I thought you might enjoy this video of a 25-minute legalization debate I did recently. It aired on a news network that broadcasts primarily to Arab audiences across Europe and the Middle East.

While we continue to work for reforms like medical marijuana, changes in drug sentencing, restoring financial aid to students with drug convictions and limiting the use of SWAT teams to emergency situations, it's also important to get the truth out about the failure, the harm and the injustice of drug prohibition itself.

Please watch the video (it's in three parts), please send it to a friend, and please make a donation today to help us get the truth out, around the globe, about drug prohibition and the need to end it.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/truthcampaign/donate

David Borden
Executive Director, StoptheDrugWar.org (DRCNet)
News & Activism Promoting Sensible Reform

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Grand juries are charged with evaluating potential crimes presented to them by prosecutors and deciding whether indictments are merited.

Oregon has already decriminalized marijuana possession and enacted the second-largest state medical marijuana program in the country, and now some Oregon activists are ready to move to the next lev

David Borden, Executive Director

Do drug laws affect drug use rates?

Click here to view the full one-hour program on presstv.com. David Borden did not appear in the first half due to technical problems. PressTV is an English-language network based in Teheran, which airs across Europe and the Middle East.

references for statements made by David Borden:

• Past-year prevalence of marijuana use among young people in the tolerant Netherlands about half as in nearby France:
  The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe, 2007 report EMCDDA (page 41)

• States with marijuana decriminalization have not seen resulting rises in use:
  various studies including Institute of Medicine, Monitoring the Future, Connecticut Law Review Commission, others

• Teen marijuana use declines in states with medical marijuana laws:
  Marijuana Use by Young People: The Impact of State Medical Marijuana Laws

• Substitution effect between marijuana use and alcohol use:
  Substitution of Marijuana for Alcohol: The Role of Perceived Access and Harm, Journal of Drug Education, 2006

• Average Age of Netherlands heroin addicts has been increasing (e.g. few young heroin addicts):
  Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction

• Opiates and cocaine were banned almost a century ago (1914) by the Harrison Narcotics Act:
  Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs

• Taliban earns $100 million in opium profits in 2007:
  Drug War Chronicle citing UN Office on Drugs and Crime Chief Antonio Costa on BBC

• Drug prohibition sends hundreds of billions of dollars per year in illicit revenues to the global underground:
  UN World Drug Report, via Drug War Chronicle

• The US homicide rate increased under alcohol prohibition and decreased following it's repeal:
  Schaffer Library alcohol prohibition section

• Street price of cocaine (adjusted for purity and inflation) drops by 80% since 1980:
  Rand Corporation, via Joint Economic Committee, US Senate

A former health secretary and an ex-university president are calling for the legalization of marijuana in Puerto Rico in a bid to reduce the prison population and prevent young people from being ex

David Borden, Executive Director

How long does an experiment need to continue before it's declared a failure?

Anti-prohibitionism or drug legalization defense?

Appearing in London at an event aimed at undermining cocaine consumption in Great Britain, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderón appeared to suggest that discussions about cocaine pol

About 6:30 local time Wednesday evening, the latest outbreak of Mexican drug war violence occurred in Culiacán, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, long a drug-producing regi

Hans van Duijn, head of the Dutch police union, told Radio Netherla

The Los Angeles Times is publishing a series of debate pieces this week between Saying Yes author Jacob Sullum and Charles Stimson, a former prosecutor and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Here's the first question:

What's the difference between drug legalization and decriminalization? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Jacob Sullum's answer is terrific. Charles Stimson's answer begins this way:

Two points: First, there is no difference between decriminalization and legalization. Second, whichever term you want to use, it's a bad idea.

I suppose there is nothing more predictable in the world than the tendency of drug warriors to open their arguments with sweeping and false generalizations. Still, this is just so dumb and wrong that it barely qualifies as an opinion.

We could debate the exact meaning of decriminalization, but it is typically used to describe situations in which penalties are simply reduced, i.e. a fine instead of possible jail time. You can still be taken into custody and subjected to various escalating sanctions. For example, 33,000 people were arrested for possessing small quantities of marijuana in New York City in 2006, despite a decrim policy that's been in effect since 1977. Legalization ends possession arrests and presumably regulates commerce.

It shouldn't be necessary to define commonly used legal terms for a senior legal fellow at a prestigious thinktank, but this is the drug war, and as usual, its supporters can be found creating their own reality in which to debate us.

After getting the opening question wrong, Stimson launches into a series of preposterous claims. He observes that daily wine consumption improves health, while daily marijuana use destroys the mind. He accuses drug-addicted navy sailors of threatening national security. He suggests that some states don't charge people for committing rape. He insists that drug users have too many children out of wedlock.

I can't frickin' wait to hear what he'll say in tomorrow's installment.

[thanks, Scott]

For more than 30 years, Alaska's courts have held that the state constitution's privacy protections barred the state from criminalizing adults possessing and consuming small amounts of marijuana in

William F. Buckley, the dean of American conservatism and advocate of drug legalization, died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 82.

A New Hampshire bill that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana hit a bump Tuesday when the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee gave it a thumbs down.

The Federalist Society and Students For Sensible Drug Policy proudly present an event featuring The Honorable Jim Gray (www.judgejimgray.com).

Topic: Why Our Drug Laws Failed and What We Can Do About It

Vancouver, British Columbia, was the scene this week of an international conference on drug policy, affiliated with the United Nations, that didn't turn out the way the UN imagined it.

David Borden, Executive Director

Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, has created a firestorm with comments made to the BBC that d