Greetings from Occupied Washington

Dear friends,

Soaring criminality in the Trump White house has brought our nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Indiscriminate mass firings in the federal workforce, and the appointment of dangerous fringe figures to the most important federal positions, have compromised our safety. The president and vice president are busily bullying and betraying democracies around the world. And the new DOJ leadership is explicitly corrupt. Also, Trumpflation has started.

What should have been expected from the president who sent a mob to attack the US Capitol, in a plot to steal an election he'd lost at the ballot, and who campaigned on promises of "retribution"? What plans might Trump have for the insurrectionists themselves, after pardoning or granting clemency to all including the most violent on his first day back in office?

Fortunately, Americans have noticed, and they don't like what they see. After starting his term at net negative favorability – the first president in the history of polling to do so – Trump's popularity has already fallen substantially from there, just one month in. The insurrectionist pardons may be the most disapproved part of his presidency so far. But propagandist-in-chief and cybersecurity crisis Elon Musk is a close second.

In the meanwhile, policymaking continues. Some things we're paying attention to:

• Trump has threatened to do military attacks against drug cartel organizations inside Mexico. He took a possible first step this week.
• US sanctions against the International Criminal Court threaten to derail the court's Philippine drug war extrajudicial killings case.
• Reclassification of cannabis (marijuana) to Schedule III in the Controlled Substances Act – which would recognize its medical value, while freeing the ailing industry from a debilitating organized crime tax – awaits a new DEA hearing, though it faces new and likely less sympathetic leadership there.
• The House of Representatives has passed the so-called "HALT Fentanyl Act," a bill that responds to a very real crisis, but does so in a misguided way.

We've taken action this year too:

• See Phil's latest feature article, about Trump and Mexico, online here.
• See a sign-on letter we organized opposing ICC sanctions that highlighted the Philippine drug war case, online here. (News articles here and here.)
• Watch a press briefing we co-organized featuring advocates from the Philippines, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar. (Some news articles are here and here.)
• We're finalizing editorials explaining our efforts supporting cannabis banking and rescheduling – two issues whose importance is not always fully understood, even within the drug policy reform movement. And we're seeking sponsors for our second report on armed robberies of state-legal cannabis stores.

We hope for all of this to continue. But we need your help for that to be possible. If you support our efforts – for drug policy reform, and as part of the movements to save democracy in the US and abroad – I ask if you can take a moment to make a donation. Our donations page at https://stopthedrugwar.org/donate links to forms to make tax-deductible and non-deductible donations by credit card, PayPal or ACH; and there's info on other ways to donate at https://stopthedrugwar.org/about/donate.

One last thing: As I wrote after the election, we will engage productively, with Congress or even the administration, when there's a chance to achieve some good in our issues. And when or if good things happen, we'll report them honestly. For example, we're pleased Marc Fogel, an American schoolteacher imprisoned in Russia for carrying medical marijuana, was released at the request of an administration envoy. And we wish newly-announced "pardon czar" Alice Johnson, herself the recipient of presidential clemency for an unjust drug war sentence, much success in the role.

But we're also going to speak clearly about how we view the larger state of affairs in the United States, and to continue to do our part to protect democracy and human rights, in the US and abroad. As part of that, we continue our opposition to Trump and Trumpism, which was formalized in 2017 and never revoked. We understand that not everyone here agrees, and we respect your views, but this is how we see things. You can read more of our thoughts on this in our post-election message, "How Things Move Forward."

So, greetings from Occupied Washington. Or if it's not quite occupied yet, many of us worry it could be. But we're pushing forward and doing our part. And we see reasons for hope – I hope you do too.

Sincerely,

David Borden
StoptheDrugWar.org
Washington, DC
"US and UN Drug Policy Reform"
https://stopthedrugwar.org