MEXICO'S four-year assault on drug cartels lacks a clear strategy and a modernised military, and suffers from infighting among security agencies, according to US State Department cables leaked to WikiLeaks....

The cables call into question many of the efforts publicly touted by the two countries, from the use of the Mexican army, which is described as outdated, slow and risk averse, to the United States' $1.4 billion Merida Initiative, which is seen as ill-conceived and doing little so far to fight drug traffickers.

In one cable, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asks about how the stress is affecting President Felipe Calderon's "personality and management style,'' while a cable by U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual notes that Calderon has admitted to having a tough year and has appeared "down'' in meetings....

"Calderon has aggressively attacked Mexico's drug-trafficking organisations but has struggled with an unwieldy and uncoordinated interagency and spiraling rates of violence that have made him vulnerable to criticism that his anti-crime strategy has failed,'' reads a January 29 memo called "Scenesetter for Opening of the Defence Bilateral Working Group'' that also criticises competition among Mexican security agencies, corruption and Mexico's abysmally low prosecution rate.

How did you first become interested in psychedelics and what was it about them that made you wish to research and study them?

JK: I have always been fascinated with strange features of the brain, and in college I began studying philosophy, religion and mysticism, and was very interested in Gnosis and methods of transcendence. I certainly knew what psychedelics were, but was not really interested in them until a friend mentioned that LSD was said to produce mystical states. I had not previously made the connection between psychedelics and mysticism, but a quick trip to the library, spending a few hours skimming through works by Huxley, Leary and Hofmann, made me realize there were aspects of the mind still beyond common explanation. My initial interest was ignited by the curiosity to have that ineffable mystical experience first-hand. I wanted to see if it was as strange and wonderful as advertised.

James Kent is the editor of DoseNation.com.

Those awkward moments after you come back down...

Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD, died in 2008 aged 102. This book, which he saw in proof form shortly before his death, has consequently become a posthumous tribute to the man, celebrating his life, work and influence. It takes the form of several essays by Hofmann himself, followed by a Festschrift of others by luminaries such as Ralph Metzner and Stanislav Grof, the whole ensemble edited by Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation.

What comes across as intriguing is that though Hofmann chose a career path of empirical science in becoming a chemist, he nonetheless had a strong mystical orientation, which first manifested in childhood: "While I strolled through the birdsong-filled forest, freshly verdant and illuminated by the morning sun, everything suddenly appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Had I previously not looked carefully, and did I suddenly now see the spring forest as it really was? It radiated the splendour of a peculiar, heartfelt beauty, as if it wished to encompass me in all its glory. An indescribable feeling of happiness, of belonging and of blissful security perfused me."

It was this kind of perspective and serendipitous outlook that led Hofmann towards the discovery of LSD, and he gives a distinctly Jungian analysis of the string of chance events and coincidences that paved the way. Even though he was searching for a circulatory stimulant, not a psychedelic, and even though he’d synthesised the compound five years before and found it to be ineffective for that purpose, he was nevertheless drawn by its chemical structure to synthesise it again: "...a repetition, so to speak, founded on a hunch, chance had the opportunity to come into play. At the conclusion of the synthesis, I was overtaken by a very weird state of consciousness, which today one might call 'psychedelic'." Another chemist might have taken it no further, but Hofmann was sufficiently intrigued to conduct a self-experiment three days later, and the rest is history.

Originally published by City Lights in 2010 'White Hand Society -- The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg' is authored by Peter Conners. The book takes a refreshing look at psychedelia's most culturally potent point of history to date. Conners has previously published a memoir entitled 'Growing up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead', the novella 'Emily Ate the Wind' and a collection of poetry called 'Of Whiskey & Winter'.

A number of books have been published of late dealing more exclusively with Timothy Leary and his Harvard colleagues like Richard Alpert (now Ram Dass,) Ralph Metzner, Frank Barron and alike; however, by shifting the focus to Leary's relationship with poet Allen Ginsberg, Conners has created a far wider historical-cultural context; indeed a wider countercultural context. The beauty of this, as we shall see, is to connect the psychedelic movement with some of the wider cultural shifts that had been developing since WW2. Not only, for example, does this perspective plug directly into the Beat generation but simultaneously into the political and social upheaval of the mid-to-late 1960s.

Safiq Shaikh was 13 when he began chewing a blend of tobacco and spices that jolted him awake when his job at a textile loom got too dreary. Five years later, doctors in Mumbai lopped off his tongue to halt the cancer that was spreading through his mouth.

Shaikh believed the fragrant, granular mixture he chewed, known in India as gutka, was a harmless stimulant and at first he ignored the milky lump growing inside his mouth. Now Shaikh is one of about 200,000 Indians diagnosed with a tobacco-related malignancy this year, says his surgeon, Pankaj Chaturvedi.

India has the highest number of oral cancers in the world after a group of entrepreneurs known locally as "gutka barons" turned a 400-year-old tobacco product hand-rolled in betel leaves into a spicy blend sold for 2 cents on street corners from Bangalore to New Delhi. Sales of chewing tobacco, worth 210.3 billion rupees ($4.6 billion) in 2004, are on track to double by 2014, according to Datamonitor, a branch of the international research firm based in Hyderabad, India.

Mary and Matt, my guides, sat beside me on the couch at Johns Hopkins Medical Center to look at an art book until the psilocybin took effect. In only about fifteen or twenty minutes I knew I had received an active dose rather than a placebo. "I'm going down," I told them. On went the eye mask, the headphones, the blanket, and the blood pressure cuff, and I began to sink into another world.

The descent seemed even rougher than the previous time, a rattling, lurching, high-speed roller coaster ride straight downhill through tingling geometric shapes and tunnels of textured blackness. The music on the soundtrack exaggerated the eerie atmosphere and kept me wary. Once again the abdominal spasms started up as well. Chemicals washed over me in repeated waves, bringing hot sensations and a bad taste in my mouth. As soon as I managed to get stabilized from one wave, another would follow. The sheer number of these cycles suggested that this was a stronger dose than I'd had the first time...

I also came upon another impression that I had forgotten from the first session, the sense of emerging into "rooms" or public areas in the blackness. Sometimes I seemed to be on the periphery of a large sphere, many stories tall, with a city-of-the-future feel to it, tiers of terraces around the edge and flying objects like space cars. For all I knew, this could have been a single cell -- all sense of proportion was lost. I described this to Mary and Matt for their records.

Despite the strong effects of the psilocybin, I was able to keep in mind my intention to work with what was presented to me. Whenever my consciousness regrouped into my familiar identity, I mentally reiterated, "Tell me where we are going. I am willing to go where you take me." I was determined to remain as nonjudgmental as possible and to offer no resistance, as Dr. Griffiths had advised, even though I was apprehensive.

Before the session began that morning, I had asked various sources of spiritual inspiration, ranging from the Archangel Michael to Joel Goldsmith, author of The Infinite Way, to help me through the experience. Now when I silently called on them to come and be with me, I detected a sense of wry amusement as if they had been watching. "We are already here," they responded wordlessly. "It is you who are in our territory now." I told this to Mary and she too found it surprising. I felt the truth of their message, and it heartened me. This was my first encounter with other intelligence in an altered state.

From Wired Science via anonymous. An oldie but a fun illusion to think about.

Schizophrenia sufferers aren’t fooled by an optical illusion known as the "hollow mask" that the rest of us fall for because connections between the sensory and conceptual areas of their brains might be on the fritz.

In the hollow mask illusion, viewers perceive a concave face (like the back side of a hollow mask) as a normal convex face. The illusion exploits our brain’s strategy for making sense of the visual world: uniting what it actually sees -- known as bottom-up processing -- with what it expects to see based on prior experience -- known as top-down processing.

"Our top-down processing holds memories, like stock models," explains Danai Dima of Hannover Medical University, in Germany, co-author of a study in NeuroImage. "All the models in our head have a face coming out, so whenever we see a face, of course if has to come out."

This powerful expectation overrides visual cues, like shadows and depth information, that indicate anything to the contrary.

But patients with schizophrenia are undeterred by implausibility: They see the hollow face for what it is. About seven out of 1000 Americans suffer from the disease, which is characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and poor planning. Some psychologists believe this dissociation from reality may result from an imbalance between bottom-up and top-down processing -- a hypothesis ripe for testing using the hollow mask illusion...

Schizophrenics aren’t the only ones who see the concave face -- people who are drunk or high can also'beat' the illusion. A similar disconnect between what the brain sees and what it expects to see may be occurring during these drug-induced states.

I had a job as a hotel nanny in Hawaii for a while. It was awesome. I was Maui Poppins. My company worked all of the big resorts. Mostly it was an evening gig, where I had to hang out with tiny strangers in a hotel room for a few hours while mom and dad went to dinner and a show. The problem with hotel rooms is there’s not much to do in there besides bounce on the bed and watch TV. Now I’ve got no objection to gymnastics practice, but I feel like a failure when my charges are compelled to resort to passive entertainment. So after a few weeks of making up games like "let’s put dozens of strips of toilet paper up on the fan and then turn it on and see how many we can catch in the air", I started bringing a bag of tricks and toys along with me on my visitations. The contents got use-tested and refined over time, and eventually I got it down to a tight collection of classic hits.