With BCCI, we had to spend two years setting it up, two years doing undercover work, and another two years getting it to trial. If they want to do something big, like go after the money, that’s how long it takes.”

But Mazur warns: “If you look at the career ladders of law enforcement, there’s no incentive to go after the big money. People move every two to three years. The DEA is focused on drug trafficking rather than money laundering. You get a quicker result that way – they want to get the traffickers and seize their assets. But this is like treating a sick plant by cutting off a few branches – it just grows new ones. Going after the big money is cutting down the plant – it’s a harder door to knock on, it’s a longer haul, and it won’t get you the short-term riches.”

The office of the comptroller of the currency is still examining whether individuals in Wachovia are criminally liable. Sources at FinCEN say that a so-called “look-back” is in process, as directed by the settlement and agreed to by Wachovia, into the $378.4bn that was not directly associated with the aircraft purchases and cocaine hauls, but neither was it subject to the proper anti-laundering checks. A FinCEN source says that $20bn already examined appears to have “suspicious origins”. But this is just the beginning.

Antonio Maria Costa, who was executive director of the UN’s office on drugs and crime from May 2002 to August 2010, charts the history of the contamination of the global banking industry by drug and criminal money since his first initiatives to try to curb it from the European commission during the 1990s. “The connection between organised crime and financial institutions started in the late 1970s, early 1980s,” he says, “when the mafia became globalised.”

Until then, criminal money had circulated largely in cash, with the authorities making the occasional, spectacular “sting” or haul. During Costa’s time as director for economics and finance at the EC in Brussels, from 1987, inroads were made against penetration of banks by criminal laundering, and “criminal money started moving back to cash, out of the financial institutions and banks. Then two things happened: the financial crisis in Russia, after the emergence of the Russian mafia, and the crises of 2003 and 2007-08.

“With these crises,” says Costa, “the banking sector was short of liquidity, the banks exposed themselves to the criminal syndicates, who had cash in hand.”

Costa questions the readiness of governments and their regulatory structures to challenge this large-scale corruption of the global economy: “Government regulators showed what they were capable of when the issue suddenly changed to laundering money for terrorism – on that, they suddenly became serious and changed their attitude.”

Hardly surprising, then, that Wachovia does not appear to be the end of the line. In August 2010, it emerged in quarterly disclosures by HSBC that the US justice department was seeking to fine it for anti-money laundering compliance problems reported to include dealings with Mexico.

“Wachovia had my résumé, they knew who I was,” says Woods. “But they did not want to know – their attitude was, ‘Why are you doing this?’ They should have been on my side, because they were compliance people, not commercial people. But really they were commercial people all along. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. This is the biggest money-laundering scandal of our time.

“These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world,” he says. “All the law enforcement people wanted to see this come to trial. But no one goes to jail. “What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing – it doesn’t make the job of law enforcement easier and it encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars. Where’s the risk? There is none.

“Is it in the interest of the American people to encourage both the drug cartels and the banks in this way? Is it in the interest of the Mexican people? It’s simple: if you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 30,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point.”

Woods feels unable to rest on his laurels. He tours the world for a consultancy he now runs, Hermes Forensic Solutions, counselling and speaking to banks on the dangers of laundering criminal money, and how to spot and stop it. “New York and London,” says Woods, “have become the world’s two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street.

“After the Wachovia case, no one in the regulatory community has sat down with me and asked, ‘What happened?’ or ‘What can we do to avoid this happening to other banks?’ They are not interested. They are the same people who attack the whistleblowers and this is a position the [British] Financial Services Authority at least has adopted on legal advice: it has been advised that the confidentiality of banking and bankers takes primacy over the public information disclosure act. That is how the priorities work: secrecy first, public interest second.

“Meanwhile, the drug industry has two products: money and suffering. On one hand, you have massive profits and enrichment. On the other, you have massive suffering, misery and death. You cannot separate one from the other.

“What happened at Wachovia was symptomatic of the failure of the entire regulatory system to apply the kind of proper governance and adequate risk management which would have prevented not just the laundering of blood money, but the global crisis.”

International drug crime measures ‘lead to executions’

Michael Carmichael — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:40:33 +0000

Enforcement by Britain, the UN and the EU backs up regimes that ignore human rights, says report.

The United Nations, the European commission and individual states including Britain are flouting international human rights law by funding anti-drug crime measures that are inadvertently leading to the executions of offenders, according to a report seen by the Guardian.

The International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA), a non-governmental organisation that advocates less punitive approaches to drugs policy globally, says it has gathered evidence revealing “strong links” between executions for drugs offences and the funding of specific drug enforcement operations by international agencies.

It says programmes aimed at shoring up local efforts to combat drug trafficking and other offences are being run “without appropriate safeguards” that could prevent serious human rights violations in countries that retain the death penalty.

The report concludes that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime ( “are all actively involved in funding and/or delivering technical assistance, legislative support and financial aid intended to strengthen domestic drug enforcement activities in states that retain the death penalty for drug offences.

“Such funding, training and capacity-building activities – if successful – result in increased convictions of persons on drug charges, and the potential for increased death sentences and executions”.

The report claims there is evidence of “complicity in acts that violate international human rights law”, undermining the Council of Europe’s commitment to abolish the death penalty, the United Nations Charter and UNODC’s stated opposition to the penalty for drugs offences.

The 33-page report lists a series of case studies it says illustrate how efforts to garner convictions for drugs offences across borders have resulted further down the line in executions. International law does not prohibit the death penalty but does limit its use to the “most serious crimes”. The meaning of “serious” is challenged by some states with the death penalty.

Rick Lines, deputy director of the IHRA and co-author of the report, said: “Many people around the world would be shocked to know that their governments are funding programmes that are leading people indirectly to death by hanging and firing squads.” He said agencies and countries were not intentionally funding programmes that led to people facing the death penalty but that it was “a fact” that executions were happening.

The report comes soon after the execution by firing squad of Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah, America, that once again highlights human rights concerns about capital punishment. However IHRA’s focus on the persistence of capital punishment in other “retentionist” countries for drugs crimes is likely to resonate this week. Saturday is UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, organised to highlight that some states, including China, have always executed drugs offenders to make a public example of them.

An IHRA report published last month revealed that of the 58 states that retain the death penalty, 32 permit it for drug-related crimes. Some use it more readily than others. The estimated overall number of executions including those for drugs-related offences in 2009 was 714, according to Amnesty International, although this does not account for potentially thousands more executions that are not disclosed by China.

Commenting on the IHRA report, Rebecca Schleifer, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, said that while UNODC in particular has recently “taken steps in the right direction” to account for the human rights implications of its programmes, its drug enforcement activities, and those of other organisations and countries, continue to “put them at risk of supporting increased death sentences and executions in some countries”.

Sebastian Saville, director of Release, a British drugs and human rights charity, said there was an urgent need for political leaders in Britain and the US to rethink their “disastrous ‘war on drugs’ policy and tacit support for regimes that continue executing people for relatively minor offences”.

A UNODC spokesman welcomed the report for drawing attention to capital punishment, saying it raised “legitimate concerns” about how actions designed to deal with drugs crimes “may indirectly result in increased convictions and the possible application of the death penalty”. He said UNODC had taken “concrete steps” to implement human rights assessments as part of “all drug enforcement activities”. The IHRA report makes a number of recommendations including that European governments, the European Commission and UNODC urgently leverage their influence with countries that retain the death penalty “to restrict or abolish the death penalty for drug offences.”

More at http://www.ihra.net/news

DMT and the Pineal: Fact or Fiction?

David Luke — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:23:58 +0000

A well-known factoid bandied about by psychedelic drug geeks is the idea that DMT, or some other psychoactive tryptamine, is produced by the pineal gland. When did this idea originate? And is it actually true?

By John Hanna for Erowid.org

During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History” at a 1983 University of California at Santa Barbara conference, Andrew Weil mentioned in passing, “Dimethyltryptamine [...] is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.” Meanwhile, at U.C. San Diego, Rick Strassman had begun to wonder whether or not the pineal might produce psychedelic compounds. That same year, in his booklet Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, Albert Most claimed that: “A pair of naturally occurring pineal enzymes [...] is capable of converting serotonin into a number of potent hallucinogens.” Most stated that the pineal could transform serotonin into 5-methoxy-N-methyltryptamine, and then make that into 5-methyoxy-N,N-dimethyltrptamine. Alas, no references were provided to support Most’s description of pineal catabolism. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this general line of thinking–that some psychoactive tryptamine is created in the pineal–was birthed in the early 1980s.1

It took a couple of decades for the meme to spread into the wider drug-geek pop culture, more recently and rapidly due to the Internet, after the 2001 publication of Strassman’s popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Consider the following transcription from a radio rant [audio file online here] given circa 2005/2006 by the actor-comedian Joe Rogan, host of the TV show Fear Factor:

It’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland [...] that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man. Literally. But the craziest thing [about it is that] it’s natural, and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, and right before human death, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine. Nobody knows what sleep is all about. Nobody knows why dreaming is important. But dreaming is hugely important. If you don’t dream, you’ll go fucking crazy and you’ll die. While you’re dreaming, while you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, you are going through a psychedelic trip. And very few people know about this. But it’s been documented.

There’s a great book on it called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by a doctor named Dr. Rick Strassman. And he did all of these clinical studies at the University of New Mexico on it. And you take this shit, and literally you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like, you feel like you’re in another dimension. I mean you’re in another dimension. [...] There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three-dimensional space; and it’s like they’re arteries, except there’s not blood pumping through them, there’s fucking light–pulsating lights with no boundaries. And you couldn’t really understand it. And there’s an alien communicating with me. There’s a dude who looks like, like sorta like a Thai Buddha, except he’s made entirely of energy and there’s no, there’s no, like, outline to him–he’s just one thing. And he’s concentrating on me, and he’s trying to tell me not to give in to astonishment. Just relax, and try to experience this. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be fucking shittin’ me.’ And I’m a stand up comedian, you know. ‘Cos as a stand up comedian, we pride ourselves in being able to describe things. So I’m like, ‘How the FUCK am I gonna talk about this?!’

As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

Rogan does an excellent job of expressing a number of bullet points from Strassman’s book in a humorous manner. But the problem is that none of these points are known to be true. And although Strassman clearly states that his ideas about DMT and the pineal gland “are not proven”2, many people have accepted them as fact. As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT, much less any evidence for the more far-out speculations that Strassman makes about DMT being a chemical modulator of the human soul. When Strassman examined the pineal glands from “about ten” human corpse brains, there was nary a trace of DMT to be found in them. This doesn’t invalidate his theory, since DMT is metabolized quickly, and none of the corpse brains were fresh-frozen. Further tests on fresh-frozen brains could be done. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

By the end of his book, Strassman proposes that DMT may provide access to parallel universes (and alien beings) via superconductive quantum computing of the human brain at room temperature, or via interactions with dark matter. Strassman states: “Because I know so little about theoretical physics, there are fewer constraints reining me in regarding such speculations.” And for those who know virtually nothing about any given topic, there appear to be no constraints on speculation. It is for exactly this reason that Strassman’s theories have both been accepted as fact by many people, and then expanded into creative new directions. A few offshoot theories include the idea that ancient prophets produced more DMT, that electro-magnetic fields increase DMT production, that spending a couple of weeks in total darkness increases DMT production, and that fluoridated water suppresses DMT production. An Internet search will turn up a bounty of wacky spin-offs, all of which cite Strassman’s speculations as the facts backing up their further claims.

Is DMT produced by the pineal gland? Maybe…

Notes #

Albert Most is perhaps better-known for his 1984 booklet Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which explains how to collect and smoke the 5-MeO-DMT-containing secretions from this animal. Coincidentally, Most was one of the first two volunteers in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, which started in 1990 and ended in 1995. And during the period when Strassman was researching DMT, Andrew Weil went on to co-author two journal articles with Wade Davis on the topic of B. alvarius’s psychoactive secretions.
Strassman’s DMT: Spirit Molecule on DMT in the Pineal :

These hypotheses are not proven, but they derive from scientifically valid data combined with spiritual and religious observations and teachings. [...]

The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. Specific examples of this phenomenon are the following:

When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.

Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.

In some of us, pineal DMT mediates the pivotal experiences of deep meditation, psychosis, and near-death experiences.

As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001)

Noam Chomsky and Latin America

fredarmesto — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:14:31 +0000

Noam Chomsky speaks about the future and predicts difficult situations for China and India. On the other hand he analyzes the appearance of progressiveness in Latin America as very important. For the first time in 500 years, LA is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration and also is beginning to face some of its massive internal problems.

The following lines are excerpts from Democracy Now´s interview made by Amy Goodman.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you see American empire in ten, twenty, thirty years?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Prediction in human affairs is very low—has very little success, too many complications. The United States, I think, will come out of the economic crisis, very likely, as the dominant superpower. There’s a lot of talk about China and India, and it’s real, they’re changing, but they’re just not in the same league. I mean, both China and India have enormous internal problems that the West doesn’t face.

You get kind of a picture of this by looking at the Human Development Index of the United Nations. The last time I looked, India was about 125th or something. And I think China was about eightieth. And China would be worse, I think, if it wasn’t such a closed society. In India, you sort of get better data, so you can see what’s happening. China is kind of closed. You don’t see what’s going on in the peasant areas, which are in turmoil, you know. They have environmental problems. They have huge—hundreds of millions of people are kind of like at the edge of starvation.

We don’t have—you know, we have problems, but not those problems. And even the industrial growth, which is there—you know, for part of the population, there’s been improvement. But when you take, say, India, where we know more, in the areas where high-tech industries developed—and it’s pretty impressive. I’ve visited some of the labs in Hyderabad. You know, it’s as good or better than MIT. But right nearby, the rate of peasant suicides is going up, very sharply, in fact. And it’s the same source. It’s the neoliberal policies, which privilege a certain sector of the population and a certain—and let the rest take care of themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the rise of progressives in Latin America?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s important. I mean, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration, which is a prerequisite for independence, and also at least is beginning to face some of its massive internal problems. I mean, Latin America has probably the worst inequality in the world. There’s a wealthy sector, small wealthy sector, which is extremely rich, but they have—their tradition is that they have no responsibility to the country, so they send their capital to Zurich. You know, they have their second homes in the Riviera, and their children study in Oxford or whatever. This is beginning to be faced in different ways, but it’s sort of happening all over the continent. And they are beginning to integrate. The United States obviously doesn’t like it. In fact, it’s barely reported most of the time.

So there was a very interesting case last September, when President Morales in Bolivia—Bolivia is, in my opinion at least, probably the most democratic country in the world. Nobody says that, but if you look at what happened in the last couple of years, there were huge, popular, mass organizations of the most repressed population in the hemisphere, the indigenous population, which for the first time ever has entered the political arena significantly and were able to elect a president from their own ranks and one who doesn’t give instructions to his army, but who’s following policies that were largely produced by the population. So he’s their representative, in a sense in which democracy is supposed to work.

And they know the issues. It’s not like our elections. They know the issues. They’re serious issues: control over resources, economic justice, cultural rights, and so on. You can say they’re right or wrong, but at least it’s functioning.

Now, the elites that have traditionally ruled the country, of course, don’t like it. And they’re threatening virtual secession. And, of course, the United States is backing them, as the media are. And it got to the point last summer, I suppose, where it led to real violence.

Well, there was a meeting of UNASUR, the Union of South American Republics—that’s all of South America—a meeting in Chile, Santiago, Chile. And it came out with a declaration, important declaration, in which it supported President Morales and opposed the—condemned the violence being led by the quasi-secessionist forces. And Morales responded, thanking them for their gesture of support, but also saying, correctly, that this is the first time in 500 years that South America is beginning to take its affairs in its own hands without the intervention of foreign powers, primarily the US. Well, that was so important that I don’t think it was even reported here. I mean, the meeting was known, so you see vague references to it. But it’s an indication of developments that are taking place in various ways.

See Full interview.

Have we cracked the DMT Puzzle?

Charlotte Walsh — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:53:28 +0000

James Kent attempts to tie a knot in the meme of autonomous elves and other DMT entities.

“Snippets of the Psyche” revealed in DMT space, by James Kent

The comments in this article are adapted from Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, by James Kent.

The following is an edited version of an e-mail conversation written during a bout of insomnia, in response to DMT, Moses, and the Quest for Transcendence, by Clifford Pickvoer.

To: Clifford Pickover
Sent: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 02:51:05 -0700
Subject: DMT Elves

Hey Clifford, a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall. I have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years, and though I have not published the results of all my research I would like to share with you some of the conclusions I’ve made about DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.

In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it induce contact with autonomous elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid responses, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be “shocking,” it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.

Now don’t get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain’s perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this point I would like to offer the following observations:

1. DMT acts primarily at the 5-HT2A receptor, which is where the hallucinogenic tryptamines work their visual magic. Without going into all the details here, let’s just assume for a moment that a molecule with the proper shape acting at 5-HT2A site can significantly disrupt and/or enhance visual sensory processing, depending on dosage. If this is the case, then dumping DMT into the perceptual wetworks is akin to messing with the logic that produces the display on the computer screen you are looking at right now. Any programmer can tell you that a single line of code consisting of only a few characters can drastically alter the way your screen presents the data coming from your video card. It can make the screen flicker, blink, warp, twist, or fall into infinitely recursive fractalline chaos. When this happens is your monitor now displaying an “alternate reality” or “parallel dimension”? No, it is not. It is simply taking the same old data and processing it with a new factor in the base algorithm (disruption/excitement at the 5HT2A receptor). Even a very small tweak could produce dramatic results. Since the sensory processing system is so delicate, any abrupt chemical perturbation can cause it to become excited, unstable, or fall into chaos. When the visual system is disrupted for any reason we get phosphene activity, which is the visual system’s version of a “ringing in the ears.” Phosphene activity is chaotic, but as we all know chaos does not produce random noise, it is familiar and predictable, and produces some damn trippy patterns.

2. The sensation of seeing aliens, elves, or being in the presence of God(s) is not unique to DMT users. Otherwise sane people who have never tried DMT report these sensations all the time, and it is generally treated as a sign of psychosis (see separate topic on Charles Bonnet Syndrome CBS). However, recent research has shown that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe you can reliably reproduce the feeling of being in the presence of God (also known as “seeing the light,” “feeling enlightened,” or having a “religious epiphany”). It is an innate human sensation — just like the feeling that “I’m being watched right now” is an innate human sensation — we just don’t catalog it as such because it is relatively rare, happening perhaps only once in a lifetime to those who do not artificially stimulate themselves, perhaps never in a lifetime. Some people have very dramatic religious epiphanies with angels and demons and all form of cherubim marching through with horns and such with no drugs whatsoever, and though it is a common event we generally treat it today as a psychological aberration; though back in the day it was the stuff prophets were made of. Since this kind of religious epiphany is something our brains can already do, the fact that a substance like DMT can reliably reproduce this single phenomena (in concert with other effects, of course) is not much of a stretch.

3. The archetypal DMT “entities” are pretty well categorized, with most people seeing elves or aliens or fairies or angels or some kind of loopy little spirits that dance about and tell riddles. Sometimes it is a spirit-animal like a jaguar or a snake, sometimes it is none of the above and goes totally off the map. But getting back to the elf thing (which is what many people find to be the most curious aspect), I initially found it very surprising to be confronted by elves in my DMT experiences, and on psilocybe mushrooms as well, and did indeed perceive them as externalized, morphing, disincarnate beings. I even managed to carry on rudimentary conversations of sorts. However, the more I experimented with DMT the more I found that the “elves” were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind would wander through all sorts of magnificent and amazing creations, but the times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some non-transient feature that would confirm at least a rudimentary “autonomous existence” beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream fades. So it is with the elves as well. When you try to shine a light of reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

4. Which brings me to my last point. Psychedelics in general have an amazing capacity to activate the mind’s eye, or what I call the imaginal workspace. In our day-to-day lives we have two active areas that are processing our perception of reality. The first is the primary workspace where all our sense data is compiled in our pre-frontal cortex to give us our waking picture of reality. The second is the imaginal workspace, where we can think about abstract thoughts or visualize the contents of our cupboards from memory (or whatever). The imaginal workspace is generally running in the background, helping us plan our actions by visualizing them in advance — like driving to the grocery store for instance. We visualize the store, plan a route, and then go. All the while our primary workspace is taking up most of our attention. This balance flips, however, when we are caught in deep abstract thinking, like daydreaming or trying to solve a difficult problem. And when we sleep the primary workspace is actually taken-over by the imaginal workspace to process all the backlogged data that was set aside during the waking day. When this happens we dream, and our primary workspace is filled with imaginal data (memory compressed by the hippocampus), and suddenly we are immersed in an imaginal reality that looks and feels just as solid as waking reality. Since it is being processed in the primary workspace, the same high-end gear that we use to processes our waking reality, we can’t tell the difference. The only difference between being awake and dreaming is the origin of the data that is being processed in the primary workspace. When you are awake you are processing external sense data in the primary workspace. When you are dreaming you are processing internal (imaginal/memory) data in the primary workspace.

I have done many experiments with lucid dreaming and self-induced visionary and hypnogogic states and I can tell you that the switch from external to internal data sources feeding into the primary workspace (and vice-versa) happens in a split second. It is too quick to notice unless you are waiting and watching very carefully for the neural hand-off. But it is there. It is a physical, mechanical thing. One second you are awake and listening to the faucet drip, the next second you are wandering through a dream parking lot listening to the sound of your keys jingling, searching for your car. If you catch yourself and wake back up again you are back to the drip-drip-drip of the faucet. Close your eyes and you are back in the parking lot (or wherever). So, knowing that there’s this kind of murky area in between waking and dreaming where imagination feeds into working memory, it is not much of a stretch to assume that psychedelics can interact with the chemical signals which manage that hand-off between external sensory data and imaginal data flowing into our primary workspace. It may very well be that in the psychedelic state our selective sensory inputs are totally opened up so that everything is crashing in at once, making it impossible to parse the data and distinguish what is real from what is imaginal until the drug actually wears off. In short, concrete psychedelic visuals may be nothing more than chaotic visual patterns overlapped with images created from waking dreams.

So, within the framework of this equation one question remains: Why is the alien/elf archetype so common to the DMT experience? The only answer I have is that we humans must have innate evolutionary wetware that forces our senses to latch onto any piece of anthropomorphic data that pops into otherwise randomly uniform data — like spotting the face of another human or a jaguar peering out from behind the bushes, or seeing another human moving through tall grass. The evolutionary advantage of such a trait is obvious, and in standard Rorschach tests even the most amorphous blobs are found to look like faces and/or people no matter what culture the observer is from. Now, given the amazing swirling kaleidoscopic imagery produced in the typical DMT trip, it is inevitable that anthropomorphic shapes will emerge and then express themselves in even greater detail as the mind latches onto them and “dreams” them into focus. With the imaginal workflow kicked into high gear, it is not surprising that these emergent anthropomorphic entities can then speak to us, revealing shocking details from our own subconscious in a conversational stream of visual theater. Given all of this, in a nutshell, the case for autonomous disincarnate DMT entities is closed. All that is needed to produce them is our own over-excited visual system and imagination, and thus Occam’s razor wipes them right off the table and into the fairy-dust bin.

In conclusion I would just like to mention a couple more things. The visions produced by DMT are not solely elves and alien entities. A wide variety of archetypes and just plain-old whacked-out stoner shit creeps into the mix. It is highly individual and in many cases is heavily dependent on set and setting. This fact alone (more than anything else) leads me to believe that the DMT entities are mere figments. If, for example, everyone always saw talking penguins and only talking penguins while high on DMT, that would be much harder to explain and much more mysterious. The fact that DMT “consciousness” reveals itself in so many forms tells me that the “messenger” — be it elf, alien, jaguar, or whatever — is basically arbitrary within the context of the patterns and archetypes our minds tend to pick out of random noise. However (and this is the good part), the really interesting thing about DMT experiences is not the elves (messengers) themselves, but what it is they are saying (the message). And when you get to the heart of what the typical DMT message is, it is usually something about the environment or living systems or the vast plant consciousness that penetrates our world. The “Gaia consciousness” that infuses the experience is undeniable, and what to make of that I don’t know, other than to entertain the possibility that this ancient plant consciousness actually exists and is attempting to make itself known through the DMT-enlightened mammal brain. If so, then this is the real discovery of the DMT experience, and this is the topic that should be looked at more closely. In the context of DMT being a two-way radio for plant-human communication, the “elves” themselves are nothing more than a cartoon interface for the exchange of information.

A Drug Free World Reloaded

Cosmo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:27:37 +0000

I attended this UN Summit in Vienna reviewing 10 years of the international War on Drugs last year and this short video does a good job of summing up the contrasting attitudes on drug policy of government representatives on the political ladder with specialist NGOs and academic experts.

The New Cocaine Mafia

Cosmo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:05:22 +0000

Vanguard correspondent Christof Putzel travels to southern Italy to investigate how Europe’s growing appetite for cocaine is funding the growth of West African crime syndicates and fueling a turf war with Italy’s largest mafia organization, the Camorra.

Mexican Drug Policy Reform Movement Takes Shape

Cosmo — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:29:10 +0000

The Beckley Foundation’s tour of North and South America with the Global Cannabis Commission is having a big effect. Mexico in particular is taking the lead in pushing for a paradigm shift in international drug policy.

International Conference in Mexico City Provides Hope, Inspiration to a Budding Domestic Movement

Posted by Kristin Bricker

This past February 22 and 23, drug policy experts and organizers from around the world gathered in Mexico City for “Winds of Change: Drug Policy Around the World,” a conference organized by the Collective for a Comprehensive Drug Policy (CUPIHD).

The conference was the first event CUPIHD has organized as a collective. Jorge Hernández Tinajero, CUPIHD’s president, told Narco News, “All of [CUPIHD’s members] have been working on this issue for at least ten years from our respective areas of expertise.” However, it was only recently that they joined forces under the banner of CUPIHD, which they founded last year “in order to transform the drug policy in Mexico to one with a harm reduction and human rights perspective.” According to fellow CUPIHD member and former federal Congresswoman Elsa Conde, the Winds of Change conference “is just the beginning.”

At the conference, drug policy experts from Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Holland, the United States, and the United Kingdom shared their experiences in their own countries. While recognizing that the situations in their respective countries were very distinct from that of Mexico, they hoped that Mexicans could learn from their experiences, strategies, tactics, and experiments in drug policy reform.

Pien Metaal from Holland, for example, spoke about the backslide towards criminalization that her country is currently experiencing after years of increasing decriminalization. Her organization,Transnational Institute, analyzes and compares drug policy around the world. Metaal provided a broad overview of how various European and Latin American countries have experimented in decriminalization. She focused on the various ways governments have reclassified drug distribution, possession, and use as they move towards decriminalization, giving conference participants a variety of options to consider and advocate for as they fight for reform in their own countries. She noted that in order to move towards more just sentencing policies, many countries have begun to draw legal distinctions between different drugs, between users and dealers, between dealers and major distributors, between mules* and large-scale traffickers, and between small and large producers.

The Transnational Institute has also compiled information from studies in countries that have decriminalized drug use to some extent in order to draw conclusions about the impact of drug decriminalization on drug use and drug-related crime. Metaal argues, based on an analysis of available data from various countries, that “law enforcement measures are not effective in reducing the expansion of drug markets. Rather, it is the poorest and most marginalized people and families who pay the price of these policies. There is sufficient evidence that alternative policies do not increase [drug] consumption, but they do increase access to [prevention and rehabilitation] services and medical attention.”

Ethan Nadelmann from the US-based Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) spoke during two plenary sessions. Nadelmann explained how and why his organization has focused most of its efforts on legalizing medical marijuana in the United States. While the DPA seeks to “end the war on drugs” in general, it has chosen medical marijuana as a wedge issue, one that seeks to remove or reduce stigmatization associated with drugs and open the door to a broader debate on the war on drugs. “We hoped and we believed that by working on the use of medical marijuana, it would begin to transform the public dialogue around marijuana,” Nadelmann said. “It would change the conversation, and we hoped it would reduce the resistance to speaking about marijuana legalization more broadly. I think we’ve been successful in that regard.”

Nadelmann told the mostly Mexican audience that he was by no means arguing that Mexican drug reformers should also take up the cause of medical marijuana. Rather, he said, “If you look at the way drug policy reform evolves and educationally leaps forward in different parts of the world, it can be for very different reasons… Each place is different. I think in Mexico you are still looking and struggling for what will be the angle, the specific thing that enables Mexico to leap forward on this debate. In the United States it was medical marijuana.”

Nadelmann argues in choosing a key issue to focus on in order to advance the movement, drug reformers must ask, “Where can we get traction? Where can we dig in? Where can we make a stand in order to begin to fight back?” As Nadelmann points out, a good issue to begin with in policy reform is the issue most people can agree upon—an issue where most people believe the drug war has gone too far.

Nadelmann, while reminding conference attendees that he is not an expert on Mexico and is not in a position to tell Mexicans how to go about building a drug reform movement, “guessed” at what might be key issues in Mexico that the movement could seize upon. “My advice, take it for what its worth, is to focus on moving opinion in Mexico on the marijuana issue. It is almost impossible to speak realistically in political terms about the legalization of cocaine or heroine or methamphetamine, but with marijuana yes, it is possible, and it can happen,” Nadelmann argued. “In Mexico right now only 30% of Mexicans support the legalization of marijuana. Mexico needs a rapid jump in support for the legalization of marijuana. And it needs to be linked in the public mind that legalizing marijuana is the best way to deprive the drug gangsters of billions of dollars.” Nadelmann noted that the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the US drug tsar claim that at least half of Mexican drug gangs’ earnings come from marijuana.

Nadelmann also shared several examples of how his organization seized on specific opportunities to launch campaigns that changed people’s opinions on drug policy. In Tulia, Texas, for example, forty black people were arrested in a drug raid, with the only evidence against them being the testimony of a single white police officer. All of the prisoners were later released. Drug policy reform organizations seized on the case to foment a criticism of drug policy, which disproportionately affects black and brown communities in the US, within the traditionally socially conservative black community.

Nadelmann believes that Mexico is also living an educational moment, one that can be seized upon to open up a debate on drug policy. “Currently, there are places in Mexico that look like Chicago during the era of Prohibition and Al Capone. If there has ever been a moment to question the costs and benefits of prohibitionist policies, the moment is now.”

Several conference attendees wondered out loud if the key to moving the Mexican public on drug policy reform lies in Ciudad Juarez, the new “murder capital of the world.” A journalist pointed out that President Felipe Calderon’s recent visit to Juarez was a complete disaster. On February 11,police violently attacked a protest outside the convention center where Calderon was to speak on security. Many of the protesters were students from the Juarez high school that suffered a massacrein which gunmen murdered at least 15 people—mostly students—at a party. Inside the convention center, the mother of a murdered student railed against a speechless Calderon for three minutes. Given the recent unrest against government policy in Juarez, the journalist told conference attendees, “I think there is something going on in Juarez and El Paso. Even if it’s just ‘We don’t want aggressive law enforcement, we don’t want the military in our community,’ even if that’s the only result, it softens people up” and opens up the possibility of a debate on broader drug policy reform.

In addition to choosing a key issue to push in order to advance drug reform, Nadelmann offers a second piece of advice to Mexican drug policy reformers: “Insist on the legitimacy of open dialogue. The worst prohibition is a prohibition on thinking. When the government engages not just in censorship, but in self-censorship, and when it discourages and denies the possibility of open and honest dialogue, it undermines the ability to come to a better policy, and it reveals their own fears and securities about the value and legitimacy of the policies they are enforcing.”

While Mexicans may still be grappling with how to take their first steps towards building an effective movement to end the drug war, CUPIHD’s conference made a giant leap forward in promoting an open and honest debate on the issue. While the drug war is omnipresent and discussed nearly constantly in the media, in Congress, in schools, and on the streets, false information abounds. This prevents an honest and informed debate on how to go about fixing what everyone acknowledges is a serious problem.

Two Mexican experts in particular debunked common misconceptions about the drug war in order to promote a more honest debate based on accurate information. Professor Alejandro Madrazo, a member of CUPIHD, discussed Mexico’s recent legal reform that the media billed as “drug legalization.” He pointed out that while the government did legalize the possession of very small quantities of drugs, the majority of users generally carry more than the legally permitted amount. Thanks to the new law, this consumer “is being pursued with more force and more tools,” and the law makes the prosecution of consumers much easier. Furthermore, Madrazo argued, the law seeks to forcefully incorporate states into the federal government’s war on drugs, and it redistributes power and responsibilities in that war. The end result, he argues, is far from legalization.

Luis Astorga from the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute for Social Investigations debunked many of the government’s so-called statistics that relate to the war on drugs. “Nearly every day the media gives credibility to declarations from public officials, but they never demand that they show a study and a methodology for how they arrived at those numbers.”

Astorga taught conference attendees how to evaluate the numbers they hear in the media, particularly those that come from the government, to determine if they are credible or questionable. In doing so, Astorga systematically debunked or called into question statements Mexican and US government officials have made in the media regarding the amount of Mexican land that is used for cultivating drugs, the number of people who work in drug trafficking, the amount of money drug trafficking brings into the Mexican economy, and the number of drug consumers and addicts.

Moving Forward

Ex-Congresswoman Conde closed the conference with the following words:

“There is no doubt that we recognize the failure of the so-called war on drugs. We require new winds of change to advance alternative policies for the world’s drug problem. We have seen that prohibitionist policies have not been effective in most countries. This paradigm has resulted in grave human rights violations and violations of individual rights. It has also entailed discrimination and social exclusion. The escalating violence increases with every passing day, increasing the territory within which organized crime operates with impunity. We insist that prohibitionist policy means that states have given up their control over the drug market. We insist that prohibition, in market terms, is much more costly and useless than regulation.”

“Now,” Conde asked, “after two days of work and reflection, where do we go from here?

“Gabriel Tokatlian, an Argentinian investigator, invites us to use common sense in drug policy. He tells us that the best policy is one that privileges justice, equality, health, human rights, education, and employment. This is precisely the vision that is absent in current drug policy, at least in our country.”

Notes:

* A mule or mula is an individual, generally poor, who transports relatively small amounts (less than a few kilos) of drugs, generally in or on their body, at the behest of a large-scale drug trafficker.

Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate

Amanda Feilding — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:54:59 +0000

Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate, analyzes cannabis policies around the world and lays out the advantages of a fully regulated legal market and how a country can overcome the international conventions in order to have policies that better suites its individual needs. Below is an excerpt from the book.

Amanda originally wrote this piece for the Huffington Post

Cannabis is by far the most widely used illegal drug and therefore the mainstay of the ‘War on Drugs.’ It is used by an estimated 4% of the global adult population, that is, 166 million people out of an estimated population of 200 million illegal drug users’. It therefore constitutes roughly 80% of the ‘illegal drug market.’ However, cannabis has only ever held a relatively marginal position in international drug policy discussions. In response to its peripheral role in the global debate, I decided to convene a team of the world’s leading drug policy analysts to prepare an overview of the latest scientific evidence surrounding cannabis and the policies controlling its use. The report would both bring cannabis to the attention of policy-makers and also provide them with the relevant facts to better inform their future decisions, particularly in the context of the United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review of 2009, and thereafter.

The historical context of the United Nations’ policy is critical here. In 1998, the international community agreed a 10-year program of activity for the control of illegal drug use and markets. These agreements were made at a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) held in New York in June of that year, and a commitment was made to reassess the situation at the end of the 10-year period. The nature of this program was epitomized by the slogan ‘A drug free world — we can do it!’ However, the reality is that since 1998 drugs have in general become cheaper and more readily available than ever before. We hope that this volume will help lead the way towards a more rational, effective and just approach to the control of cannabis.

Cannabis is, however, a complicated issue, with many seemingly contradictory facets. On the one hand, it has a history of spiritual and medicinal use that dates back millennia; this, together with the explosion in its use during the latter half of the twentieth century, indicates the many subjective benefits that users attribute to it. Moreover, it is one of the least toxic substances used recreationally, where the risk of overdose is negligible. On the other hand, recent years have seen growing concern about an association between cannabis use and a variety of possible harms, particularly mental health disorders. Only through extensive and rigorous research can we hope to clarify the contradictions between the perceived benefits of cannabis and the dangers it presents.

Some of the many questions on which we lack reliable evidence include: Why do people choose to use cannabis? What are the psychological and therapeutic needs it fulfils? What are the processes it might enhance? Why and when is cannabis harmful? Can this be understood in terms of differences in individual genetic and personality types, or in the type of cannabis consumed, or in the pattern of its consumption? By answering these and other questions we might minimize the harms caused by cannabis use and help to prevent its misuse, as well as better understanding the benefits many users reportedly derive from it, both in alleviating sickness and promoting well-being.

When considering harms, it is also important to include the adverse effects of a criminal justice approach to cannabis control. This is particularly pertinent given the evidence that cannabis control policies, whether draconian or liberal, appear to have little or no impact on the prevalence or intensity of its consumption. Indeed, at the onset of international cannabis prohibition, use of the drug was confined to a scattering of countries and cultures, but since then it has spread around the world and is now widely used in most developed countries, to the extent that it has become a rite of passage for a majority of young people.

In the developed world, it is all too easy to overlook the unintended consequences of the War on Drugs, including the extensive violations of human rights, since in these countries the violations are most predominantly felt by drug-users themselves, particularly where discriminatory enforcement leads to significantly higher levels of arrests among the disadvantaged and minority groups. However, in producer/transit countries, such as in Latin America, the suffering caused by this war is vastly more widespread, affecting not only farmers but also whole populations by the destabilization of political and social systems through corruption, violence, and institutional collapse. While attention to these systemic effects has primarily been focused on other drugs, the war on cannabis also plays a significant role.

However, despite cannabis being responsible for the great majority of arrests for illicit drug-use — in the US alone approximately 750,000 arrests per annum – international drug policy discussions have tended to ignore cannabis, focusing instead on those substances that cause the most harms: opioids, cocaine, and amphetamines. As discussed in this volume, although cannabis has always been marginal to the main interests of the international drug control system, the upholders of the system have been extremely reluctant to consider reforms which would change its status within, or remove it from, that system.

Although this Report is specifically targeted at reviewing cannabis laws, it is worth noting that any change to the scheduling of cannabis under the international drug control system could lead to the questioning of the whole War on Drugs approach. Without cannabis within the system’s remit, the number of illegal drug-users in the world would total somewhere in the region of 40 million people – arguably too small a number to justify the vast costs, in money, human suffering, and political corruption, of the current efforts to enforce the ideals behind this unwinnable war. With a much narrower target the War on Drugs might turn instead into a more sensible campaign to relieve the problems caused by the dependence of a small number of users on more addictive and dangerous drugs.

The present volume reviews the issues which need to be considered by policy-makers in developing more effective cannabis policies that minimize the harms associated with its use and control. We hope that this Report will prove useful in policy discussions concerning cannabis, not only in the context of the 2009 international review, but also as a guide for governments seeking to reform their cannabis policies thereafter, and that it will further promote a wider discussion of these important issues amongst the general public.

Psychedelics and Species Connectedness

David Luke — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:15:19 +0000

Evidence suggests that at the very least the consumption of psychedelic substances leads to an increased concern for Nature and ecological issues. On one level we can understand that this may be due to a basic appreciation of place and aesthetics that accompanies the increased sensory experience, or that since psychedelic plants come from Nature we are forced to enter its realms when we search them out. However, on a deeper level we can also appreciate that a communication with Nature may on occasion occur through the phenomenological properties of the psychedelic experience, some of which have been hailed by experients as life-transforming and spiritually renewing, even “mystical.”

By Dr. David Luke & Dr. Stanley Kripner

With the aid of mescaline Aldous Huxley came face to face with such a mystical experience, even though the Oxford Theologian R.C. Zaehner (1957) denigrated his experience of “nature mysticism” as somehow inferior to the “genuine” theistic mystical experience. Yet the irony remains that the very split from Nature that some Christian theologians claim occurred in the Garden of Eden may lie at the heart of many people’s current sense of separateness from their ecology. Whereas, under specificircumstances of substance, set, and setting, psychedelics are capable of augmenting such a reunion. Despite Zaehner’s derisions, Huxley (1954) reportedly witnessed this reunion through his experimental uses of mescaline: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation – the miracle, moment by moment of naked existent.”

Is it this naked existence that reconnects the natural environment to the mental capacities of those psychedelically-inspired experients? This type of experience forges a way of thought that is filled with ethical, ecological implications, and which is reﬂected in the work of shamas, alchemists, and other practitioners who respected nature. The patriarch of psychedelia, Albert Hofmann, demonstrated this by reporting that a mystical
experience he had had when he was young prefigured his discovery of LSD. He stated that “…my mystical nature experience of nature as a child…was absolutely lik an LSD-experience…. I believe I was in some fashion born to that.”

Read the full article by clicking on the link below:

Species Connectedness