Do you ever wonder how people can walk down the same streets, go into the same places, watch the same news, yet almost seem to inhabit different worlds?

Language has a lot to do with how we understand things. When we read about a gunfight between rival drug dealers, we'll think "drug prohibition" -- that fight is happening because drugs are illegal, and so gangs instead of regulated businesses settle their disputes with violence instead of through fair competition or the courts. But the news article usually doesn't say anything about drug prohibition. Instead an article is much more likely to just talk about "drugs." A better than average report might go into how people are fighting over the money being made, but it's likely to stop there.

This fall, staff and volunteers of StoptheDrugWar.org (DRCNet), under the auspices of our Drug War Chronicle newsletter, will carry out a one-week demonstration project in which we rewrite every English-language news story about drugs that we can find on Google News, in ways that make clear the role of prohibition in the situations being reported on.

We will do things like change "drug-related shooting" to "prohibition-related shooting" or "police officer" to "prohibition agent." We will add in quotes from experts from law enforcement and public health and politics who do like to talk about prohibition. We will let the reporters know we've rewritten their articles -- that's why we're planning to do this for all the articles that week, it's a reason to send notes to every drug reporter in the country, in the English-speaking world, actually, and have a lot of them actually checking out our site. Our rewrites should get into Google News themselves. And we'll create a valuable intellectual resource for anyone who writes about drugs and the policies society has enacted toward them.

We're pretty excited about this, and hopeful that we'll make our point in a powerful way, and establish relationships with large numbers of media professionals around the world in the process. Click here to see a sample of what we're doing, and write to us if you'd like to join the team!