Mexico's president Felipe Calderon is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the 'war on drugs' there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight

The birthday fiesta was in full swing at 1.30am when five SUVs pulled up outside the house. Figures spilled from the vehicles and ran towards the lights. They burst into the house and levelled AK-47s. "Kill them all!" A shouted instruction, only three words, and the slaughter began.

Gunfire and screams drowned the music. Some victims were cut down immediately, others were caught as they tried to escape. By the time the killers left there were 17 corpses, 18 wounded and 200 shell casings. Among the dead was the birthday guest of honour, a man local media named only as Mota, Mexican slang for marijuana.

The atrocity last month in Torreon, an industrial city in the northern state of Coahuila, came amid headlines shocking even by the standards of Mexico's drug war. A sophisticated car bomb of a type never before seen in the country; a popular gubernatorial candidate gunned down in the highest-level political murder; and then last week the release of official figures putting the number of drug war-related murders at 28,000.

It was against this backdrop of bloody crisis that President Felipe Calderon said something which could, maybe, begin to change everything. He called for a debate on the legalisation of drugs. "It is a fundamental debate," he said. "You have to analyse carefully the pros and cons and key arguments on both sides."

A statement of the obvious, but coming from Calderon it was remarkable. This is the president who declared war on drug cartels in late 2006, deployed the army, militarised the city of Juarez and promised victory even as the savagery overtook Iraq's. Calderon stressed that he personally still opposed legalisation, but his willingness to debate the idea was, for some, a resounding crack in the international drug policy edifice.

"I just unfriended you on Facebook."

This short collection of expansive essays and book reviews is the first publication completely authored by Gyrus, editor of the late-1990s underground magazine Towards 2012 and the ongoing periodical Dreamflesh: A Journal of Ecological Crisis & Archaeologies of Consciousness. Much like Time & Mind, the title of this anthology reflects its author's interest in exploring the prehistory of mind and its changing states of consciousness. This is not an academic text however -- although academics may find it fascinating reading -- and the author makes no bones about his exploratory methods.

What better place for a discussion on the rarefied subject of magic mushrooms than the hippy-oriented Sunrise Festival in Somerset, England, just down the road from Stonehenge? On a hot Saturday afternoon in early June 2010, a group of us gathered in the Ancient Futures yurt to hear Andy Letcher’s talk on ‘Reading the Codex: Making Sense of Magic Mushrooms’.

Andy Letcher, a holder of two doctorates -- the first ecology related, the second concerning Bardic performance in contemporary Paganism -- is the author of 'Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom', a comprehensive and informative overview of mushroom culture and its position in the larger psychedelic pantheon. Published in 2006, the book was generally well received and critically acclaimed, but due to its revisionist stance on many of the cherished theories concerning psychedelic use throughout history, it has also excited much controversy and opposition. On some internet message boards this has escalated to open hostility and outright abuse, and, perhaps worse still, the accusation that Andy has never even taken mushrooms.

'On Hashish' is a selection of protocols and various writings on intoxication by Walter Benjamin. They are based on experiments that took place between 1927-1934 in Berlin, Marseille and Ibiza. Many were conducted in group conditions, which included individuals like Ernst Bloch and Jean Selz. Although Benjamin had planned a great drug-related work during his lifetime, it never came to fruition. This collection was first published posthumously in 1972 as 'Uber Haschisch'. I'll be working from the English translation, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Initially inspired by 19th century writers like Charles Baudelaire and the group environment of Club Des Hashishins, Walter Benjamin began experimenting with Hashish along with various contemporaries including physician Ernst Joel and philosopher Ernst Bloch. According to the translators forward: "The philosophical immersion that intoxicants afforded Walter Benjamin was not symbolist derangement of the senses -- but transformation of reason. Which is to say: transformation of the traditional logic of noncontradiction and the traditional principle of identity". He wanted to explore philosophically, and quite literally in his drug taking, the horizons of experience.

Jeff Wilcox, a middle-aged, clean-cut man who dresses in the Bay Area casual business attire of clean jeans, collared shirt and running shoes, may be the face of Marijuana, Inc, the corporatization of cannabis.

He has just persuaded Oakland to legalize industrial-sized marijuana farms, touting a study that promised millions in city taxes and hundreds of high-paying union jobs.

The long-struggling city, which has failed spectacularly to capitalize on the high-tech boom, could be the Silicon Valley of pot, Wilcox told the City Council this week before its historic vote to grant four permits for urban, industrial-size marijuana farms.

But as Wilcox points out, his business model -- a nonprofit -- will be less Google or Apple and more Trader Joe's, a California cut rate gourmet grocery chain. The store's best-known product is $2 per bottle Charles Shaw wine, known affectionately as Two Buck Chuck and considered a great glass of wine for the price.

"The new Two Buck Chuck will be $40 an ounce pot," Wilcox said in an interview, looking forward to a day of full legalization. Boutique growers could produce the high-end stuff in their "gardens," he explained, while he supplied the masses with a clean, controlled, great-value product.

If California legalizes marijuana, the rest of the nation may well follow. One way or the other, cut rate, highly potent California weed is unlikely to stop at the state's borders.

[Thanks Mason!]

More than 800,000 people are arrested on marijuana charges each year in the United States, many on the basis of an error-prone test...

The Duquenois test was developed in the late 1930s by a French pharmacist, Pierre Duquenois, while he was working for the United Nations division of narcotics. In 1950, he completed a study for the UN which claimed that his test was "very specific" for marijuana; it was adopted by the UN and crime labs around the world as the preferred test for marijuana.

After undergoing several modifications, including the use of chloroform, the test became known as the Duquenois-Levine test, and became widely popular. Though scientists would show in the 1960s and 1970s that the D-L test was nonspecific, meaning it rendered false positives, it remains today the most commonly used test for marijuana -- used in many of the 800,000 marijuana arrests that take place each year...

Despite its widespread use, as early as the 1960s, the D-L test had been proven incapable of definitively identifying the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. A 1968 article in the Chemistry and Pharmacy Bulletin of Japan reported that the D-L tests "lack in adequate specificity." In 1969, M. J. de Faubert Maunder, a chemist in the Ministry of Technology, a UK government agency, documented the unreliability of the D-L test in an article in the Bulletin on Narcotics, noting that test results depended heavily on the subjective judgment of the analyst -- and thus could easily vary dramatically from lab to lab. "[A] positive test is not recorded until this colour has been identified," he wrote, "and because it is almost impossible to describe in absolute terms it is best recognised by experience." Moreover, he reported finding twenty-five plant substances that would produce a D-L test result barely distinguishable from that of Cannabis and cautioned that the D-L test "should never be relied upon as the only positive evidence."

[Thanks 23 Wolves!]

Prior to the reactionary media hysteria and the subsequent government backlash at the end of the 1960s, a wealth of serious scientific research was conducted into the therapeutic and medical benefits of powerful psychoactive drugs. By the beginning of the 1970s, however, almost all therapeutic applications and scientific human research with such drugs had been curtailed and their use criminalized. In the following years, this potentially beneficial side to hallucinogens became largely forgotten. Only during the last decade, has this research gradually been resumed to the point where we might now even speak of a renaissance of research into psychedelic medicines. As a testament to this revival this extensive two-volume tome currently serves as the authoritative reference text on psychedelic medicines, particularly with regard to the advances made in the last ten years.

Rivaling this one in my experience is "The Devil Does Drugs"; although this video isn't as good as the previous one, it does have this excellent comment on YouTube: "I remember stomping ,flailing throwing fists, and being on drugs, but thats as far as I remember. I awoke stuck to my pillow with my own blood, and this song was still playing, fucking awesome. Thanks for memories."

That one has some of the best lyrics and samples ever, including the infinitely famous "Everybody thinks I'm high and I am", which inspired DJ Voodoo and The Liquid Method to make a slammin' breakbeat techno track, which featured prominently on a mix CD called Funky Desert Breaks by DJ John Kelley: