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This is what Mexico is up against, and helps explain why the country’s incoming president wants to go in a different direction.

In what clearly looks to be a drug cartel show of strength, a video circulating this week on Mexican social media shows a convoy of dozens of vehicles and scores of uniformed and heavily armed men stopped on a mountain highway in the state of Jalisco. They appear totally unconcerned about presenting an armed challenge to the Mexican state, and with good reason—there is no sign of a police or military presence anywhere.

The video, which first popped up on messaging services such as WhatsApp before being picked up by Mexican news websites, appears to show members of what is now arguably the most powerful drug cartel in the county, the CJNG (Jalisco New Generation Cartel). The CJNG first formed in 2009 but has risen to preeminence in the country's bloody cartel landscape in the wake of the capture and extradition to the United States of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the long-running Sinaloa Cartel, which has since splintered in his absence.

In the video, the suspected cartel member who filmed the footage and a companion talk about the cartel and show other men wearing shirts bearing the CJNG initials. The scores of gunmen, many wearing military-style uniforms and helmets, others wearing pasamontañas (balaclavas), are relaxed and jovial as they casually stroll along the federal highway. Accordion-tinged music blares from car radios.

"Cartel Jalisco," one masked gunman says, pointing to himself. "We're just here on patrol," says another. The videographer describes one group of five men as "los guapos del cartel" (the good-looking guys of the cartel).

The release of the video came just days after federal officials announced they had arrested a local CJNG leader in the disappearance of three Italian citizens in January, leaving some to speculate that the video was a response to the state's actions and was intended to demonstrate the group's power.

The CJNG now controls large chunks of western and central Mexico, especially mountainous regions like the Sierra de Nayarit, where the video was allegedly filmed. It is currently engaged in turf wars with rival drug factions in several states and announced just last week that it is going after la plaza (the franchise—control of the local drug trade) in the state of Morelos.

Beyond the day-to-day brutality of its involvement in the country's drug wars, which left a record 29,000 dead last year and more than 200,000 dead since the federal government deployed the military against the cartels to bring peace and security in 2006, the CJNG is also responsible for notorious acts of violence this year, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of three Guadalajara film students and the attempted assassination of Jalisco Labor Secretary Luis Carlos Najera.

Responding to the video, Jalisco Interior Secretary Roberto Lopez Lara said authorities were attempting to authenticate it, but moved to reassure residents. "The state has the security of all residents of Jalisco under control," he said.

The video tells a different story. It's a story all too familiar to Mexicans, who have by now endured more than a decade of drug prohibition-related violence, corruption, and impunity. That's why President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador is talking about doing something entirely different: ending the drug war.

Here's the video:

:

 

This article was produced by Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

 

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Some groundbreaking research begins to look for answers.

Microdosing psychedelics has been a thing for a while now. It is the practice of ingesting drugs such as LSD or psilocybin (the stuff that puts the magic in magic mushrooms) in amounts too small to create a psychedelic experience in a bid to improve focus and creativity, boost mood, or quell anxiety.

Microdosing has developed a laudatory literature—see Ayelet Waldman's 2017 A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life and Michael Pollan's 2018 How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence—but next to no serious scientific study.

Until now. In findings first presented at the June Beyond Psychedelics conference in Prague (and to be published as three separate research papers later this year), University of Toronto researchers offered fascinating insights into the how, why, and results of using small amounts of psychedelics for therapeutic effects.

In a research announcement, cognitive neuroscientist and study co-author Thomas Anderson said his interest in the topic was sparked when he reviewed the scientific literature and found plenty of anecdotal reports but a lack of scientific research on the practice.

"There’s currently a renaissance going on in psychedelic research with pilot trials and promising studies of full-dose MDMA (ecstasy) use for post-traumatic stress disorder and of psilocybin use within healthy populations or to treat depression and end-of-life anxiety," said Anderson. "There hasn’t been the same research focus on microdosing. We didn’t have answers to the most basic epidemiological questions—who is doing this and what are they doing?"

Anderson and a team of researchers decided to do something no one had done before: ask the users themselves about their experiences. The researchers identified microdosing communities on Reddit and other social media forums and sent them an anonymous online survey asking about the quantity and frequency of their psychedelic use, reasons for microdosing, effect on mood, focus and creativity, and the benefits and drawbacks of the practice. The survey generated 1,390 initial responses, with 909 respondents answering all questions. Two-thirds of the respondents were either current or past microdosers.

"We wanted to ensure the results produced a good basis for future psychedelic science," Anderson said.

What they found was that microdosers reported positive effects, including improved focus and productivity, better connection with others, and reductions in migraines. Quantitatively, microdosers scored lower than non-microdosers on scales measuring negative emotionality and dysfunctional attitude.

Microdosers did report some drawbacks to the practice, but those were related more to the illegal status of psychedelics than to the practice itself.

"The most prevalently reported drawback was not an outcome of microdosing, but instead dealt with illegality, stigma and substance unreliability," says Anderson. "Users engage in black market criminalized activities to obtain psychedelics. If you’re buying what your dealer says is LSD, it could very well be something else."

The survey did help clarify the frequency of microdosing—most respondents reported using every three days, while a smaller group did it once a week—and just what constituted a microdose.

"Typical doses aren’t well established," said Anderson. "We think it’s about 10 mcg or one-tenth of an LSD tab, or 0.2 grams of dried mushrooms. Those amounts are close to what participants reported in our data."

But accurate dosing was another problem area: "With microdoses, there should be no ‘trip’ and no hallucinations. The idea is to enhance something about one’s daily activities, but it can be very difficult to divide a ½-cm square of LSD blotting paper into 10 equal doses. The LSD might not be evenly distributed on the square and a microdoser could accidentally ‘trip’ by taking too much or not taking enough," Anderson said.

"The goal of the study was to create a foundation that could support future work in this area, so I’m really excited about what these results can offer future research," he explained. "The benefits and drawbacks data will help ensure we can ask meaningful questions about what participants are reporting. Our future research will involve running lab-based, randomized-control trials where psychedelics are administered in controlled environments. This will help us to better characterize the therapeutic and cognitive-enhancing effects of psychedelics in very small doses."

Eventually, the science will catch up to the practice. In the meantime, microdosers are going to microdose. Anderson has a scholarly caution for them: "We wouldn’t suggest that people microdose, but if they are going to, they should use Ehrlich’s reagent (a drug testing solution) to ensure they are not getting something other than LSD."

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From murders to suicides

Mexico has suffered one of the world’s highest murder rates for over a decade, a consequence of the government’s aggressive, 12-year-long battle against drug trafficking organizations and other criminal groups, which has led lethal violence to escalate across the country.

Almost 30,000 Mexicans were murdered in 2017. May 2018 was Mexico’s most violent month in 20 years, with an average of 90 killings a day, according to the Mexican secretary of the interior.

Prominent victims of Mexico’s conflict include 136 politicians and political operatives assassinated while campaigning for the July 2018 general election, 43 student teachers who disappeared in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero in 2014 and the eight Mexican journalists killed so far this year.

In places where the violence has been highly concentrated, residents have spent the past decade taking precautions, coping with fear and processing tragedy.

Now, new data from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua reveals the dangerous mental health toll of living with extreme, chronic violence: suicides.

From murders to suicides

Violence researchers like myself once considered Chihuahua, which shares a border with Texas, to be a Mexican success story in decreasing lethal violence.

Its biggest city, Ciudad Juárez, which sits just across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, used to be one of the world’s most dangerous places. Its 2010 murder rate of 229 killings per 100,000 people was 14 times higher than the Latin American average and 38 times the global homicide rate. An average of 70 Ciudad Juárez residents were killed every week.

By 2015, thanks in large part to a pioneering public-private anti-violence initiative called Todos Somos Juárez, or We Are All Juárez, the city’s murder rate had dropped to 32 murders per 100,000 residents.

These days, violence is slowly rising again. Depending on the year, Juárez ranks among Mexico’s most dangerous cities.

But even when homicides were dropping in Juárez, suicides were steadily rising.

A recent survey by the Autonomous University of Juárez City and the Centro Familiar de Integración y Crecimiento, a group that helps grieving families, found that 33 city residents over the age of 18 attempt suicide every day. Another 43 Juárez residents daily will think about suicide without attempting the act.

The city’s 2017 suicide rate, 8.9 per 100,000, was nearly twice what it was in 2010. Last year, nearly 12,000 people – 1.3 percent of Juárez’s total population – tried to kill themselves.

Juárez’s mental health crisis reflects a state-wide trend. According to government data from 2016, Chihuahua state had the highest and fastest-growing suicide rate in Mexico.

In 2010, fewer than 7 of every 100,000 people in the state committed suicide. By 2015, the figure had reached 11.4. Last year, Chihuahua saw 12.3 suicides per 100,000 residents.

That’s more than twice the Mexican national average and just shy of the United States’ alarming rate of 13.8 suicides per 100,000 people.

Young people in Chihuahua struggle the most. Among residents aged 15 to 29, approximately 16 in every 100,000 will commit suicide – double the national average for that age group.

The trauma of living with chronic violence

Why are so many in Chihuahua driven to take their own lives?

Local researchers believe that chronic exposure to traumatic events causes the kind of severe mental distress that can lead to suicidal behavior.

Last year, the Autonomous University of Juárez City conducted research with 315 students on campus. It found that living in one of the world’s most violent cities had triggered paranoid thoughts.

Few of the students interviewed had been victims of Juárez’s brutal violence. But all had heard about kidnapped women, beheadings and other crimes – some equally gruesome – from friends and family or on the news. As a result, they had an unshakable feeling that their lives were in danger.

Researchers also conducted a similar study on student mental health in 2014. It determined that 35 percent of students struggled with depression and almost 38 percent reported anxiety. Nearly one-third showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, including always feeling on guard, trouble sleeping and difficulty concentrating.

Surveys by the World Health Organization and the International Consortium of Psychiatric Epidemiology across nine developing countries, including Mexico, estimate the average rate of PTSD at 2.3 percent. Anxiety affects about 6 percent of respondents.

Research on high school students in Ciudad Juárez has likewise found a higher-than-usual incidence of depression, paranoia and PTSD.

Ciudad Juárez sits just across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, Texas. Scanzon/Wikimedia, CC BY War as a suicide risk factor

These results are consistent with mental health surveys in other conflict zones.

A 2011 study of people displaced during Colombia’s civil war found evidence of PTSD in 88 percent of participants. Forty percent suffered from depression.

Researchers interviewed 1,011 students in Afghanistan in 2006, five years into the U.S.-led war against the Taliban. Almost a quarter had flashbacks and anxiety, both signs of PTSD.

Such results have contributed to the World Health Organization’s classification of disaster, war and conflict as suicide risk factors.

Mexico’s public health emergency

Research on the mental health impacts of Mexico’s drug war is in very early stages.

I cannot conclude with certainty that chronic violence in Ciudad Juárez is driving the sharp uptick in suicides in Chihuahua state.

But Chihuahua’s suicide crisis may well indicate a simmering public health emergency in other Mexican states with high murder rates, including Michoacan and Guerrero – not to mention in neighboring countries like El Salvador and Honduras that remain far more violent than Mexico.

With 2018 on track to be another year of record murders in Mexico and president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador taking office in December, this the moment for Mexico to begin grappling with the hidden, longer-term costs of its bloody drug war.

Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California San Diego

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

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