Join the drug policy reform movement at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity this Saturday 10.30.10

Are you coming to Washington, DC for The Daily Show's Rally to Restore Sanity or The Colbert Report's March to Keep Fear Alive this Saturday 10/30/10?

SSDP is involved in organizing events before, during, and after the rally to mobilize supporters of marijuana and other drug law reform. With the support of the Drug Policy Alliance, the Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet), and other allies, we can unite as a powerful movement for drug policy sanity in Washington, DC on October 30th. Less than 72 hours before California voters will go to the polls and decide the fate of Proposition 19, a potentially monumental step forward toward ending marijuana prohibition. We must take this incredibly appropriate opportunity to be a voice for sensible drug policy, join us in Washington, DC...

BEFORE: Sign Making/Distribution Party
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For those who will be in town the night before the rally, we'll be at an SSDP satellite home/office welcoming people into town, networking, and preparing materials. We'll have some already made 'Legalize Pot' signs courtesy of DPA, and a some 'Yes on 19' signs courtesy of the Yes on 19. Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign.

DURING: Rally to Restore (Drug Policy) Sanity
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Meet us at the Rally! We'll be the enormous group dressed in suits and holding "Legalize Pot" signs (similar to the event logo) standing at in the center of the National Mall at 4th St.

AFTER: Phonebanking to Restore Sanity
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Immediately following the rally, join us in our DC headquarters office for a phonebanking party to call voters in support of Proposition 19. There will be pizza! If you can, please bring a laptop & your phone.

In a recent piece on Alternet, Yair Tygiel of the Drug Policy Alliance outlines the powerful ways in which our drug policies are lacking sanity:

• As long as parents believe that prohibition -- rather than education and regulation -- keeps their kids safe, our country is not sane.

• As long as over 750,000 people are arrested for marijuana possession in the U.S. every year – most of them Black and Latino men who use and sell marijuana at the same rate as Whites -- our country is not sane.

• As long as foreign-born residents of the U.S. can be deported for a marijuana law violation – no matter how long they have lived in this country – our country is not sane.

• As long as millions of people on parole and probation are thrown back through the revolving prison doors for failing a drug test, our country is not sane.

• As long as the U.S. black market for marijuana fuels rampant violence in Mexico, our country is not sane.

Please visit rally.ssdp.org for details and updates. Hope to see you in DC this Saturday!

Regulation Works. Prohibition Fails.

This great 30sec PSA shows how the legal and regulated market for alcohol makes it difficult for young people to purchase the substance. On the other hand, marijuana prohibition makes it easy for kids to buy pot from the local dealer who doesn't care how old customers are, as long as they have money.

If you have a parent, family member or friend on the fence about regulating marijuana like alcohol, send them this video.

Students Must GOTV in California

If California's Proposition 19 wins in 12 days, it will be because students came out and voted.

As Firedoglake's Jon Walker points out, those most likely to vote yes on Prop 19 are also those most likely to not vote on November 2. 

According to the recent SurveyUSA poll, supporters of Prop 19 are more likely to be infrequent voters and less likely to have already voted by mail. The poll found those voters who say they “always” vote oppose Prop 19 by a margin of 44 to 47. On the other hand, likely voters who tend to rarely vote in midterms overwhelmingly support Prop 19. As a group, these infrequent voters support Prop 19 by a margin of nearly two to one, 58 percent to 34 percent. This means that for every two percent increase in overall turnout from infrequent voters, there would be an almost one percent increase in support for Prop 19.

The poll also found that among people who have already sent in a ballot, Prop 19 is narrowly losing, 47 percent to 50 percent, but it leads 48 to 42 among those who plan to vote but have not already. Of course, people who have already voted can’t change their minds and, by definition, can’t forget to vote on election day, which is not true with those who have yet to vote early.

Bottom line. Young people not only need to vote on Nov. 2, they have to drag their friends and peers to the polls with them.

5th grader under the influence of D.A.R.E turns his parents in.

After attending a D.A.R.E presentation on cannabis, an 11 yr. old 5th grader in Matthews, North Carolina brought his parent’s cannabis to school and turned them in to the police.

"Even if it's happening in their own home with their own parents, they understand that's a dangerous situation because of what we're teaching them," said Matthews Officer Stason Tyrrell. That's what they're told to do, to make us aware."

The student’s father and mother were arrested on October 14th. They were both charged with two misdemeanor counts of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. The 11 yr. old and a sibling were subsequently removed from their house by social services.

This sort of informing isn’t an isolated incident, nor is it discouraged. The D.A.R.E curriculum encourages children to confide in the police. “One of the first lessons found in DARE teaching materials stresses the "Three R's": "Recognize, Resist and Report." The official DARE Officer's Guide for Grades K-4 contains a worksheet that instructs children to "Circle the names of the people you could tell if . . . a friend finds some pills"; the "Police" are listed along with "Mother or Father," "Teacher” or "Friend." The next exercise instructs children to check boxes for which they should inform if they "are asked to keep a secret" - the police are again listed as an option.”

This isn’t a recent phenomenon either. “The Wall Street Journal reported in 1992 that "In two recent cases in Boston, children who had tipped police stepped out of their homes carrying DARE diplomas as police arrived to arrest their parents." In 1991, 10-year-old Joaquin Herrera of Englewood, Colo., phoned 911, announced, "I'm a DARE kid" and summoned police to his house to discover a couple of ounces of marijuana hidden in a bookshelf, according to the Rocky Mountain News. The boy sat outside his parents' home in a police patrol car while the police searched the home and arrested the parents. The policeman assigned to the boy's school commended the boy's action.”

The students find out that being arrested for drug possession doesn’t end with everyone wearing brightly colored-in smiles and holding black-pencil drawn hands under a scrawled yellow sun. “Nine-year-old Darrin Davis of Douglasville, Ga., called 911 after he found a small amount of speed hidden in his parent's bedroom because, as he told the Dallas Morning News, "At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people who use drugs need help... I thought the police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said they would arrest them... But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that." The arrest wrecked his parents' lives, said the Dallas newspaper; both parents lost their jobs, a bank threatened to foreclose on their homes and his father was kept in jail for three months.

If the police’s strategy in winning the war on drugs is to get children to turn their parents in, it’s best they should raise the white flag. Legalize consensual non-violent acts. Vote ‘yes’ on Prop. 19.

SSDP's Phonebanking Parties begin at Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference

Over 60 people gathered in Richmond, VA last weekend at SSDP’s 1st Annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference hosted by our chapter at Virginia Commonwealth University. If you weren't able to make it, check out some photos and videos of the conference.

We kicked off the event on Friday with a Phonebanking Pizza Party, where over a dozen students generated around 200 calls to California voters about marijuana legalization using Just Say Now’s Virtual Phonebank!

Heather Ness, a linguistics major at the University of Maryland where she serves as the treasurer for our UMD SSDP chapter, commented about her experience at the party saying: “It was so easy and fun! Once one or two people broke the ice, everyone started calling. Because we’re calling young voters, it’s like having a conversation with a peer.”

Mike Liszewski, SSDP board member and President/Founder of the UDC School of Law SSDP chapter asked the audience during the conference, “Who here wishes they could vote in the California election this November 2nd so they could vote yes on Proposition 19?”

Almost every hand went up.

“This is the closest thing you can do next to voting that will directly impact the outcome of this groundbreaking initiative that will tax and regulate the responsible adult use of marijuana.”

Visit ssdp.org/pizzaparty to host your own phonebanking party. You can start making calls on your own anytime at JustSayNow.com

Call Voters for Marijuana Reform

Watch the instructional video and start making calls today!

You can use your phone to directly help legalize marijuana!

Our Just Say Now Phonebank is a virtual system that provides you with a free, quick & easy way to reach individual voters in states voting on marijuana initiatives.

There are thousands of voters in Arizona, California, Oregon, and South Dakota who we need to vote for marijuana reforms this November. These voters need to hear from you, and we need to identify supporters so we can get out the vote to end the war on marijuana.

Help us end the war on marijuana - start calling voters in support of marijuana reform today. Click here to start calling: http://go.firedoglake.com/

Our goal is to call 50,000 voters in California in the next 30 days.  If 2,500 people call 20 voters each, about 5 calls per week, we can reach that goal.  You don't have to do it all yourself, though - pass this email to your friends and ask them to call.

Each call just takes a few minutes, and you can start calling voters with just your email address or Facebook account. There's even a video that explains how to call, step by step.

If you're in an SSDP chapter, you can earn points and compete with other chapters everytime you call or rectruit people to your chapter's team. Points are updated in real time on our leaderboard!

Voicing your support for this issue has never been easier or more urgently important, so start calling voters today.

Police shoot unarmed pregnant woman during drug raid.

On September 24th, an unarmed woman nine months pregnant was shot during a drug raid in Spokane, Washington. While the officers were executing the search, during which they found no weapons, she apparently became ‘non-compliant’ and tried to flee out of a second story bedroom window.

A press release by the police said the officers tried to restrain her, but ‘a shot went off’. The woman then fell out of the window. Carmen Nelson, a neighbor, said neither she nor her stepson heard the police giving commands before the shooting. "I heard one gunshot, a woman screamed and a man hollered out afterward," Nelson said. "I'm upset a pregnant woman was shot. I believe she didn't deserve it." The woman went into labor the night before, and was expecting a baby boy.

The mother of the victim said there were no drugs in the house. The police said they found marijuana, crack cocaine, and controlled prescription drugs. This is the third officer-involved shooting since August 25, 2010 in Spokane.

Let’s break this down- The police couldn’t control a nine month pregnant woman experiencing labor pains without shooting her? And could those ‘prescription drugs’ possibly be medications? Even if she had been inadvisedly using cocaine while pregnant, and the evidence wasn’t planted like this, studies have shown there to be no birth defects directly linked to the consumption of cocaine during pregnancy.

President Regan was eerily accurate in comparing the war on drugs to the WWI Battle of Verdun- Hundreds of thousands died in abject misery and thousands more were maimed, shot, and forced to live out their lives in pain. Verdun became a rallying cry for more men, more guns, more blood, even though it was strategically useless and nothing came of it except for suffering and death.

If you want this to continue, do nothing. If not, register to vote.

The people who are elected to make the laws that bind you

Rep. Lamar Smith from Texas on Fox News recently criticized the Obama administration's approach to marijuana and wants stricter drug law enforcement. Rep. Smith recently introduced H.R 5231, a bill would criminalize Americans working in Switzerland trying to save lives with heroin assisted treatment, for example.

“Rep. Lamar Smith (Texas), the top Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee who would likely become chairman of the committee under a GOP majority, accused the administration of being too lax in its enforcement of drug laws.

"The administration is clearly sending the message that they don't think it's bad to use marijuana," Smith said on Fox News. "So they're encouraging the use of marijuana. And that simply is not a good thing to do."

Smith blamed the administration's decision to not enforce federal laws against marijuana dispensaries in states that have legalized the drug for medicinal purposes. Smith blamed the administration's approach on drug laws for recent statistics showing an increased use of marijuana.

"We ought to be enforcing our drug laws, not backing away from them," said Smith, who also lamented a recent revision of criminal sentencing guidelines that reduced sentencing guidelines for crack-cocaine traffickers.”

Possibly Rep. Smith is referring to the 1,663,582 total arrests for drug abuse violations in the US in 2009, with someone being arrested for a drug offense every 18 seconds as being too lax. Maybe he’s referring to these ‘non-enforcements’, this ‘non-enforcement’, or possibly this ‘non-enforcement of federal drug laws as being too lax. After all, President Obama promised those raids would end while he was campaigning, and he gave respectful and thoughtful consideration to a question about the legalization of marijuana.

You know what? I did something about it. I took a total of 1 minute and 23 seconds out of my day to call Speaker Pelosi’s office urging her to cancel the vote on H.R 5231, a bill sponsored by Rep. Smith. I registered to vote when I received my driver’s license, which took all the effort of answering a few questions.

We can either stand by idly and watch our friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters be thrown into the back of a police cruiser after having their door smashed down in the middle of the night or we can take a stand and vote. Why should those who seek to criminalize non-violent, consensual behavior be allowed to impose their morals on us then utilize our money to do so in the most violent manner possible?

Register to vote, make a difference in your community.

Mexico Takes the Next Step: Presidential Candidate forces Senate to Demand Official Report on Californian Cannabis Legalization

Remember in early August of this year when Mexican president Felipe Calderon waffled on whether or not he wanted his country to legalize drugs? He said he was open to a debate, but that a debate in Mexico would change nothing if the underground cannabis market in the United States persisted.

In the weeks between August and early September, many official types in Mexico and the United States have inveighed against legalization. Mexico's first lady, Maragarita Zavala, absent and then present at events with the US Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowski in Mexico City, and even Barack Obama from the White House, each have rejected legalization in Mexico or elsewhere as a panacea, especially for drug war violence. Notwithstanding an approach of binational official denial, legalization efforts have a history in the United States: going back to 1970 US voters have voted on legalization in several states west of the Rockies. But in terms of international diplomacy or even international relations legalization hasn't entered the lexicon, or politics, of Mexico-US relations. Not even former president Vicente Fox -- a pragmatic legalizer of all drugs, especially cannabis -- could shift the official positions of Mexico City and Washington, DC.

Until now. And not because of the debate called for by Felipe Calderon, and in spite of the official supression of legalization in Washington. How has the legalization debate spread?

What fascinates is to watch how the debate in Mexico has moved from intellectuals in newspapers to bureaucrats who have to instruct official government departments and ministries to study drug legalization in the United States, and especially California. In the past month, former foreign minister to Vicente Fox, Jorge Castaneda, a professor at New York Universisty, and Hector Aguilar Camin, a prominent magazine publisher, writer, broadcaster, and historian, have voiced their support for legalization in the pages of the Washington Post. The pair are constant critics of Calderon's presidency, especially in newspapers. Around the same time as their op-ed, the Mexican Senate voted to produce an official interministerial report on legalization, thereby forcing the Calderon government to enter into a debate it had supported rhetorically.

The report's a somewhat unexpected next step. It's exactly what a resolution drafted by Santiago Creel, a former interior minister in the Fox Government and current Senator, will actually do. According to media outlets, the report will assess how reforming drug laws, but especially cannabis legalization in California, might affect Mexico.

Creel stated his questions: "What's going to happen to conusmption? Is it going to grow? What is going to happen to the price? What will the effects be? This could happen in November," emphasized the senator, who has put himself forward as his party's presidential nomination for elections in 2012. With words leading him to suggest that there is more than one way to examine this issue:

In the analysis and assessment we have centered on the effects organized crime has had on the country; that's where we have centered our attention and our
attempts.

Another senator from the ruling PAN party, Ramon Galindo, questioned the binational dynamic of the drug war: "One asks why then, why do we have to be shedding blood if they [Californians] are considering such a radical change in direction."

News of the Senate's official request underscored why looking at foreign policy is crucial in regards the debate about legalization:

"In Mexico we have considered the problems of production, traffic, and the consumption of illicit substances as the exclusive domain of our country's internal policy, whereas because the stated phenomenon brings with it international repurcussions, it ought to be addresseed and confronted from a foreign policy perspective."

Meaning that Mexico might be the first country to ever study another country's drug laws and their transnational effects. Which must make Washington rather nervous. Especially with a senator sesemingly so well informed on US drugs policies and the problems of Washington's solely criminological analysis focused on drug trafficking.

Boy with bloodshot eyes suspended on suspicion of smoking pot. Turns out his dad was dead.

Earlier this month on September 14, Kyler Robertson was suspended by the administration at Byron Nelson High School in Trophy Club, Texas. The administration thought his eyes were red from smoking pot. It turns out his dad had been stabbed to death that previous Sunday.

Kyler stopped by the main office to pick up a tardy slip as he returned to school on Tuesday to be with his friends. School employees accused him of smoking pot due to his red and watery eyes and he was suspended for three days. Kyler was not given a test for drug use. Instead, “when administrators suspect a student is under the influence, a school nurse will observe symptoms like their behavior, odor and their eyes,” said District spokeswoman Lesley Weaver. Testing is left to the parents.

After his mother had him tested and the results came back negative, Kyler was permitted to return to school. Kyler’s mother is appealing the district to remove the suspension from his permanent record.

Go get ‘em, administrators. It seems that reefer madness is still very much alive at Byron Nelson High School. Stamp out the terrible scourge of reefer causing children to talk back to their parents, wear their pants low, and cause vehicular manslaughter. Be sure to get those with hay fever.