Throw the bums out

Voters in Athens, OH ousted two incumbent school board members who voted for a student drug testing plan that was fervently opposed by parents and students. The voters reelected another incumbent who opposed the testing proposal.

New board members Gordon Brooks and Mike Chapman both acknowledged that the policy, which met with fierce opposition from some district parents, helped spark their decisions to run.

Let's hope that elected officials elsewhere take note that supporting programs that do nothing to protect young people and instead needlessly infringe on their civil rights - all while flushing taxpayers' money down the toilet - will only jeopardize their political careers.

Student journalists forgot to do homework

The geniuses on the editorial board of the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts, recently opined in favor of the HEA Drug Provision.

Short and sweet, the federal government is not funding a student's college education so they can get high. If that is how they choose to spend their money and their time in college, they certainly do not need to be wasting the government's money in the process; money, mind you, that could have gone to students who take their education and time here more seriously.

Someone needs to (respectfully) tell these fools that there is already a measure that makes sure students are getting the most out of their college education and the federal financial aid they receive - it's called grades. That's right, students must maintain a 2.0 Grade Point Average to receive aid. So if students are wasting all of their time using or selling drugs instead of studying and going to classes, they're already going to lose their aid.

The HEA Drug Provision is discriminatory, causes much more harm than it prevents, and should be repealed immediately.

If you have five minutes, please write a letter to the editor of the Daily Collegian and send it to: editorial@dailycollegian.com. Don't forget to plug SSDP for any interested students who might read your letter!

Drug War: Still keeping little girls safe at school

Two incidents from last week show how the Drug War - purportedly aimed at protecting young people - actually makes matters worse for us.

The first example comes from across the pond in England. At an elementary school there, police officers conducted a demonstration aimed at scaring kids out of bringing drugs to school by showing them how dogs can easily sniff out controlled substances.

But the doofus officer conducting the demonstration made a BIG mistake:

Ch Supt Dave Wheeler for Lincolnshire police said: "When the packages were being hidden two packages were inadvertently placed in the girls bag and when the dog found the drugs only one package was retrieved.

Understandably, the parents of 10-year-old Kia Butterfield are pissed:

She added her two younger children aged one and three were running around the house at the time and might have thought the bag of speed was sweets.

And back here in the U.S., we're now giving drug tests to teenage girls experiencing the symptoms of PMS.

16-year-old Nicole James of Raymore, MO wasn't feeling too well when her special time of the month came for her during the school day. Understandably, she was too embarrassed to tell school officials that her queasiness was a result of her period. When administrators thought she might be under the influence, they decided to give her a field sobriety test.

Dale James said Nicole did not fail the test, but the school told him she did not pass with flying colors. So, the family was given two options."Either a police officer could take my daughter down to juvenile hall, or we could have her tested (for drugs) ourselves," Dale James said. He said they opted for a drug test, which Nicole passed without a problem.

The parents are now trying to get the school to pay for the cost of the drug test. Good luck to them and all of the other families sick of the Drug War's invasion of young people's privacy and its infringement on our safety.

Why do we fight the drug war?

That was the question being asked and answered repeatedly by almost a thousand drug policy reformers (about 100 of them student activists) as we gathered at the Westin in Long Beach, CA this weekend for the Drug Policy Alliance’s 2005 International Drug Policy Reform Conference.

The issue was pondered as speakers delivered remarks, reformers chatted next to exhibition booths, and other guests at the Westin saw dozens of students wearing t-shirts bearing the words “I fight the drug war - ask me why.”

Some of us are primarily concerned with the way the drug war deprives human beings of autonomy over their own minds and bodies, while others are more motivated by the way current drug policies waste taxpayers’ resources and proliferate violent crime, disease, and death. Most of us have a myriad of reasons for dedicating so much of ourselves to the cause of ending the drug war.

From the disproportionate impact U.S. drug policies have on people of color, to the diversion of otherwise-taxable transactions to the criminal market, and from the impact prohibitionist supply-reduction policies have on the rain forest in Colombia and other countries, to the implications for federalism and states rights, the war on drugs reaches into almost every area of human life and public policy.

Writing now from Long Beach and reflecting over a weekend that went by way too quickly, I have to say I’m in awe of the quality and dedication of so many SSDP activists who traveled here from across the country to meet each other and talk about how to win campaigns and build our organization. Not surprisingly, brilliant students with diverse backgrounds and experiences don’t all agree on how exactly to win this decades-old war. Spirited discussions about how to most effectively move forward took place during breakout and plenary sessions, the SSDP Congress, on the nearby beach sands, and in hotel rooms into the late hours of the night and early hours of the morning.

And I’m further encouraged as I sit here and think about how many conversations activists had over the weekend with other guests in the Westin’s elevators and with pedestrians on the way to and from the other hotels in the area where many attendees slept and hung out.

But of course, we can’t and won’t stop there. If we’re going to put an end to these destructive policies, we need to tell everyone we know and everyone we meet about how the drug war negatively impacts them and everyone they love. No person or family is left untouched, which was made eminently clear by the wide assortment of backgrounds conference attendees came from. Students, cops, judges, drug users, current and former addicts, substance abuse treatment providers, elected officials, medical marijuana patients, former prisoners, and many, many others came together from many different perspectives in unison against a war that destroys lives.

As Ethan Nadelmann, DPA’s executive director, said during the conference’s opening plenary, the reform movement is made up of people who love drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who just don’t give a damn about drugs one way or another.

The diversity of perspectives represented at the conference shows just how complex issues surrounding drug use and abuse really are. There are no silver bullet solutions to these problems, but it is especially up to us – young people who will incur the consequences of these policies for the rest of our lives – to formulate and implement more effective ways to minimize the potential negative consequences associated with the demand for and use of drugs.

I hope that those of you who attended the conference will comment here and share your thoughts on the historic gathering. And if you have any digital pictures of the weekend’s events, please send them to me so we can put them on the SSDP website and share the memories with everyone.

12 inches of...

Remember Snow, the one hit wonder from 1993? He had that song, Informer. I always thought his name was a comment on his skin color, but maybe I was wrong....

It seems some parents are all freaked out that their kids (or worse, other people's kids) are wearing t-shirts with a picture of a snowman on it!

“This is part of a phenomena in which parents have no idea what their children are exposed to. There is a code that children are aware of but not parents,” says Sue Rusche, president and CEO of the anti-drug group National Families In Action.

Waaaa! I can't stand it when some people bemoan a subculture, whatever it is, that has codes and adds meaning to everyday items. If you don't get it, shut up or join in! Youth subcultures are particularly vulnerable to adult scorn and it's a shame that groups like Rusche's outfit and others continue to reach for simple answers to the very complex questions about how to help our youth make wise and informed decisions about drug use.

SSDP believes that parents with open and honest relationships with their kids will have children that make wise decisions about drugs, regardless of what's on their shirts.

Yes, these shirts are a bootleg comment on Young Jeezy's former profession -- cocaine dealer. But so what? Now, he's a very successful rapper who presumably makes his living legally. I think it's a wonderful American success story!

Unfortunately, this guy didn't get the memo or the paper. A few days after the above story ran in newspapers across the county, he was arrested as part of a sweep of "some of Tampa’s toughest neighborhoods."

But we shouldn't judge a guy too harshly who gets caught breaking the law while wearing a shirt glorifying breaking the law. Apparently, not even all of Tampa law enforcement could be bothered to read.

"One officer wondered why so many cameras were focused on the drug suspect. “I thought, ‘this is a little early for Christmas clothing.”

Drug Policy Reform Family Reunion

The SSDP staff and other contributors to DGD, along with hundreds of other people who realize that the War on Drugs is causing more harm than good, will converge at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform this week in Long Beach, CA. Check this space frequently for LIVE updates from the conference. ;-)

photo from the 2003 DPA conference

I'm looking forward to seeing many of you there and hoping to stay in touch with the rest of you through the blog.

Why Get Involved with SSDP?

A little over two years ago I attended my first Hemp Fest at the University of Rhode Island. I had just graduated from high school and was beginning my first semester at the Community College of RI. I willingly admit my reasons for attending the HempFest were primarily selfish. I had no real knowledge of Hemp or even the War on Drugs (despite years of D.A.R.E.), and this was simply a day of relaxation, free musical performances, vendors, and the strong possibility of meeting others who share similar "interests".

I remember seeing a red stop sign sticker saying STOP THE DRUG WAR. It was the first time I had ever heard those words together in a sentence and my first thought was "Why would anyone want to stop the war on drugs, drugs are bad. Marijuana is one thing, but why would anyone support the use of hard drugs?” I honestly thought it was stupid.

I was not even aware that speakers were part of the day's events until Micah Diagle and Justin Holmes began speaking. They described the mission of SSDP and touched on facts concerning the war on drugs that I had never heard anywhere before and I actually started listening to what they had to say. I was shocked to hear about medical marijuana patients like Susan Pfiel, a paraplegic patient who was handcuffed to her bed for using medical marijuana in California, a state that had passed a medical marijuana law. Hearing about the disproportionate incarceration rates of minorities compared to whites disturbed me, as did the aspects of Plan Colombia, the HEA Drug Provision, the amounts of tax-dollars spent to wage this war, and the violation of constitutional rights, something that I had experienced on several occasions with police officers but never knew that I could do anything about it. SSDP seemed like something I needed to get involved in. An opportunity to learn about the political process, the war on drugs, the people it effects, and what other options could be executed to decrease drug use in our country.

After that day I began educating myself about SSDP and the War on Drugs and decided I wanted to get involved. My outlook had been changed. I realized this was not about marijuana; it’s not a bunch of "stoners" hanging out and talking about what their favorite pot strain is. It can become very aggravating when despite the clear mission statement of SSDP, some people refuse to see the group as anything more than advocates of recreational drug use. I cannot emphasize the importance of discrediting this ignorant assumption. In fact the drugs themselves are hardly ever a topic of concern. Rather it is about the laws concerning those drugs and what role they play in our society. It is about non-biased factual education on these drugs' negative effects, not scare tactics and propaganda. It is about people all over the world who are impacted by a war that cannot be won. The very idea that it is possible to rid the world or even a single country of certain chemical substances by incarcerating human beings and eradicating ecosystems is foolish and more destructive than any of these illegal substances could ever be.

So now I have started the first SSDP chapter at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire. FPC joins the hundreds of schools that have recognized SSDP as a campus club and so far we have received great reception from faculty, students, and even the campus ministry. Through SSDP I have made great friends, received a scholarship to attend the Drug Policy Alliance International Reform Conference in Long Beach CA, and rollerbladed 48.9 miles in the name of justice.

So if you find yourself interested in SSDP or unsure about its mission make sure you research the organization and also the war on drugs. Gain a clear understanding of what is going on in YOUR name and what you can do to change it. SSDP deals with hundreds of issues and I am sure there is one you care about regardless of your political views.

Parents: The Anti-Drug?

I saw this on Saturday in the NY Post. (Yes, I read that rag...for fun, and of course, for the gossip!) but it occured to me that if even this parent (John Timoney, Miami Chief of Police, formerly of the Philly PD and NYPD) can't keep his kids from the lure of illicit drug profits, then what chances do average, everyday Moms and Dads have to keep their kids off drugs?

And yet, even though this tough-on-crime, law and order-type has had not one, but two "druggie" kids, he still never gives up on trying to help them through their difficult problems with drugs. According to the NY Post article...

Sean drifted away from his family years ago, sources said.

But his father never gave up on him and won't give up on him now, a former NYPD chief and close friend of the family told The Post.

The friend recalled when [daughter] Christine was in her mid-teens and addicted to heroin.

"John saved Christine numerous times, getting her to hospitals or rehab. His response never wavered. He always responded to help her, relapse after relapse.

"It became more debilitating and frustrating for him to respond, but time after time, he went to her side. Fatherly love was much stronger than his tough law-enforcement image.

"He knew, or hoped, that age would rescue her. But he had to keep her alive through her teens to get there," the friend said.

The article goes on to say that Christine is now doing well, having graduated college, become engaged and is close to her family.

I certainly don't mean to jump on top of what is clearly a difficult family drama. But I do think it's imporant for all parents -- particularly those who are being influenced by the barrage of ads telling them that it's their fault if they don't stop their kids from using drugs -- to stop and think about how much control over their kids' actions they really have.

Finally, when faced with the choice of abandoning his child to the legal system or standing by him, Chief Timoney chose to do whatever he could to help. Parents across the country should take note!

People are talking about this over on TalkLeft.

We see you, White House!

Thanks to all the visitors and contibuters from around the U.S. (and the world) that have made the recent launch of the DARE Generation Diary a huge success!

And special thanks to the Executive Office of the President for reading our blog today! I would speculate that the visitor was a young intern with the Office of National Drug Contol Policy, attempting to finally find some accurate information regarding our nation's drug policy. Welcome aboard, son!

Or perhaps it was even drug czar Johnny Walters himself, poking around to see what his favorite student organization is up to:

The last time I saw his Czarness (at the 2004 D.A.R.E. National Conference), he was preaching that the most crucial job DARE officers could do is to help the feds combat local efforts to legalize medical marijuana.

DARE to keep kids out of grandma's medicine cabinet?? Get real, Johnny.

Here's an idea: DARE to stop wasting taxpayer money on battling the sick and dying. Instead, spend it on something useful like... oh... treatment for addicts or effective drug education.

Up next: belt and scarf prohibition?

Apparently, a dangerous "new" trend is sweeping the nation:

Experts say parents should be aware of a potentially deadly practice -- called "the choking game" -- that some children are using to get high.

Children as young as 10 years old have participated in "the choking game," so they can feel a rush in their brains before passing out from a lack of oxygen.

Kids use their hands -- or sometimes anything including belts or scarves -- to choke themselves or each other until unconscious.

Oh, the crazy things those youth will do these days...

The biggest tipoff will be changes in mood, attention span and grades because they are causing very small subtle brain damage every time they do this, he said.

"Anytime you see a kid change, you need to take it seriously," he said. "There is something going on that shouldn't be."

Oh, really? I thought adolescents undergo drastic changes all the time due to puberty. Turns out, it's really because of all the simulated drug experiences those little rascals are engaging in. Silly me.