Action Alert: Help prevent overdose deaths in NY!

Here in New York, we've been hard at work trying to pass an Good Samaritan (or Medical Amnesty) bill that would protect individuals from criminal prosecution when calling 911 in an alcohol or other drug related medical emergency. This life-saving overdose prevention bill passed through the State Assembly last week and now we only have a few days left of the legislative year to get it through the Senate.

It is crucial that we flood Senator Skelos's office with calls urging his support in the next 24 hours to make sure this life-saving bill becomes a live-saving law next week!

Call Senator Dean Skelos, the New York Senate Majority Leader, at (518) 455-3171 and urge him to consider the following:

- S4454A has been carefully crafted to save lives while not allowing drug dealers to "walk free"

- The Assembly version of this bill will save lives and should pass without amendments

- Senators on both sides of the aisle have already expressed their support for the bill as currently written and no amendments are necessary for it's passage

Your supportive calls last week on this issue caused Senate Majority Leader Skelos to take notice! It's looking likely that this bill will pass, but now some are calling for amendments to weaken the bill and we need to make our voices heard.

After you call his office, we'd love to hear how it went, so let us know here. If you don't live or go to school in New York, than please pass this around to friends! We've got to act now and we can't do it without your help.

The Power of Student Activism

Check out our very own David Haseltine, president of the University of Connecticut SSDP chapter, on Huffington Post talking about how SSDP helped pass Connecticut's new marijuana decriminalization law. Go David!

Make your voice heard at the UN

From our friends at Avaaz.

To Ban Ki-moon and all Heads of State: We call on you to end the war on drugs and the prohibition regime, and move towards a system based on decriminalisation, regulation, public health and education. This 50 year old policy has failed, fuels violent organised crime, devastates lives and is costing billions. It is time for a humane and effective approach.

Click here to sign the petition.

(Moving) Office Space, SSDP-Style (VIDEO)

After about a decade in our national headquarters on Connecticut Avenue, this is our last day here. While we're sad to say goodbye, we're excited about our new office space in downtown Washington, D.C. We'll tell you more about our new space soon and include some video. But for now, remember that part from the movie, Office Space, where employees took a baseball bat to the hated printer?

Please enjoy this video of our Associate Director, Stacia Cosner, totally destroying trashed office furniture with a baseball bat so that it can be transported to the dump. Dedicated readers may recall that Stacia represents SSDP on the Capitol Hemp One-Hitters, a team in the Congressional Softball League made up of drug policy reform activists, so it shouldn't be any surprise that she's got a mean swing.

It's just a softball game ...vs. the Drug Czar's team

SSDP is the official sponsoring organization for The One Hitters, a co-ed recreational softball team in the Congressional League in Washington DC, established in 2002 our team is comprised of individuals who work for or support marijuana and other drug law reform. This year, we're officially 2-1 so far, but if I do say so myself, we're not too shabby.

Being in the Congressional League, we play some interesting teams, such as those who work for various Congressional offices, government institutions, advocacy groups, law firms, and others. Perhaps the most unlikely match up for a league softball game would be The One Hitters vs. The Czardinals, which is the Office of National Drug Control Policy's team. We were thrilled earlier this season when our respective coaches scheduled a game between the two teams! But then for some reason, The Czardinals cancelled on us ...again.

The One Hitters is a co-ed softball team established in 2002

in the Congressional League in Washington, DC comprised of individuals

who work for or support marijuana and other drug law reform.

contact: OneHittersSoftball@gmail.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 25, 2011

One Hitters Burned Again By Timid Czardinals

Office of National Drug Control Policy Backs Out of Softball Game with Drug Policy Reformers

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Once again, the softball team representing the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has backed out of playing a Congressional Softball League game against the One Hitters, a team consisting of members of several drug policy reform organizations and others who support ending the “war on drugs.” A game between the two teams had been scheduled for May 25, but the ONCDP Czardinals pulled out shortly after scheduling the game, with ONDCP public liaison coordinator Quinn Staudt citing an “accidental double-booking.”

This is not the first time the Czardinals have refused to play the One Hitters. In 6 years, the team found one reason or another to avoid taking the field against this team of individuals dedicated to reforming the out-of-date and ineffectual policies promoted by the ONDCP.

This behavior is being mimicked on the national stage by the ONDCP as well. While drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has stated that he will no longer use the rhetoric of a “war on drugs” and President Obama said that he wants to move to treat drug abuse as a health problem rather than a criminal justice problem, little has been seen in the way of action in that direction. The President has also said that he does not support the legalization of any drug, even marijuana, despite the inarguable damage marijuana prohibition does to society, individual users, medical patients that benefit from marijuana treatments, governmental budgets, and respect for the rule of law.

"It is really disappointing that the ONDCP not only refuses to have an honest debate with drug policy reformers about the absolute failure of drug prohibition, but also keeps ducking out of softball games with us,” said One Hitters team captain Jacob Berg. “We think it would be a great opportunity to advance the discussion between drug law reformers and the people ostensibly in charge of drug policy in this country. I wonder if they are afraid to have that conversation. The drug czar said ‘legalization’ isn't in his vocabulary, but it's just a friendly softball game!"

The One Hitters hope the Czardinals will put aside ideological differences and accept their invitation to play a softball game this summer on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Delaware Governor Signs Medical Marijuana Bill

This morning, Delaware Governor Jack Markel signed the state's medical marijuana bill into law, making Delaware the 16th state to have legalized the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The bill received final legislative approval Wednesday. A spokesman said Markell wanted to sign the measure as quickly as possible because of the lengthy time that will be needed to get a state-run system for distributing medical marijuana up and running. 

The new law allows people 18 and older with certain serious or debilitating conditions that could be alleviated by marijuana to possess up to six ounces of the drug. Qualifying patients would be referred to state-licensed and regulated “compassion centers,” which would be located in each of Delaware’s three counties. The centers would grow, cultivate and dispense the marijuana.

Congratulations to Delaware for implementing sensible policy! Now we'll just have to wait and see if Gov. Markel gets a threatening letter from the DoJ...

The Case of Mexico: The Banality of Being Against Drug War Violence

You know the context in Mexico by now.

If not, you can read about a protest SSDP-University of Oregon organized to coincide with Cinco de Mayo. This group used 36 people in a fall-down protest to signal, 1,000 for each person, the number of fatalities in the Mexican-US drug war since 2006.

And follow this sequence of events: Felipe Calderon comes into the presidency in 2006. He starts a war against drug traffickers. Even with, or perhaps partly a result of placing military as police in Mexico's cities streets and highways, the homicide rate soars. The US through the State Department and the Merida Initiative has pledged up to US$1.4 billion for a militarized campaign, and funds to revamp the criminal justice system towards greater openness.

None of these strategies has calmed the violence. By mid-2006 36,000 people have died; a quarter of a million have disappeared; the world's most dangerous city Juarez, on the US-Mexico border, has shed a quarter of a million inhabitants; Mexico is the world's most dangerous place for journalists; and nobody knows how many orphans this violence has produced, and what sort of a response Mexico's psychological services can provide. We know that forensic medical workers are overworked. These statistics and facts mean that more people have become caught up in webs of violent death, many and perhaps most just minding their business while the army, police, and drug trafficking organizations fight over the sovereignty to control an illicit, prohibited market.

These are the broad facts which comprise the context, ever-changing as it tends to be. And of course, since the country is at war, there are many more facts, most of them macabre. Many of them registered as barbarities. And within such bleakness, several protest movements have arisen.

MEXICO'S MASS ANTI-DRUG WAR PROTEST MOVEMENT...WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT ISN'T

It was inevitable. Mexico can sometimes be a country of protests, and when problems become massive and intractable, so resistance to those problems has the likelihood of being large. It happened with the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional from 1994 - 2001, commonly known as the Zapatistas. It happened with the student strikers who shut down the National Autonomous University, the UNAM from 1998 - 1999. These are two massive movements considered to have undermined the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's seventy year hold over power from 1930 - 2000.

Mexico's mass protest movement du jour, popularly known as the Marcha por La Paz, was brought together by Javier Sicilia, a little known poet, writer, and Catholic militant after his son, Juan Francisco, and six other youngsters were killed in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City. It is a tragic case. And perhaps because the case comes from middle Mexico, those not-quite-well to do folk, who live on the precipice of Mexico's political economy including many in the middle class, it played better in the media. After a while, and with discontent in politics at new heights, Javier Sicilia, a drug war victim, embraced the role of reformer of the state. The most consistent demands from Sicilia concern democracy, security, and justice.

Sicilia's demands have nothing to do with ending prohibition, and nobody in his movement has said very much about what happens to Mexican sovereignty when US anti-drug interests rule Mexico's political economy. This means that whatever suggestions Sicilia makes regarding democracy, security, and justice, his protests will have missed explaining why the Mexican drug war exists. In almost all of the news coverage after the march on Sunday, correspondents allowed marchers to describe the problems coonfronting the country through its drug war: the crisis of the presidency, continuing corruption, impunity, no opportunities for young and old. Almost NONE of these articulations concerned dismantling prohibition, a form of organizing the state's violence against drugs which has so clearly undermined democracy, security, and justice in a number of countries around the world.

This means that, in the current Mexican case, being against the drug war does not necessarily mean being against prohibition.

And it means that once again, coalitions -- which includes SSDP -- like those led by the Drug Policy Alliance will want to continue to pressure all political actors in Mexico, those in mass movements, and those in formal politics, of the need for anti-prohibition as the central, complex, rationale, sound, pacific policy choice through which advances in security, democracy, and justice will eventually flow.

Remembering Rachel Hoffman: Third Anniversary

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Today marks the third anniversary of the murder of Rachel Hoffman, a former SSDP member and 23 year old graduate of Florida State University. Rachel was murdered by two drug dealers after the Tallahassee Police Department pressured her to become an informant in an undercover sting operation, promising to keep her safe, only to lose track of her.


Despite only finding 4 ecstasy pills and a few ounces of marijuana in her home, the police department asked Rachel to purchase 1,500 ecstasy pills, 2 ounces of cocaine, and a handgun (which was contrary to department policy as it opened the opportunity for the suspected criminals to explain the presence of the gun), using $13,000 cash in a buy-bust operation. She was murdered with the very gun police had sent her to buy. Rachel's lawyer, family, or the state prosecutor were never informed about the operation and after her murder, the Tallahassee Police Department held a press conference to blame her for her own death.


Three years later, this tragic loss of life must serve as a reminder of the need for reform of drug policies nationwide. It must remind those in defense of such policies that they simply don't work. More than that, it must help us all to change our mindsets about the relationship between people and drugs. This drug war has grown so large and seemingly unstoppable that its supporters no longer seem to care about measuring it's success. Rachel was labeled as a being some sort of drug kingpin despite only a few ounces of marijuana being found in her home. Now she's gone and the two drug dealers that murdered her are behind bars for life. If the drug war works, and this is what is called success, then no one should be able to find and use marijuana in Florida anymore right? We all know that's not true.


Margie Weiss, Rachel's mom, fought hard for the introduction and passage of Rachel's Law to help prevent more young people from being taken advantage of by police as informants. The law passed in 2009 and established minimum standards that law enforcement must meet when dealing with informants. Under Rachel's Law, law enforcement must "take into account a person's age and maturity, emotional state and the level of risk a mission would entail." It also prohibits police from promising informers more lenient treatment. 

The Purple Hatters Ball, a music festival to benefit the Rachel Morningstar foundation and celebrate Rachel's life and energy is taking place next weekend in Live Oak, FL. Named after the bright purple top hat Rachel would wear to concerts, the festival features lots of great live music and embraces Rachel's passion for life.

We wish the best for the Hoffman family and thank them for their strength and determination to bring change to Florida's criminal justice system.

Somethin's Happenin' Here: Mexican Youth Congress Formulates Anti-Violence Strategy

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the center of the drug war exists in Washington, D.C. With all the bloviating, all the Congressional handwringing, all the dissimulating by the White House's Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowske and all the hardheadedness of the DEA head Michelle Leonhart, the power of prohibition does seem to lie within the DC Beltway.

But what is going on in Cuernavaca, a city south of Mexico City? And how does it concern youth and students who oppose the drug war?

First, the context: in Cuernavaca, at March's end the son of a somewhat famous poet and writer -- Juan Francisco Sicilia, father Javier Sicilia -- died in despicable circumstances, along with six of his friends, all of whom were dumped in a car in Cuernavaca. In his anguished wrath, Javier Sicilia blamed Felipe Calderon's failure of a drug war. With 35,000 dead and his son and friends more statistics, Sicilia projected publicly a letter to the president which protested all violence, repeating time and again that they were all fed up with a type of imagination in public life that led only to death.

Sicilia soon commanded a massive social movement, whose first action, a march in Cuernavaca, attracted more people than at any time in its history. At the march, Sicilia called for national and international marches against violence and the drug war at the beginning of May.

A vibrant, viable social movement comprised of youth and students has emerged within this context. Last weekend, on 28 and 29 April, youth and students from all over Mexico convened an emergency national congress. In a post from the Americas MexicoBlog, on-the-ground-correspondents reported the proceedings and an outcome. What emerged was a complex document that defines what Mexican youth and students want from their government.

Among other things, the document demands reforms in the following areas:

• Immediate Demilitarization: The War on Drugs is a War Against the People; Its US origins violate Mexican national solidarity; Youth have already won a major victory, curbing national military service and converting it to social service.





• End the Violence and Impunity: The systemic violates human rights, and negatively affects women, young girls and boys, and youth.





• Decriminalization of Drug Consumption: The drug war must be seen as a public health problem; legalization must be debated, and prohibition opposed as it enriches the political class and drug traffickers.





• Lives with Dignity: Death lives among urban and rural marginalized populations, neoliberal policies have inflicted instability and misery in people's lives, making them move, making low-level drug trafficking a survival strategy.





• Art and Culture for All: Decommodifying artistic and cultural expressions.





• Education: Guaranteed access for all and policies that promote human liberation tied to creativity.

The Youth Declaration embraces a new type of anti-prohibition, an anti-violence strategy national in scope and local in significance. It defines the next steps to follow in order to secure the objectives, outlined above.

- Convene a plural, inclusive, democratic space to discuss and construct the proposal of our Pact for Rebuilding the Nation on May 9 at 10 in the morning at the Journalists’ Club (Club de Periodistas) in Mexico City

- Propose to the new forum that a national body be formed to struggle for Peace with Justice and Dignity

- Organize mobilizations at the headquarters of the institutions responsible for the war

- Occupy symbolic spaces and build organizing centers with regular activities that allow us to have a presence and be a point of reference in the fight for Peace with Justice and Dignity

- Build a strategy to consolidate this process we’ve begun today based on the following initiatives.

- Convene a national meeting in Ciudad Juarez within the framework of the Signing of the Pact, which would follow up on youth networking and organizing

- Convene Committees for Peace with Justice and Dignity in every school, neighborhood, community or work center

- Convene a second Youth Meeting for Sept. 1-3 at UNAM’s University City

- Pay homage to the children and mothers killed in the armed conflict on May 10 in Mexico City’s Zocalo

-National Art and Culture Festival for Peace in Mexico, along with a protest march

- Organize an international academic forum for discussion of the armed conflict and the social problem at its root.

No conclusion yet exists to summarize what is happening in Mexico. The Mexican population of various generations and in various parts of the country seems fed up with Washington's security discourse, promoted by the Calderon government. Something IS happening here. And what is happening stands directly in contrast to the drug war policy objectives of Barack Obama's government.

Better to Live: Mexicans Mobilize against the Drug War

The last few months have seen bodies heaped upon bodies in Mexico. In some cases, the heaping is quite literal: drug graves have been opened up in the northern Gulf state of Tamaulipas, the largest contained almost two hundred people. Authorities sent cadavers to Mexico City for identification by forensic specialists. Though killed by drug gangs, investigators in Tamaulipas suggest that the local police was complicit.

And yet the greatest outcry to this uptick in brutality came in the wake of the deaths of several teenagers in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City. Cuernavaca is known as the city of eternal spring, it has an enviable climate: spring, all year round, and is the second home for many Mexico City residents. It's now also known as the place where poet, writer, and journalist Javier Sicilia initiated protests against the Mexican government and its failed drug war policies. Why has Sicilia become an outspokent figurehead for pain? At the end of March, Sicilia had to confront that which all parents fear, the death of his son. Juanelo Sicilia and six other friends were found dead in a car near Cuernavaca, the result of drug war violence.

Deaths in Mexico attributed to the drug war now number 35,000 since 2006. Juanelo Sicilia and his friends are yet more grim statistics. Yet Javier Sicilia decided to use the deaths of his son, and those of his friends, to move people to protest the violence in Mexico, its scope, and President Felipe Calderon's inability to imagine his government acting in ways that do not heighten violence.

At the end of March Javier Sicilia convened a national series of marches. The Cuernavaca march ended up being the largest in the city's history. He also convened more marches for the week of 5 - 8 May. The second Cuernavaca march starts on 5 May and ends in Mexico City's main square, zocalo, on 8 May, a distance of almost 100kms. Many Mexican cities are participating, as are some foreign cities. You can find a list of registered marches, here.